Monthly Archives: October 2011

When eras end

October 18, 2011HardwareThomas Pindelski

Machines peak as technologies die.

Canon has just announced it latest full frame pro-DSLR, the Canon EOS-1 DX, and you can read twelve pages of detail from the maker here.

My first reaction was not one, but two flashbacks to the ends of prior eras. One was in sound reproduction, the other in film SLRs.

As the LP record peaked in the late 1970s and its makers saw the looming threat of the CD on the horizon, they tried ever harder to improve a medium which was already far better than any machine cut spiral groove in a warped piece of vinyl ever deserved to be. They added four channel sound. One version used differential wave sensing and special cartridges to get a quart out of a pint pot. It delivered about eight fluid ounces. The other, truly worthy of Rube Goldberg, used dual grooves and dual styli! Of course, the music time was halved but, hey, it was quadraphonic, man! Turntable makers adopted all sorts of wild schemes, replete with sensors, to have your cartridge and arm jump to a track of choice, using more guidance systems than an ICBM, and the extent of these technologies and the effort put into them, compared with the ‘place the needle on the LP’ predecessor had to be seen to be believed. Admirable for sheer engineering chops, yet laughable for the resulting complexity and low payback.

The truly loony. Thorens Electronic turntable.

The LP era has been dead since 1980 and CDs were killed a few years back by iTunes, yet there are still cranks out there preaching the mantra of better sound/clarity/depth/etc. between hits on the bong. Uh huh! Don’t ever ask them to take a double blind test with their $10k turntable and $50k tube amp, competing with their $200 iPod. First they likely will refuse. “That’s so below me”. Second, they will refuse because they are scared. And you would be too if you had just sunk a decade’s worth of the average income of a third world worker into a dumb motor which rotates a platter and some obsolete glass tubes designed when Edison’s mum was still changing his undies.

The situation with traditional flapping mirror DSLRs is similar and the Canon EOS-1 DX is a symptom of the rapid setting of the sun on that era. On the one hand, manufacturers like Nikon and Canon have largely amortized their substantial investments in the technology. Adding another CPU or two and tweaking the sensor at the margins is cheap and the lens range has been full and mature for years. Sure, you come out with a Mark II of this or that now and again, but it’s takes hype to sell that secret sauce. Face it, boys, it’s over.

Who needs these marginal improvements? Sports snappers, I suppose. Fashion mavens also. They largely work with a stationary camera with a mechanical support and they have to impress their clients. Showing up at the Vogue studios with an impatiently waiting supermodel with an iPhone for gear isn’t going to cut it. Plus, someone else is paying for the gear. Then there are the guys – and they are always guys – who buy, literally, ‘on spec’. Nothing so warms the cockles of this set as a big brochure loaded with the latest specs. What thrills!

“I need the shallow depth of field” or “I need the robustness and weather resistance” or “I need the lens range” and so on are the major reasons. All rot, of course. Shallow depth of field is easily conferred by a click or two in Photoshop and the only one who knows it has been done is the operator. They will never take pictures in the rain as they dare not risk their costly gear. And the lens range thing falls down once you try to actually carry two or three of these behemoths more than 100 yards from your car. Nope. It’s simple equipment fetishism, and it has kept many a manufacturer knee deep in profit. More power to them.

So this latest Canon is an example of the imminent demise of the big DSLR. In the film days a like demise was evident with the announcement of the Contarex Super Electronic. This camera, from Zeiss Ikon, had everything. Electronic shutter, electronic do-dads that could be added for all sorts of wild and wooly remote control schemes, film magazines (on a 35mm camera!), huge capacity motor drives and maybe as good a range of lenses as costly German labor could manually manufacture, from both Zeiss and Schneider, all at prices comparable to a big pro DSLR today with its premium lens range. And no less heavy.

They sold a few in 1968 and promptly went bankrupt, destroyed by superior, lighter, faster, cheaper offerings from …. Nikon and Canon.

