Yearly Archives: 2008

The amazing technology price spiral

Photography

No bottom in sight.

Right before this year’s Superbowl, that annual orgy of advertising and steroid fueled ‘athletes’, I though it would be pretty smart to buy a nice big screen TV. I have no earthly intention of watching this ridiculous spectacle masquerading as sport, but a ‘Superbowl Special’ is a ‘Superbowl Special’. So I decided to fight my way through a parking lot of drivers with multiple tattoos and monster trucks, and spring for a big screen LCD TV.

I had recently acquired an AppleTV and simply could not make out movie synopses on the old 168 lb. cathode ray tube Sony, so I trotted off to WalMart and blew $900 on a 42″ Vizio. I had been watching the price trends in flat panel TVs and my guess was that prices had pretty much bottomed. As for the brand, I knew that Sony/Samsung made the LCD panel (as they do all these large panels) so had little concern over longevity and quality control. Made in South Korea is a hell of a lot more reassuring than Made in Detroit. Another $30 saw a pair of half decent bookshelf speakers from Radio Shack plugged into my old amplifier, and took care of the truly awful sound produced by the native hardware in the TV.

So I was feeling pretty smart.

Well, I just checked the prices around that annual spell of Genuine American Idiocy known as Black Friday – the biggest retail sale day of the year, coming right after Thanksgiving – and felt pretty foolish. The same TV was now selling for $600 (I think of it as the ‘Subprime Special’) and if you felt spendy, another $100 got you one with a plasma screen rather than an LCD one. Throw in a massive recession and maybe these things will get cheaper yet.

Price trend for a typical Panasonic 42″ LCD TV over
the past nine months. High, median, low.

And we all know the story about CD and DVD players. As an avid classical music fan, I simply had to have a CD player and spent no less than $1,000 on my Hitachi 1000 in 1983. It works to this day and something far better/faster/etc. can be had for …. $50 or less.

Hard disk drives are the worst offenders. My 60gB which came with the MacBook was replaced with a 160, then a 250 and now a 500gB version. Prices? How about $100, $100 and $80, respectively? And that’s all within 18 months. And for mass storage, you can now get 2 terabytes in a properly fan cooled enclosure for under $400. I know as I have 8 terabytes’ worth!

As for flash memory and RAM, who on earth would want to be in those businesses? Every time I use my crappy old Olympus C5050 for a snap for this site, I am reminded that the 256 megabyte CF card it uses ran me over $130, 7 years ago. By contrast, the 2 gB CF card in my 5D now retails for under $25.

Then, take the Canon 5D. An outrageous $3,000 for the body when announced 3 years ago. Now its better/faster/etc. replacement, the 5D Mark II, is expected to retail for $2,600. Meanwhile, lightly used 5Ds sell for $1,300 and falling. I would have bought a used one when acquiring mine a couple of years ago but they were nowhere to be found.

Could I have waited another year for the TV or two years for the camera? Maybe and no. While the TV was a luxury, this avid photographer, well and truly sick of the process/scan/retouch cycle dictated by film, found there was no alternative to the 5D. It’s not that I care for Canon. Frankly, brand means little to me. But I do care for full frame sensors and half decent lenses at reasonable prices. Plus, realizing that used prices of even the best film cameras would come crashing down – because of cameras like the 5D – I decided then and there to unload all that Leica and Rollei gear, making my net investment in my 5D + 7 Canon lenses about as close to zero as you can get. Actually, I made money on the deal. Why anyone would buy near-obsolete film gear beats me, but I trust it made some loony collector happy somewhere.

Frankly, I simply cannot see improving on the quality of the 18″ x 24″ prints from my 5D originals, but two years hence when the 5D Mark II is selling for $1,000 on the lightly used market, thanks to the better/faster/etc. 5D Mark III, I may just snap one up. Anyway, I’ll need another body while Mark I is at Canon to have all the garbage removed from the finder system, thanks to Canon’s non-existent dust sealing in that model. If they will even deign to accept it for overhaul, that is.


Recent 5D selling prices.

Natural Redhead

Photographs

Pure serendipity.

I wa staying downtown San Francisco at the St. Francis at the turn of the millennium, and when I leaned out of the hotel window, this is what I saw:

Natural Redhead. Christmas, 1999, San Francisco. Leica M6, 50mm Summicron, Kodachrome 64

The original slide was digitized on a Nikon 2000 film scanner and is otherwise unprocessed.

I have been lucky to own many Leitz 50mm Summicron lenses, as befits the greatest optic of the past century. These included a collapsible screw mount one (very early) which I used on a IIIG ‘Barnack’ body. For my M2, M3 and M6 I variously owned single and dual range versions of the fixed mount 7 element design in that gorgeous chrome that only Leica could do in the 1950s. Then there was the six element variant – the one without the infinity catch and the last with a removable head which you could use on your enlarger. I did. And finally the magnificent first version of the Summicron-R for the Leicaflex, which I used on my SL and R4. That one combined Nikon vibrance with Leica subtlety in your color snaps.

All were dear friends, participants and collaborators and if I admit to a favorite – a cruel task indeed, as to elect one for the top rung is to relegate all the others – it would be the six element on my M2 or M6. Many knocked it, and the satin black finish was so …. ugh!, but I liked the high contrast compared to the earlier versions and the low weight. In some respects, its images felt more Nikon than Leica. You know. Where you elect punchiness and contrast over detail.

It’s a trade off I was willing to make at that time of my life – a long time, come to think of it, as that Summicron was a colleague for nigh on twenty years. Do you think you will be able to say that in twenty years regarding your latest purchase?

Micro Four Thirds

Micro Four-Thirds

Yet another format and lens mount?

When Olympus and Panasonic announced their Micro Four Thirds (what?) camera system a few months back, I confess to stifling a yawn. Yet another cropped sensor format with claims to compactness and ‘newness’. Please.

Further, reading preliminary reviews of the first camera to use this format, the Panasonic G1, left me underwhelmed. Sure, the camera was a DSLR and it was small, albeit not much smaller than the smallest DSLRs from Olympus and Pentax, and yes, the camera offered the opportunity of using rationally priced lenses from Leica not otherwise available, but as I am no lover of cropped, small sensors I gave the new products little thought.

However, I chanced on a review of the Panasonic G1 DSLR the other day and noticed something to like amongst the otherwise unexciting product features. The camera, although a DSLR, dispenses with the noisy flapping mirror and bulky pentaprism and condenser lens, replacing both with an electronic viewfinder. Heretofore, every consumer grade camera I have tried with an electronic viewfinder has been simply awful. A small, unsharp image with enormous latency (you move the camera and the image smears and follows along later) made this gimmick of no practical use for photographers. Now, maybe, things are changing, as most reviewers state that the EVF in the G1 is close to optical quality and latency is a thing of the past.

The micro four thirds system uses the same sensor size as the four-thirds one, meaning a 17mm x 13mm useable area, compared to 36mm x 24mm for full frame 35mm DSLRs. However, the cameras use a smaller lens mount for lenses, as these no longer have to be designed to clear a flapping mirror, as no mirror is used.

Why is this interesting? Well, it’s no secret that while I find the Panasonic LX-1 point-and-shoot a usable proposition – click in the left column to learn more – no one could accuse the microscopic sensor in this camera of boasting great image quality or low noise. Nor is the poor shutter lag anything to get excited about. And I continue to long for a truly pocketable camera with a proper viewfinder (no, not an LCD screen) to emulate the film Leica of yore with the addition of a half decent digital sensor. The one used in the micro four thirds cameras is many times the surface area of that in the LX1 so there is hope. As for the Leica M8, I consider its price and feature set to be nothing more than a joke. Limited automation, ridiculous and bulky variable focus length lenses (not true zooms) and a viewfinder last perfected in 1954 on the Leica M3 by a factory with little capital which checked its design originality at the door in 1938 or so.

However, the Panasonic G1 is of no interest to me, as for some reason Panasonic has seen fit to emulate the traditional SLR-looking design of the body, rather than doing something really revolutionary. Maybe they felt that buyers would turn away from something with true minituarisation and new looks, which only prompts me to ask why bother when like size can be had in the smallest Olympus DSLR for a fraction of the G1’s $800 price tag?


The Panasonic G1. Yet another DSLR-shaped waste of capital investment

But there is hope. If the EVF really is as good as the reviewers say (I have yet to try it) then there is no reason why the manufacturers shouldn’t get rid of the faux prism hump, making the whole thing yet smaller, and still permit the use of those great Leica lenses, the latter being easily the best feature of my Panasonic LX1. And, hey presto!, before you know it you have a camera as small as the Leica CL, that little jewel made by Minolta all those years ago, with all the advantages of automatic-everything and image stabilization to boot. And no noise or vibration from that wretched flapping mirror.


The (Minolta) Leica CL, first sold in 1973. A sweet full frame film camera with Leica interchangeable lenses.

So, Olympus and Panasonic, given that you have some of the best designers on this earth and have made the rational and praiseworthy decision to delegate the optical part to the best there is – Leica – why not a truly innovative update of the classic rangefinder camera body for those of us praying for something like this for over a decade? I will be the first in line to buy one if noise is low and shutterlag minimal. And while I’m at it, why is shutter lag hardly ever mentioned by reviewers? I can only think they are conflicted by commercial consderations or, more likely, judging by the quality of the test snaps included with many reviews, these people have yet to learn the difference between a good photograph and a hole in the gound.

Happy Thanksgiving

Art Illustration, Cooking, Photography

The best time of the year.

For an index of articles on art illustrators, click here.

For an index of cooking articles on this blog click here.

This year we are blessed with friends from England and my in laws from San Diego. I managed to track down a Diestel turkey – you know, the kind that wanders California’s great wide expanses while listening to Mozart. This translates into a tasty and juicy bird.

And, in protest against our government’s woeful ways with our money and our citizenry’s placid, nay, complicit, acceptance of the rape of our economy, the wines this year are Spanish (a nice Rioja to start) and French (thank you Bordeaux!) Even the port is from where port should be from, meaning Portugal, US winemakers being clueless when it comes to making this grog.

On the hardware front I have finally invested in a genuine French Sabatier chef’s knife. It’s from Thiers, in France, and if you decide to get one be super careful as the name is not trade marked, meaning there are lots of nasty imitations out there. You will not find this one at WalMart. The one I got has a carbon steel (non-stainless) blade, meaning a little more care is called for when cleaning, but provides a far keener and longer lasting edge, something stainless steel cannot equal. I toyed with the idea of one of those Japanese ones where the metal has been folded on itself a billion times or something, like one of those Samurai swords, but found the look beyond ugly. Form cannot be forgotten even when function is superior.

I was rather taken with the ‘rosewood’ handle on this one, though it’s actually epoxy. Unlike Apple’s deceitful ads (twice as fast, twice as light, blah blah blah) this one makes no claim to anything other than a sharp edge. Heck, it will rust on you before you can say Vive la France if you don’t dry and oil it after use. Note the lovely design of the bolster, where the blade enters the handle. Unlike your camera, this will still be a current model in fifty or a hundred years’ time. And spare parts will remain available ….

Sharpening? Why trust the Village Idiot with missing digits to do this the old way? The answer is the right tool to confer the right angles of grind and a proper steeling, something your local ‘expert’ knife sharpener knows nothing of. I use one of these and immediately ran my new knife through it producing, yes you guessed it, a finer edge than the factory managed before shipping. Proof? How about two millimeter thick tomato slices, the skin intact? The ultimate test of a kitchen knife.


The ultimate test. Two millimeter thick tomato slices.


The Chef’s Choice 130 knife sharpener’s Stage 2 burnishing steel, removed for clarity.

After re-establishing the proper 25 degree edges on your trashed knives – using the Stage 1 coarse diamond wheel – you pass the blade over the Stage 2 burnishing steel a dozen times a side. Then one final quick swipe through the fine stropping wheel in Stage 3 and you are set. In each case, you torque the knife’s handle so that the blade is gently forced against the tool, something the instructions fail to point out. So twist CCW on the left and CW on the right. Thereafter a swipe across the Stage 2 steel every now and then is all that’s needed and the amount of material you will be removing will be one thousandth of that destroyed by the Village Idiot. And Stage 2 needs no mains power – it’s simply a stationery hard steel.

Well, I’m off to the kitchen where the bird awaits.


Diestel turkey with rosemary from the garden, ready for the oven.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Update September, 2020.

The chef’s knife gets little use nowadays, obsoleted by a cleaver – a superior tool in every way.

In the tide pool

Photographs

Wading about

On a favorite, secluded beach off Highway One the other day, I was wading about in the tide pools at low tide and came across this beautiful collection of kelp. Well hidden in the shade of a giant boulder, it was a moment’s work with the ring flash to bring out the gorgeous cornucopia of colors, shapes and textures otherwise hidden from view.


5D, 100mm macro, ring flash, 1/60, f/4, ISO 200

The auto-everything E-TTL of the ring flash makes this sort of thing close to child’s play. Just bring your imagination.

Tide tables are very useful for this sort of thing as you don’t want to arrive at high tide. These are my local ones.