All posts by Thomas Pindelski

About Thomas Pindelski

The author

The Nikon D800

Hardware, Nikon bodies, Nikon lenses

No more Cold Turkey.

‘Cold Turkey’ refers to the process whereby and addict gives up addictive substances in one fell swoop. No weaning, no cutting back, no phasing out. Bang. All at once. The most compelling version of the process can be seen in French Connection II where poor old Gene Hackman is made an addict of heroin by his captors. It’s a disturbing movie and a good one.

And when the iPhone 11 Pro came along I went Cold Turkey with regard to my DSLR, MFT and 35mm film hardware. The Nikon D3x, the D700, the two film bodies – FE2 and F100 – and two Panny GX7 bodies along with a plethora of lenses were all sold, right down to the last lens cap and card reader. In the four years since I have been chugging along (almost) happily with that iPhone and its successor, the iPhone 12 Pro Max. Almost? Well, in a word the ergonomics are indistinguishable from the function of a bilge pump. Both suck. And the reach at the long end is extremely limited.

So the other day finding that I might want a ‘serious’ camera on occasion I reneged on the ‘iPhone only’ commitment and bought a DSLR and lens.


The Nikon D800, introduced in 2012. Mine came with two Nikon batteries
and the ghastly factory strap, quickly replaced with an Upstrap which I found in a drawer.

My D800 body came with a mint 85/1.8 AF-D Nikkor which I immediately resold. Never sell a body with a lens – you will lose money on both, as did my seller.

What is the thinking behind buying a camera discontinued almost a decade ago, along with a 28-300mm VR Nikkor discontinued in 2021? There is a host of good reasons.

Quality: As an upper end Nikon body, the D800 succeeded the fine D700, upping the sensor megapixel count from 12 to 36. Who needs 36 megapixels? See below. The body is robust and the shutter long lived with subsequent iterations (D810, D850) adding little.

Economics: At introduction the D800 retailed for $3,000. The latest Nikon mirrorless digital bodies sell for $2,000 to $5,500 (Z6/II, Z9) and you need the latest Z series lenses to take full advantage of what these offer. By contrast the used D800 I just acquired ran me $525 with a very low shutter count of under 16,000.


Open a snap in Preview for a shutter actuation count.

You can buy beaters with hundreds of thousands of actuations (probably ex realtors, wedding snappers and war types) for just a little less, which seems pretty dumb to me (KEH on the web, Roberts Camera and many others on eBay), especially given the abundant availability of lightly used bodies. I got a mint body and, for another $450, a mint 28-300mm ‘lens for all seasons’ VR Nikon AF-S lens. And I had to splash out another $13 on an SD/CF card reader (the D800 can use one of each) as mine had been sold at the start of the Cold Turkey interlude.

Negligible depreciation: With the D800 having lost over 80% (!) of its original cost in the decade since it was discontinued it’s not going to go much lower very fast. So if I get disillusioned with my purchase it’s out of here for negligible net cost. Same reason I only buy used cars …. every 20 years!

The Nikon F mount: It’s probably fair to say that more lenses were made with the Nikon F mount than with any other. The new mirrorless Z cameras dictate the use of a kludgy adapter with these and you do not get the full functionality of the latest Z optics. But with the Nikon F mount you do get access to some of the finest SLR optics made at ridiculously low cost. My own journey through that cornucopia of choice is best seen here. And all those manual focus Nikkors work with the confirmation light in the viewfinder of the D800, taking the guesswork out of critical focus.The D800 will happily use old screw drive AF-D lenses as well as the latest AF-S optics, not to mention the old and vast range of manual focus lenses.

Weight: The D700 weighed 40ozs, the D3x 50ozs, with the Z6/II and Z9 coming in at 25 and 47ozs (!), respectively. The D800 weighs 35ozs, just 10ozs more than the Z6/II. Not bad.

Cropping: While sensors of 45 megapixels are now common on the high end, the 36 megapixels introduced with the D800 was a revelation. If your lenses are of decent quality then you can extend the long end with cropping rather than carrying extra glass. Here’s a case in point:


D800, 28-300VR at 300mm. ISO 800.


Crop of the above image.

The cropped image is one quarter of the full frame, meaning the focal length equivalent is no less than 1200mm. Handheld. VR is the icing on the cake of the D800’s big sensor. The crop is unprocessed – the minor color fringing and sharpness drop off are easily fixed in Lightroom.