Now the latest Canon is hardly going to break the well diversified business of Canon; the new breed of cell phone cameras is a far geater threat. But I doubt it’s going to make them rich either. It’s simply too much, too late.

The iPhone 4S – Part II

October 17, 2011iPhoneThomas Pindelski

The good and the bad. And some ugly.

I posted some preliminary impressions about the camera in the iPhone 4S here. I’ll be writing more when I have had a real chance to wring the camera out. One point worth noting is that you can snap faster with this camera – shot-to-shot – than with my ‘serious’ stand-by, the Panasonic G3! Apple has engineered the heck out of shutter lag to the point where this cell phone camera leaves the point-and-shoot brigade in the dust. High time time some one got this right. You now have shutter lag and inter-snap delay comparable to your 3 pound monster DSLR. Mums the world over, seeking to capture their drooling toddlers just so, will love it. And so will street snappers. Like me.

I’ll go further. If Henri Cartier-Bresson were alive today, he would be ditching his tired old Leica for an iPhone 4S. The image quality equals his Leica’s to all intents and purposes, face recognition means he won’t blow focus, and the gadget is a whole lot smaller. Plus you can call your sweetheart for a spot of voulez vous between taking snaps on it. Best of all, if she pinches it after a night of passion, you can disable it remotely from your home PC! And you are out two hundred bucks and costs …. which will likely be greater, after throwing in a bottle of Chateau Mouton Rothschild to oil the wheels, so to speak.

The goal of this piece is to make more general comments from the overall perspective of a user whose previous phone was the iPhone 3G. This was Apple’s first phone to add 3G capability but, sadly, when iOS4 came out, the phone became distinctly sluggish in response. The later 3GS added a faster CPU and reversed that performance loss, but did not add enough to convince me that an upgrade made sense.

I had the iPhone 4 on order when it was announced, but the faulty design of the antenna, despite Apple’s lies to the contrary, saw me cancel my order in disgust, consigning Apple to this journal’s Hall of Shame.

Watching the product roll out for the 4S left me with mixed feelings. Certainly the specs were a very significant jump from the 4 and the addition of magic sauce in the guise of Siri was enticing, not to mention a far faster CPU and a more capable Sony camera. But, rather than calling it the iPhone 5, Apple named it the 4S which left me feeling a bit jaded. Had the masters of hype and spin missed an oopportunity to add a quick $30bn to AAPL’s market capitalization by a simple naming error?

No. It turns out that the launch saw one million 4S models ordered on the first day of availability with sales for the weekend rumored at four million. And, yes, AAPL’s market cap rose by $30 billion last week.

So what are my initial impressions, coming from the 3G?

