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Sachi heard a weird sound in the dryer, and discovered why she must check my pockets before doing my laundry: there was an ink pen and a USB flash memory stick in the pockets. Miraculously, the ink pen did not leak in the wash (must have been the tight cap), but we both figured that the USB flash stick, my 1-year-old 1GB Kingston “Data Traveler,” was toast.
Nope. Still works perfectly. There’s a lot to be said for solid-state technology.
Stumble it!
I figure five years is not all that long to wait for a new music player, right? Or for a new cell phone?
As it happens, it has been five years since I bought either one. I got the cell phone in August 2003, and the iPod 3G in October 2003. Note that I actually seemed to like the cell phone, partly because it had a messy–but workable–kludge to import the address book from my Mac. At the time, it was actually fairly impressive for a phone that I was able to get for a fairly cheap price. And I really liked the iPod, which, as I pointed out at the time, was easy to figure out, unlike the cell phone.
But now, both are fairly junky, the cell phone more than the iPod. The cell phone seems positively chintzy. The camera is so bad that after I had taken a photo of a landmark along the route to our wedding hall, neither Sachi nor I were able to make out any details in the image later. The phone book is a bit of a joke, the thing doesn’t ring out loud half the time when people call, and the other features the phone has are so hard to figure out that I just ignore them. When I am able to figure out the email, inputting text using the keypad is so freaking monotonous I can’t stand it.
The iPod, while old, at least still works as advertised, and I have no trouble accessing its features; it’s just old and has none of the newer features, is all. No color, no video, just the Chicago-font menus. I still use it regularly; these days, it’s my exercise companion, playing music to help keep me going on the elliptical trainer.
It’s a 20 GB iPod, so will actually have slightly more memory than the new iPhone I’m getting. After 5 years and no battery exchange, the lifetime of the battery is still surprisingly long–several hours at least–though if I leave it for more than a week, it gets dangerously close to dying after a half-hour of use. The cable is beginning to fray where it meets the body, and the plastic cover of the firewire connecter broke loose some time ago. I have no idea what I’ll do with it when I get the iPhone; put it in a drawer, maybe. It works fine, but I think that if I tried to sell it, people would just laugh. I paid $450 for it new, by the way.
Usually, I don’t wait that long for new devices. Three years is how long I wait between laptop purchases (I am due for a new one, waiting for the next MacBook/MacBook Pro models to come out), about the same for desktop computers (I am on my third desktop since 1998, only two of them Macs). I guess one of the reasons I have not gotten a new cell phone or iPod is because I have been waiting for the all-in-one device since August 2006, when rumors started getting more copious about the iPhone. Since then, it’s been a waiting game for the thing to come out in Japan. After all this time, I’m pretty antsy to switch over to something that isn’t five years old and devoid of any new features. I mean, just look at what I’ve got now above, and what’s coming soon below. Can you blame me?
Stumble it!
Just a month ago I laid out what would be needed for ebooks to catch on. The list included:
the book feel would be greatly enhanced by a fold-out screen, like a real book; two screens hinged to oppose each other, just like a real book. Not one screen and a solid cover.
Looks like I was right, and here is a prototype:
Thank you, thank you.
Stumble it!
Well I was wrong on one thing–the Zune is getting a new feature. They will start supporting games–not apps in general, but just some games, very soon. Of course, this is the same thing that the iPod got some time ago, and Apple is soon moving on to more advanced stuff. But still, I got that one wrong.
But I got something else right: the Zune is a poor bet. So believes the gaming retailer GameStop, which has announced that it will stop selling Zunes. “We have decided to exit the Zune category because it just did not have the appeal we had anticipated,” said a GameStop spokesperson.
They probably just carried the Zune because Microsoft pressured them to, I’m guessing–the store is game-centered, after all. That fact is even more relevant since they decided to stop selling Zunes just before the Zune adds games to its repertoire. So for MS to be pressuring a retailer to sell its wares and yet have that retailer, dependent on MS’s other products (namely the X-Box line) drop those wares is a fairly significant sign of Microsoft’s waning power.
Stumble it!
Remember how the Microsoft Zune was all set up to be an Apple killer? How “the Social” with WiFi sharing (DRM’s to three plays, of course) was going to blow the iPod out of the water and eat up Apple’s market share?
Okay, you’ve have long figured out that the Zune did no such thing. But Microsoft was shouting from the rooftops some big news a few weeks ago: we sold out two millionth Zune!!! Wow! Two million Zunes! What an accomplishment! Even better than June last year, when the Zune hit the one-million mark ahead of schedule! Two million Zunes in just over eighteen months! Never mind that Apple sold 76 million iPods in the same time period (not including iPhone sales). Never mind that The iPod is sold worldwide, while the Zune is still a U.S.-only product (though Canada is getting the Zune soon!). Never mind that the Zune is not growing in sales–they sell 1 million units every nine months, no increase.
Dan Dilger, although biased, does a pretty thorough job explaining how and why the Zune is stuck in nowhere’s-ville.
But Microsoft is not done yet, not by a long shot! They’ve got a Big New Idea, coming soon! Bigger than selling Zunes in Canada! Is it a Zune Phone? No. Touch-screen Zune? No. Zune in a few more colors? Maybe, but not this time. No, the big new idea to make the Zune break out is… Ads! Yes, Microsoft is making the Zune even better by adding ads to the Zune Social web site, and maybe bringing ads to the Zune itself!*
How could anyone resist that! Eat our dust with your puny 3G iPhone in more than five dozen countries across the world, Apple!
*Unfortunately, I am not making this up.
Stumble it!
You must see these videos. This is what computers will be like in the near future.
