« June 2008 | Main | August 2008 »
July 31, 2008
[ OLD DOGS AND NEW TRICKS ]
THERE ARE SOME PEOPLE WE HAVE HEARD OF who claim to know the meaning of E=MC2 Unfortunately we don’t know enough to be able to tell if this is an idle boast. There are also a few persons who skite about their comprehensive understanding of the working of Adobe Photoshop. We do know enough about this subject to take their bragging with a grain of salt.
Photoshop is an intimidating piece of software. After using it in its various incarnations for the past ten years we admit to still skating around on the surface. And that, frankly, is not good enough. We needed to brace ourselves and get to grips with this astonishing industry standard application.
So we enrolled for the Adobe online eSeminars for Photoshop users. (www.adobeeseminars.com.au) Each seminar last 60 minutes. They are free.
Adobe has assembled a cast of eTeachers, made up of talented photographers from Australia and New Zealand. You will need a broadband connection to take part because they are streamed “live”. Past seminars are also available at tinyurl.com/5cp9vo, but they are also streaming, so they must be watched in real time.
Things don’t always go smoothly with these narrowcasts. There are occasional sound and image dropouts and, inexplicably, the foul-ups are preserved in the stored versions. And you can’t fast forward through the bad bits. However, this is a small price to pay for the usefulness of the online seminar form.
There is another, more serious, drawback with this style of teaching. The presenters do things very quickly, making it difficult to grasp the concept being demonstrated and then being able to replicate it later. Last week the teacher showed a nifty way of getting a photo of a busy intersection in which the final image has no cars or people in sight. To follow his rapid fire demonstration you needed to know about Stack, Auto Align, Smart Objects and Median. Oh dear, back to “Photoshop for Dummies”.
Still, even though the teaching style leaves something to be desired, these seminars are an eye opener for those of us who have hitherto scratched the surface of Photoshop. The demonstration of digitally creating a group photograph from two images so that the dopey expressions in one are replaced with the beatific smiles in another was a revelation.
There were only 55 participants in last week’s eSeminar. You can’t interrupt the teacher while he’s in full flow but you can post questions as the session proceeds, which the presenter answers at the end. It’s a sort of delayed interaction.
However, if you’re the sort of person who prefers learning from a book, twe came across a beauty in the newsagent last week. It is in the Focus Photoshop Guide series and the current issue is “The complete guide to perfect portraits”, with attached CD-ROM.
The digital camera is a merciless recording device and, frankly, most of us have a few warts, wrinkles and pimples we would rather not have preserved for posterity in the family photo album. And some of us can benefit from a bit of glamorous fogging of the facial features. Now, for $20, you can find out how the pros make their models look gorgeous, even on bad hair days.
*
Posted by terry at 02:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 25, 2008
[REVIEW—KODAK ESP 5 all-in-one printer]
Price: $200
You press the button, Kodak does the rest
The low-down: This combined printer/scanner/copier uses Kodak’s unique paper recognition system. The paper has a code printed on the back which is read by the printer and paper type is automatically selected. Print size is up to A4. There are two pigment ink cartridges, a black and a five colour tank. One of the “colours” appears to be a clear layer that gives protection and eliminates annoying “bronzing” which can be a problem with pigment printers. Kodak claim low running costs – 20 cents for a 10 by 15cm print. The scanner is an average quality domestic unit. There are slots for printing from most memory cards and there is a Bluetooth option. There is a small LCD and some image enhancements can be done in the printer.
Like: The output from the printer is a revelation. The prints are sharp, accurately coloured and long lasting. Wilhelm Imaging Research says prints set new standards for longevity with permanence ratings of more than 125 years. Even prints on refrigerator doors withstand the ravages of kitchen gases better than any other. The ease of use of the ESP 5 makes all other printers seem antediluvian in their finicky and unpredictable behaviour.
Dislike: There is no provision for printing on CD/DVD blanks. The setup process demands that the computer be set to “small fonts” – ridiculous! The scanner lid doesn’t work well with books.
