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Argh. Pots and pans are great, but they do accumulate grossness after a while. Consumer Reports says everything they tested work pretty well in cleaning off ordinary stains fro msheets. But, what about really getting the junk off of stainless steel pots and pans. It is a brown film of cured oil.

I tried Bar Keepers Friend which was a sample from Calpholon One. It worked decently well to clean a really burned stuff, but left some residue. Apparently there is water based which works OK, and oil based which is toxic and horrible but works. There is something called Bayes Cleaner which says it is eco-friendly and works.

Another recommendations is Sheila Shine

Nothing like omakesase at Nobu to celebrate Serena Williams and Dina Safina win.

Cool sake on this.

Nobu is great but knowing the sushibchef is better!

Omg. A 43c day in Melbourne. Doesn’t even begin to describe how hot it is. Feels like living in a radiator.

Now Serena Williams vs. Dementieva is like watching two power hammers motor away. In row C. Glad roof is up at open.

Wow. Weather forecast is out. Lots of 43C days in Melbourne. That is over 109F. So cooking hot. Also power demand is breaking records. They say it is 100 year heat wave.

Having an open electricity trading system makes it so much easier to plan.

Cool places to hang out. The BOA Steakhouse and also the Viceroy for drink. I have never felt so trendy and cool. Except maybe in Shanghai :-0

Wow it does get hot here. Over 40C (104F). I don’t know how people play tennis in this kind of weather. The Crown Towers is pretty nice. Was top readers choice in Australia/Pacific in 2007.

The Qantas flight was nearly a nightmare. The Airbus 380 needed a new part. So they delayed it from 11:15PM until 10AM the next day as a part had to be flown in. Qantas staff was terrific, so we got on a 747 headed to Sydney and actually made it in 45 minutes to a connector to Melbourne. Wow.

Anyway, enjoying the nice weather. Photos to follow!

I’ve never used this thing as I’ve always resorts to DxO to process my RAW images, but now the DxO is just starting to support the Canon 5D Mark II and it doesn’t yet have a module for the Canon EF 70-200 F/2.8 L IS USM lense if you can believe that, so I have to learn how to use Canon’s own RAW processor. Here are the confusing things. The other alternative is something called Bibble and then of course the generic DNG from Adobe.

Color Management. According to Photography-on-the-net, you have to manually set the display color space if you have already color calibrated, so I use the SpyderPro 2, so set this so you see the right thing on your screen. Canon’s 5527 Digital Color Management Guide is pretty helpful. It is kind of nice the guide assumes a 5D and a Pro9000 printer plus DPP. It basically says, set your 5DII to use Adobe RGB instead of sRGB and the Pro9000 can render this well. One important thing is that it says ambient light should be at 5000K (not 6500K common in video output).

To calibrate your camera, first set the picture style to faithful and select RAW output. Then take the color chart from the guide and photograph it. Then go to DPP and set working color space to Adobe RGB and choose relative colormetric. Then in Easy Print or Adode Photoshop, set it to use the ICC and also to use Relative colormetric.

Well, HDMI has lots of issues but at least it is reasonably standard. We do have one now very old rear projection system that is 1080i with just component inputs, so how do you connect the Playstation to it. Got an el cheapo Gigaware cable that support component to Xbox, Playstation or just about anything else, but it shows a wierd artifact. I get floating bands of purple scrolling through. So what to get that really works.

As UltimateAVMag.com explains, Sony has a proprietary connection called Multi AV output and there is a optical Toslink which only outputs Dolby Digital and DTS (not the newer Dolby True HD or DTS-HD Master Audio).

It used to be that the main game in town for a compact SLR was the D40x and the Nikon 18-200 superzoom. Now the market has caught up and both Canon as well as Sigma and Tamron have shipped superzooms. So if you have a subframe camera, what’s a good choice? Well, unfortunately, if you are a Canon owner, it is filled with compromises. Looking across all of these, is a hard choice. Tamron is out because of build quality and autofocus issues. I’d probably give a slight nod to Nikon and Canon just because they are F/5.6 rather than F/6.3 at the high zoom, but they are more expensive. So Sigma if you are on a budget.