This technology is called “Multi-touch.” Apple’s iPhone already uses it. For example, you use two fingers to squeeze or expand a photo, so it gets bigger or smaller. But the iPhone is just the simple beginning. Soon, Multi-touch will come to your personal computer, and it will make the GUI even more natural, even more easy to use. There is no mouse, just your hands on the screen. Keyboards appear on the screen when you need them, and disappear when you don’t need them.
In the videos below, engineer Jeff Han demonstrates the use of Multi-touch on a large screen, either a panel like the top of a desk, or even a large screen on a wall. You can use all ten fingers to control different points on the screen to create all kinds of amazing effects. If the screen is big enough, more than one person can work at the same time, doing very complex jobs in a very simple way.
Expect a Multi-touch personal computer to be released in the next year or two. I would not be at all surprised if Apple is the first to come out with one. When you think about it, Apple’s Dock works quite well in this context; with a few modifications, you can see the Dock growing quite naturally into this technology. The iPhone is a primitive example of how this can be applied, showing that Steve Jobs is seeing how this will be the UI for the future. The iPhone’s swipe, pinch/squeeze, and the virtual keyboard all play into this. This even makes me re-think the idea of the Art Lebedev keyboard being the “keyboard of the future”–instead, virtual keyboards within the monitors will be the norm, instead of little LCDs or OLEDs in the keys themselves.
There have been rumors that Apple has been working on tablet computers, touch-screen computers, and–important to this technology–resolution-independent displays. I am beginning to sense that this is a big movement in Apple, signaling the trend of the GUI for the next decade and beyond.
Just like today’s technology makes the “futuristic” sets of he original “Star Trek” seem quaintly archaic (compare the iPhone to the Communicator), this multi-touch screen technology is going to make the even more futuristic sets of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” seem even more out of date.
Stumble it!
I don’t think Kindle is it. Nor is it this one, or this one.
But they’re getting there.
So far, the ebook readers haven’t broken the magical barrier where everyone will have to get one. Maybe Steve Jobs will come out with one when it’s time. Maybe not.
Here’s my projection on what’s needed. First, color would be nice. Not a deal breaker if it’s black-and-white; contrast is more important than color. But color would help. Contrast is a deal-breaker, though; if you don’t see sheer whites and dark blacks, it won’t sell. Nobody likes the washed-out look. That’s why they don’t sell paperbacks with the text in light gray, or even charcoal.
Resolution is more important. Pixel jaggies won’t cut it. Font smoothing won’t cut it. It has to look like paper, to a certain extent. That means high-quality text. That means more than 72 dots per inch. Readers are now up to 160 dpi, not bad. Higher would be nice.
The size of the screen could be bigger too. Right now the displays are about eight inches, or roughly the size of a paperback–but that’s just the screen. The bevel makes it bigger. More screen, less bevel.
Next, the book feel would be greatly enhanced by a fold-out screen, like a real book; two screens hinged to oppose each other, just like a real book. Not one screen and a solid cover.
Next, it has to be a touch screen. Get rid of the buttons on the border, make the bevel as thin as possible. Turn the pages by swiping across a screen. Natural interface. Multi-touch would be nice.
Finally, the price point. This can’t be a luxury item. Right now, decent readers cost $300 to $400. Too much. Price point has to be less than half that, $150 or less. It can’t be something that you’re constantly worried might get broken, that you would have to convince yourself to replace if it did.
We’re not there yet. Ebook readers have not yet arrived. They will. They’re a great idea. Imagine being a college student, and having an ebook reader like the one I just described being your one and only book to shlep. Your books all in one place, all with a text search feature, connected to the Internet so you can browse your favorite web sites and online databases. Heck, while we’re at it, one of the two screens becomes a touchscreen keyboard, and you can use it to type.
For the home reader, all your books in one place, backed up on a home computer or hard disk, DRM flexible enough so you don’t notice it. For the businessman, email on the fly, maybe even a built-in camera and a cell-network connection for audio or video conferencing.
Not all of those bells and whistles I just mentioned need to be there. WiFi and email, a natural yes; color, camera, and cell connection, no. The extras can be added for a premium.
Sounds like I am asking for way too much for too low a price, right? But imagine describing the iPhone to someone in 1997–16 GB storage, 3“ color touch screen at 163 dpi with 480×320 resolution, WiFi and Bluetooth, web browsing, email, cell phone, 2 megapixel digital camera, digital music and video player, games, apps, with an on-board version of a UNIX-based OS, all in a small, solid, stylish package, for $500. Hell, a 1 megapixel digital camera alone would have cost more than half that much in ‘97, and most of the rest would have sounded like a pipe dream. People paid $500 for a 10 GB iPod in 2001, with a crappy, tiny LCD screen, no other functionality than a music player. Even that would have been more than anyone expected in ‘97.
Ebook readers will probably hover in the background for a few years yet, until someone meets most or all of the feature sets I described above. Say, a dual-8” folding multi-touch high-contrast 200-dpi-plus color screen, with WiFi and Internet/email and decent battery life, for about $150. I would definitely use that to read all my books. Maybe even $200, But the price can’t go too high, or else people won’t use it the same way they use books.
But get most of those features for the price of a PSP or DS Lite, and you’ll have broken the barrier to massive sales. Many of us would probably buy it for a higher price with only half those features, but not the mass market.
Stumble it!
RIM, which makes the BlackBerry, is reportedly developing a touchscreen version of their device which is code-named “AK,” for “Apple Killer.” Right away, you can guess that it probably will be nothing of the sort. I am pretty sure that when Apple designed the iPhone, while they may have been aiming to make a device that was far better than other devices, they were not focused on making a “BlackBerry killer,” or a “Nokia killer.” If they had, the iPhone would probably be a lot worse than it turned out to be.
