You Can’t Always Get What You Want

One more post to finish up on digital photography.

Obviously the camera business has moved on since 2010, and there have been numerous improvements plus new categories of camera have been introduced. Most of the innovation has been in the premium compact area, since compact cameras were the most affected by the smartphone and tablet disruption. More expensive compacts have replaced the cheap ones that were supplanted by smartphones.

One question I always ask myself is: can I really have it all with one camera anyway – compact and light, reasonable telephoto and wide angle capability, fast focus and low shutter lag to capture fast action, viewfinder, high quality bright lens?

I haven’t played with this Sony Cyber-Shot RX100 Model IV but  – although it comes close – at this point I’d still say you can’t always get what you want. Looking in more detail:

  • Compact Size – About the same as my S90 although about a cm thicker. I’d still call it pocket sized. It’s a bit heavier as well.
  • Zoom Capability – Can go a bit wider than my S90 but not as long. This might be a problem as I find the current S90 a bit short for maritime photos.
  • Performance – the combination of a larger sensor and Sony’s technology makes for an amazingly fast action. This small camera rivals a DSLR. No problem here taking photos of kids.
  • Viewfinder – yes, a lovely pop-up electronic one.
  • Bright lens – a very fast and bright Zeiss lens comes standard.

It’s interesting that this Cadillac small camera isn’t made by photo giants Nikon and Canon, but Sony – the Walkman guys. This might seem odd until you realize that Sony makes most of the one inch photo sensors that go into this class of camera – and they saved the latest tech for themselves. As for optics, maybe they don’t have the Nikon heritage but there is nothing shabby about Carl Zeiss.

There are a lot of gee whiz features with this camera like super slo mo video, 4K HD video, wifi to connect to a smartphone, etc. None of this gets in the way of making great images though.

So aside from the very short telephoto capability this one ticks most of the boxes. Still can’t always get what you want though; right now to buy this premium pocket camera you are looking at $1200 Canadian plus tax – a DSLR with a couple of lenses goes for that price.

 

 

Good Enough? (Adventures in the Digicam Market)

Back in the day, marketers of computers used to sell their products based on the speed of the processor. A similar thing took place with digital cameras where the measure of quality (according to the sales folks) was the number of megapixels (MP) captured by the camera sensor. In both cases the more the merrier.

The actual “picture” was more complicated than that – especially in the case of the digital camera. To illustrate my point here are some photos taken from my digital archive. Each one was taken from one of the six (count ’em) digicams I have owned in the past 13 odd years.

2 MP Canon Powershot A60 (2003)

 

5 MP Nikon Coolpix 5000 (2005)

 

6 MP Fuji S6000fd (2007)

8 MP Fuji F480 (2009)

 

10 MP Canon Powershot S90 (2015)

24 MP Nikon D5550 (2016)

Minor differences in photo technique aside, all of these pics look OK at the resolution demanded by a typical web based blog. Yet there’s a difference of 22 MP and a factor of 12 at least in the resolution from my earliest Powershot A60 point and shoot to the Nikon D5550 DSLR. The fact that the requirements for web photos is relatively low is one reason why most people with smartphones/tablets don’t bother with a real camera any more – they can just snap a photo with their phone and post it on Facebook in a jiffy, knowing it’ll be fine.

So should I have saved my cash and just stuck with that Powershot A60? If my needs were just to get a photo of a building or mountain and post it here, probably yes. But as I said earlier the situation for any photographer isn’t that simple. Let’s take a look at each camera I’ve owned what it could and couldn’t do.

Powershot A60

A decent first digicam, the price was reasonable and the quality was good – Canon after all. It had a 3X optical zoom that covered the basic range you’d want for snapshots. The major problem though was that 2 MP sensor. A photo taken with the A60 would not even fill a wide angle computer screen today. As for photo prints you’d be lucky to get a 4X6 size print from it – no chance for enlargements. It was also very slow to boot up and focus so if you had to photograph anything that moved fast – no way. When I owned this Canon I never would consider it as a replacement for a film camera – especially if I went on holiday and wanted to get some photos printed later.

