Monthly Archives: October 2012

A shared interest

Photographs

On Cypress Street.

“Is that the 160?” I asked.

A quick glance from the owner confirmed I was the real thing. Bikers know bikers. It’s a sixth sense sort of thing.

“No, actually it’s the 300. A 1969. I just bought it from a guy in the country”

“Nice machine. I love the way Honda used to do those chrome panels.”

“Yeah. Some people say it’s not very fast but at our age you are just happy when you get home alive, never mind fast!”

“Indeed. It has an overhead cam no?”

“Yes, you can get at it through those little side covers on the cylinder head. Very easy. Some say the bike is kinda boring.”

“They used to joke that the difference between a British bike and a Japanese one was the puddle of oil under the British machine. As for boring, I can handle that, as long as it starts first thing.”

Whereupon the owner gave the starter a couple of kicks and the machine sprung into a nice vigorous yet refined idle. Japanese engineering at its best.

These sort of chance encounters, I find, are common. I make it a habit to wander down alleyways and side roads when in the city and San Francisco’s Cypress Street is as wonderful as these things get, replete with dozens of Mission District murals. So that’s how I chanced on the biker.

Wishing him well I toddled off only to be met with a roar and sharp turn as he came by to show how well things were running.

To see the location, click the picture below, courtesy of the GPS unit in attached to the Nikon.

Click the picture for the location.

Biker babe on Cypress Street.

All snapped on the Nikon D2X with the 16-35mm AF-S Nikkor.

The new iMac – 2012

Macintosh

Another dog in fancy dress.

Long time readers will know of my raft of iMac, MacBook and iBook failures which drove me to having a friend build for me not one, not two, but three Hackintoshes, machines which have proved themselves to be robust workhorses over a long time now. These use standard, inexpensive, PC parts but run OS X.

On Tuesday Apple announced its latest iMac with the usual attendant hype and my advice to all photographers, having studied the design and specs, is that you avoid it like the plague.

The fall 2012 iMac.

Why do I say this?

First, the slimness thing is a head fake. Apple has simply deleted the optical DVD drive – you can still use an external one – and gone to a 2.5″ hard disk drive from a 3.5″ one. Look at the rear panel and you will see it bulges out substantially in the center to accommodate the pieces. Only the edges have been slimmed down. But yes, there is an overall slimming nonetheless and this raises crucial questions about heat management, the iMac’s bugbear. Changing to a 2.5″ drive will reduce heat output but the design does not use the rear alloy plate as a heat sink for the CPU or, more importantly, the GPU. It’s the GPUs which literally melted in my many failed Macs. Mac laptops do use the base as a heatsink which is why they tend to get so warm on your lap, whereas the iMac uses one fan (one fan – think about that) to cool the whole interior. For comparison my Hackintoshes have seven fans each – box intake, box exhaust, power supply (two fans), disk drive fan, CPU and GPU. And we are talking fans, not toys. 5 inch diameter quiet fans.

Second, ergonomics. The iMac sticks with the hopeless stand which has no height adjustment, so if you do buy one, add the cost of a couple of reams of paper on which to support the machine, because it will almost certainly sit too low on your desk. There goes your 21st century-looking work desk.

Third, pricing remains way too high. While Apple has yet to disclose pricing on the 27″ Intel Core i7 model (the i5 is $1799 with 8GB of RAM which is user upgradable – RAM in the 21.5″ model is not user upgradable) I would guess that the i7 with 16GB will run $2,400 and you are still stuck with that ghastly, glossy screen. Apple claims that reflections have been cut “…70%…” whatever that means and you can count me skeptical on that.

Fourth, be prepared to upgrade to a proper keyboard. The stock Apple chiclet keys one is a perfect example of form over function.

Fifth, base spec 21.5″ buyers beware. The HDD has been downgraded from 7200 to 5400. What a gip!

And last, but not least, unless you really want carpal tunnel, add another $50-100 for a good mouse because the Magic Mouse which comes with the machine is magic for the medical profession only.