Lightroom: I refuse to ‘upgrade’ to Adobe’s subscription version of Lightroom. I prefer to keep control over my images. My purchased version (6.4) has not been materially improved and natively supports import of D800 RAW files with no special tricks required. All I have to do is plug in my $13 USB3 card reader into the 2010 Mac Pro (still barely improved on by Apple, and adequately powerful to deal with the D800’s large files), with USB3 being a nice way of speedily handling those 70 megapixel uncompressed RAW files. Nice.

In conclusion, if you want a state-of-the-art camera and lens combination, have no issues with buying used, do not wish to spend over $1,000 and lose very little should things not pan out, the D800 with a modern polycarbonate-encased Nikkor AF-S lens is the way to go. And the ergonomics are the best on the market – button placement, feel in the hands, use with gloves, the menu system, and so on.

Geotagging revisited

Lightroom

Works with any digital camera.

‘Geotagging’ refers to the addition of GPS location data to your digital images. While images taken on a cellphone are automatically geotagged, most digital cameras do not provide this facility. Even most of the latest digital cameras are deficient in not providing built-in geotagging in the interest of saving on battery drain, and saving on cost, as no GPS receiver is required. Some manufacturers, like Nikon, will sell you a separate GPS unit conceptually similar to the one linked immediately below.

I last addressed geotagging in 2012 when I attached a GPS receiver to my Nikon D700 and recorded GPS data on a separate data logger, a small storage device carried in the pocket.

I continue to regard geotagging as an important tool when it comes to retrieving old images, a tremendous aid to putting them in a specific time and place.

But there’s an easier and more reliable approach than using a costly hardware dongle, one which does not display the frequent connection loss suffered by the hardware approach described over a decade ago and which will work with any digital image with a time stamp.

While what follows is Apple-centric this approach will work equally well with Android/Windows, when you are not busy rebooting your Windows computer, that is.

Two components are required to geotag your digital images:

  • An iPhone in your pocket – I’m using an iPhone 12 Pro Max
  • A GPS tracking app on that iPhone – I use GPS Tracks, an app that is actively supported

My digital image management software is Lightroom and what follows is Lightroom specific, Mac or Windows. I’m using the last version of non-subscription LR, 6.4. When Adobe changed to a monthly subscription model they dishonestly and purposefully broke the ‘Maps’ module in non-subscription versions of LR so that you can no longer view your picture location in the LR app. They claimed it was changes at Google which irretrievably broke Maps. This was a lie. The real reason they did this was to force owners of the non-subscription version to sign up for a subscription with its monthly toll. A couple of lines of code would have fixed the issue. And yes, it will be a cold day in hell before I change to the subscription model with this dishonest business and lose control over my images.

But we do not need Maps in LR for what follows to work. What you do need is a superb plugin from Jeffrey Friedl, suitably and nerdily named Geoencoding support which comes with a 6 week free use period whereafter an honor system contribution is called for. When you unzip the download file make sure that the file named ‘gps-jfriedl.lrplugin’ is placed in one of these two directories on your Mac. The first is user specific, the second will make the plug-in available to all users of the Mac:



Where to put the Friedl plugin file.

Next, download GPS Tracks to your iPhone and start the app before your photo journey, after first making sure that the time indicated on your digital camera is more or less the same as the time reported by your iPhone. While you do not have to be dead on, the time stamp on your digital image is the one that is used to look up the data generated by GPS Track to determine the GPS coordinates at the time indicated on your digital image.

At the conclusion of your photo journey stop the GPS Tracks application and email yourself the GPX file it has generated. This records GPS coordinates by time. Drag and drop that GPX file from the email onto your Mac’s desktop. GPS Tracks provides a short trial period for data export to work after which the annual subscription cost is $10. Well worth it if you want all your digital images geotagged.

Next, go into LR and go to File->Plug-in Manager, and enable the plugin, thus:



The Friedl plugin enabled.
You can vary what is disclosed in LR from this pane.

Reboot LR for the changes to take effect.

Now download your photos from your digital camera to LR, highlight the ones you want to geotag, and go to File->Plug-in Extras->Geoencode, pointing to the GPS Tracks GPX file on your desktop thus:



The Friedl plugin after geotagging 8 images.

Your images are now geotagged and you can display them in Google Earth using Lightroom, just like you used to be able to do before Adobe broke the Maps module in LR, as follows:



How to display your journey in Google Earth



The GPS track displayed in Google Earth.
The yellow pushpins show where I took photos.