Nikon Coolpix 5000

I got this one used from a US based online camera store. It was superbly built as a “professional” compact camera – not a DSLR but pretty nice. The 5 MP sensor and excellent 3X wide angle to short telephoto lens made this a fine camera for landscapes. You could get enlargements from it and it made images large enough to fill a big widescreen computer monitor. However – this camera had some maddening design flaws. The flash sensor was easy to cover with your finger when holding the camera so that flash photos almost always came out wrong. It was very slow to start and focus – useless for any fast action. The storage medium was Compact Flash cards – large and relatively low capacity. The viewfinder was prone to parallax.

I still have this camera today. It’s a jewel of obsolescence. Again I never took it on serious trips because it did not have any telephoto capability.

Fuji Finepix S6000fd

Probably at this point I should have accepted the inevitable and gone for a digital SLR – that is the only true solution for fast action and big photo prints. However in 2007 DSLRs had in my view a fatal flaw – dust got on the sensor when you changed the lens and your photos had little goobies on them you had to take out after the fact. Cleaning the sensor was difficult and risky.

There was another partial solution if you wanted to take telephoto pics as well as wide angle pics – the bridge camera. And the Fuji Finepix S6000fd was a great bridge camera. Decent sensor, a big 28-300 mm style lens, manual zoom capability. This camera became the one that finally put my film cameras away for good. It went on countless trips and holidays.

It wasn’t perfect though. It was still slow to focus and shoot. It had a poor low res electronic viewfinder, and the LCD screen on the back was easily washed out in bright light. Taking photos in the sun was always an adventure – luckily I could crop them later on. And like all SLR type cameras it was large and bulky.

Fuji Finepix F480

OK so I had my telephoto problem solved – but did I always want to carry around a big heavy camera when I was getting off a ship somewhere for a short visit in a port? The answer seemed to be to have a large and a small digicam – both of which were capable of decent photos. The Finepix F480 certainly was a good image maker – 4X zoom, suitable wide angle, 8 MP sensor. And it went in a pocket easily. It used the same XD storage cards as my larger S6000 – bonus. Also it was cheap.

However – it had a very slow lens that made it difficult to focus in low light. It was extremely slow to focus and shoot if I wanted to take pictures of grandkids.

My daughter now has this little digicam and it still gets use from time to time. It proved to me the desirability of having a small camera for holidays and I went looking for something a bit better.

Canon Powershot S90

I believe I finally hit the sweet spot in pocket cameras with this Canon – I’ve had it for over 5 years and I’m still delighted with it. It has a bigger 10 MP sensor, a very bright decent wide angle to short telephoto zoom  lens- just a great performer. Again it’s a bit slow focusing for fast action but for landscapes and holiday snapshots it cannot be beat. It was a bit more expensive but worth it.

I am so happy with this little camera that I didn’t take anything else along on our Transpacific once in a lifetime cruise. It doesn’t have a viewfinder but the LCD screen is pretty bright and clear – it only gets a bit dodgy in the brightest of bright summer days. A keeper to be sure.

Nikon D5550 DSLR

OK so if I’m so happy with the Canon S90 howcum the presence of yet another camera – this time a real digital Single Lens Reflex? Well by 2015 the DSLR makers have solved the dust problem on the sensor so no more little goobies in your photos. As well a DSLR gives a very large sensor, a real viewfinder through the lens, multiple lens mount possibilities (including my old film lenses,) and best of all it focuses and shoots really fast. It’s fast enough to capture the grandkids in any activity.

A DSLR is still bulky with all its lenses, and I don’t think I’ll need it for most trips – but it’s there if I need it.

True digital convergence – a small, light, fast focusing camera – may be on the horizon but for now I think what I have will do the trick.

 

 

 

 

 

Disruptive

It just dawned on me the other day how disruptive digital photography technology has become. It took a few years from the earliest heavy, slow, low capacity digital cameras of the 1990s but disruption is here – has been since 2005 at least.

I mean, it’s less than 15 years since I bought my last film based cameras – a Nikon SLR and a tiny Rollei fixed lens for travel. Both of these are still in the closet at home. The last time I took a film camera on a holiday was in 2006. I remember I ran out of film in Oslo and had to buy some at extreme Norwegian prices. Today I wouldn’t be able to find it at all.