Any time you design something based upon trying to beat someone else, you usually wind up short, because you’re basing your design on something other than the user’s actual needs or desires. If RIM were smart, they would simply hire the best engineers and tell them, “forget every other device; simply start from scratch and make the best communications device you can imagine.” Which is what I imagine Jobs told his design team.
Instead, they probably went to the engineers who were stuck in BlackBerry mode and told them, “imitate the iPhone, but make it better!”
Long story short, I’m not selling my Apple stock any time soon.
Stumble it!
If you bought an HD-DVD player and/or recorder and some HD-DVD titles, then it looks like you’ve got a nice, new Betamax machine on your hands. That’s right: Toshiba has apparently thrown in the towel as Blu-ray takes the prize as the winner of the new high-capacity DVD battle.
The turn came when Warner Brothers made the switch to Blu-ray. This kind of surprised me, because over the past few years, there were all kinds of dips and turns in the battle, where each maker seemed to suffer big setbacks, but then charged back later when the tide turned. When Warner–just one studio of many–announced their switch, there was a lot of buzz that this was some momentous turn. Beats me as to why–a variety of studios had been turning this way and that for a while now, and it never seemed to change anything.
Toshiba fought back, primarily by slashing prices on their players, which had always been cheaper and had come out earlier than Blu-rays. But that didn’t seem to work. Vendor after vendor decided to go Blu-ray, until the lethal blow came with Wal-Mart deciding to drop HD-DVD. That signaled the end that had begun with Warner’s move. Toshiba has not made its formal announcement yet, but it seems pretty much set:
A source at Toshiba confirmed an earlier report by public broadcaster NHK that it was getting ready to pull the plug.“We have entered the final stage of planning to make our exit from the next generation DVD business,” said the source, who asked not to be identified. He added that an official announcement could come as early as next week.
And here I was, figuring that it would last until somebody came up with a hybrid drive, like they did with the DVD±R/RW format. For a long time, people thought that the plus-minus wars would produce a single winner, but now everyone uses optical drives that allow for both types (although it’s getting harder and harder to find “plus” disks; “minus” seems to be the anti-climactic winner there).
Instead, everyone who bought an HD-DVD player will start to find it harder and harder to get disks to put into their machines, and eventually will have to buy a Blu-ray device.
The competition was good for at least one thing: it drove prices down a lot faster than might have happened otherwise, and spurred development and releases. Hopefully, that trend won’t slow down too much now that Sony can take a breather and relax, its dominance assured.
Oh, and guess who championed HD-DVD? Microsoft. And who picked Blu-ray from the start? Apple.
The only downside I can see: now we have to get used to a weird format naming system. Until now, it had been simple: everything was -ROM, -R, and -RW, and the initial letters made sense–CD and DVD. For some strange reason, Sony decided to go with “BD-R” and “BD-RE” for the recordable and re-writable formats. One would have expected “BR” (for Blu-Ray) to be the initial string instead of “BD” (for Blu-ray Disk), but when you think about it, that would have made the full designations “BR-R” and “BR-RW”–which sound a bit “chilly.” But “RE”? Apparently, that’s for “RE-writable,” instead of the long-used “Re-Writable” (“RW”). Why Sony changed that, beyond the desire to confuse people, is anyone’s guess.
But what really blew me away was this map:
Those are Blu-Ray regions, as in the DVD regions that have created so many headaches for international travelers. Just last night, I got an email from an old student who was having trouble getting American DVDs to play on his Japanese computer. That’s because Japan uses Region 2, strangely aligned with Europe, but not with America, which uses Region 1. But look at the new map: Japan and America use the same region. That means we can use American BD-videos in Japan! Which means that potentially, I could buy films from Amazon.com for movies that are only just coming out in theaters in Japan, and for a price which is less than the two movie tickets Sachi and I would have to buy here. That’s nice. (Although it should be noted that HD-DVDs were region-free–oh well.)
So, what will you be in for with a Blu-ray upgrade from your old DVD? Well, for starters, Blu-Ray has a minimum of 5 times the capacity–25 GB vs. the old DVD’s 4.7 GB (though I find a DVD-R will only take 4.3 GB when you actually want to record something). However, multi-layer discs are becoming available; you can buy 50 GB Blu-rays now. There is talk about BD’s with up to 10 layers, or 250 GB of storage on a single disc. No news on when those will be out, though. Blu-Rays, having so much capacity, will take longer to write; currently, it’s supposed to take a half hour to burn a 25 GB BD-R with the fastest available writer.
Blu-ray movie discs should have a more powerful and varied interface, allowing for more features the user can control. Let’s just hope they did away with that idiotic you-can’t-skip-past-these-ads “feature.” BD’s also sport a much thinner but tougher plastic coating, supposedly resistant even to scrubbing with steel wool.
So, should you buy your Blu-ray today? As always with computer equipment, it depends–future equipment will always be cheaper and/or have more features. Drives bought today might not be able to handle higher-capacity discs released in future years. On the other hand, optical disc drives do have a tendency to crap out after a few years of steady use; there’s no telling how long the new machines may last. And by the time those better-featured machines come out, prices may have dropped to a level where you might not mind buying a new machine so much.
Me, I’ll have to wait until I get a Hi-def TV. However, they do sell Blu-ray drives for computers, and I do have this nice, big, HD-ready 24-inch iMac screen… but looking at what Yodobashi Camera is selling, their cheaper units seem to only work with Windows PCs–ironic, since Apple supports the Blu-ray format, and Microsoft went HD-DVD. Figures.
Stumble it!
Fake Steve Jobs is right: holy crap. Check this out–seems like a cheap and easy way to change your regular TV set into a cool 3-D set without having funny-colored or even polarized glasses lens. Seems like a company could apply this beyond the Wii and create a relatively cheap piece of hardware that could have all kinds of cool applications in 3-D and VR.