Sigma 18-200 F/3.5-6.c DC OS HSM was the first 11x zoom for the Canon. I got one. It wasn’t super expensive. I would agree though that it has its compromises. DPReview found that the main issue was that it wasn’t sharp at 80mm or so, so ironically, it does well in wide and highly zoomed, but not in the middle. It has relatively low distortion (compared with the Canon, see below) and chromatic aberration. It’s optical stabilization isn’t as good, although for me having four stops of stabilization hasn’t really been an issue at that kind of low light, it is the subject, not the photographer that is the problem. There just aren’t that many things that are that still when it is dark. The other disadvantage is that if is F/6.3 at 200mm, so is really only good in bright daylight.

Tamron AF 18-270 F/3.5-6.3 Dii II VC LD Aspehrical (IF) MACRO like all these has an amazingly long name. It is even more telephoto and has vibration reduction just as good as the Canon or Nikon. The main issue is that it is slow in autofocus, so in the real world not a great choice. And there is geometric distortion and chromatic abberation as well.

Canon EF-S 18-200mm 1:3.5-5.6 IS was finally introduced last October to compete with the Nikon. It really does have some compromises. Wide angle was mediocre because of barrel distortion, chromatic aberration and softness. You can cure some of these except for softness with their supplied software. At zoom, it has distortion at 50mm and chromatic aberration at 200mm. Compared to the Nikon, it is about the same in quality. With Nikon more sharp at 18mm and Canon at 200mm and doesn’t have Nikon’s poor performance at 135mm.

Nikon 18-200mm F/3.5-5.6G IF-ED AF-S VR DX was the lense that started it all in the superzoom category. Certainly it is way better than the el cheapo lenses. Like all these in this category the idea is decent performance but make it lightweight so you might actually travel with it. The main issues are distortion and softness at 135mm.

I’ve been using DxO for a while now as a RAW converter mainly to handle vignetting, but also for things like highlight recovery. The 4.0 version was great, but the new 5.0 has had lots of bugs, so I haven’t upgraded. Now with a new Canon EOS 5D Mark II, I have to do something as only the 5.0 version supports it. In looking at whether it is fixed, found Popular Photography is now using the DxOMark as a reference for the quality of the RAW image.

As an aside, my old Canon EOS 350D cost $560 and was launched 17 February 2005 (I bought mine mid 2005). It scored a 56.9 out of 100 with subreading showing Low light ISO at 637 and Dynamic Range at 10.8 EV. As an aside, its ISO reading are much more accurate. ISO 800 is really ISO 718. Youa re geting decent dynamic range. Even at ISO 800, you are getting 9.7EV

In comparison the new Canon 5D Mark II rates at 79 out of 100 with a Color depth of 23.7, Dynamic Range of 11.9, but the biggest change is that Low light ISO goes to 1815. Most interesting factoid, when Canon says ISO 3200, the measured ISO is actually more like 2133. At that setting, you are getting 9EV. The sweet spot ISO 800 (which is really 533) giving 10.3 EV.

Since we are competitive people. On the Nikon side, the D40x delivers 63.9 DxoMarks with great dynamic range of 11.5 and low light ISO of 516. And the D700 which is a 12MP full frame is 80.5 with color depth about the same at 23.5 vs. 23.7, Dynamic range a little better at 12.2 vs. 11.9 but most important is low light ISOP at 2303 vs. 1815. But of course, Canon 5Dii has twice the pixels.

If you can afford at $9K camera, the bet one so far is the 24MP Nikon D3x with a DxO Mark of 88/100 with 24.7 Color depth, 13.7 dynamic range and 1992 Low light ISO. The dynamic ranges are just amazing for Nikon.