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Fuji X100 manual

Fuji

Lots to like.

Click below to download the Fuji X100 manual:

Click to download the Fuji X100 manual

What follows is based on a reading of the X100 manual; only real-world picture taking will allow critical evaluation, but what follows is encouraging.

The best way to read the PDF manual, if you download it, is using GoodReader on an iPad or, for those with younger eyes, on an iPhone. Both devices provide a superior PDF reading experience to anything on a computer and have the added benefit that you can take the manual with you for those occasions on which you get stuck. Since I first reviewed it the very inexpensive GoodReader app has been enhanced multiple times and I recommend it unreservedly.

First and foremost, all praise and thanks to Fuji for a great English translation and a logical layout. All you never want to know about manuals can be found in Panny’s for the G1 which is by a considerable margin the worst manual I have ever read and still, on occasion, try to decipher.

In summary, a reading of the manual discloses that Fuji has not blown it; while many or maybe all of the programmability choices exist on competing cameras the point here is that Fuji has not omitted any I consider important. What follows is addressed to travelers and street snappers for whom the X100 is an optimal design. Thus I do not address macro or movie modes or LCD displays and the like.

Here’s what caught my eye. What follows builds on and corrects some of the statements in Fuji’s Brochure which I reviewed earlier.

The Command Control, p4:

Longitudinal pressure on the Command Control toggle switches to magnified image view for precise manual focus. Akin to the G1 which will switch to this mode in the EVF when the focus ring is operated on Panny lenses.

OVF display options, p5:

Much of this can be switched on and off (see below), meaning you can get it down to the essentials. It seems even the distance indicator scale is optional. Nice. All I want is shutter speed, aperture, ISO and exposure compensation, plus the focus area. Note the ‘temperature’ indicator. This caused me to flashback to all those overheated, blown Macs I have suffered ….

Strap fastening, p9:

The instructions are incorrect. You want the loose end threaded such that it is between the two external strap lengths. Buy an Upstrap to see how it’s done. And buy an Upstrap anyway as it will absolutely not slip off your shoulder and, yes, you guessed it, the one from Fuji is emblazoned with the words ‘FUJI’ in bright white. This is so that your insecure American friends, who put stickers in their cars and on their clothing telling all and sundry they went to Texas Ballspond Road U or some similar degree mill, can share in your tasteless advertising display.

SDXC cards, p12:

The X100 takes SD, SDHC and SDXC cards.

The LCD display, p17:

Mercifully, it can be turned off.

OVF display, p19:

Here’s a better illustration of which display elements can be toggled on/off. The OVF is 0.5x life size. It’s unclear what the EVF is – I would guess 0.7x (no frame lines, image extends to edges) and very handy in poor light where OVFs do not cut it – and don’t let Leica M bigots tell you otherwise. For comparison, the Panny G1 is 0.7x at 50mm FFE, or 0.5x at 35mm FFE, so the viewed image in the X100’s OVF will be the same size at that of a G1 set to 35mm FFE. By contrast, the X100’s EVF image will be some 40% larger than the G1’s at 35mm FFE.

Shutter sounds, p 21:

This is actually far from trivial. Sometimes you want audible confirmation of the shutter, and until we know about the mechanical feedback from the shutter release button, having these options makes sense. Also handy when doing panoramas, though I doubt I will be switching on the ‘mirror reflex’ sound.

OVF power saver mode, p22:

The fact that the power saver mode applies to the OVF is a tad disappointing, as it suggests the OVF displays use quite a bit of power. The problem is that in power saver mode autofocus is far slower. Evaluation of this compromise in the light of battery capacity will have to await real-world use.

Quick Start mode, p.22:

The normal ‘start from cold’ is 2.2 seconds which seems very slow. The Quick Start mode cuts that to 0.7 seconds at the expense of battery life. That’s fast enough (a quick first pressure on the shutter release when lifting the camera to the eye should do it) but the battery life impact remains to be determined.

