May 2006 Archives

If I was a typical amateur photographer who was looking for a new speedlite to go with a new DSLR, I'd probably go for the old 420EX if I could find one, unless I was really serious about flash photography.

So what are the dimensions and weights of the recommended cameras, its interesting to see the tradeoffs, as you can see the Sony Cyber-shot is really in the middle so very convenient for travel. It weights less than a pound, while the whole kits for the Digital Rebel is 1.1kg (more than 2.5 pounds) or up to 3 pounds with the flash.

So for the lightweight packer, the F11 really can go anywhere and the Sony is perfect for those trips where you do want to reduce the weight and maybe have just carry-on. The Canon kit really does require another separate bag.

<a title="user account | Performancing.com" href="http://performancing.com/"Performancing.com. I really wanted to love this product. Basically, it adds a window in Firefox and you can then edit. So it is like a super version of justblogit.

For me unfortunately, it has the following problems when used with MovableType:

• It doesn't know about category hierarchies and the category is not sticky, so most of my posts end up in no category because I forget to add it. Justblogit is better because it is forms based.
• Half the time, the RPC takes too long and it claims that the post failed when it didn't, so you end up with multiple posts.
• When you try to edit a post, the same thing happens and it is unclear whether the post took or not.
• It doesn't get along super well with Textile2, so for some posts, it adds things like breaks and so forth so textile markup fails.
• It can hang trying to send and there is no way to reinitialize except by restarting Firefox.

Overall, made me feel like I'll stick to justblogit despite its limitations. Or go back to w.bloggar.

OK, as I promised I'm signing up to more web 2.0 sites. These are just from trying to find photo imaging sites:

* ShoZu. This is one of a zillion sites that let you connect your phone to a photoblog on the web. Their big thing is a link to flickr which promotes it.
* Fotki. A nice site that is centered around photos, but includes blogging and just about everything else.

Polar S720i Heart Rate Monitors
. I've had one of these for quite a while and the battery if finally dead. Got two years out of though. Fortunately you don't have to send back to Polar, but you do get an additional year warranty if you do:

Battery life is estimated at 1.5 years on the watch and 5 years or 2,500 hours on the chest transmitter · Watch batteries are standard 3 volt lithium and may be changed by a jeweler

It is $13 to replace it with Polar and they guarantee water resistance. So not a bad deal for a watch tjhat is designed to brave the elements :-) Here is the repair form which is kind of hard to find.

DCViews. Well, the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H5 is probably the closest thing to the right small camera with big quality compromise. The key thing is that it can shoot decently at ISO 400 so is good for low light situations. Read the reviews, but with 12x optical zoom, 3" LCD viewer, less than 15 ounce weight, its the camera for those occasions where you need more quality than a pocket camera and more zoom, but don't want to carry a big DSLR. DigitalCameraInfo liked the speed which goes to ISO 400 in good light and ISO 200 in really dark but said its colors were over saturated and more consumer oriented than accurate in terms of colors. It basically "red shifts" for more pleasing skintones like consumer cameras and there is no accurate setting. DCResource liked it but they don't do super technical color review. Both reviews point out that at ISO 800 and above, the EV range, that is the difference between dark and light really falls. As an aside, a Digital Rebel XT has very clean images in dark up to ISO 1600 according to DCResource and shows that in parameter 1 mode, the Digital Rebel is oversaturated as well by 115% or so which is why you shoul duse parameter 2.

So this completes the picture for Rich's camera recommendations as follows from small to big:

• Fujifilm FinePix F11 ($300). You can't get this one in the US, but thecamerabox carries it. It is bigger than the really small ones, but it still fits in a guys pocket and most important, with 6 megapixels and really great ISO 400 performance, it is the perfect pocket camera. At $300, not too bad a price either. What just about everyone should have. There are smaller ones, but they tend to have poor image quality and for a pocket camera, you really want available light shooting because the flashes are so poor.
• Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H5 ($500) At $500, this is the good compromise for someone who doesn't want the bulk of a full DSLR nor do they really need the wide variety of high quality lenses. This one as I said has a 36-432mm equivalent lense at F2.8-F8. It is image stabilized and most important for the small 7 megapixel sensor, it has good ISO 400 shooting so works with available light.
• Canon Digital Rebel XT ($700) and Canon 28-105mm F4 L IS USM lens ($1200). Well, this kind of breaks the bank, but at $650 plus a $1200 lense, you really have an amazing camera. The picture quality of this 8 megapixel will be very good and you are buying a very expensive pro lense, but it will last a life time. The main problem with this setup is all ergonomics. The Digital Rebel is just so small, it is actually hard to handle and it is very light while the lense is very heavy at over a pound, so it is a little hard to figure out how to make it all hang together. The tiny viewfinder also takes some getting used to. My old N80 plus 50mm F/1.8 lense feels way more balanced and its surprising how you need just a little more width. Finally one last thing to note is that as many reviews have said, it does feel like kind of cheap plastic rather than armor plated. Still, following the philosophy of spending the dollars on the glass and not the "box" at the end, this is a really great system that all together costs less than the body of the 5D.
• Canon EOS-5D ("$2800":($1700), Canon 70-200 F2.8L IS USM lense ($1700) and Canon 16-35mm f2.8L: USM EF ($1300) for really long shots as well as a wide angle zoom lense as well.. This is a $2700 street body, but it mates with the 24-105 above and at 12 megapixels and full frame, it is the ultimate dream for the afictionado., this is the good compromise for someone who doesn't want the bulk of a full DSLR nor do they really need the wide variety of high quality lenses. This one as I said has a 36-432mm equivalent lense at F2.8-F8. It is image stabilized and most important for the small 7 megapixel sensor, it has good ISO 400 shooting so works with available light.