The much vaunted ‘Retina Display’ introduced in the iPhone 4 is so much hype. The increase in definition on the pathetic little screen is barely noticeable.
The shape is awful. Gone is the plastic fluidity and charm of the 3G/GS, replaced with sharp corners and a brutalist design. Like going from a Ferrari to a Mercedes. The sublime to the functional. Still, at least it still fits my belt case from iPhone 1, bought in 2007 on the day of release and now a collectible!
The camera release button is now the ‘Vol +’ mechanical button, a massive improvement from having to try to stab the soft release on the 3G’s screen.
Performance improvement is startling, though coming from a 3G that’s axiomatic. It’s especially noticeable in the Stocks app where graphs simply fly into view.
AT&T’s HSDPA 3G technology is impressive. While it’s fashionable to trash AT&T, this technology on their US GSM network is miles ahead of what CDMA systems like Verizon and Sprint offer. I measured download speeds of 3.5mb/s (3.6 is the maximum), compared to 8-11mb/s on the home wifi system. And that 3.5mb/s is on 3G. CDMA systems will be 5-10 times slower. So if you need fast 3G, and I often do when no wifi is available, the AT&T iPhone 4S is the one to go for if coverage in your area is good. Fourth generation cellular speeds with third generation technology. This is in no way an advertisement for AT&T whose sense of business ethics is right down there with the Vampire Squid’s.
Anyone buying the Sprint version likely needs a lobotomy. Sprint is paying 11% for debt, as it’s broke, and will have to borrow $2bn just to front money to AAPL for all the iPhones it reckons to sell. Add another $8bn for LTE expansion and you can say bye-bye to this poorly run business, whose CFO at the last investor presentation didn’t even admit to those numbers, ones that anyone could figure on a napkin. The collected analysts actuallylaughed! That has to be a first.
The Hotspot facility is a blessing. My Virgin Mobile MiFi failed within its warranty period, a replacement was no better and I hope mine is the last refund check Sprint/Virgin cuts before they go belly-up. Simply stated, for a modest additional monthly fee, your iPhone 4 or 4S becomes a mobile wifi source, so that you can use your laptop or non-3G iPad to get on the internet when no wifi is available. And with HSDPA 3G speeds, do you realize how huge that is? I have lost track of the numbers of books I have read and stock trades I have placed using the iPad on trains, and this restores that functionality now that the MiFi is no more. I had some problems getting it to work (a call to AT&T resulted in “4S? Never heard of it.”) but a reboot of the 4S, some colorful language and a further boot into the resident Border Terrier fixed that.
Siri. When I first heard of this AI/voice recognition technology my reaction was to flashback to that famous Doonesbury cartoon ridiculing the handwriting recognition in Apple’s Newton PDA. At that time the company was being run by a sugared water salesman named John Sculley, who had fired Steve Jobs.

My concerns were heightened when Apple’s Chief Hype Officer Phil Shiller (what an appropriate name) referred to Siri as a ‘Beta release’. A first for Apple. Uh oh! You know what that means. In the event, while it has its faults, Siri is awesome and will only get better. A quantum leap in computing which will soon obsolete the keyboard on mobile devices.

Naturally, my very first demand to Siri was from Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, which just happened to be the very first DVD I bought:

A friend in England seems to be developing a more personal relationship with her 4S, as the following shows:

She tels me that Siri is a man over there, whereas US residents get a woman’s voice. Go figure.

So not only does Siri work, it also has a sense of humor when it comes to more pilosophical issues! Hardly surprising. For all those asking where the next Jobs will come from, they need look no further than to Scott Forstall, the head of iOS development at Apple. Smart, ambitious, young, fit, hard driving, intolerant of fools and now accounting for 75% of Apple’s revenues.

The camera. See yesterday’s piece.
Battery life. Apple claims 8 hours of talk time which is their best yet. I will never test that but a full day of hard use with the mobile hotspot was fine.
iCloud. This is why you will not have to buy lots of memory for future mobile devices. Much of your data will be stored in the cloud. I set up iCloud on the 4S (it also works on the 4 but not on earlier models), on my iPad 1, my MacBook Air, the MacMini and one of the Hackintoshes and it really works as advertised. Buy a song on one and it appears on all others (up to five devices for iTunes). Later this month iTunes Share will be rolled out which will allow the movement of existing content to the cloud, the first 5gB free, with $ for more. I have 25gB as my MobileMe(ss) account was moved over to iCLoud. iCLoud will further lock-in Apple’s customers to their ecosystem and generate significant additional annuity revenues. Smart and, so far, seems well executed. It could scarcely be worse than MobileMe.
iCloud login and account. This area is a mess caused by Apple’s indiscriminate use of the phrase ‘Apple ID” which can mean either your iTunes Music Store ID (ITMS) or your iCLoud ID (IC). Here’s what I make of it:

1 – If you have an ITMS and no MobileMe account you are in luck. Go to SysPref->iCLoud and create a new iCloud account using your ITMS ID. That way you will only have to remember one Username and Password for ITMS and IC.
2 – If you have a MobileMe account go to www.me.com and convert it to an IC account. Your IC account will have the same name as your MobileMe account, which you will cease using. Do not create a new IC identity – use the old MobileMe one.
3 – Whenever you input an ID: In SysPrefs-iCloud it must either be your IC Username and Password from #1 above, or your former MobileMe Username and Password from #2 above. In iTunes it must be your existing ITMS Username and Password.
4 – If your ITMS and IC Usernames and passwords are different, tough. Apple has stated they cannot currently combine the two.