Shutter speed combinations, p27:

Not all shutter speeds are available at all apertures. The fastest at f2 and f/2.8 is 1/1000th, compared to the camera’s 1/4000th minimum. So if the light calls for 1/1000 @ f/5.6, you would set the lens at f/2 and switch in the 3x Neutral Density filter, getting f/2 depth of field but an effective working aperture of f/5.6. A bit of a pain but you can get there – meaning shallow depth of field in bright light. You can also assign the ND filter function to the Fn button for instant availability – see below. (The above assumes you are using Aperture Priority auto exposure, where you choose the aperture and the X100 figures the shutter speed).

Exposure compensation indicator, p29:

The indicator is available in all three viewfinders. It’s essential if you use the manual exposure compensation dial to remind you if you have set it at something other than ‘0’. Easily forgotten.

First pressure focus, p30, 45:



Phew! Confirmation at last that a first pressure on the shutter release button can be used to lock focus, exposure or both. Like most street snappers I will set this to lock focus and set the rear panel AEL/AFL button to lock exposure. Then I can focus-take first pressure-recompose-snap for those times when the main subject is not in the center of the frame. Let’s pray the focus confirmation double-beep can be silenced.

Burst mode, p36:

For serial shooters there are two burst bodes – 3 and 5fps. The camera’s buffer is 20mB in size (p113, below) which is small. Two to three buffered shots at best. No indication of how quickly the buffer flushes and it will be interesting to see whether faster SDHC/SDXC cards make a difference or whether the buffer’s native flushing speed is the slowest link in the chain.

Panoramas, p38, 39:



Panoramas for street snaps? Actually this is potentially very useful as it affords ultra-wide opportunities and, if I am reading the book right, the implementation is brilliant. After taking the first snap, you hose the camera around and it knows when to take the subsequent ones! And you can do horizontal or vertical panos which suggests some interesting opportunities. Panos can span 120 or 180 degrees. I’m hoping that exposure is locked based on the first frame, much as it is in Burst Mode, above. Otherwise stitching will show.

Auto-ISO, p50, 83:



Note the reference to reduced dynamic range at ISO 100. Note also the reference to AutoISO kicking in if exposure cannot be accommodated otherwise. Nice, I use this constantly on the Panny G1. Note also the ability to limit upper ISO in the second page, above.

Exposure metering, p51:

The street snapper will probably elect ‘Average’. There’s no time to mess with spot metering when taking candid snaps.

The Fn button, p52:

A nice selection here. Given that there’s a separate AFL/AEL button on the back to lock focus or exposure (I will use it for exposure), being able to assign the Fn button to another function is very useful. The ND filter, in view of the shutter speed limitations explained above, would appear particularly useful, instantly forcing a shutter speed 8x longer. I assume this is a ‘one press per picture’ control, but it’s unclear.

Th replacement of the Fn button on the top plate, rather than on the rear of the camera, is interesting. It’s next to the shutter release and should make for ease of use – one quick push and you have your change of choice.

Custom settings, p54:

There are many. Hooray! They can also be recalled using the Fn button. Double Hooray! The very last thing I ever want to do on the street is hunt around for settings on an unreadable LCD screen. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that the ND filter can be assigned to a custom setting.

In camera RAW processing, p67:

Nice to have until Adobe creates X100 RAW conversion for LR3 and Photoshop.

Aspect ratios, p68:

There are two. For someone with 35+ years of Leica M use coded in his genes there’s only one – 3:2.

SilkyPix with the Mac, p95:

Contradicting the impression from the earlier brochure, SilkyPix will work with the Mac, both PPC and Intel variants. This is nice as it’s currently the only app which will process X100 RAW images, until Adobe gets up to speed. I suppose that’s a relief of sorts, though Silky Pix has a very poor UI and you will have to reimport all your RAW files to Lightroom, or whatever you use, later.

Card capacities, p113:

The chart is wrong. They mean ‘3:2’ where they write ‘4:3’.