Verdict: This printer is the latest implementation of technology that Kodak first showed in the 5000 series all-in-ones. Here’s the unbelievable bit – if your monitor is properly calibrated then every print you make will look exactly like the picture on the screen. No fiddling with mysterious parameters in Photoshop. No need to choose paper type or ICC profile or colour management – the Kodak driver doesn’t even know about these things. Just choose paper size and output quality from draft, normal or best and press the print button and what you see on the screen is what you get. Consistently. In our experience this is without precedent in domestic printers. We love it!
*
Posted by terry at 04:53 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
[ UPGRADE DILEMMAS ]
Are you in the market for a digital single lens reflex? If you are then, according to the market research department at Canon you are not on your own. Forty-three per cent of potential digital customers are thinking of an SLR. So what’s keeping the credit card in the wallet?
Several things – price, weight and complexity. Well, price is no longer a valid reason for avoiding the SLR. Entry level SLRs are about the same price as the better quality compacts. And weight has come right down with both Canon and Olympus boasting about their feather-light models, the Canon 1000D and the Olympus E-420.
Olympus say their potential customers want an SLR that works just like the compact they are accustomed to using. That means that it will have “live view” in which the LCD is the viewfinder, and an all-in-one, wide-angle to extreme telephoto lens. These putative buyers can’t be fussed with a bag full of lenses when they have found that one 10X zoom on their compact is quite good enough.
There are good reasons for opting for a wide ranging zoom. First, it obviates the need to change lenses in dusty conditions. If you are on the Serengeti stalking a cheetah and the Land Rover is churning up the dust then changing a lens will let that dust into the camera. That is always bad, even with automatic dust removal.
Second, a super zoom is cheaper than the combination of shorter lenses needed to cover the same range.
However there are penalties, which we have harped on before in this space. Distortions at the zoom limits are usually extreme. Resolution is not as good as with primes or short range zooms. The lenses are slower – for instance, the Tamron 28-300 lens (RRP $900) we have been testing has an aperture of f3.5 at the wide end, which is acceptable, but not fast, to f6.3 at the long end. f6.3 is a smaller maximum aperture than some cameras need for their auto focus to work reliably.
We tried the Tamron on a Nikon D300, which has a sensitive auto focus system. When the lens is extended to 300mm the camera has difficulty focussing. Most of the time we relied on manual focus. Fortunately the focus mechanism is smooth and well damped.
Tamron’s approach is to go for maximum extension at the long end and for a modest short end – not wide-angle at all.
The Nikkor 18-200mm, (RRP $1200) is wider than the Tamron and less ambitious at the long end. Its aperture range f3.5 to f5.6 and it auto focuses quickly, precisely and quietly. The Tamron also works well enough at the 200mm point, so perhaps that should be regarded as its normal limit. Both lenses have image stabilisation.
If you wouldn’t know barrel and pincushion distortion if you saw it and you have no idea what vignetting is then you could love either of these lenses. And, in any case, these effects are absent at intermediate focal lengths.
*
Posted by terry at 04:51 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
July 16, 2008
[REVIEW—KODAK V1073 camera]
Price: $400
Typically Kodak
The low-down: This is a 10 megapixel compact camera with a 37–111mm zoom lens, branded as Schneider Kreuznach. The lens is optically stabilised and there is the obligatory face detection. Images can be captured in the appropriate resolution and format for high definition television. The only viewfinder is the 7.6cm LCD screen which becomes unreadable in bright sunlight. The ISO speed settings go up to 8000! (They have to be kidding.) The special feature of the camera is that almost all controls are through the LCD touch screen. The camera is handsome in an austere way and it feels solid enough in the hand.
Like: The picture quality is typically Kodak – bright, slightly over-saturated and over-sharpened. Postcard prints made straight from the camera on the new Kodak ESP5 printer are consistently excellent. And, much to our surprise, we found that pictures taken at ISO3200 are almost acceptable when allowances are made for the fact that it shouldn’t work at all. Noise reduction is generally, but not always, well handled at all speeds.