Finally, if you are also shooting video, there are two recommendations:

• Sony DCR-SR100 ($1000). This is a hard disk recorder, image quality isn't quite up to the tape based, but the convenience is the key.
• Sony HDR-HC3 ($1200). This is the prosumer version for HDTV recording. Records on tape in 1080i. Its lighter and smaller and perfect for those of us on the bleeding edge. Main drawback is of course the tape.

About and also google:"photo storage".The gold old days of the web are back, now there are literally dozens of sites that will let you store your photos for free on the web and the amount of storage is unbelievable. About has a good list to start with, but here are some reviews of the better places. I'm looking for somewhere that lets you put 3GB plus of photos up there. Right now Adrian, Steve and I share 1GB that we use for everything for $20/month. Here are some of the top hits from a query on photo storage. (FYI the query on A9.com and google.com are very different, I've used google for this analysis) and here they are in order of what I liked:

• imagestation. This is run by Sony. You get unlimited storage with unlimited sizes. Quite fast on upload as well but minimum set of features when you get there.
• Webshots. My buddy Peter uses these guys, not clear on how they work quite yet.

These sites are free but had one problem or another

• GJPix. This site comes up with a google:"photo hosting" search. It looks like a place where there aren't many limits except for a 4MB limit per picture which is pretty Ok except for my largest photos. Other problem is there is no auto uploader, it does one photo at a time.
• Shutterfly. Steve has been using these guys for years. Personally I've found the site in years past slow and right
  now when I tried it again, the Firefox uploader hangs Firefox, so that's a negative.
• Kodakgallery. This is the old ofoto site. Has unlimited hosting. Like Shutterfly, I've used it in the past. The site looks good, but the uploader just crashed and you can't get the original images back down, they just go up and you can see them on the web and buy prints, but can't download the images.

These sites are free with limitations of all sorts. I ranked in order of what makes sense:

*"Photobucket":http://photobucket.com. These folks just got a big venture round and do the photo backend for lots of sites. You get 1GB for free and up to 10GB per month of bandwidth to up and download and they downres your photos to 1MB. So not really great but OK if you have a low resolution camera.
* Club Photo. Unlimited free storage but they delete your albums not used in 90 days
* dotPhoto. They have unlimited storage but you have to use their service to order things

Finally here are site that cost money on google pagerank order. Personally, I think these are the ones to get because the cost is very nominal and they have the most functionality. In order of features. I'll report later on how stable and reliable they are:

• fotki.com. This is a social network and photo sharing system. You can email and MMS to magic email address to send it up there. It has a Java applet that is very nice that lets you startup loading. It also has tagging and nice sharing features plus a nice browse. It is $30/year annually for unlimited storage. They are not very upfront about this. The site limits you to 50-MB if you don't pay but puts in you a trial, so you can upload lots of stuff and then discover you have to pay $30 otherwise it is gone. Not super friendly, but not that much money either. Better than flickr in that there is a 14 day trial before they blow you out.
• Flickr. The first one I ever really used. Their restriction is a little strange. There is no limit on what is stored, but there is 20MB/month limit on what you can upload. If you pay $25/year, then it becomes a 2GB monthly upload limit with no limit on storage. That's actually not a bad deal as 2GB is probably about 500 high resolution photos per month. There is also a desktop based< uploader and you can send your camera phone photos to it via a third party application. Works only for Symbian phones. Since they are now owned by yahoo, I presume their quality would be high.
• Photosite. This is another social networking plus photos site with 100 free photos, for $3/month, you get unlimited storage.
• pixagogo. It is $5/month with unlmited photos and no I haven't tried it, at $60/year, it is lots more than fotki.

Photoblog. These things appear everywhere, but what are they exactly. Photoblog has a good definition cribbed Photoxels:

The histogram is simply a graph that allows you to judge the brightness of an image. You can think of the area under the graph as comprising all the pixels in your captured digital image. The left side of the histogram depicts how many "dark" pixels you have captured; the right side, how many "bright" pixels you have captured.'

Outbackphoto has a good overall description of what you are trying to do with the histogram. In short, you don't want it to pile up to the right (over-exposure) nor to the left (under-exposure). The shape doesn't matter as long as it is mainly in the middle.

You also want to check each individual color as you could get one color blown out. In this histogram, everything looks fine, but the blue is way to the right (overexposed) because the photo was of a blue flower. Not that in the average histogram of all colors (red, green and blue), green gets valued the highest, so even if the overall histogram looks good, it could be that red or blue or overexposed. The traditional histogram is also called the luminanc histogram FWIW.