And check out the guy’s web site. He seems like a frickin’ genius.
Stumble it!
Remember the Optimus Keyboard from Russia? The one with the OLED keys that change appearance? This is the “keyboard of the future” that I’ve said (since two and a half years ago) is bound to be coming into vogue as soon as it gets affordable, and will break us free of QWERTY shackles. The problem up until now is that the only version of this, the Optimus, costs around one and a half thousand bucks, way too steep for anyone but the rich or insane–or the insanely rich.
But watch out–a new contender is now making OLED keyboards, claiming that they can find no Optimus-claimed patents to hold them back. United Keys has even signed a deal to produce OLED keys for gaming keypads for a company called FoxConn, which will presumably be not too expensive. The first version will sport only nine OLED keys in the F-key spots, which will likely let the price be low enough to allow any means-limited fanboy to get their hands on one. Game handsets and controllers will presumably be offered as well.
And, of course, there was the Apple patent people sighted a few weeks back which seems to be aiming for a more conservative, black-and-white OLED keyboard which would presumably be cheaper and would accomplish the primary mission of universalizing keyboards. This makes sense not only in languages, but also in switching between Mac and Windows configurations when in Boot Camp or Parallels.
Meanwhile, Optimus is not standing still–they’ve gone all Star Trek: The Next Generation on us, and advanced to a no-button keyboard concept, one which looks so suspiciously like the the Star Trek control panels that Mike Okuda might want to file a patent infringement suit of his own.
This is along the lines of Apple technology which will allow for tactile feedback from a flat screen–allowing your fingers to feel like they are pressing physical buttons.
The future may be closer than we think.
Stumble it!
One of the things I wanted to know before buying the 10.1-megapixel XTi was, how did its 300mm zoom compare with the 10x zoom on my older 3.2-megapixel PowerShot S1-IS? Would the new, much more expensive camera deliver any better magnification?
The numbers were not translatable, apparently; no one that I could find had a direct x-to-mm chart showing equivalencies. But there had to be some way to compare the two. As I went ahead and bought the XTi anyway, I was able to simply shoot comparable photos and see what the differences were.
I should note that I was not taking any care to match the f-stop, exposure times, white-balance or metering, so the image colors and other qualities may seem different between the two cameras; this is simply due to my lack of attention to certain details, rather than any actual differences in the cameras.
If you inspect a camera’s image in Photoshop (or another image editing program), you can get information on what settings the camera was set to when the photo was taken–what shutter speed, aperture, and focal length, for example. This is called “EXIF” data. With the digital SLR, the focal length (effectively, the “zoom”) is directly proportional to the “mm” rating for the magnification. For example, my short lens is 28mm ~ 105mm, and my long lens is 70mm to 300mm. That’s exactly how the focal length reads in the EXIF data. 50mm is considered a standard focal length for normal photos.
With the point-and-shoot S1-IS, however, the focal length is reported as ranging from 5.8mm to 58mm, 5.8mm being the standard wide-angle “non-zoom” setting, and 58mm being the “10x” zoom. Even when using the same “mm” measuring system, the numbers are obviously not equivalent to what the DSLR’s use. So instead, let’s see what the photos look like side-by-side. Since there is not enough room on your screen, let alone my blog frame, to show entire photos, these images have been reduced, but in ways to show equivalency.
First, here are two images, showing the S1-IS at 5.8mm (max zoom-out) and my 28 ~ 105mm lens on the XTi at 28mm:
S1-IS
XTi
As you can see, the XTi’s 28mm was a bit more “zoomed in” than the S1-IS’s 5.8mm. Of course, the XTi has far more megapixels; the S1-IS image is 2048 pixels wide, while the XTi’s is 3888. If we reduce the S1-IS’s image to be proportionate to the XTi’s in pixels, it would look like this:
S1-IS
Compare that to the image just above it, and you can see how much more information the XTi captures.
Okay, now for the maximum zoom. On the S1-IS, max zoom is “10x,” or “58mm.” For the lens I bought for the XTi, the max zoom is 300mm. I took photos with both cameras of some birds just below the far shoreline. Here are the whole images superimposed.
This one is a bit confusing to sort out. The XTi’s image looks smaller, but that just means that it is zoomed in more. I had to reduce the XTi’s image that much to match the area in the S1-IS image. The XTi’s image is still 90% wider than the S1-IS’s, so clearly it contains a great deal more detail.
For a slightly better idea, this time I’ll show a small portion of the above images–a 450-pixel-wide cropped part of each image, showing what the exact pixels caught for each camera:
S1-IS
XTi
You’ll notice that the XTi’s image is much more “zoomed in”; this is a combination of the slightly greater actual zoom (about 20% more), and the increased detail from having more resolution.
You might also think that the S1-IS has better sharpness. However, there are two factors playing into this: first, I believe that the XTi was dealing with a smaller depth of field, and my inexpert focusing caused a different part of the image to be in focus; and second, as the birds and other objects in the S1-IS’s picture seem smaller, they also seem sharper. However, they are not. If we enlarge the S1-IS’s image so it shows the birds approximately at the same size at the XTi’s image, we get this:
S1-IS
XTi
This makes it quite clear that we’re getting a lot more detail with the XTi. Since I had to blow up the S1-IS image about 250% to get it to match the size of the XTi’s, I would guess that the 300mm zoom on the XTi is approximately worth a “25x” zoom for a point-and-shoot.
Now, I do have a telephoto converter for my S1-IS, though I forgot to bring it with me on this trip. However, the telephoto lens only adds 60%, for a total 16x zoom–not to mention that the quality is not all that great. With the 1.6x telephoto converter on the S1-IS, at full zoom, there is a lot of purple fringing and other artifacts that I have yet to see on the XTi at full zoom.