Dislike: There is a strange effect of noise reduction that shows up in areas of solid colour, such as blue skies. The effect appears as solid blocks of blue of a different tone. Very curious. And the LCD is totally useless as a viewfinder in sunlight. The protective layer over the touch screen makes viewing in bright light impossible.
Verdict: The test camera came without an instruction manual but we had no trouble finding our way around the various functions – the mark of an intuitive piece of equipment. We liked the zappy, Kodak-style images and were impressed with the print quality, even up to A4. Touch screens are not much to our liking, they seem more gimmicky than useful. And the zoom control is ridiculously small. But as the Box Brownie for the twenty-first century the Kodak V1073 fits the bill. And unlike the Box Brownie it will fit easily in anyone’s pocket.
*
Posted by terry at 11:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
[ SHOPPING IN HONKERS ]
HERE AT IMAGING WE HAVE HAD A BRILLIANT GET-RICH-QUICK BRAINWAVE. We reckon that there’s big money to be made from an online shop called stuffyoucantget.com.au that specialises in doodads that you need but are not stocked by any retailer in this backward country.
Take, for instance, the white balance lens caps that we mentioned in a recent article. All attempts to track down these useful gadgets in local shops led to a blank. If you do manage to get through to a salesperson you spend minutes describing what you’re looking for. Then you listen while they explain – patiently, as though to a dim-witted child – that there is no such thing. And there’s no point in looking at any retailer’s web site because they will be out of date and incomplete.
Go to eBay and type in “white balance lens cap” and stand back. There is any number of Hong Kong vendors ready to do business. You can buy any size cap to fit any lens. Average price is about $8, including postage. We ordered three. They arrived in a few days.
We needed a wireless remote release for the Imaging Nikon. $51 all-up from HK for a very good third party device because we couldn’t find anything comparable in Australia.
Last week we tried in vain to find replacement foam ear pads for a Sony headphone set. The official Sony spares supplier offered to import pads for $18 each plus postage. This is for a headphone set that costs $35. We ordered four pairs of pads from HK for a total of $10.
And local retailers wonder why grey importing is flourishing. Anyone who goes into a shop and lays down ready money for an expensive camera would be well advised to check out the prices offered on eBay. The price differences are big but there are risks. Usually the warranty is not effective in Australia. You should be charged GST when the item arrives and that can close the gap between HK and local prices. But the reality is that consumers can now shop anywhere where the deals are best. It’s called globalisation.
Imaging would rather buy locally. Businesses, jobs and the balance of payments are at stake. But the local shops won’t stock low-margin items and their web sites were all made in 1948 and never updated. Many do not publish prices on their sites.
One of the keys to the transformation of shopping habits has been PayPal. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has released a draft ruling that would stop eBay, the owner of PayPal, from forcing customers to use their payment system. The eBay/PayPal combination is so big that the ACCC is concerned about the “anti-competitive effect” of the PayPal-only policy. But it is interesting that the complaints are coming from the vendors and not from the buyers. Vendors can lose up to 2.4 per cent of their price through PayPal fees, which presumably will result in increased prices all round.
However, PayPal is a boon to cyber-shoppers. You are not giving your credit card details to an unknown seller and, as eBay claim, the opportunity for fraud is diminished. In fact, without PayPal we here at Imaging would not dare to buy from Hong Kong.
Now, let’s get started. First, register www.stuffyoucantget.com.au
*
[FOOTNOTE: A couple of visitors have sent bewildered emails asking where they can find "www.stuffyoucantget.com.au" My apologies. It was meant as a joke. Just a way of getting into the story. There is no such web site. But if the idea appeals to you then go for your life.]
Posted by terry at 11:24 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
July 10, 2008
[REVIEW—LOWEPRO MINI TREKKER AW]
Price: $200
Great camera carry-all
The low-down: This is a back-pack style camera carry bag made from tough weather proof (the AW stands for “all weather”) nylon. Overall dimensions are approximately 46h 35w 20d. The bag is lined with shock absorbing foam and is partitioned internally with moveable padded dividers, held in place with Velcro pads. There are external pockets and straps for carrying a tripod. There are three internal flat pockets in the bag’s front lid. The bag is closed with a zip and compressed with two side straps. There is a top carry handle as well as the conventional back-pack shoulder harness. And the bag comes with its own raincoat, which is tucked away in a pocket on the base. You pull it out and over the bag and it is instantly water proof. Very clever.