With all this discussion of gamuts, I wonder how you should actually print to my trusty Canon i9900. The results are pretty interesting:

• With the very best paper, the Canon Pro Glossy, sRGB is really too small, it can print way beyond it
• Even with Adobe RGB gamut, there are many more colors it can't print, but it is a much better match
• With ProPhoto RGB, that is way, way bigger, so a poor match.

Note that when you are actually printing, Photoshop is smart enough to know from the ICM profile of your printer and the paper, what it can actually print and if you set if for perceptual mapping, it will squeeze the colors of your photo into what your printer can do. That is one reason why its important to have a printer calibrator and an ICM profile for you paper on your printer. Red River does this as does Canon for its papers.

By the way to see this page, we need a VRML plugin.VRML Plugin and Browser Detector (X3D Too) is a handy tool that lets you see what you need to load. It uses Javascrip to help. The choices right now are Octaga

For grins, Dry Creek Photo also has gamut information on the sensors in Canon cameras. They don't have the 5D, but they do have the 1Ds Mark II and the Canon 20D. The Canon 20D is the same sensor as the digital rebel and running this shows that it is a good match for Adobe RGB, although it has some colors that Adobe RGB can't display. That's one reason to produce output in RAW format. Then you can use a convertor that uses ProPhoto for instance to capture everything the sensor does since cameras typically only write JPEGs in Adobe RGB space.

As another aside, the default rotation in Octaga is way too high, you need to right click and choose Navigation/Speed and slow the Rotation Speed from 1.0 to something more like 0.3

Digital Darkroom Instruction. I've been using Adobe RGB as an improvement over sRGB, but with these huge 48-bit color images, you can go even bigger to ProPhoto RGB which is 50% larger.

Luminous Landscape also has a good turorial on ProPhotoRGB while earthboundlight cautions folks that for 8-bit/color (e.g., 24-bit images) sRGB is best because in 8-bit color, you want the colors to be close together for more accuracy, otherwise you get banding (as earthboundlight explains. But with 16-bit (48-bit total) should use Adobe RGB as this is all that paper today can produce and there are many more colors available.

Bigger images will need to wait for higher bits 20-bit (60-bit total color). Of course with digital cameras, it is going to be a long day before they can produce so many colors. It is only with film that you get such broad range of colors. With Vuescan, you can put them into either ProPhoto RGB or Ektaspace, the two widest and the Photoshop CS can read in the photo and the gamut information too.

Two large-gamut alternatives to Adobe RGB are Ekta Space PS5 and ProPhoto RGB. Ekta Space was designed by landscape photographer Joseph Holmes to encompass the entire gamut of Ektachrome films (however, it’s suitable for any E6 film because the dyes used in all E6 films are similar). ProPhoto RGB was developed by Kodak and is of interest to digital photographers because it’s the only large-gamut alternative available in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR).</blockquote

ColorVision I've been using the Spyder2Pro for a while now and didn't realize that they had updated the calibration software.

Makes me wish I had got PrintFix as well to do printer calibration. Oh well, always more to do.

Shutterbug: Minolta DiMAGE Scan Elite 5400. Two years ago, I bought the then brand new 5400. It had a resolution advantage then over the Nikon 4000 and since then the technology has plateaued. Most film has about 4000 dpi and I've actually found that for most photos, 2700 dpi is just fine unless you are using a really good SLR.

The other thing about it is that it has 48 bits of color depth, a dynamic range of 4.8 and has Digital ICE dust and scartch removal. Still, using it has been much more complicated than you'd think. It just ain't that easy to get good scans. Here are some tips for you:

1. There is a big temptation to just go to 5400 dpi and 48-bit color, load the Minolta Imagescan software just scan away. Well, there are some problems. First, it produces only TIFF files and a 35mm is 200MBs per image. Not only is this gigantic on the disk, but Photoshop is unbearable slow even on an Athlon 64 overclocked to 2.2GHz. And you see lots and lots of noise. So for most ordinary photos taken with an instamatic camera (we have two excellent ones by the way, the Olympus Stylus and the Yashica T4Pro, the later with an incredibly sharp fixed focus lense) I scan them at a more manageable 2700dpi which leads to 50MB images. Only for the really great landscape or high detail shots do I pump them to 5400 dpi.
2. When you take a 200MB TIFF and turn it into a JPEG, there are many programs like iTunes that don't like 10MB JPEGs. I literally hung itunes when it tries to convert large JPEGs into Apple's proprietary format. With some adjustment, I found that with Photoshop CS, a JPEG image quality of 70 usually leads to a 4-5MB file. By the way, that is equivalent to using a 12 megapixel digital camera in terms of resolution.
3. Make sure you put the film in the right way. The carrier looks about the same, but it will only insert with the tapered end into the film reader. If you put it in the wrong way, it goes in, but the scanner then hangs in Windows and you need to reboot to get it to work again. Also, when you put the film in, the door side swings up. This is the right orientation to make sure the negatives are right side up with the thin swinging upwards.
4. The scanner will hang and have all kinds of trouble quite a lot. For instance, sometimes, the scanner will not accept new images. Other times, it seems to get very confused about colors, so pictures will be all blue or red as if one of the scan lines is reporting always on. Power cycling the scanner and the PC seems to fix most of these problems, but it happens every couple of hours it seems.
5. Normally, you need to create two images, a JPEG for ordinary use and if you are a geek, you keep a TIFF file for archiving. This is because TIFFs are lossless compression, so you really do have the original photo. JPGs do throw things away.
6. Unless you have bigger shoeboxes and are more organized than me, keeping track of what is what is really hard. Particularly since 35mm has no digital information. What I finally did was to use the filenames and put all the information there, so my files look like 2005-03-23 Nikon-N80 20-700-VR Kodak-Portra-400NC.tif where there is the date, the camera, the lense and the type of film. Then, I put them in directories that look like \\pictures\tif\2005\2005-03\2005-03-23\. That way I don't end up with lots of photos called photo1, photo2, etc. I'm pretty sure that most folks like me will like the "blog" style of ordering, most people can figure out where they were on a given date.