Like I said, it’s a mess. The worst mistake is to use your ITMS Username and Password as your IC Username and Password if you have an IC or existing unconverted MobileMe account already with a different Username and Password. You will get massively confused with multiple IC Usernames and Passwords when you decide to convert your MobileMe account to an IC one. You want the same IC Username and Password for iCloud on all devices you want to share the cloud seamlessly – regardless of what your ITMS identity may be. If different devices have different IC Usernames and Passwords because you have set up more than one IC identity, those devices will be unable to seamlessly share iCloud content.

AirPlay. This one is a real sleeper. It will destroy the Wii and Playstation game consoles, as henceforth your iPhone will become a touch controller for gaming on the big screen, requiring only the addition of a $100 AppleTV to confer brains on the dumb display which is your TV set. You will pay $5-10 for games which used to cost $40-60. Meanwhile AirPlay works well for video, and I find I can route videos from the iPad to the ATV seamlessly. I can also route them from my file server using the AirVideo app, but I get stuttering, suggesting that the next generation of ATV and iPad will be required to process video data fast enough over the air. But you get the point. Your file server will soon be able deliver video wirelessly to anywhere in your home over wifi, controlled by an iPhone or iPad.
Messages. This app has been revised so that IMs can be sent free to any other user of iOS5 anywhere in the world. Now I happen to think that Instant Messaging is one of the very worst inventions of the technology age. It has simultaneously destroyed analytical thinking while replacing motion with action. In fact, I would go as far as to say that allowing our children to IM is significantly hurting their prospects of success later in life. The fast replaces the correct and IMs (like that other stupidity, Tweets), can be incredibly distracting for an undisciplined person. Still if you want to send free IMs to other Apple buddies, doing so from within the Messages app will show your sends in blue; if the recipient is not on iOS5, the message will be sent using MMS and will appear green. And you will get hosed down by the telco. I tested this internationally and not only does it work perfectly, all conversations are also fully replicated on both my 4S and iPad. Images in your Photos app are easily added. Either party can be on 3G or wifi.
The oleophobic glass coating on the screen (introduced in the 3GS) does a great job of keeping greasy fingerprints at bay. How long it will last is another question, and I’m sure that brutal cleanings will not help matters, but it’s significantly more fingerprint resistant than the plain glass on the iPhone 3G. Not enough to make you fall for a glossy screen, but an improvement overall.
The iPhone 4 faulty antenna design has been fixed.

The iPhone, with its attendant ecosystem, is quite possibly the most complex consumer technology ever developed. At $200 plus a two year contract it’s a bargain for those needing its broad capabilities and wanting to do an absolute minimum of maintenance to keep multiple devices synchronized. However, unlike the 2007 iPhone 1, there are masses of menus and submenus buried under the ‘Settings’ icon, meaning it’s no longer a trivial process to set the device up just so for your needs. It demands study and understanding to get the best out of it.

Are there Android phones which are better? I have no idea, as I have not used any, so I am not qualified to comment. The BS quotient here has always been low and will remain so. I have no advertisers to please.

Getting out of an existing contract:

If your existing iPhone 4 contract with the cellular service provider still has time to run, you have several ways of mitigating the penalty for early exit should you decide to immediately upgrade to the 4S:

Sell your phone back to Apple. They will pay up to $200 for a pristine one. Easiest option.
Sell your phone on eBay. Easily $300. But you have to deal with the crooks who dominate eBay – the management and the users.
Sell your phone in Europe – $400 and up. Now you have to deal with Russian crooks. And eBay. Good luck with that.
Threaten your existing carrier with a move to a competitor. What have you got to lose?

My lock screen on the 4S? Thought you would never ask:

Now the only question I have left for Apple is “When will Siri come to OS X?”

Disclosure: No AAPL position.