Like: Mary Poppins would own a camera bag like this. More comes out of it than you would think could possibly fit inside. Because of the simple and flexible internal partitioning the “pockets” can be arranged to take an amazing amount of gear. The bag is beautifully made.
Dislike: You could argue that stuffing all that gear into one bag and hanging it from your shoulders won’t be good for your back. Apart from that there is nothing not to like.
Verdict: This is an ideal bag for a photographer who lugs a lot of gear around. We filled it comfortably with two DSLRs with lenses mounted, plus four other lenses and a flash unit. There was plenty of room in the several pockets to take things like remote releases, filters and a compact camera. We still had room left over for a cut lunch. Compared with our usual carry bag, a sac noir we bought for a few francs in Paris ten years ago, the Lowepro is sheer luxury. But more than the luxury feel we appreciate the fact that the discrete compartments for cameras, lenses and accessories keep the gear from rubbing and banging together, which does nothing any good. A winner.
*
Posted by terry at 02:14 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
[ IT’S FREEBIE TIME AGAIN ]
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A GOOD PHOTO AND A BORING SNAP is rarely to do with the cost of the equipment. The famous American photographer, Edward Steichen, reckoned that “no photographer is as good as the simplest camera.” And another equally famous snapper reckoned that if your pictures are no good it’s because you are standing in the wrong place.
The art of photography is more to do with aesthetic considerations, such as composition and the perception and use of light, than with the mechanics and optics of the camera. And the good news is that there is nothing esoteric about the fundamentals of good photography – they can be reduced to a set of commandments. Which is just what Kodak has done with its excellent web based tutorial “Photo Tips” at tinyurl.com/6nl442
There are rules here for every conceivable photographic subject and situation, from taking pictures of babies to capturing fireworks displays.
You want to know how to take a picture of your art nouveau commode to advertise on eBay? You can find advice here. Along with all the basics of good composition and lighting. Altogether this Kodak tutorial is the best, least intimidating, most useful general introduction to the basics of photography that we have seen. There’s even a section on making a photographic inventory of your house for insurance records, although there is no mention of the obvious – if the house burns down where are the photos?
While on the subject of freebies, we have discovered a couple of nifty free photo editors. PhotoPad (tinyurl.com/57nb59) is a fast editor with an attractive and intuitive interface that does just about everything most people could want. It can crop, straighten and colour correct as well as convert images to grey scale and even automatically remove red eye and pimples.
Photoscape (www.photoscape.org) is a versatile viewer and editor. It’s not as pretty as PhotoPad but it does the same editing job, with a couple of extra tricks up its sleeve. The back lighting function is intriguing and the “bloom” feature makes for glamorous portraits. There is an excellent RAW converter built in.
Now for something completely different, a little application that does only one thing – it straightens up converging verticals. This thing is called ShiftN and you will find it at www.marcus-hebel.de (click on the ShiftN tab).
Image editors, such as Photoshop and PaintShop Pro, have filters for correcting converging verticals (the effect you get when you photograph the Empire State building from ground level and the walls seem to converge to a point in the sky) but ShiftN, being stand-alone, can be used with the free editors mentioned here.
ShiftN does a pretty good job of automatically detecting verticals and making them stand up straight. However, if fine tuning is needed the interface is clunky. There is no instant feedback from the preview images. The correction must be applied and then checked in preview.
As an application ShiftN is a bit underdone, but it works well enough to be included in any suite of free photo editing tools.
We never cease to be amazed at the generosity of the smart programmers who create these useful applications and then give them away.
*
Posted by terry at 02:11 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 03, 2008
[REVIEW—SANDISK USB-PLUG MEMORY CARDS]
SANDISK ULTRA II SDHC PLUS CARD 8GB
SANDISK MICRO CARD 8GB WITH MOBILEMATE READER
Price: Plus Card $117 Micro and reader $107
What’ll they think of next!