Using Dimage scan utlity

The DiMage Scan Utility seems buggy, many times, I left it on batch scan and some images would be dark and some bright. If you use the scanner continuously, then the driver will crash and you need to reboot the machine. The most annoying problem is that if you preview with digital ICE off and then scan with it on, about 50% of the time, the actual scanned images will be very dark. There is some sort of bug with digital ICE that confuses the image. However, most of the scanned images from it are very much like what was actually printed by
A&I, my favorite high quality mail-order place.

The documentation is very poor, so here are some notes on use:

1. Exposure control is also tricky with the program, leave it on automatic, but it is amazing to see the variation.
2. It has white balance and other controls, but the main advantage is that it scans in 48-bits so you get very high quality TIFFs (and gigantic too)
3. The program has a batch mode and for some reason will scan very different if digital ICE is on and when it is off. It is also very slow with digital ICE on and runs the CPU at 100% when it is on. Most of my film I've found does have scratches on it, so I use that quite a bit. FYI Digital ICE means the scanner also scans in infrared. Scratches are above the level of the emulsion where the actual picture lives, so by this technique, since IR has a different focal distance, it can tell what's closer (e.g., the scratch) and what's in the middle (e.g., the picture). Its amazing and does work well.
4. With Digital ICE on, the Scanner utility would about every 30 photos get
5. The Minolta DiMage software is pretty hard to figure out. It turns out that different films have different responses to color, so you can get everything from very dark to very light and the colors can be way off. It for instance has unsharp mask, but don't use it here, do that with Photoshop as the Adobe tool is way better. It also does exposure compensation, etc.
6. One thing that is a problem is that if you pick 16-bit linear as the scan, then you only get the negative and then you need a program like Vuescan to interpret them since you can just reverse colors
7. The actual preferences seem very confusing. Here is what I finally settled on:
   1. Exposure control. I left this on for both slides and film. You can change it manually, but the utility does a decent job.
   2. Autofocus on scan. I left this on as the manual focus doesn't have any feedback on the screen, so you can twiddle the knob and then have to rescan to know if you hit the right focus. I've not had a problem with this except for very warped film.
   3. Color depth at 16 bits. The 16bit linear sounds good until you realize it just scans the negative in negative and you need another program to fix it. Photoshop won't do it correctly because all negatives have an orange color to it that photoshop doesn't easily take out.
   4. Prescan for quality. Otherwise, when you scan, you only get thumbnails and you want large too so you can see what is going on
   5. Color matching. You want to use the AdobeRGB, this has much wider gamut (e.g., you can get more colors) than sRGB which is the PC default. Also I don't quite understand what Use monitor ICC profile means but it recommends you turn it on if you have a calibrated monitor. I've seen no difference either way.

Vuescan

I also used Vuescan and found it to be more stable, but the colors never seem quite right. This is because Vuescan has different profiles for common film, but when film is developed, the exposure levels seem to change, so getting to look right is quite an exercise particularly because Vuescan doesn't have color correction built in, so you have to do that later in Photoshop. The main problem seems to be that the colors change dramatically with time. Seems like there is a driver bug somewhere in Vuescan.

1. Color correction seems to really off with Vuescan. Although it has profiles for lots of film, to me the actual scan it produces and what I get from Dimage Scan Utility and the actual photo seem very different. There aren't as obvious a set of tools to fix this. For instance, there isn't the this is really "white" eye dropper as in Photoshop or the Dimage utility. You have to play with the white balance, but this doesn't change the curves for each channel.
2. White balance isn't really documented except in tooltips, you right click on the true white in the picture. To reset it, double click the right mouse. You can also do auto balance, but it is often tricked I've found. So, find somewhere that is white and then right click on it and you'll get the colors rebalanced. I haven't found where you set the black point though.
3. The Kodak Portra 400UC isn't listed and the 400VC looks really washed out, the generic negative actually looks closer.
4. There is really no help for forums for vuescan (that's a big advantage of Silverfast), the main help is at Scantips which frankly I didn't find too helpful.
5. To really do a good job, you need to calibrate your monitor as well as the scanner itself. There is a standard calibration target artfully named IT8. You buy slides or negatives with it from folks like Wolf Faust and then scan them in, this sets the calibration perfectly. You have to do this for every film that you use. Or shoot a specific color target under controlled settings and then scan it in. This sets up the scanner, but of course when you take the photo, that can be a problem but at least you know the scanner isn't causing any bias.