So, in the end, the XTi with a 300mm lens has more than twice the magnification power of my old S1-IS–if you include the extra boost given by the extra megapixels.
I’ll have to try another test on another day to see if I can work out the possible problems with focusing and other image settings, to give an even closer comparison. However, this will do for now.
Stumble it!
Second day using the camera, and everything is going well. The focusing issue seems to be a matter of self-training, recognizing where the camera is focusing on and compensating. For example, when I am shooting birds on the ground and there are prominent depth-of-field issues, I notice that the camera will not focus on the center of the frame, but rather just below center. So, if I want to focus on a bird on the ground, I have to position it just below the center of the screen.
I also have yet to produce RAW images. Are they sharper than the JPEGs? I’ll have to experiment and find out.
I have also noticed more a feature I mentioned last time: if you are focusing on an area with several objects at different distances, the camera may focus on the wrong one. If you release the shutter and hold it halfway again to re-focus, the AF will usually offer a different object to focus on, as if to say, “Oh, that’s not your subject? OK, then how about this? No? What about this?” It can all be done pretty quickly, too.
Anyway, a lot of the same birds were there, but I did spot this Northern Flicker unexpectedly (click for larger image):
As usual, hummingbirds virtually swarmed around this giant tree near the bike bridge. Got one of them pretty well as it perched in a nearby tree. The first image can be clicked for a larger version:
There were also the prerequisite White-crowned Sparrows:
As well as the usual Stellar’s Jays and Acorn Woodpeckers, as well as a Black Phoebe that seems to have laid claim to the meadow:
There was also a flock of Chestnut-backed Chickadees. One I got real close; here’s a cropped-but-not-reduced shot:
Here’s a reduced shot, with a larger unreduced version after a click:
This one’s kind of cute, like the bird is hiding behind the flower…
And a squirrel; larger image on click:
Stumble it!
It was just a short trip, down to the creek and across the bike bridge. Lots of birds down there. Saw two kinds of jays, some woodpeckers, a load of hummingbirds, Black Phoebes, Dark-eyed Juncos, a Plain Titmouse, American Robins, a Mourning Dove, plus a couple of less usual birds–an American Goldfinch, for one, and what looked like some sort of Meadowlark. Here are some of the images. As my 28-105mm lens only came this afternoon, I was just using the 70-300mm zoom.
First impressions: Wow, what a difference! With the S1-IS, the zoom was good and all, but startup, zooming, and focusing took so long in comparison. It could range from 6 to 10 seconds, from pressing the “on” button to taking an image at full zoom. The XTi turns on instantly, you can zoom manually at high speed, and autofocus works in a flash; if I don’t have to fuss with the lens cap, I can go from a cold start to a full-zoom auto-focused shot in less than 3 seconds. If I don’t have to turn the camera on, then less than that. And that makes a huge difference in bird photography; the birds will hop or flit out of frame so fast, I wound up losing most of my shots on the S1-IS to having to wait for the camera to be ready. Today, I caught probably twice as many birds as I would have otherwise. The camera felt like it was always ready.
First of all, was an easy test of good depth-of-field effects; it’s easier to get the blurred background with a zoom lens, taken at a bit of a distance.
Here’s another example with some nice flowers; an 800 x 600 version available on click.
This shot was partly luck, and partly the lens. A Black Phoebe sat up on a pole about 20 feet away from me. Still, the camera zoom and 10.1 MP helped a lot to make this bird appear large in the images. Click for an 800 x 600 zoom shot. Here’s another view of the bird, works better:
Here’s a photo of two hummingbirds perched in a tree at a fair distance. Alas, the images using the full zoom are not as sharp as I’d like; see below for a view of one of the hummingbirds at 100% size–the actual pixels from the original shot, just cropped. It doesn’t really get very sharp. But the extra megapixels allow for reduction and sharpening to make it look that way.
There were a few Stellar’s Jays–pretty birds, crested and deep blue and black.
The second one has an 800 x 600 blow-up.
Then there were some basic “brown birds,” or common birds of an uninteresting brown color; in Japan, that would be the Brown-eared Bulbul; here, I believe they are Brown Towhees here.
Still common but much prettier is the Dark-eyed Junco.
Also an interesting bonus with this camera: being able to catch between-the-frames shots like this Junco taking off:
That wasn’t usually possible on my S1-IS for a few reasons: first, even if I was fast enough to take the shot, and even if the camera was on and ready, it would still take a second or two for the camera to respond and snap the shot, by which time the bird was long gone. Second, the S1-IS takes almost a full second between shots, even without the flash (with the flash, well, forget about it).
With the XTi, the camera responds immediately, taking several shots in quick succession (if it’s in Continuous Shooting mode), allowing for the capture of flyaway moments like the Junco above.
It also allowed me to snap this image, a bird that flitted by for a split second and then disappeared. I think it’s a Meadowlark or something.
Finally, I got the American Goldfinch below. Several of them had flown into a tree, but this one stayed for a while, on a branch more visible than the rest.
For fun, I took some moon shots as well; the 300mm lens does a good job of capturing it.
Notes on the XTi: the focus is trickier than it seemed. I thought I was getting very good focus most of the time, but when I reviewed the shots on my computer, so many were just off. It was the usual problem with autofocusing on birds: anything in the foreground or background still has a tendency to rob the subject of focus. However, there may be a fix: the XTi normally focuses using nine different focus sensors, but you can limit it to just the center focus sensor. Hopefully, that would focus directly on whatever was in the middle of the frame. Hopefully; I will try that out soon.
Alternately, I could use the manual focus; it would take a little longer, but could yield better results. Or maybe not: if I couldn’t tell the focus well enough when taking the images, how good would manual focus be?