No matter, as digital storage has really taken over the market formerly occupied by 35 mm film. I was in Staples last week and picked up a 32 GB SD card which would hold over 7000 SLR exposures – nearly 300 rolls of print film. You would get even more than that in a smaller point and shoot digital camera. No wonder Kodak is out of business along with photo finishing giants like Ritz and Black’s.

Even cheap digital point and shoot cameras are the victim of disruptive tech. Most average photo shooters today use a cell phone to take selfies and post them on Instagram or Facebook. I haven’t gone that way; I have a digital SLR for serous photos and for travel I use a small but fairly sophisticated compact. I have given up hauling a heavy SLR and a bunch of lenses onto the aircraft and ship. Last year I photographed an entire TransPacific cruise with my Canon S90 – a camera the size of a deck of cards.

Maybe I didn’t have a truly telephoto capability but I managed OK.

More disruption appears to be on the way as high end point and shoot units begin to challenge the DSLR and even the video camera. But that’s a subject for another post I think.

 

YASTAH

 

I think I’ve probably always had a slight hearing disability. When I had my first formal hearing test as a young professional, the plant nurse reported that I had some hearing loss in my left ear. At the time I put it down to ill-fitting headphones but she was probably right.

It was 34 years until my next hearing test, and sure enough the audiologist reported that I had a weak left ear, and my right ear was normal. By then I’d spent half a lifetime in and out of noisy plant environments. I got a hearing aid for my left ear only, and it made a fair difference in my aural acuity. I could hear birds again, and I knew where they were singing from. I also got to hear whining disk drives, refrigerator compressor noise and other cool stuff I hadn’t really missed up till then.

Well fast forward another dozen years, my wife’s complaining I don’t hear what she says anymore and I have trouble picking up all the grandkids’ talk. So it was back to the local hearing aid center today. This time I found out I have pretty good low frequency response (although the dam’ left ear is still worse) but rather profound decline in both ears as I go to higher frequencies. My verbal acuity can use a little help too.

Now two (count ’em) hearing devices are indicated. I have never liked the beans in your ears sensation I get from my 2004 era hearing aid so that prospect didn’t thrill me.

The Hearing Instrument Specialist looked at me as if I’d just stepped off the boat from nowhere. It seems that technology has advanced slightly in the past 12 years. Now they have a little unit that sits behind your ear, a small wire runs down to your ear canal and the receiver works off that. Completely open, no plugged ears. And man are those units awesome – they can be programmed to boost the missing frequencies, cut out background noise, and even help with tinnitus if you have it (I do.) I couldn’t believe the difference these little suckers made.

So now all I need is money. The costs are equivalent to a nice Caribbean cruise per ear. My provincial health plan helps out but only a little. I suppose it’ll be worth it if Maria doesn’t have to shout and repeat stuff three times though.

So this year I’ve already found out I might need cataract surgery in a year or so, and now YASTAH – Yet Another Sense Takes A Hike. Good thing I don’t taste for a living any more. That’ll probably be next. Getting old sure ain’t for sissies, as Bette Davis once remarked. And she had the eyes for it.

 

 

 

 

The Most Interesting Man…

No it’s not this Dos Equis dude. In my view the most interesting man I’ve heard about lately is arguably Richard M.Stallman – or RMS as he is known in the IT community worldwide.

I will not publish Mr. Stallman’s photo here because he cares deeply about his privacy. You can Google or Bing him if you want.

Richard Stallman started the Free Software Foundation in the 1980s with the goal of making a Unix-like operating system that was free – and in the sense of freedom from restrictions, rather than free of charge. Think free speech, not free beer – libris not gratis. The name for this new operating system was GNU. He and his colleagues had completed a fair number of the necessary programs by the early 90s but they were still missing the Kernel – the program that interacts between the user programs and the hardware itself. RMS and his co-workers had a kernel program in mind – it’s called The Hurd. Their design  – while elegant and sophisticated – was very hard to debug, and as a result took years longer to get operational. Even in 2016 The Hurd hasn’t achieved “production” quality although it works OK in virtual computing.

So what happened with the rest of GNU? Well, in the early 1990s Linus Torvalds produced a working Kernel program that ran on PCs. He made it available via the Internet, and a number of folks “discovered” the GNU tools and patched them into Linus’s kernel. The result?  RMS would like us to call it GNU/Linux but most of the world just chooses the name Linux. The rest is history.