The iPhone 4S – Part I

October 16, 2011iPhone, PhotographsThomas Pindelski

It works well.

Given the poor ergonomic design of any cell phone when it comes to taking pictures, the iPhone 4S is not half bad. Sure, you have to hold the wretched thing feet from your face while you ponce about and squint, trying to make sense of what little you can make out on the screen, but iOS5 software makes the ‘+ Volume’ button into a shutter release and there’s a small built in flash (which I have yet to master and which refuses to work when I want it to) to lighten the shadows, or something. Maybe it just enhances the specs?

Coming from an ancient iPhone 3G there is a lot to like here. Sort of like when the torturer moves from ripping out nails to mere thumbscrews.

Nor do I for one moment agree with the tired dictum that has it that “The best camera is the one you have with you”. Pure rot. If you meander around hoping for something to happen, well you might as well wait for the next Hindenburg to blow. Please. Good pictures are made when you have A Sense of Purpose. Sorry, swanning around is not going to cut it.

But after the massive migraine induced by getting iCloud working and OS Lion upgraded and the new iPhone 4S responding to commands, more or less, I was just happy to go out for the groceries.

And I took the 4S with me.

And I saw some things.

Pumpkins. 4S, 1/140, f/2.4, ISO 64

Pumpkins sporting the ‘300’ effect. 4S, 1/150, f/2.4, ISO 64

De Soto. 4S, 1/120, f/2.4. ISO 80

Search me how the iPhone 4S determines the ISO, or anything else for that matter, but I do know you just push the button, bang away (the shutter lag and inter-frame delay are very short) and the picture looks like it may print at a decent size. Or at least one in which this old fart can actually make out details.

The lens has a full frame equivalent focal length of 35mm which is ideal for street snaps.

From the iPhone’s ‘lock screen’ all it takes is two stabs at the Home button and a touch of the camera icon and you are off. Nice UI design given the appalling ergonomics.

So there’s some serious potential here, not least for the fact that no one takes you seriously if you are pirouetting about with a cell phone. That is worth a lot for this street snapper. I was not kidding when suggesting that the point-and-shoot camera makers were in big doo-doo.

More to come.

A few words on Lightroom 3 import settings.

Imported JPG snaps from the 4S are overexposed compared with the usual RAW imports from my G3/G1, so I adopted the following import setting for the best results:

The sharpening settings are identical to those for the Panny G3 and may be a tad too aggressive.

The files size is 3264 x 2448 (4:3 aspect ratio), for 8mB a snap. My iPhone 4S is the cheapest 16gB model, so that means if I leave 1gB free I can still store 125 snaps. If space runs out, get on wifi and upload your pictures to the iCloud, erase from the iPhone and bang away some more. With iTunes Share coming at the end of October, the need for local storage drops greatly so it’s hard to justify the premium asked for the 32gB and 64gB iPhones 4S models. Maybe if you like to carry a lot of games on your iPhone more memory makes sense.

More snaps and field feedback appear in Part III.

Once. Again.

October 15, 2011PhotographersThomas Pindelski

The second issue is out.

I wrote about the free ‘teaser’ issue of the iPad photography magazine Once here. The second issue is just out and it’s a bargain at $2.99.

There is a startling documentary photography piece by Matt Eich on alligator farming in Louisiana. I don’t know what these tough men get for doing this job, but you can bet it’s a lot less than Bottega Veneta gets for the handbags which result.

A bayou alligator is shot prior to becoming a handbag.

The other two pieces illustrate the Bay of Bengal’s increasing salt content, a result of global warming, and Chernobyl’s catastrophic aftermath, including an outstanding interactive map showing areas with stil dangerous radiation levels around the blast site.

‘Once’ is recommended to all iPad users who enjoy documentary photograhy with a powerful message. Mine is an iPad 1 running the latest iOS5 and I rout the pictures and videos to a big screen to which an AppleTV is connected. A great way of seeing photographs, though display on the iPad’s screen is almost as good.

At $3 an issue you are not adding to the world’s recycling problem while supporting great artists.