Silverfast

Silverfast is a whole family of software. First there is Silverfast ai. These are scanner dependent programs that do scanning. You can also set it so that it just does bulk scanning and then later with the HDR Suite, you can do touchup and fixing

1. For some reason, Silverfast flips the images, so what is the right side for Vuescan is the wrong side for Silverfast AI. Kind of confusing
2. Tutorial. The programs are so complex that they really need a tutorial. Here is a brief one. The first thing to note is that Silverfast AI does the scanning, while you edit with Silverfast HDR>
3. Silverfast HDR is 48-bit scanning software. Since this is professional grade, then charge $300 for the it. It has way more controls than Vuescan though and is much harder to use.

So how much on the Internet can you save if you want to subscribe to a magazine. Here's one journey (and test) to get the lowest price on The Atlantic

• eHow recommends going to the publishers site directly. For the Atlantic, this is $2.45 per copy or $24.50. They do have an educational discount program buty you need to order 5 copies per issue at least.
• Amazon. I figured these guys would have the rack rate which is $24.95 per year so no bargain there.
• netMagazines. I've used these guys in the past. They have the same $24.95 rack rate for a year although they have a complex package pricing system that might make it easier
• google:"magazine subscriptions" shows that Magazines.com and magsdirect.com are the top two hits, so checking those and Magazines.com has the same $24.95 price
• MagmaMags has the Atlantic at $16 which is pretty good but again I don't know if they are reputable.
• Magazinepricesearch.com has actually built a price searching engine like pricegrabber and shows couponing. For isntance with DCMPS40P, you get $10 off from netmagazines.com and SpringMags coupon at magazines.com gets you $5 off. The main issue though of course is are these underlying sites reputable.

Some other searches there are for Harpers Magazine which is $11/year from magazania.com and magazinecity.com. The rack rate by the way is $14.97 from magazines.com

The New Yorker is biweekly so it is somewhat more at $47 rack rate while it is $18.80 at DeltaMagazines.com. NetMagazines also has a $34 price with the DCMPS16 coupon. Magmaweb a $19/year educational-only price as well.

Barracuda 7200.10 750GB Hard Drive (Seagate-ST3750640AS) - PriceGrabber.com. Just installed this on our server. Wow, it is amazing density. Also, the prices are dropping. Last week it was $477 and this week it is $439. Expensive, but it is hard to get that much density in any one drive.

Nexus 120mm Real Silent Case Fan. Well, the temperatures for the hard disks in our main server seem high, so the price of these really great Nexus fans has fallen from $16 to just $12.50, so time to get a bunch.

Nexus does it again with the quietest 120mm case fan available anywhere! The Nexus 120 mm has a true 22.8 dB(a) decibel rating - measured in an anechoic chamber using ISO standards. This is one instance where the case fan's decibel ratings haven't been understated by the manufacturer.

Vast - Search for Jobs in the United States. A kind of cool idea. Add structure to your searches, so it isn't just full text, but you look for things like jobs, cars and personals. Bill Burnham mentioned it in his blog.

Blog Administration: Fixing Movable Type StyleCatcher. It has taken me a year to get this finally working. Turns out the README for StyleCatcher isn't complete. You also have to change some parameters in the settings, it picks up the wrong real path and web path defaults for my installation.

The StyleCatcher 1.01 README.txt file says installation consists of copying the appropriate files into your "plugins" and "mt-static"
directories and setting permissions. But there's a bit more to it than that.

Once you've installed the plugin, you have to login to MT as an administrator, go to the PLUGINS page, and configure the StyleCatchter plugin (select "Show Settings").

There are two settings:

Theme Root URL:
Theme Root Path:

The latter is the path to the "themes" folder that you need to create. The former is the URL for this folder. For example:

Theme Root URL: /mt/mt-static/themes
Theme Root Path: /var/www/html/mt/mt-static/themes

Make sure you set permissions on this folder so the web server can write to it, as this is where StyleCatcher will store themes that
it downloads.

I had some trouble with this, because StyleCatcher filled in these two fields for me, and it chose the wrong URL which meant it couldn't find any local themes.</blockquote

Maxtor.com - Warranty Services. Don't get caught like me. One of our three brand new Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300GB hard drives just failed. I suspect it is the luck of the draw plus maybe the fact that we defragged it quite a bit and maybe the heat, but in any case, make sure to backup your data.

I'm replacing it with a 750GB Seagate 7200.10. Windows XP is amazing, you just install a giant drive like that and you load it.

I'm going to end up with a pair of 750GB drives in our main machine. That is more than a terabyte in a desktop machine. Wow.

Strange thing was that SMART didn't detect the failure.