Still, the autofocus is much better than on regular point-and-shoots, and the responsiveness of the camera is just great. So far, I am very pleased with this camera.
One other point: I was looking for an thumbnail viewing program to use with the new camera’s images. Since they are so big (2~4 MB for each photo), I must weed out the bad images much more assiduously. But this presents problems. I never really thought iPhoto was great for this–iPhoto ‘08 is acceptable in some ways, but was still slow going from one image to the next, and had some annoying foibles–like not actually deleting photos I removed, and after removing one from the list, iPhoto would jump back to the beginning of the list instead of looking at the photo after the deleted one. Other thumbnail image-viewing programs were only worse. (Though I must admit, I haven’t tried Canon’s program on the install CD–I should do that.) I was about to give up when I realized that I had the perfect image viewer: Mac OS X. Just open up the folder with the images, click on the first one, then hit the space bar to get Quick Look. It was a lot faster to view images, and if I didn’t like one, a Command-Delete would zap it to the trash. Arrow keys can change the view to the next photo in the list. Very handy!
Stumble it!
I probably shouldn’t have, but I did. And today it got here. Well, part of it, anyway. It cost a lot more than I had figured on, and frankly, I don’t really think that I need it that much. No, I don’t have buyer’s remorse. It is such a nice toy, and I know that I will enjoy it and use it for quite a while. It’s just that I have a bit of sticker shock.
Here are the elements that I’m getting:
The 28-105 lens is lower-end, but has a better range and better quality than the much-maligned 18-55mm kit lens. The 70-300mm IS Zoom lens is the centerpiece of the set, in a way–it’s the lens I’ll be using outdoors most. One down point I discovered: the image stabilization kind of eats up battery life. Therefore, the two extra batteries. Not Canon OEMs, which are pretty expensive, at least $40 apiece or so, but cheap under-$10 alternatives which people on Canon photography boards say work as well or sometimes even better. The Flash card is not as big as they get–that would be 8 GB nowadays–but the Ultimate IV is supposed to be the speediest, which could make more of a difference.
Like I said, such a nice toy. It takes pictures so easily. Point and shoot, much more so than the actual point-and-shoots. The autofocus is very nice, the zoom lens is great to use… it’s like graduating from a beat-up chevy wagon clunker to a nice mid-range BMW.
Not that there haven’t been a few kinks along the way. The biggest one had me in a bit of a panic, made me think that I had gotten a lemon and faced a vacation that would consist of waiting to see if the camera could be returned from the repair center before I had to leave for Japan. It turned out all right (I’m pretty sure, at least), but had me scared for an hour or so.
When I got the camera, the first thing I checked was whether it would be necessary to charge the battery first. I hate it when you have to do that–toys should, after all, work right out of the box. But the instructions said nothing about it. I slid the battery into place, and the camera worked. Swell! I ran out and started testing it. Unfortunately, it was delivered late in the afternoon on an overcast day, so there wasn’t much chance to get anything blogworthy on film. Furthermore, I had not run through the instructions yet, so could still not figure out how to make it work best. But I practiced some, took dozens of shots, and then took it back inside to see the results. Pretty good.
Throughout the evening I experimented further, and eventually sat down to go through the manual, trying each new thing I learned by snapping a few more photos. I got to the part about manual control and depth-of-field, and figured that I’d try some comparative shots. After one shot that I took, the camera shut down.
Now, had it simply lost all power, I’d have concluded that the battery had died and I hadn’t noticed the indicator. But the power lamp, the “on” light, remained lit. That suggested that the camera was still powered. But the LCD screen wouldn’t light, none of the buttons worked, and even if you switched the power toggle off, the power lamp remained lit. It had all the earmarks of the camera’s computer crashing, freezing, hanging. The only thing that would bring it back was to remove the battery and then slide it back in. Then it would start up again, I could review pictures, and could see the battery indicator showed half-full. But when I took another picture… it froze again. Removing the battery would always fix it, but the next photo taken–no matter what setting, no matter how I did it–would always freeze the camera in the same way. I tried erasing the flash card, pushing all the buttons, but whatever I tried, it froze and crashed and hung again.
At this point, I was pretty upset. I figured it was a lemon of a camera, broken almost right out of the box, and envisioned spending the rest of my vacation on hold with Canon customer support, shipping my toy away for weeks and maybe even suffering problems after that. An alternative of returning it to the seller and getting a new one in exchange still meant that I’d miss at least a week of photography, the time I had set aside for birdwatching.
Just to be sure, I started recharging the battery, and as I did so, I started Googling possible keywords that might lead me to discussions where people spoke of the same problem, perhaps with a cure. Eventually, I found the answer: this discussion thread, describing more or less exactly my problem. The cause: the battery ran out.
Sure enough, after my battery recharged (it takes a little under 2 hours), I found that the camera worked just fine again. Of course, that struck me as a rather glaring oversight in Canon’s otherwise very nice design–to allow a battery to run out and present symptoms that mimic a terrible mechanical failure… not good. Of course, there were extenuating circumstances. As it turned out, I was using a battery that was not fully-charged to begin with, and at the time the camera seemed to freeze, I was eating up power enormously: I was using the built-in flash, image-stabilization was on, and the camera was in continuous autofocus-and-metering mode. So perhaps that egregious power usage sent the camera over some limit or threshold, and caused the seeming malfunction. Still, that’s a bit of a bug that Canon should have looked at.
So, why had my battery indicator shown half-full? In my experience, when a battery runs out of juice, turing the device off and then on again usually results in a slight burst of life, and the battery reads higher for a moment. It happens in my cell phone that way, for example. Must have happened here. Also, it seems that SLR’s don’t give the blinking-red-empty-battery warning, nor the “You have to change the batteries now” sign-off message, something that also caught me off-guard, being a newbie.