GNU/Linux is a worldwide success and GNU/Hurd is still in the lab. And I’m sure deep down this really grates on Richard Stallman,

One should never minimize the contributions of RMS and his co-workers. In addition to contributing most of the GNU/Linux software tools, they wrote the GNU Public Licence – which outlines the rights and responsibilities of any user of GNU (free) software. The Linux kernel is also licensed under the GPL. The net effect was to energize a worldwide collaboration in software development which has taken Linux to another level.

Free software development soon led to the concept of Open Source. Open Source is a bit more pragmatic approach which uses the collaborative development process of Free Software but allows for the use of non-free (proprietary) bits like MP3 music compression, and video card drivers. This goes far beyond the scope of Richard Stallman’s work, he doesn’t agree with it and he gets really ticked off if people call him the father of Open Source development.

What is most interesting about RMS though is not his substantial contributions to the GNU Project (and by extension GNU/Linux) but his philosophy. To RMS software development using the Free Software model is a way of life, a community building exercise, something worth putting your name on and devoting your life’s work to. It’s rare to come across such a Don Quixote in the IT world. I respect and admire him.

Need you ask what he thinks of Apple, Amazon or Donald Trump?

Keeping Your Cool

Living as we do north of the St Lawrence River by a hundred kilometers or so we don’t get long stretches of heat and humidity like – say Baltimore. But it does get warm enough (scheduled for low 30s – 90 degrees F today) that it is worth it to have whole house air conditioning.

Here’s a photo of our Concord central air condensing unit. It was new when the house was, and while it isn’t a big name in A/C it works OK. Concord is a house builder’s brand that is one of many owned by Lennox.

This unit gave us good service for 10 years and then last year we had a few issues. Of course it waited until the first hot day – and shortly after the furnace contractor checked it over – to start acting up. It was slow to get started and finally it tripped the circuit breaker – first time ever. After that it wouldn’t start at all.

Since it was a really hot spell just then I repaired to the basement to sleep – it was cool and clammy down there but I managed until Mr. Oates came down to join me around 2 AM and amused himself by rolling the ball around in his kitty play track. Very stimulating.

When the repair guy returned he found that the run capacitor was faulty. This is the gadget which keeps the power draw low while the compressor and fan are running, and also helps start the unit. Not good when it fails. When replacing this part the service guy recommended adding a separate start capacitor – these used to be standard equipment in old school A/C units but due to cost reduction efforts they omit them now. The start capacitor speeds up the initial process of getting the fan going and the compressor pumping.

It wasn’t a very expensive part to add and frankly I don’t see the rationale of leaving it off to save on production costs. Since it was added, the start capacitor has done its job well. The condenser unit starts up rapidly and much more quietly. We haven’t had any issues with the circuit breaker. And for a middle aged unit such as we have, reducing the initial power surge can go a long way towards a life extension on the compressor.

The start capacitor – a recommended addition, a false economic omission. That’s the way I see it anyway.

Suck It Up

I needed some canned compressed air the other day, to blow the dust out of a laptop fan. My can in the workshop was exhausted, so I headed over to the local hardware store to get another one.

I couldn’t find any on the shelf in the electronics section so I flagged down a store clerk. She couldn’t find it either. We went to Customer Service and had the following conversation:

“Sorry, sir. It appears we don’t have any.”

“But you do sell it, don’t you? I remember getting a can here not too long ago.”

“Yes we do – but our last two cans were shoplifted. Apparently you can inhale the stuff and get high. Who knew…?”

So it was off to the neighboring town and Staples. Surely they would have some canned air. But I couldn’t find it anywhere. Another staff member took me to an obscure lower shelf in the computer section and got a big locked plastic box off the shelf. You know, the kind of box Staples uses to lock up expensive hard drives and video cards.

As she’s struggling to open the box and take out a couple of cans, I told her what I had heard about this canned air stuff.

“Yes, that’s why we have it under security packaging now. In one of our Toronto stores, they found a young lady passed out in the bathroom with a couple of empty cans of Dust Destroyer. We aren’t anxious for that to happen in Carleton Place.”