Camcorderinfo highlights the new HC3 and says ironically the older HDR-HC1 is a better unit for prosumers because. See the Sony HDV Info and intechspot for more data, but the HC1 is about $1350 and still available while the HC3 is about $1250 right now:

• The HC1 is less sharpened, you also need to switch the HC3 to "-2" color to desaturate the colors to make it more accurate
• The HC3 does have somewhat higher resolution than the HC1 at 3.42 megapixels per frame vs. 3.15
• The HC1 has external controls and a microphone jack which the HC3 deleted
• The HC1 has a nicer pivoting viewfinder.
• Lowlight performance was similarly execellent from both models
• The HC3 is a litle shorter at 82mmx78×139m and weighs a hefty 500 grams without the battery (600g with) and is about 1/3 smaller and that's a big advantage for more casual users whereas the HC1 was 188mm long and 680 grams (780g with), so it is much lighter.

Well that Panasonic VDR-D300 never did show up, something wrong with my credit card information or something. So, time for another look at the camcorders before Vfinally getting one quick for the summer. I really need two of them. An idiot proof one that is good for Connie and the kids. The DVD camcorders are ideal, although image quality is lower, they produce a DVD which means less work for all. Then there is a prosumer one for those high definition occasions, here's an update thanks to Camcorderinfo:

• Canon DC40. Canon introduced a DVD camcorder. It is the same size of my old Optura 100MC, but unfortunately, picture quality is lower because DVDs are just not as good as miniDV tapes are for quality. Its image quality is about the same as the Sony DCR-DVD405, but not as nice as the VDR-D300, so on balance, the Panasonic still wins. For DVD camcorders, it feels like Panasonic, then Sony by a nose.
• Sony DCR-SR100. This is a hard disk camcorder that JVC started with the Everio. It only has a 30GB hard drive, but it produces standard MPEG-2 .MPG files, so you literally just drag and drop it into your computer. While an early model, it does seem that this is better than most DVD camcorders in that it is just a hard drive, so you don't have to worry about putting a new DVD in every 20 minutes, but it does mean that you need to do video conversion with a computer afterwards. Again, image quality isn't up to miniDV standards (yet!). This is about $1000 at Pricegrabber

So the choice is hard, DVDs that are already done, or a 30GB first generation hard drive machine. I'm probably going to get the 30GB hard disk because the idea of all those miniDVDs around is just too confusing. And with a 30GB (7 hours worth) of video, it means we don't have to refill alot. Since the SR100 is new, there doesn't appear to be any discounting of its $999 list price yet. Keep looking at Pricegrabber though.

• Pricegrabber shows it running at just about $1000 street. So B&H Photo is very reputable and has them in stock right now. Shipping is a nominal $11
• Tiffen 30MM UV Filter. Tiffen makes nice filters and for an additional $9, you get both UV protection as well as something to protect the lense. No additional shipping when you buy the camcorder
• You are kind of stuff here since the microphone jack requires a proprietary Sony connector (uh! Sony, what a way to make money). See Sony Accessories.
  • HVL-HL1 3 Watt Video Light. I had one for our Canon and it was marginally useful. The problem is that 3 Watts isn't enough in most cases and it really drains the battery.
  • High-Fidelity Stereo Microphone ECM-HST1. This is a shotgun microphone that mounts on top. It can either be wide or narrow focus. This seems the most useful of the accessories. It lists for $90, but BHphoto has it for $70 street.
• You don't really need an additional battery, the base one lasts about two hours.

SonyStyle.com | TX Series. Shawn was asking me, what notebook to get, I've been in favor of the ultralight Sonys because I generally don't need the speed of the Intel Core Duo and most importantly the weight. These models use a very low power Pentium M, but the result is that they get unbelievable battery life and are the only sub three pound notebooks with a DVD player that really lasts six hours.

The models keep changing though, so here's an analysis of what to get from the Sony

• VAIO VGN-TX750P/B. This is the current low cost model. They have definitely been eliminating the lower sub $2000 models, but getting rid of the CD-ROM only models, that's too bad, since who needs a DVD writer on such a slow computer. In any case, this is the low end with a 1.2GHz 753, EDGE and 802.11b/g and then a DVD+RW DL optical drive plus 512MB of memory and 80GB hard drive. List is $2300 with a street of $2150 on Pricegrabber
• VAIO VGN-TX770P/B. The same as above, but it has 1GB for $2600. This is pretty expensive for just 512MB more of memory. Tempting just to buy third party memory and install it yourself. Street price is more like $2400 on Pricegrabber

If you go slightly bigger to the SZ series, you get a much faster processor in the Core Duo, but weight climbes to 3.7-4.07 pounds, but you do get a 13.3" screen. For me, the small 11" screen makes more sense since I take many economy class flights and you can't open up such a big screen back there.

*

Intel reveals roadmap details, aggressive architecture refresh strategy. Well, Intel is definitely working hard, their update to the first Intel Core Duo is coming faster. Here is the new schedule for the new Intel Core Duo 2 family:

• Server chip (codenamed Woodcrest) ships June.
• Desktop (codenamed Conroe). July.
• Mobile (Merom). August.

Of course, now even more confusing is when Apple will ship their hardware based on these dates, so here's the current prediction:

• Merom-based Macbooki to be announced at the August Apple Worldwide Developers Conference
• PowerMac replacement will depend on whether the Woodcrest or Conroe will be used and could be as early as June (if Woodcrest is used)

So, what did I what's the final recommendation on what to get, here is where and some places. These places by the way are already obsolete a week later so go to pricegrabber to get the correct latest prices.