I simply cannot recommend the iMac for photographers. The stress to which you will subject the innards when doing thermally challenging tasks like advanced Photoshop processing (Content Aware Fill, selective blur, etc.) will crank up the heat in your new toy, with repeated cycling threatening its very survival. And if you propose to rip movies, you would be insane to use this machine. It’s simply not capable of handling the repeated load. Even my superbly cooled Hackintoshes will crank up the CPU to 158F (service limit is 190F) when using Handbrake to rip/compress a DVD. With an iMac with its cooling compromised by Apple’s obsession with slimness, you will hit the service limit every time. That’s like running your car flat out daily. As for the whole slimness thing, it strikes me as odd that the world’s most obese nation would seek slimness in its hardware rather than in itself.

What I have written in the past, for photographers with heavy duty processing requirements who have no time to worry about machine failure and who want to be able to replace any failed part at a moment’s notice, rather than losing their machine to Apple for days, there has never been a better time to build a Hackintosh. The newest tools for making OS X run on a home built PC are better than ever and the cost of the whole thing, with a couple of decent matte IPS displays will be very competitive with what Apple is asking for its latest piece of sub-functional jewelry. It bears adding that part failures in my three Hacks are exactly zero to date and these machines all run 7/24.

A note on Apple’s ‘new’ Fusion hard drive: Rarely have I heard such BS as Apple is spewing about its revolutionary Fusion hard drive. This is simply a hybrid HDD like Seagate has been selling for years. 128GB of RAM is added to the HDD’s circuitry to cache frequent events – opening a browser, checking email, etc. – the hope being that this will speed the machine’s performance. Rarer events – opening or saving a photo file – are dealt with in the traditional way (direct save to spinning disk) with the addition of a cached RAM version of the saved file. Of course, when you are saving 60mp files from your D800 that cached version will quickly be removed by the next file, as you only have a limited RAM cache. Operational speed gains for photographers? Zilch. The only difference between Apple’s Fusion drive and Seagate’s hybrid one is that Apple places the RAM on the mother board rather than inside the drive. The RAM module is the same one used for memory in the Mac Book Air. This is about as far from innovation as it gets. Your best bet for storage is an internal solid state drive (and Apple will hose you down for that) to store the OS and applications, with an external USB3 drive (Thunderbolt is ridiculously overpriced, still) for data storage, with a backup, of course. Don’t even think of upgrading the internal drive – these machines are not built to be dismantled.

Disclosure: Long AAPL bull option spreads 2013 and 2014.

Apple boneheads

iPad

Flunked Retail 101.

When Apple released iPhone 1 in July 2007 I plunked down $600 for one immediately. The price was ridiculous but as an investor I needed to know about a device which proved to be transformational and disruptive. A few months later nice Mr. Jobs refunded me $200 for his bonheaded pricing.

Well, Jobs may be gone, but the boneheaded gene remains in the corridors of Cupertino, making its latest appearance in the guise of the $329 iPad Mini.

Let’s be clear. There is only one reason Apple entered the mini-tablet segment. To make money. They perceive that they can make significant amounts while retaining the brand’s dominance of the tablet sector by entering the mini segment. Only there are perfectly capable tablets like the Nexus 7 at $199 and much less capable ones like the Kindle Fire for even less. Would you pay $130 more for the Apple product, assuming you do not dine our nightly and do your own laundry? Obviously not. Your school age child can still pull up Wikipedia just fine on his $199 Nexus.

So say goodbye to conquest sales at that price. Because conquest sales are everything for Apple, just as they are for luxury car makers. Once you have used it, you do not go back. You just buy more. And you become a repeat customer.

So pricing the iPad Mini off standard profit margins makes no sense. It needs to be priced as a loss leader/entry product to get the poor schmuck using Android into the Apple ecosystem. And $329 is not going to do it.