That said, an 8gB SDHC card will store a claimed 420 RAW pictures, meaning 19mB a snap. If you opt for RAW + JPG storage with ‘Fine’ JPG, one combined snap will take 23.9mB, meaning 334 picture-pairs on an 8gB SDHC card. Note that a Class 4 card is recommended as a minimum for movies – higher Class numbers mean higher write speeds. The 8gB cards I use in the G1 are Class 6 so they should work fine.

Battery and charger:

The battery is shipped flat and takes 2.5 hours to charge. Bummer!

The weight of the battery charger, above, seems incorrect – way too low.

* * * * *

Here’s my X100 kit so far:

Upstrap and spare battery. Wanted: One X100!

Now all I need is the camera ….

The HackPro upgraded

Hackintosh

In the real world, do its dated specs matter?

Update March 14, 2011: Adding a fast Solid State Drive for the OS and applications is discussed here.

If you are into serious video processing or game play on your computer the answer may be ‘Yes’. If, on the other hand, your goal is fast processing of photographs and vast amounts of cheap storage, there’s no compelling reason to build a newer HackPro.

Since my HackPro came to life thanks to master builder FU Steve, the following component changes have redefined the state of the art in the fastest Macs, albeit still with compromised cooling and poor to non-existent expandability in all but the MacPro:

  • The Q9550 Core2Quad Intel CPU is now replaced with the i7 four core
  • 800 mHz DDR2 RAM is now 1600 mHz DDR3 RAM – faster

Other than that, there has been little change. LightPeak/Thunderbolt is not yet available on the MacPro and you can bet PCIe cards for the PC and HackPro communities are just around the corner. Graphics Processing improves little on the superb Nvidia 9800GTX+ in the HackPro with the current Nvidia GT260/ATI 5770 models largely reflecting a name change, not real-world speed improvements for photographers. The ATI card is 10-20% faster on some games but for PS/LR3 use there’s no practical difference.

But, if you want to make a HackPro today, several of the components FU Steve used in mine are no longer available. No matter. Ace tech journalist Adah Pash, who inspired my techie colleague FU Steve to create the original HackPro ‘build’, has updated his piece for the latest components, and you can read it by clicking the picture below:

Click for the article.

Cooling? You will not improve on the HackPro. Large case, power supply, HDD and CPU fans, a huge CPU radiator and a separate GPU fan all in a large box keep the Hackster as cool as a cucumber, no matter what you throw at it. It’s so well cooled, in fact, that I have finally shaken my paranoid habit of constantly checking temperatures – a legacy of my Mac days and burned wallet.

The process remains as simple as before and if you can assemble a Lego kit you can make a Hackintosh. If you are serious about photo processing and want seriously reliable hardware, consider it.

OS X Lion, you ask? Will it work? Fear not. You can bet that the hacker community will have that one up and running a few days after Lion is released. Just two warnings. If you use xrite’s EyeOne match colorimeter, then keep an installation of Snow Leopard or earlier running on a separate HDD or HDD partition. It will not run on Lion. And if you use a Hewlett Packard DesignJet 30/90/130 printer like I do, then keep a version of Leopard (not Snow Leopard) or earlier available as the System Maintenance and color profiling tools will not work on Snow Leopard or later. What a mess.

The best upgrade:

The best improvement in speed, if you built the original HackPro, is not from ripping out and replacing CPUs and RAM and motherboards. Rather, it results from replacing the traditional spinning disk HDD with a Solid State Drive (SSD). As my MacBook Air testifies, SSDs boot very fast, even though the CPU in the MBA runs at a modest 1.4gHz – half the speed of the one in the HackPro. Yet apps load in under half the time in one quarter of the RAM! The latest Pash ‘build’ uses an SSD as an OS X and application drive (your option – it is not cheap to do this) and when I get FU Steve to upgrade the original HackPro to include one of these, you can be sure I’ll explain how he did it here.

iPad v2

iPad

The upgrade question.

