Monthly Archives: May 2011

Plasma displays

Hardware

The sweet point.

Plasma and LCD displays continue to compete, with the latter now making the manufacture of plasma screens much below 42″ an uncompetitive proposition. But though plasma displays are heavier and use more energy than LCDs, and though they use a glass front plate with all the attendant issue of reflections, they remain the standard by which contrast range is judged. Nothing beats the blacks of a plasma screen.

What prompts this piece is my use of an inexpensive LCD display for display of art on the wall. I thought it might be interesting to compare prices of plasma displays at different screen sizes.

For some five years now the 104″ Panasonic plasma display has been the largest readily available plasma display, starting out at some $90,000. You see them now and then on TV where they are used for presentation purposes, though it is ordinarily far cheaper to simply use a blue screen behind a news anchor to project charts and the like.

The Panasonic 104″ display.

That Panny whopper has come down in price a lot, and I compare the most common Panny 1080p plasma displays for size, price and weight in the following table. The ‘Area ratio’ refers to the relative surface area of each screen compared to the 42″ one. So the Panny 104″ has more than six times the area of the 42″:

The chart clearly shows that the pricing sweet spot fades rapidly once the screen size exceeds 65″, and you can bet that there’s not that much left to be gained from economies of scale, as it’s unlikely that displays larger than 65″ will ever sell in the quantities needed to really bring prices down. Homes are simply not large enough, for the most part, and the logistical nightmare of installing a 500 lb. display does the rest.

Not that I would complain if you gave me that 104″ display, having lived with a 100″ projection screen in our previous home. The problem with the projection screen was that you needed a darkened room for the overhead projector to cast a contrasty image, but the price of the installation was a small fraction of the Panny plasma whopper.

Cost of a 100″ projection system.

Power consumption – a few watts, compared to 1,500 for the giant Panasonic.

CrashPlan – Part IV

Software

Finally uploaded.

After two weeks of uploading, some 170gB – comprising my user settings and Lightroom catalog – have been uploaded to CrashPlan’s servers. I first wrote about this cloud storage service here.

100%! Two weeks of uploading ….

Hereafter, uploads will be limited to incremental changes as new photos are added to Lightroom.

So how well does recovery work? Click on the ‘Restore’ icon and this is what you see (CrashPlan uses East coast time):

Note that you can recover at any date – just like in Apple’s Time Machine.

The first, unnamed, dropdown is the User’s directory, which CrashPlan uploads by default. The second, ‘HackPro HD’ contains only those directories elected when the upload commenced. In my case, that means my Lightroom catalog:

Drill down and you get to the catalog of Pictures:

One more step and you see the actual RAW, TIF or JPG files:

Check the files to recover and you see this:

I clicked on ‘Click here to download your restored files’ and the 12.5mB RAW file was deposited on the HackPro’s Desktop in 24 seconds, using my 10 mb/s broadband connection. That’s 0.52 mBytes/second compared to the theoretical maximum of 1.25 mB/s (10 megabits equal 1.25 megabytes and the line is 10 megabits/second). Not bad. The Desktop is a good destination as there’s no risk of overwriting your Lightroom catalog.

A couple of clicks and the file is in Photoshop, ready for processing:

File restored from CrashPlan’s cloud server. G1, kit lens @ 30mm, 1/320, f/5.6, ISO 100.

You can also restore the sidecar file with all the processing data, to avoid having to reprocess the picture.

Restored Zip files remain separately available for 24 hrs – the original RAW (or whatever) file remains untouched:

The only anomaly encountered so far is the wildly erratic reporting of upload status. I asked for daily email updates and got them at inconsistent times. That’s troubling, as inconsistency is the last thing I want from a cloud backup service, but the files appear properly uploaded and easily restored:

Erratic reporting from CrashPlan.

A check of files in my HackPro Lightroom and the CrashPlan directories confirms a like file count.

So, for $50 a year with currently unlimited data volumes, CrashPlan looks to be a useful supplementary backup plan. Just don’t make it your primary one. Are you about to trust all your pictures solely to a fragile ‘cloud’, where you have no independent verification of the adequacy of procedures or the financial solvency of the business?

Finally, recalling my earlier mantra that the only valid backup plan is one which has the qualities of paranoia and mistrust at its core, I made a reminder in iCal to prompt me to do a test restore of a file monthly. That way I get some comfort that the cloud database is not corrupted. It takes seconds to do.

Update June 13, 2011:

With incremental upgrades to my Lightroom catalog on the HackPro work machine being conferred faultlessly, and automatically, in the CrashPlan cloud storage database, I have signed up for 3 years for a total of $119.99:

In Part V I look at backing up additional files and at how best to backup applications.

Tomorrow’s photo gallery realized

Photographs

Prints are dying.

Almost five years ago I wrote of The photo gallery of the future, which would use a large screen display to show changing art work.

A while back, wanting to add a stock quote display to my office without using precious real estate on the three Dell displays attached to the HackPro, I pulled an old MSI Barebone computer out of storage and added an inexpensive (Hyundai!) 21.5″ LCD display. More of an art work thing than anything else – it’s not like I stare at a ticker all day. The MSI had proved too slow for its intended role as a movie server and had been replaced by a MacMini. But for streaming stock quotes, a low data volume application, it proves ideal. The display, which is 1920 x 1080 and includes a pair of (awful) speakers ran me all of $150. Adding a $15 VESA mounting plate and a few minutes with a stud finder and drill and the display was up on the wall.

On the sofaback, the cheap Hyundai display.

A few moments in iPhoto and I had my collection of Renaissance art pictures converted to a slide show and moved over to the Barebone. Now, at weekends, when it’s resting, it displays Caravaggio, Raphael and Titian. What could be nicer?

The 21.5″ display on the wall.

The next one will have to be 42″, just as I expected five years ago.

200 megapixels

Cameras

Innovation from Hasselblad.

The newly introduced Hasselblad H4D-200MS digital camera body is not for everyone at almost $50,000. However, for the working professional who needs to make barn-sized prints for a living, the price of entry is easily recovered.

Click the picture for more.

The body is a modified variant of the existing H4D-50 which makes six consecutive pictures of a subject, shifting the sensor in between, thus exposing all photosites (digital receptors) to equal amounts of light. The camera then merges these six images into a 200 megapixel whole. Commendably, the regular camera ($31,000) can be upgraded by the maker. The loss of some 100 megapixels (6 x 50 = 300) presumably arises from the process deleting duplicated data points.

A 200 megapixel file size (200 megabytes) is nothing to laugh about. You will need high speed data processing power to manipulate such files and a lot of storage to back them up. Further, the technology can only be used with stationary subjects, but for the contemplated billboard-sized results, subjects will likely include product advertisements, food shots for the sides of trucks and so on. These are largely static so that hardly seems a limitation.

Fuji, the owner of Hasselblad, deserves congratulations on this innovative camera.

London’s Tate Gallery uses this technology, and you can see more by clicking the picture below. The difference is readily visible in the small reproduction below, but on their site you can really zoom in to see what this is all about.

Click the picture to go to Hasselblad’s comparison page.