Soon after, I ordered the two backup batteries. Natch.
Stumble it!
So, I finally broke down and decided to get my very first digital SLR camera. The timing seems about right; the cameras I’m looking at have come down in price well enough for me to afford. The last time I looked at these with an interest in buying, the body-only prices were about a thousand dollars. Today, they hover just above $400, with simple “kit lens” sets around $500.
By this time I have it shaved down to two possibilities: the Nikon D40x or the Canon Digital Rebel XTi (also called the 400D, or in Japan, the “Kiss X.” Yeah, I know). And between those two, I am leaning heavily toward the Canon XTi.
One of the reasons is that when I checked them out at the camera shop, the Canon felt better, and more familiar. One feature that could have tilted the choice either way–the ability to compose shots live using the LCD screen–seems absent in both models, available only in DSLR cameras above a thousand dollars, or so the camera shop guy claimed.
The Nikon D40x starts at $610; the Canon XTi at $601. The Nikon got a 7.7 rating at CNet, the XTi an 8.0 (though user reviews were less enthusiastic than for the Nikon). More in-depth reviews at dpreviews.com gave the Nikon a very slight edge over the Canon, though the side-by-side feature roundup (another one here) seems fairly on par when it comes to features that matter more to me. Dpreviews did give the Nikon better marks for speed, but when I handled both in the camera store, the Canon had notably better speed in taking consecutive shots. Maybe the settings on the Nikon were wrong, or the conditions unusual?
The Nikon lacks the sensor-cleaning feature that the XTi has–something I’d be worried about–and is said to focus more slowly. Also, it looks like the Nikon’s ability to use auto-focus with attached lenses is limited. Nikon’s USB connection is quite a bit faster; though I do dislike sitting there waiting for images to download, it’s something I can live with.
I am also looking to get a good zoom lens to go with the standard 18-55mm lens that comes with the camera in “kit” form. Hopefully one that won’t break the bank; some of those higher-end lenses look lovely, but I’d rather not pay triple the price of the camera for a lens. The Sigma 70-300mm f/4-5.6 DG APO Macro Telephoto Zoom Lens; people say mostly very good things about it, and the price (around $200) looks good as well. The wireless remote for the camera also looks cheap and useful.
Anybody with experience here want to give me some advice? I’ll probably buy within the next couple of days.
Stumble it!
There is an incredibly thorough point-by-point comparison between the iPod and Zune 8GB flash players just published at RoughlyDrafted. While the author is recognizably Apple-biased, the review is nevertheless devastating against the Zune (even if you discount for bias), pointing out its flaws and shortcomings in rather gory detail.
One point that I had not been aware of: the depth of the Zune’s WiFi shortcomings. Zune’s WiFi has two features: user-to-user sharing, and wireless syncing. User-to-user sharing has always been an obvious flop; there are too few users, too few real-life opportunities to share even when in the presence of other users, and DRM limitations which make it far less likely that people will share.
Wireless syncing, however, sounded at least partly useful, though I have never been too hot about it. After all, you have to plug in your player almost every day anyway just to charge it up. Wireless syncing would only be useful in limited situations, such as when you get new music on your computer and don’t want to wait for the next charge-up to sync it.
Details in the review, however, completely blew away my illusion that this feature might be even partially useful. Apparently, while it is possible to sync wirelessly, most “wireless” syncing situations demand that a cable of some sort be attached–either a USB cable or a power cable–else the battery gets drained too fast. In which case you need to re-charge anyway. And if you’re going to plug in, then what the hell is the use of WiFi, especially when it is much slower than a direct link?
In short, just that one piece of information shattered one of the few potential advantages of the Zune. Not that this surprises me at all, but the whole article clarifies rather potently the chasm of quality between the two players.
Stumble it!
Today, I was going to go down to the electronic shops and pick up a new HDD/DVD recorder because, as I’ve chronicled recently, my 3-year-old Toshiba machine broke down. It started showing an error message signaling a hard disk failure four or five days ago, and refused to start up–even just enough to eject the DVD that was in its drive. Repeated attempts to revive the machine failed, including letting it stay off for a long time, unplugged for a long time, and by pressing every available button I could press. I called customer support and was told that the hard disk would have to be replaced (they finally got back to me and told me it would cost about ¥40,000), and every report I could find on the web from people with the exact same problem suggested that this was the only chance for recovery.
So I decided to get a new unit costing about $700, including a $10/mo. upgrade of our cable box. I was just about to walk out the door to buy the new DVR when I decided, for the hell of it, to try to turn on the old Toshiba one last time. And what do you know, it turned on, and worked fine.
Over the past few days, I’d had the machine turned off while plugged in, and noted that twice, the front panel display had some mysterious message, “D-L-D.” I have no idea if that had anything to do with it, but either way, the old problem disappeared and now seems to work fine. I am busily archiving everything recorded on it to DVD, treating the machine as essentially on its last legs, which, for all I know, it might actually be.
So the new DVR purchase is on the back burner for the time being….
Stumble it!
Before finalizing a decision on getting a new DVR/DVD recorder, I figured that I’d try calling Toshiba to at least find out what’s going on. And I was quickly reminded of the fact that Toshiba customer support sucks bit fat hairy ones. I called their number, and they now have a “choose one of these three options” voice menus. The first one includes the “RD Series,” so I dial it. They answer right away, but tell me that for my model, the RD-XS53, I have to call again and choose #2 from the menu–and no, they can’t transfer me. So I call again, and choose #2–this time there’s a 5-minute wait, after which a guy gets on the line and says that for my model, the RD-XS53, I need to dial #3.