If all of this seems labor-intensive, be assured that it is not. The GPS data logging happens automatically in your iPhone and exporting that file to your desktop and importing it into Lightroom is a matter of seconds.

Advantages: The GPS location system in your iPhone is way superior to the one in that little Nikon DSLR plug in hardware dongle linked at the top of this piece and will work with any digital image with a time stamp.

Disadvantages: Additional battery drain on your iPhone. My 40 minute walk, above, incrementally drained some 6% of the iPhone Pro Max’s battery – call it 9% for every hour of use. Not a lot and if you have an iPhone Pro or Pro Max with the larger battery you are set for a day’s photography with GPS Tracks running all the time. If you need a recharge on the go consider one of those inexpensive pocketable car starter batteries.

Adding a second Sonos Sub

Home theater

Whoa!

I mentioned that the sound system in the home theater is all Sonos. Easy to install, mostly wireless and more than loud enough for the medium sized room which is 20’9″ long, 13’11” wide and 9’2″ high, with a flat ceiling. The latter is the preferred configuration for Dolby Atmos, which the Sonos Arc sound bar supports, as selected upward firing speakers bounce the height information off that ceiling to the listener.

The speakers – the sound bar, the two rear surrounds and the sub – have internal amplifiers and wireless data connectivity for all but the sound bar, so that all that is needed is a power source for each. The sound bar is hard wired to the UST projector with an HDMI cable. That makes for an easy installation.

Even with the one Sub the sound is smooth with no obnoxious peaks or valleys. I generally find that +6 to +8 on the rear surrounds makes for the best sound stage and the bass is not lacking. Response curves show it is smooth down to 25Hz. Late last year Sonos enhanced their iPhone app to permit use of two Subs and reviews suggest that two are better than one. However, at a costly $750 for a Sub, there may be some confirmation bias at work here. Keeping the Subs away from the walls avoids the usual resonance hump in bass response, which avoidance is desirable for smooth reproduction.

So I sprang for a second Sub:



Two are better than one. The Sonos system
makes for an elegant, uncluttered installation.
The rear surround speakers are not shown.

Packaging and installation are very much ‘Apple quality’. The iPhone app walks you though the process of adding the second Sub and once done you run the Trueplay function which has the speakers emitting sounds for 60 seconds while you walk around with the iPhone, waving it this way and that. This captures the sound stage and tunes the system for best results. (If your cell phone is an Android one you will have to borrow an iPhone or iPad as the function works on iOS only).

And yes, the bass is now smoother and cleaner and the mid range is further cleaned up. The image above is from the opening minutes of Damian Chazelle’s ‘First Man‘, the Neil Armstrong story, where he is piloting the experimental Bell aircraft into space and, yes, the effect is earth shattering.

Recommended, if not cheap.

An old Mac Mini for the home theater

Hardware, Home theater, Macintosh

A tremendous value.

When crafting my home theater the default assumption was that the enormous 55lb. energy quaffing Mac Pro would be the computer of choice. This has served me faultlessly for many years and one of the really nice benefits was that four large hard drives could be accommodated within the chassis where many movies were stored. For perfect streaming nothing beats hard wiring, no wi-fi to go down.

Interested in saving power and cutting intrusive bulk, I was reading about the latest M1 and M2 CPU-eqipped Mini’s and quickly realized that this was far more computing power than was required for the simple job of streaming movies. (The Mac Pro, of course, is total overkill, but it’s so inexpensive nowadays that economics are not an issue). So I searched around and came across this rather ancient 2014 Mac Mini on Amazon which, in its base configuration, ran me just $126. Sure it has no internal additional hard drive storage, but that was easily side-stepped with a cheap Probox like the ones I have been using for years. The old Mini is blessed with no fewer than four USB 3.0 sockets and a Probox is connected to each, meaning 16 external hard drives are accessible.

By the way, the availability of these old Minis on Amazon is spotty but keep checking and they crop up. You do not need more than 4GB RAM or the costly SSD option for streaming movies. The advertised image is incorrect – the 2014 Mini I received does not have a slot loading DVD drive. Mine came with a fresh installation of OS X Catalina (10.15). Here are the connection options on the machine:



Abundant connectivity.

Note the presence of an HDMI socket which is used to connect to the UST projector in the home theater.