The low-down: These are two clever variations on SD and Micro SD memory cards. The Micro card is a conventional memory medium for mobile phones and Sandisk’s MP3 players, but in this package it comes with a tiny card reader that plugs straight into a USB socket, obviating the need for the usual Micro SD adapter. With 8GB of space on the card this provides good memory expansion for mobile phones and players. The SDHC Plus card is even smarter – take it from the camera and it plugs directly into a USB port. The memory card is hinged, and it is opened out flat for insertion into the camera. Then, for file transfer to the PC, it is folded closed and the USB pins are exposed. In this configuration it plugs into the socket.
Like: There is evidence of brilliant lateral thinking in these memory cards. Most PCs and laptops these days have readily accessible USB ports, and now the camera or MP3 files can be transferred without cables of any sort.
Dislike: The hinge on the Plus card is small. This looks like the weak point in the design – but that is something that can only be tested with extended use. The price is high, compared, for example with the Ultra II SDHC card bundled with the Sandisk USB card reader. The conventional card with reader is about $20 less than the Plus.
Verdict: These two new forms of memory cards are clever adaptations of the standard SD and Micro SD media. We have been using the SD Plus card in a compact camera we are testing and we found it a boon to be able to whip the card from the camera and push it straight into the USB port on the front of the PC. The MobileMate Micro reader is a better way of transferring files than the standard SD card form adapater because it also plugs the Micro SD straight into the USB port. Very smart and highly recommended.
*
Posted by terry at 01:09 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
[ NUMBER TWO TRIES HARDER ]
Apple iPod rules, OK! Everyone knows that. Only a dag buys an alternative, untrendy mp3 player, right?
Well, perhaps. But remember the old advertisement for the also-ran car hire company: “We’re number 2 – so we try harder”. There could be some truth in that. We have been testing the proposition with a couple of little players to see how they stack up as photo storage and viewing devices.
The Sony Walkman NWZ-A728 (RRP $269) is an 8gb flash memory player that has the face area of a credit card. The Sandisk Sansa View (RRP$277), also with 8gb of flash memory, is the same width as the Sony and about 24mm longer. They are both thin and light. The Sansa has a Micro SD memory card slot, for adding to the installed memory.
Both players have the same size and resolution LCD screens – 6cm and 320 by 240 pixel resolution. And both display photos and videos, but they are also both fussy about the image format and size.
We tried throwing large jpegs, straight from a Sony compact, at both players and they refused to display them. It was obvious that we had to go through a conversion process to prepare photos for display. In the Sandisk case this means going to their website and downloading the image converter, which is a weird way of doing business. Since the converter is essential to prepare the images for storage and viewing it ought to be included on an installation disc. In fact the mini CD (there is no concession to Mac pixies) only contains the instruction manual.
Both players rely on Windows Media Player 11 to prepare music and video files, so Mac owners had best stick with their beloved iPods. This is Gates territory.
We installed the Sandisk image converter and dragged and dropped the same jpegs that didn’t work in their native form. The conversion process was quick and, in the case of the Sansa player, the converter changed the files and then automatically saved them to the player, not to the computer. From that point they displayed perfectly, fitted nicely to the full screen.
We then copied the image files from the Sansa to the Walkman (being too lazy to crank up another converter) and they played perfectly there.
The screens on these devices are small – smaller than some of the LCDs on compact cameras. No one is going to be bowled over by either display.
Each company takes a different approach to the setting of brightness and contrast. The Sansa is very high contrast which makes for subjectively sharp and punchy pictures. The Sony opts for low contrast and more realistic light and shade contours. Some people will call this natural and others will call it dull. We prefer the Sony approach. And you can’t adjust the contrast and sharpness on either unit.
It’s hard to pick a winner. The Sansa is better value for money because it has more features than the Sony – voice recording and an FM radio, for starters. The Sony is smaller with display characteristics we liked. The Sansa is better looking but its shiny black surface will give CSI fingerprint experts a field day. Both cost about the same as a comparable iPod Nano, so perhaps the also-rans should try harder.
*
Posted by terry at 01:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack