Monthly Archives: July 2010

Why the iPhone 4 sucks

Hall of Shame

An engineer’s explanation

Watch this Bloomberg video with the Consumer Reports (no ads, no conflicts) editor saying how the iPhone 4 is fatally flawed and you will understand why I was lucky to learn of the rumors right before setting out to pick mine up. I cancelled. I was right to do so.

(Note: Unsurprisingly, the video will not play using Safari on my Mac pro. Use Camino or Firefox if you want the video – Safari only gets you the words, and doubtless those will be censored by 1 Infinite Loop any day, too).

Here’s a simpler “a picture is worth a thousand words” explanation from an engineer. Me.

Why iPhone 4 sucks

Apple needs to “Do a Tylenol”. When that analgesic’s maker was landed with the problem of poisoned pills, they recalled every tablet in the world. The difference is that with the iPhone, few will likely die owing to non-existant reception (“Honey, I have chest pains, call the hospital”) but the error here is of the manufacturer’s making.

Apple in deep denial? Heck, Joe Stalin would be proud of their behavior.

So, Apple, how is your arrogance quotient today?

Be sensible. Wait for iPhone 5.

And it will be a long time before Apple’s hubris will admit error. Heck, they will fix it quietly and ship a better model. That’s about consonant with the falling standards of integrity at Apple.

Disclosure: No AAPL position. Are you nuts?

One year with the Panasonic G1

Micro Four-Thirds, Photographs, Software

A pure delight.

A couple of years back I wrote of how I use iCal to track warranties, so what would appear on my pop-up list of reminders today but the fact that I have now completed one year with the Panasonic G1.

And what a year it’s been.

The G1 was intended to be a replacement as a street snapper for my Panasonic LX1 to which I had glued an external optical viewfinder to speed framing. The LX1 is a handy and small number but its shutter lag is so-so and the ergonomics are compromised by the small size. Further, with a very small sensor, image quality tends to suffer as you enlarge the finished image. But it remains a handy traveling companion in the car’s glovebox at all times.

Until the G1 came along there really was no adequate replacement for my collection of Leica M2 and M3 street snappers, sold a few years back to procure funds for the Canon 5D and its range of fine lenses. The Canon’s image quality left the Leicas in the dust but no one could accuse the large and loud 5D of being a street snapper unless you are of the persuasion that has it that a gun is a better negotiating instrument than a quill pen.

Here, finally, was a small, unobtrusive, quiet and fast camera with a high quality kit lens which suffices for most situations encountered by the street maven. Sure, the maximum aperture is pedestrian but throw in a very capable anti-shake system and you gain two stops of speed if not of narrow depth of field. Indeed, I have not been particularly excited about adding the 20mm f/1.7 Panasonic lens owing to its lack of the one thing street photography really benefits from and that’s anti-shake technology. The 20mm focal length of that lens is certainly in the sweet spot – most of my street snaps are taken in the 14-20mm range – but it simply does not add enough and takes away the very handy zoom range of the kit lens which, at 28-90mm in full frame terms is about as perfect a traveling lens as one could wish.

And while I have added the Panasonic 45-200 zoom, which is superb in every way, it’s that jewel of a kit lens is what you find on my G1 99% of the time. Fast focusing, as sharp fully open as stopped down, small and with decent flare resistance, it answers most of this photographer’s prayers. I keep a UV filter on for protection and refuse to use the ridiculous, gargantuan lens hood.

The G1 has been discontinued in favor of the G2 with a 14-42mm kit lens and a movie mode has been added. Neither change means anything to me so the G1 and I remain happy campers.

The only alternative out there for my purposes is the underwhelming and ridiculously overpriced Leica X1 which seeks to trade on the Leica name and the fabulous

ergonomic shape of the Leica M’s body. Sure, the 40mm equivalent fixed focal length lens is ideal (though why on earth you have to wait for it to extend when you switch on the camera beats me – Leica should have used a fixed mount lens), and the APS-C sensor sounds nice though from what I have seen it only improves on the G1’s smaller sensor above 800 ISO. In addition, reports suggest the focus is slow, the shutter lag high and, of course, there’s no credible viewfinder for street work. No, I do not regard an LCD screen, invisible in daylight, as an alternative to a proper viewfinder. And that’s all you get for $2,000 …. are you kidding me?

In the past year I have taken just over 6,000 street snaps with the G1 and have had no reliability issues. Once I had set all the myriad variables to my preferred working method – 320 ISO, aperture priority, single shot, etc. – I simply forgot about all the arcane options and programmed just two Custom settings – one for 320 ISO and the other for 800 ISO for poor light. Then all that remains is to hit the streets and bang away.