$249 is the right price for this device. $329 sells to zealots and the converted only. $249 sells to everyone. And given that connectivity is the lifeblood of mobile device, where on earth is Apple coming from charging a $130 premium – like on the regular iPad – for a Qualcomm cellular chip which retails for $29? Now your Mini is $459. That’s plain stupid, Apple.

Design consistency

Nikon bodies

Thank you, Nikon.

One of the welcome features of the D2X (2005) is how little its design varies from the much more recent D700 (2008):

Top view – each camera has a GPS data receiver installed top left, the D2X’s safety tethered with dental floss ….

The top plate controls are almost identical except for the aperture/shutter Lock button on the D2X, lower left, for which I have yet to divine a serious use, and the superior metering selector on the D2X’s prism, which has an invaluable lock button to prevent accidental movement. The one on the D700 is just visible here on the rear plate and is prone to accidental change. The ISO button on the D2X moved to the lower rear. The D700 adds a handy pop up flash. The D2X has none.

The rear views are also similar:

The 3″ screen on the D700 dwarfs the 2.5″ LCD on the D2X.

Of note is that one button has been added for minus magnification on the D700 (top) replacing the two button action needed on the D2X, An improvement for those into LCD chimping, a practice I avoid as much as I do politics. Note the Nikon DK-17M magnifying eyepieces I have fitted to both bodies – a massive improvement over stock and a must-have for anyone using manual focus lenses. With these fitted both finders show a huge, clear, uncluttered image, wonderful for composition and shooting.

The D2X adds the lower information panel common to all the D-Pro bodies and most definitely not an improvement as the text is small, for the most part, and hard to read. All of this information falls nicely to the top display in the D700. Finally, in addition to the large battery grip which permits easy vertical shooting, the D2X adds a microphone and speaker activated by the button to the lower right corner of the LCD display for recording voice memos of up to 60 seconds for each snap. Very handy. The D2X hides its CF card behind the door to the right of the LCD and adopts a truly complex access mechanism which will have you resorting to four letter words when it comes time to replace the card. The D700 adopts a far superior sliding latched door on the right of the camera. Finally the center button in the four way rocker dial for changing focus points is far superior on the D700 to the one on the D2X. It protrudes a millimeter or two further, making engagement on a center press much easier. With the D2X you find yourself toggling instead of pressing, as often as not. I suspect that a small piece of rubber glues to the D2X’s button will fix what ails the design. The AE-L/AF-L and AE-ON buttons at top right are identical on the two bodies.

The front plates are identical. What the above snaps cannot disclose is the extent to which the software is much the same between the two bodies and that is the icing on the cake. It adds to an easy ergonomic learning curve the absence of torture-by-software which every new DSLR imposes on a new user. So for D700 owners thinking of upgrading to a pro body – D2X, D3, D4 – they will likely find as I did that they will be up and running in no time.

The D2X is faster in most respects. It can sustain an 8 fps framing rate in cropped mode using the stock battery; to accomplish that with the D700 requires the battery grip and new batteries, as the stock will not fit. Mercifully, regular AA cells are an option to the costly Nikon LiOn battery. Shutter response of the D2X is marginally better, but in practice the difference makes no matter. What is noticeable is how much quieter the D2X’s shutter is. Maybe that’s because it’s smaller given the smaller frame and maybe it’s also because the D2X’s flapping mirror is smaller for the APS-C format. Whatever the reason, the result is clearly distinguishable. Batteries in the D2X are inserted from the side, those in the D700 from below, meaning that if used on a tripod, the change in the D700 is more fiddly. However, both bodies have such high battery lives (probably over 800 shots on a charge) that the practical inconvenience with the D700 is not significant.

For MF lens users the focus confirmation light in the D2X is better than the one in the D700, shuddering less at the point of optimum focus. Nikon has long spec’d its pro and prosumer AF modules as requiring an aperture of f/5.6 or faster, but I have found no difficulty in using the AF confirmation light in the D700 with the f/8 Mirror Reflex Nikkor. On the D2X that light fails, making confirmation focus with the D2X impossible. A shame.