And it didn’t get much better after that. After a 10-minute wait on hold, I found out that #3 was actually the extension I needed (they didn’t try to send me back to #1, at least), but the person there had a terminal case of polite speech, as is often the case for these people. That is, they use the most polite speech form in Japanese, which is nice and all, except that it uses all kinds of alternate verbs and vocabulary words and I can’t understand a damned word they’re saying. I ask, for example, “can I call the repair center?” and the support person gives me a 60-second answer, and at the end, I have no idea what the hell she just told me. And I’m no slouch in speaking Japanese. I’m not fluent, obviously, but I don’t deal with the ultra-polite speech enough to grasp it.
So I do my usual “I can’t understand what you just said, polite speech confuses me, could you please use normal speech with simple words” request, and as usual, the person is incapable of doing what I ask, so I suffer through yet more incomprehensible yet polite speech. At least I am guessing it is polite. For all I know, she’s cussing me out royally but saying it in a polite and perky tone.
Finally we get to the point where she finally understands that all I want is a ballpark estimate of how much a repair would cost me. She can’t tell me, so I ask, “who can?” And after five or more minutes of more polite speech (I swear I am not exaggerating on the time), she agrees to have a repair guy call me. So all she needs is my name, my phone number, and my address. “Why my address?” I ask. “Because we need to know which repair center will deal with you.” “Will you use the address to send me junk mail?” I ask. She answers politely for about 40 seconds, so I don’t know what she said. I tell her my city, ward, and neighborhood, narrowing it down to an area only about 5 blocks square or so. She asks for the whole address. “Is there more than one repair center in that area?” I ask, and she says no, but keeps pressing me for the whole address. We compromise by me telling her my building address but not the apartment number, and I tell her if the repair guy comes to visit, I’ll give him that when the time comes.
I swear, sometimes it’s not worth even trying with these people. Really, I just want confirmation of what I already suspect–that the repair won’t be worth it. Someone suggested in the comments that I swap out the HDD myself, and I might do that, but I don’t know if the disk needs to have any special software or partitioning or not, so it’s a bit of a risk (I’ll ask the repair guy all the same). Besides which, the DVD drive is bound to crap out sometime soon anyway, and so I face having even more repair expenses soon.
And it can communicate with some cable tuner boxes. Just not the one I have. The one I have is the old, simple box; the cable company did not splurge on the new simple boxes with the special controlling connector. The only one that my cable company offers which will work that way is one that itself has a 250GB DVR built into it. It would cost an extra $10 or so a month to get it, but it would double the capacity I’d have at hand, and supposedly it can transfer video files to the DVR/DVD recorder, so it’d be just like having a 500 GB disk drive. I figure I might go for that setup.
I am, however, running into roadblocks: my cable company has digital broadcasting, as all of Japanese broadcasting must go by 2010 (according to the cable company), and digital video cannot be recorded as a traditional DVD-Video mode; instead, when you make a DVD-R, it creates a Video DVD disc using “VR” mode, as part of CPRM (digital rights management technology). So, will I be able to play the DVDs it makes on my computer? Will it play on my DVD player? Does it still have the same structure as a traditional Video DVD (with a “VIDEO_TS” folder), or something new? Will I run into problems if I record a movie or TV show because it’s DRM-protected? The answers seem a bit hard to find. As far as I know, I could be buying a recorder that’ll make DVDs that only it can play, or that might be hit-and-miss depending on what I do.
Ain’t it fun to shop for technology, especially when DRM is involved? Nobody wants to tell you what problems you’ll face, and so you wind up getting blindsided…
Stumble it!
Well, it had to happen. The DVR/DVD recorder I got three years ago finally crapped out. Last night I wanted to record something on the fly, but couldn’t figure out how to make it shut down automatically after a certain period of time. I knew it would eat up all the hard disk space before I cold wake up, but I’d done that before–it just eats up all the time and then shuts down. So I wake up this morning, find it has shut down like I figured; I edit the recording to erase the 4 extra hours it recorded, freeing up a bit of space.
But by the time I returned home this evening, the hard disk was clicking away–as it had some times in the past. I shut it down and restarted–and I got a hard disk error. Tried all kinds of things, but no go–the hard disk looks like it’s fried. Looking it up on the web, it seems that every mention of this error was treated by swapping out the hard drive. And mine was full of stuff I had not yet archived. Oh well.
I got the thing three years ago, for about a thousand bucks (electronics always cost more in Japan, sometimes 30-40% more than they do in the U.S., for some reason), and had always felt that the thing wouldn’t last too long. It had several meltdowns in the first year, most of them in the initial few months. Most of the breakdowns concerned the DVD drive–it failed twice, fortunately both times within warranty. I am actually surprised that it worked smoothly for two years after that. At least, I got a hell of a lot of use out of it–I’ve got hundreds of DVDs to show for it.
Repairing it now isn’t too promising an option; most likely, it’d cost more to repair it than it’s worth. Also, similar machines in Japan have dropped to below $500 (yeah, I know they’re cheaper in the U.S.–like I said), and it’d probably be safer and cheaper to go that route.
The machine I’ve used had already lost one big feature: the ability to switch the satellite tuner. Well, it didn’t lose it–instead, I lost the satellite when I moved to the new place. The new tuner is from a cable company, and it’s not compatible. I’ve been trying to record Boston Legal and Heroes off of Japanese TV for Sachi and I to watch, and half the time I miss them because we forget to set the tuner to the channel we want the DVR to record.
So tomorrow, I’ll have to check quickly with the cable company to see if there’s a model that can interact with their tuner (they rent out DVRs, but not with DVD recording), then check out what Labi, Bic, and maybe even Costco are selling. Oh, boy! An all-new convoluted machine navigation system! New adventures in frustration! Whee!
Stumble it!
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