Here is the basic dSLR setup:

• Canon Digital Rebel XT. Buydig. $674 plus $100 rebate. Check Pricegrabber for latest pricing.
• Canon EF 24-105mm F/4 L. PC Nation. $1170.70 plus $50 rebate. Pricegrabber for latest
• Canon Speedlite 430EX Flash. Digital Foto. $242 plus $15 rebate. Pricegrabber
• SanDisk 4GB Ultra II CompactFlash 60x. Beach Camera. $175. Pricegrabber

Of course, actually getting the $165 in rebates is going to be very hard. Canon makes it nearly impossible, but worth the effor.t

And for really compact needs:

• Fujifilm F11. The Camera Box. $304.75
• Olympus xD 1GB Type H Card. B&H Photovideo. $54.65

Rick asked me, why does sand ripple.

Wind ripples in the sand show how close the frontiers of science can be. The exact mechanism is not well understood. Sand doesn't really fly in the wind. Grains bounce along in a process called saltation, and bump other grains into the air when they land, called reptation. Somehow millions of these micro-events make visible ripples, a fine example of self-organization in nature. Rivers also make ripples on the bottom. Wind makes waves. Are washboard dirt roads another example? Maybe everything is just fleeting patterns of quantum chaos at an atomic level!

There seem to be two main contenders for explaining wind ripples:

It's the wind.
Wind or water flowing over a flat surface "trips over itself" because of friction with the bottom that slows it down. This creates rolling vortices of tubulence, an eddy effect that in turn produces ripples.

It's the sand.
Wind ripples result from just the saltation and reptation of individual sand grains.

I can't take it, there are just too many passwords to remember and it isn't very secure. Roboform is something my buddy Bill uses to automate this. I'm a believer now, it is sure convenient to have something that knows various passwords and that has a master. It also fills in your credit card information ifyou like, but the main use is for passwords.

Well, the xD is kind of a strange format that only the Fujifil FinePix F11 (DCViews) uses as far as I can tell. By the way, that is a great review of the F11. Amongst other things it does note that the camera sometimes overexposes. A small -1/3EV correction can be programed to take care of that. Other reviews are collected at DCViews that talk about it having shutter and aperture priority and being very clean up to ISO 400 and quite good at ISO 800! They love the very sharp and distortion free 8-24mm F/2.8-5.0 lense. TrustedReviews Also points out its battery will last 500 shots or more than what is in 1GB xD card. There is purple fringing though. Also has very accurate color reproduction.

Where do you get it, TheCameraBox appears to be the only US site to carry it. It is $295 plus $10 shipping.

There are two flavors, the M-type and the H-type. The H-type says that it can be up to 2-3x faster with compatible Olympus cameras. I don't know if the F11 qualifies

finepix f11 - Froogle. For pure quality, the Fujifilm FinePix F11 is probably the best. You can't get it in the U.S. because the big brands like Sony and Canon have blown it out of the market. The huge advantage is it can take very low noise pictures to ISO 400.

If you want to stay slim, the Sony T9 is probably the best. It is 6 megapixels, has image stabilization and can take low noise pictures to ISO 100.

Rob Galbraith did actual in camera testing with the Digital Rebel XT to see what were the fastest cards. For most of these, the RAW write speed wwas the most affect with the Sandisk Extreme III 1GB and 2GB having identical performance at 4.888MBps write JPEG and 6.26MBps RAW.

It is also interesting to see the 4GB cards were slightly slow at 4.56MBps JPEG write and 5.611 MBps with the SanDisk Ultra II 4GB where the cluster size of 4KB seemd a whisker faster than 32KB clusters.

It was also interseting to see that basically SanDisk and Lexar comes out on top at least in these tests.

Many companies sell CompactFlash media; relatively few actually design and manufacture the key internal components, including the controller and flash memory. This column lists the source of the key component or components inside the card, to help you determine if cards with different labels on the front are in fact similar or identical under the hood. For example: as of this writing, all the cards of a given capacity in this database that use Toshiba SLC components are effectively the same product. In most instances, the company marketing the card is purchasing assembled Toshiba CompactFlash cards, then placing their own label on them (this practice is common in the memory industry as a whole). Therefore, determining which company's Toshiba SLC product to buy should be done based on your examination of things like warranty, tech support and the reputation of the company selling the card.

Canon Speedlite 430EX Flash Review. Once the decision on Camera is made, then there is a high and low flash model. You really do want a flash in most circumstances particularly indoors where bounce flash is very useful. The net is that the 580EX has a guide number of 190 (vs. 140) so is more powerful and is a little bit bigger. The 580EX is a breathtaking $365 at pricegrabber so it is really the pro model while the 430EX is $242. So for my money, the 430EX is probably just fine. Nikon has the same split with the SB-800 and SB-600.

Performance of the Canon Speedlite 430EX Flash is consistent with that of the Canon Speedlite 580EX Flash - very good. I don't have much to report on it. Both of these flashes work very well as long as you understand Canon's flash technology. For the difference in price, my advice is to get the Canon 580ex Flash. Of course, if the 430ex's differences are meaningless to you, it will serve you very well.