Complaints? Well, the zoom collar on the kit lens continues to feel as if someone had buried the optic in the sand at Brighton Beach (NY or Sussex – the sand is much the same either side of the pond) unlike that on the 45-200 which is butter smooth. It grates (!) compared with the overall jewel-like precision of the camera. The electronic viewfinder burns out highlights on sunny days all to easily making pre-visualisation a tad tricky at times but it’s not that big a deal. The final image is, of course, unaffected and the trade-off is the brightness of the image in poor light or in interiors, which is outstanding. Once or twice after changing lenses I have received an error message, fixed by simply giving the lens a bit of a tweak on the camera. And that’s about it. I have no complaints about the silly overload of menu choices as I have simply saved my preferred ones to the Custom choice on the top dial. Panny got it pretty much right first time and all that remains is to wait for the GF2 with no prism hump (not needed in an EVF SLR in any case) and an even smaller Leica-looking body. Nirvana.

If the G1 fails or is stolen or damaged, I console myself with the thought that I can go through a dozen and a half of these and still have change left compared to what that Leica M9 would have run me and, unlike the well heeled owner of that piece of jewelry, my fear quotient when it comes to loss or damage is zero. Plus I don’t have to pause to focus manually through a 70 year old, antiquated rangefinder with a viewfinder which offers at best an approximation of the finished image. Finally, this is a street snapper – you are not going to use it for 40″ x 30″ pin sharp landscape prints. I use the Canon 5D for those.

So, without further ado, just click the picture below to see a couple of dozen snaps from my past year with the G1 which has, quite simply, revitalized my street photography.

Click the picture for more.

To see more from the Panasonic G1 go to my Photoblog, which is named Snap!, believe it or not.

Seeing more

iPad, Photographs

Moving to strength

It’s never a bad idea to look at more photographs. I get ideas and enjoyment and education in equal measure and the iPad is just one more handy viewing tool, and a very capable one.

Publishers of magazines are proving their usual slow selves in getting with it and some still don’t understand that only a fool will pay $5 an eIssue when an annual paper subscription can be had for 20% of the cost but patience is called for. After all, the magazine publishing business has never been inundated with grey matter, and things take time. I may love trees, but I’m not that dumb.

The Zinio app for the iPad is a work in progress but I have found the maker responsive to problem reports and the app keeps moving to strength. Their magazine inventory grows daily and includes lots of European and Asian content. It’s never bad to broaden one’s views.

Here are my current subscriptions, all geared to good photography with the exception of Macworld, which is focused on great software and lousy hardware which they love without exception (can you say ‘conflict of interest’?):

National Geographic speaks for itself, containing some of the best photography on the planet (any decade now expect them to release all their back issues for the iPad) and if you have never seen Arizona Highways you are in for a landscape photography treat. US Vogue seems unaware of the iPad’s existence (duh!), Harper’s Bazaar seems to think that subscription pricing is not called for (double duh!) and Vanity Fair, which really should know better, is in the same camp. Rolling Stone gets it and contains great photography not to mention the only credible investigative reporting in the US (can you say recent exposés of the evil that is Goldman Sucks and a dumb-as-a-brick US Army general?). It’s where Annie Leibovitz got her start and she seems to have done OK.

Check Zinio out – it’s worth it.

Lightroom 3 distortion correction

Photographs

Better and better.

I mentioned the addition of vertical and horizontal distortion corrections when first taking a look at some of the new features in Lightroom 3.

I have been using these quite a bit recently and find that my round tripping to Photoshop is greatly reduced (hooray!), limted to only the most dramatic distortion correction needs.

Here’s a case in point. Taking the original I had no choice in the matter – the cafeteria’s sign could only be shown against the skyscraper’s backdrop withsome serious tilting of the camera and as I couldn’t even get in line with the sign the whole thing is off kilter to boot. Anticipating that I would want to make some pretty serious corrections when processing, I zoomed to a wider than required lens focal length, as corrections will cut off much peripheral details.

To correct this I first rotated the image a few degrees clockwise so that the keystone distortion was evenly distributed. Then I simply used the Lens Corrections->Manual->Vertical slider, adjusting it to -35 degrees. LR3 shows you a handy grid to preclude having to guess when your verticals are really vertical. A quick tweak on the Clarity and Saturation sliders and I was done.

G1, 1/500, f/5.6, ISO 320, kit lens at 25mm

It takes far less time to do than to describe and is a feature which adds significant value to Lightroom 3, especially if you do not want to spend the large amount asked by Adobe for Photoshop or, if like me, you dislike Photoshop with a passion. (Part of that emotion, I confess, is an admission of incompetence!) A related benefit is that your Lightroom catalog suffers no data bloat if you avoid the PS roundtrip, as all the correction settings are stored in a small sidecar file, unlike the TIFF or PSD monster that PS will foist on you when you save it back into your LR catalog.