Mac RumorsCanon Speedlites compared – 580EX, 430EX, 420EX, 220EX, 380EX, 550EX. _The net is that the 420EX was just $180 new vs. the new 430EX at $250 and is just about the same, so get it used on ebay.
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.
| Camera | W x H x D | Volume | Weight (no batteries) |
| Fujifilm Fujipix F11 | 3.6″ x 2.3″ x 1.1″ | 9.1 cu in. | 155g/5.5oz |
| Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H2/H5 | 4.5 x 3.3 x 3.7 in. | 55.0 cu in. | 406g/14oz |
| Digital Rebel XT | 5.0 x 3.7 x 2.5 in. | 45 cu in. | 485g/1 lb. 2oz |
| 24-105mm F/4L IS USM | 3.3×4.2 (diam x L) | 36 cu in.| 670g/1.5lb |
| Digital Rebel + 24-105 | 5.0 x 3.7 x 6.9 | 127 cu in. | 1155g/2.5lb |
| “Speedlite 430EX”:http://www.bobatkins.com/photography/eosfaq/ex_speedlites.html | 2.8″ x 4.8″ x 4.0″ | 53 cu in. | 330g/12oz |
| Rebel + 24-105 + 430EX | 5.0″ x 5.2″ x 6.9″ | 180 cu in | 1485g/3.3lb |
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”:http://shozu.com. 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”:http://fotki.com. 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 ยท 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”:http://www.polarusa.com/service_repair/repair_form.asp which is kind of hard to find.
“DCViews”:http://www.dcviews.com/_Sony/h5.htm. 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”:http://www.digitalcamerainfo.com/content/Sony-Cyber-shot-DSC-H5-Digital-Camera-Review/Design–Layout.htm 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”:http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/sony/dsc_h5-review/index.shtml 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”:http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/canon/digital_rebel_xt-review/index.shtml 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″:http://www.thecamerabox.com/product.asp?id=fudfpf11&l=Froogle). You can’t get this one in the US, but “thecamerabox”:http://thecamerabox.com 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″:http://www.pricegrabber.com/p__Sony_Cyber_shot_DSC_H5_Digital_Camera_Black,__17744371/sort_type=bottomline) 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″:http://www.pricegrabber.com/p__Canon_EOS_350D_Digital_Rebel_XT_Digital_SLR_Camera_Body_Only_Black,__7139626/sort_type=bottomline) and Canon 28-105mm F4 L IS USM lens (“$1200″:http://www.pricegrabber.com/p__Canon_EF_24_105mm_f_4_L_IS_USM_Standard_Zoom_Lens,__11402001/sort_type=bottomline). 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″:http://www.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.php/masterid=588161/sort_type=bottomline), Canon 70-200 F2.8L IS USM lense (“$1700″:http://www.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.php/masterid=588161/sort_type=bottomline) and Canon 16-35mm f2.8L: USM EF (“$1300″:http://www.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.php/masterid=533991/sort_type=bottomline) 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″:http://www.pricegrabber.com/p__Sony_DCR_SR100_30_GB_Digital_Camcorder,__17842636/sort_type=bottomline). 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″:http://www.pricegrabber.com/p__Sony_HDR_HC3_HDV_Digital_Camcorder,__17842633/sort_type=bottomline). 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”:http://freebies.about.com/cs/digphotostorage/ 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”:http://imagestation.com. 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”:http://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”:http://gallery.greatestjournal.com. 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”:http://shutterfly.com. 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”:http://kodakgallery.com. 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”:http://clubphoto.com. Unlimited free storage but they delete your albums not used in 90 days
* “dotPhoto”:http://dotPhoto.com. 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”:http://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”:http://flickr.com. 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”:http://photosite.com. This is another social networking plus photos site with 100 free photos, for $3/month, you get unlimited storage.
* “pixagogo”:http://pixagogo.com. It is $5/month with unlmited photos and no I haven’t tried it, at $60/year, it is lots more than fotki.
!>http://www.livingroom.org.au/photolog/images/thumbnails/histogram.gif! “Photoblog”:http://www.livingroom.org.au/photolog/tips/histogram_tips.php. These things appear everywhere, but what are they exactly. Photoblog has a good definition cribbed Photoxels:
bq. 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”:http://www.outbackphoto.com/workflow/wf_41/essay.html 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.
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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”:http://octaga.com
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_
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