See also Lee Ward actual use of the thing on his 10D

DCRP Review: Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H5. The H5 is just coming out in June. First reviews are in a week or two. There is some excitement about this camera since it is $500, 7 megapixels, 12x zoom and only weighs 1.3 pounds. I'm kind of expecting that it will be like the Canon IS-3 which is 6 megapixels and pretty good at low ISOs, so it is mainly an outdoor camera.

Now that there are 10MB (aka 66x), 20MBps (aka 133x) and even 22MBps (aka 150x) cards, its a challenge to figure out what to buy.

Core Sound — PDAudio® System has done some benchmarking, but most folks don't do reviews of SD cards. There is also an issue with older cameras since anything bigger than 1GB requires a FAT-32 format so you can only see the first 1GB. Also, the really no-name cards like (A-Data have just terrible reliability and user reviews).

Some pretty good 4GB choices are:

• Patriot Extreme Performance 133× 4GB. Patriot has a good name in system memory
• Transcend 4GB 150x. This has a $30 rebate on zipzoomfly.com right now.

Warranty Check for End User. A very useful site, this lets you check to see if your hard drive is eligible for warranty repair. I've had about 50% of my Western Digital drives fail me and about half my OCZ memory, so its pretty relevant to know the warranty policy. The latest one to bite the dust is a WD2500, this is a 250GB drive, it was built in November 2003 and interestingly I thought it had a three year warranty on it, but the site says that it only has a one year retail warranty.

One of the strange things about Western Digital and most drive guys is that their OEM drives have three year warranties while their nicely packaged retail ones only have a one year. I had thought that this was a bare drive, but the serial number says that it is actually a retail one. One thing you can gather from this BTW is that the OEM drives probably are higher quality than the stuff you get from Fry's.

Anandtech brings incredibly great news!

Seagate just introduced their 7200.10 line and it uses a new technology called perpendicular recording. The net is that you can now get a 750GB hard drive (wow!). I'm actually running out of disk space with all the videos and photos I've been editing. Our main server has three 300GB drives and they are just about out. While these things cost $500 each right now, it means that in a desktop size machine, you can easily have three drives and get triple your disk space to 2TB. Now that is probably enough finally.

Also means on my photo scanning machine with its single 300GB drive and 75GB system drive, I can easily get to 1.5TB of storage. Cool!

The amazing thing is that a single 750GB drive at 7200 rpm now has the same performance as the WD740D, the 74GB 10,000 RPM drive I've been using for my system drives. So best recommendation now is to get as many of these new drives as you can find. They are more capacity and faster and not really too expensive on a $/GB basis.

I'm on a campaign to have a logon for every Web 2.0 company coming on line. I sign up for roughly 10 companies or so a week, but it looks like I need to accelerate to keep up, so I'm setting the goal at 10 per day! Major hat tip ot Techcrunch which Jonathan told me was the source of 10,000 users if you just a get a listing there!

Here are some of the latest and a quick review of them and most important get "rich" as my login!

• edgeio: Welcome. This is the company that the Techcrunch guy started. It appears to be a classified listing site. Cool I got "rich" as my login
• Vpod.tv. Not yet released, but is yet another video editing site.
• Alexaholic. This lets you graph up to five different sites for review on alexa. Very useful for seeing where various sites are.
• Feeds2.0. A Greek site, this is yet another RSS news reader
• Jumpcut. The latest int he line of video sharing services chasing youtube which by the way took another. Main feature is that it allows you to remix videos automatically and other editing
• $8M from Sequoia
• Videoegg. This is another site that does video editing.
• Motionbox. This is the si
• Grouper. This site has the best visual browsing with an 8×8 thumbnail set and auto highlight when you go over. Also, it has a nice way to view videos with a kind of wheel of text on the right. Try it.
• Riya. This site sponsors techcrunch. They are photo search company that has facial recognition to find folsk, so might be pretty cool. You have to do a massive upload of your pictures though so that it can then run around and try to find people.
• Omnidrive. Another see it everywhere page.
• Netvibes.com. Yet another portal application. It really uses AJAX quit a bit and lets you throw things in from many different sites. You can think of it as a portal where you can pick pieces from everywhere. Using the different widgets lets you see what are the hot companies.
• Nowpublic.com. This is lets you share your news and it looks like a photo and video sharing plus tagging plus blogging site. The idea is citizen journalism. Post a story and then get it rated.
• Valleywag. This is a silicon valley gossip column with tags and all the latest stuff.
• Vizrea. Ex-Microsoft buddies are doing easy photo sharing and also when you take a photo from your cell phone, it automatically (if you've got Symbian) appears on the web for you.
• Kayak. Funded by General Catalyst and AOL, this is a travel fare and hotel aggregation site.
• Amazon S3. This is pay-as-you-go storage for web developers. Great for folks who are building sites and don't want to set up a whole server quite yet.

And finally, before I go to bed, what better way to end than a sign up for mecanbe. This lets you set your life goals and is a self improvement site.

TechCrunch » About TechCrunch. It about says it. Most folks I know say that TechCrunch, although just a year old is the definitive place to keep track of the 20,000 web 2.0 companies now around.