So I came home, blew the dust out of my laptop and put the cans safely away in the workshop. But I can’t help thinking:

“It’s a strange strange world we live in, Master Jack.”

The Linux Mystique

Right then. It isn’t that there are that many people going around bragging how proud they are to be running Windows on Their PC. Bill Gates may be an exception, but these days I have heard more complaints about this monopolistic operating system than ever before.

Folks don’t like the forced updates in Windows 10. They don’t like the fact that Microsoft is forcing them to upgrade to Windows 10. They want to stay with Windows 7, but Microsoft seems determined to make that so inconvenient they’ll give in. I have heard of some unfortunates who had to reinstall their Windows 7 system and it took them a week to download and install all the updates again. And that’s with fast Internet. Heaven help anyone who might not have broadband.

Yes, there are alternatives. But ask the average person what they are and you get…buy a Mac…buy an iPad…buy an Android tablet..buy a Chromebook…buy, buy, buy. All of these choices involve a greater or lesser outlay of cash. However, there is one other risk-free alternative:

  • That is safe and secure. For the most part it’s immune to malware and viruses. It doesn’t need antivirus software, and includes a firewall by default.
  • That will do 99% of what anyone would want to do with a PC – and the other 1% in in the works.
  • That already runs on more than 50% of Internet servers, and an overwhelming majority of smartphones and tablets.
  • That can give a look and feel like Windows, like a Mac, or something completely and utterly different, if you want it.
  • That provides not only the operating system but compatible office software, music and video players, photo and video editing and cataloging, website creation software, you name it.
  • That is absolutely free – free to use, free to modify, free as in speech, free as in beer.

Of course I’m talking about Linux – the best desktop operating system you never heard of, and never used (unless you do stuff on the Internet, own a Roku box, a smart TV or an Android smartphone.) Sadly the percentage of PC desktop Linux users has stayed the same for many years – around 3%. That is Vista-esque in its minority and it’s a pity. Linux doesn’t come pre-installed on many new computers (guess what does?) so if you want it you have to install it yourself. This geeky requirement has given Linux a mystique it doesn’t really need, and discouraged a lot of people from switching to it from Windows.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Let’s say you have an old Windows XP based computer sitting in your basement and you haven’t got around to taking it in to the recycler. That would be a perfect candidate to try a Linux install on. What have you got to lose? You can’t use the old beast safely now. So it’s re-purpose or die as far as the box is concerned.

I’ll suggest a couple of possible versions of Linux for you to try. There are literally hundreds of varieties – just check out Distrowatch and you’ll see, but your old PC would probably do best with one of the following “distros” – that’s Linux-speak for an operating system ready to use.

  • Xubuntu This is a version of one of the most popular Linux “flavors” that works great with older machines such as your XP box.
  • Linux Mint Xfce or MATE Both of these are variations of the most popular Linux distro on the planet. Very easy to learn and use.

You need to decide in advance if you want the 32 bit or 64 bit version of Linux. 64 bit is best if you know your machine can run it. 32 bit will work either way.

Next you download the ISO (image file) and you can either use a DVD burner to make a DVD or USB burning software to put it on a flash drive. After that you need to get your computer running from the ISO – usually pressing F12 when your computer starts will get you into a menu where you choose to start from the hard drive, DVD or flash drive.

Once Linux is running you can play with it all you want without affecting your Windows install – so on a new machine that’s what you’d do. On your old machine you can go ahead and install Linux and after it’s done you’ll have a brand new machine – up to date, safe, secure, useful again.

If all this seems too difficult get your local geek to do it for you – probably you’ll find one hanging out at the local high school computer club. Or ask somebody like me. Anyone who can help you fix Windows can install Linux for you.

There are some varieties of Linux that get very technical and deserve the mystical label, but Linux Mint and Xubuntu do not. If you had to install or reinstall Windows on your machine it’s just as tricky – even a Windows 10 upgrade will be as challenging as a complete Linux install.

Note: I am not advising anyone with a brand new computer and Windows 10 on it to start messing about with Linux – but if you have an old system gathering dust, such as a desktop from 2006 that ran XP or an old netbook that is slow and brain-dead with Windows 7 Starter – well, why not bring it back to life? Then you can share in the Linux Mystique with the “3%” of this world.