The Mini has several advantages over the huge Mac Pro in this application. It uses far less power (6 watts idle, 85 watts max, compared with 125/285 for the Mac Pro), is easy to hide (you really do not want ugly computer boxes cluttering up a home theater), has HDMI built in (the Pro needs a suitably equipped graphics card) and, most importantly, comes with excellent Bluetooth 4.0 sensitivity. The BT in the Mac Pro is simply awful. Why is this important? Because you can hide the Mini away in a credenza, no status lights showing, and it responds perfectly to a Bluetooth mouse at 15 feet, where the Pro really struggles, even with an external Bluetooth ‘dongle’.

So if you are looking for an inexpensive, elegant computer solution for your home theater installation, this old Mini is just the ticket. Mine arrived in absolutely mint condition from a vendor named ‘iSpyDeals’. And should the small 500GB hard drive fail, it’s easily replaced. Why, you could even install a cheap SSD for even snappier performance. Just do not make the mistake of thinking that you can use this computer for heavy video processing ….

Here are the specifications and options for the 2014 Mac Mini which is still supported by Apple, if you like spending hours on the phone with a clueless ‘technical advisor’, one whose native tongue is anything but English:



Specifications.

Data Rescue …. to the rescue

Software

150 Blu Ray movies recovered.

One of the most frustrating aspects of Mac desktop computer ownership is Cupertino’s planned obsolescence policy, one which manifests itself in the endless – and mindless – ‘upgrades’ to the OS X operating system. These provide ‘features’ no one needs and ensure that old application versions cease working.

My movie HDD boxes, which contain some 20GB of movies plus 20GB of back ups had one of the 4 TB hard drives fail so I quickly procured a replacement and set to restoring it from the backup drive. The only snag is that the backup refused to mount on my desktop 2010 Mac Pro. Panic.

I fired up Disk Drill only to be told that my version of Disk Drill was outdated and required updating. I did as instructed only to be told after the update that now my OS was outdated and required updating. Some idiot at Disk Drill decided to share this requirement after the point of no return because, dear reader, I cannot update High Sierra as that’s as high as my Mac Pro will go without resorting to aftermarket hacks, something I very much do not want to do. I’m on OS X High Sierra, 10.13.6.

But I happened to have the old version of Disk Drill running on another Mac Pro so I inserted the apparently faulty backup disk in that machine, being sure to update nothing, and after 72 hours (!) Disk Drill told me it could maybe recover 15 of the 150 Blu Ray movies somewhere on that drive. Useless. I did run the recovery process out of curiosity and the recovered movies were but cut outs of the whole thing. Doubly useless. Yes, I know, Disk Drill will tell me how superior the latest version is but if they could also explain how I can actually run the thing I would be deliriously happy. So hasta la vista to another failed product, due to the raw stupidity of the developer.

I checked around for other recovery apps, suspecting that all that was wrong with my back up drive was a corrupted or lost file directory, as the disk was spinning away happily even though it would not mount in Disk Utility, and chanced upon Data Rescue which comes in both Mac and Windows versions. The Mac version is stated to work with OS 10.12 (Sierra) and later, so I downloaded a copy and ran ‘deep scan’ on the back up drive. A day later, lo and behold, all 150 movies were disclosed – even with the drive not mounted – and Prosoft hosed me down for $99 for a ‘single disk recovery’ version which I fired up immediately.



Data Rescue ‘deep scan’ gets under way.

$99 is a whole lot less than re-ripping 150 files whose average size for a Blu Ray movie is some 27 GB. 9 hours and fifteen minutes later I had the new WD HDD full with 149 of the 150 Blu Ray movies. Just one had gone AWOL. Checking a handful showed the content to be full and uncorrupted and the new disk drive was back in service, allowing us to watch Hitchcock’s ‘To Catch a Thief’ in all its glory on the 120″ home theater screen.



Data Rescue has recovered almost everything some 9+ hours later.

As for inflation, the last WD Red 4TB drive I bought 6 years ago ran me an inflation adjusted $183, whereas the new one was just $75. Not everything inflates in price! I use 5400rpm Western Digital drives; the 50% premium for 7200 rpm drives is money wasted for this application. Also, the less costly SMR drives are just fine. CMR is not needed in this simple use scenario. The differences are explained here.

So, if you are on Sierra or later then Data Rescue is recommended, based on my experience.

As for hard drives, statistically significant data (meaning thousands of samples) confirm that Western Digital drives, especially the ‘Red’ version, are far more reliable than those from competitor Seagate by a factor of 2x and, as luck would have it, the failed drive – it was completely locked up and would not spin – was a Seagate. So I’m sticking with WD in future.