Disclaimer: This blog post was typed on a fairly new desktop PC running Linux Mint. I built the PC myself and it has never run Windows. But the installation of Linux Mint was just as easy as it would be for you. I use Google Chrome as my browser, and you can do that in Linux just the same way you do in Windows.

Bring On the RAM – If You Can

My very first microcomputer – back in the Duran Duran era – was a Commodore VIC 20 that featured an 8 bit processor, a cassette tape storage drive, and 5 kilobytes of available RAM. I managed to get a couple of expansion cartridges and boot the RAM all the way up to 32 KB. Impressive.

Eight years later I had a Commodore Amiga that had 2 MB of RAM and by the time I got into the Windows universe in the late 1990s my PC had (wait for it) 16 whole MB of RAM.

Well, times have changed. When I started using Linux in 2006 my Dell desktop was totally stuffed with RAM at 512 MB. And boy, that seemed like overkill when you could run Linux on as little as 64 MB or less. Today the cheapest laptop you get at Staples or Best Buy will have 8 GB of RAM  or 1.6 million times as much as my VIC-20. My current video card has 1000 times as much RAM as my Amiga 500 had back in the day. I think nothing of putting 16 GB of RAM in my desktop today – and it’ll hold a maximum of 32 GB. Newer motherboards can hold even more than that.

The explosion in RAM availability has been good – and bad. It’s good in the sense that the latest versions of Linux and especially Windows have been designed to put all that available RAM to good use. The operating systems can drastically speed things up by keeping needed programs and data in the RAM and not always loading it from your hard drive. Today’s high RAM systems blaze through web surfing and office work – even YouTube.

Lots of RAM makes it possible to have tabbed browsing, HD video, high resolution gaming, Netflix, Spotify – all at once. Not exactly your grandpa’s Internet.

However there’s a downside to designing software for gobs of RAM – and it’s with older hardware or netbooks. It used to be that if your PC was too old and tired to run the next generation of Windows, you could rely on Linux to run and do the same stuff with less resources.

However even Linux has to run the latest and greatest browser. Yesterday I was running Linux Mint with Google Chrome and only one tab open – and my desktop was using 1.6 GB of RAM. I have a couple of old netbooks with maximum memory capacity of 1 GB and 1.5 GB respectively. Those machines would have to resort to swapping stuff on the hard drive to even run a simple web surfing task. The only way they can be useful today is with a lightweight browser like Midori and the lightest possible Linux desktop system. And this is with two to three times the RAM of my old Dell that ran Linux so well back in 2006.

My “best” low powered netbook has a maximum memory capacity of 2 GB and even with that much in it I can’t run videos or play any Web based games. It’s strictly an email/office computer I take on holiday. I have another old desktop that was incredibly powerful when new and has 3 GB of RAM – all you could use back then. It’s on the edge of usability today.

It used to be that you junked a computer because its processor was too slow or obsolete to run the latest operating system. Today it’s more a matter of how much RAM you can stuff onto the motherboard. For some old desktops and netbooks that’ll never be enough. Not any more. Pity.

 

 

Learning to Fly

 

I’m learning to fly,

but I ain’t got wings.

…Tom Petty (1991)

The grandkids were out last weekend and they brought their bikes – minus the training wheels. As I watched Dave run up and down the street behind them, it struck me that learning to ride a bike is akin to a fledgllng leaving the nest for the first time. It isn’t an easy or instinctive thing – you have to figure out the physics of two in-line rotating hoops, how to stay upright, and to avoid obstacles. But once you master all this, you have a freedom you never had in your life before – the freedom of movement. It won’t be long before you are on to a parent’s greatest nightmare – your driver’s licence.

So in a sense riding a bike is a metaphor for growing up. You try, you fail, you fall, you cry, you get up and try try again.

As a parent you want to shield your kids from the bumps an bruises of early life, but once they are on a bike you realize the futility of doing it. We all made mistakes as kids – our parents couldn’t prevent them. We all suffered the prangs, the bumps, the bruises. Our kids and grandkids are no different.

It doesn’t make it any easier to watch though.

And comin’ down

is the hardest thing.

 

 

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