Apple’s problem with the iPad is comparable to Leica’s when they released their first M-mount film camera, the M3, in 1954. That design was so perfect in every way that it wasn’t until the M6 with its integrated through-the-lens light meter came along 30 years later in 1984 that there was any serious reason to upgrade. Sure, they tinkered with the design at the margins, the M2’s wider field finder improved on the M3’s, the film rewind knob became a crank with the M4 and the finder sprouted more framelines over the years. But the core of the machine and its divine functionality remained unchanged (even as quality control went downhill and internal screws gave way to rivets) from that original stroke of genius. (I am conveniently sidestepping the mistake that was the M5 in this narrative. Heck, Apple made that silly cube Mac too). In fact, not until the M9 came along 18 months ago was there a compelling digital upgrade option for Leica M owners by which time the price had become ridiculous for most.

v2 and v1 compared.

The first version of the iPad, introduced 11 months ago, is like that M3. There is very little wrong with it and little of what is wrong has been fixed in v2. Here’s what remains wrong in v2:

  • The glossy screen. There is no matte option.
  • The slippery back. I glued on a piece of dimpled rubber on mine and it no longer wants to shoot off my lap.
  • It will not run Adobe Flash unless you hack it.
  • There is no SDHC card slot. You need the $29 dongle to upload snaps from your camera. And forget SDXC.
  • Maximum storage is still limited to 64gB.

Like Leica when it was at its peak in the 1950s, Apple has no need to make too many improvements as there is still no credible – or credibly priced – competition for its genius product. Here’s what they did improve – sort of reminiscent of those added frame lines in the M4 compared to the M2 and M3:

  • Front and rear facing cameras.
  • A dual core CPU claimed to be notably faster in processing graphics (insert Apple Hype discount factor here).
  • 3 ounces lighter at 1.3lbs.
  • A choice of a white bezel.
  • A purportedly better speaker.
  • A really dumb looking magnetic cover which is extra and waiting to be lost. After eleven months of being thrown into a canvas bag the screen on my iPad remains pristine.
  • A 1080p video out adapter which makes me wonder where and why you would be storing large 1080p movies in the iPad’s limited memory.

So if you have v1, should you upgrade?

I think the answer is ‘Yes’ if:

  • You need the cameras for video chats or taking snaps (hard to imagine taking pictures with an iPad)
  • You play lots of graphics-intensive games which need the improved GPU. This means you are under 10 and will have to approach your parents for the money.
  • You must have the latest of everything. This means you are under 10 …. etc.

If these do not make your requirements list, you can snap up a warranted, refurbished one from Apple for $150 off, or a remaindered new one for $100 off. That strikes me as a real bargain. v2 prices are the same as those for v1 when it was introduced. If you must have 3G, you are better off buying your own hot spot device as you can hang on to it when you upgrade to v3 down the road, avoiding the 3G premium, or switch to an Android tablet which runs Flash and is competitively priced.

Remaindered v1 iPads at the Apple Store – that rarest of all beasts, a bargain from greedy Mr. Jobs.

If you don’t have an iPad go ahead and get the new one but do make sure first that the slimmer design doesn’t bring with it the Achilles Heel of much of Apple’s machine design of the past decade – overheating. If it does, this won’t be the first time that form has triumphed over function at Cupertino.

You see, v1 really is that good. Just like that M3.

Classics are hard to improve.

EyeOne and OS X Lion

iPad, Software

Problems, problems, problems

October 4, 2011 update: Xrite has now released a Lion-compatible version of its software. Click here to read about it.

As I mentioned yesterday, OS X Lion will no longer support PPC Rosetta applications. That really matters little as 99.9% of software has been updated to tun on current Intel Macs. But the fact that the PPC (G3/G4/G5) Mac has not been made for some 6 years now has not motivated the people at xrite to update its colorimeter software to work on Intel Macs. So once you convert to Lion or buy a new Lion-equipped Mac, your old EyeOne or Monaco Optix colorimeter is junk. It will not work as the software cannot be loaded.

Here is the reply I received from xrite to my question as to when they would release EyeOne Intel Mac software:

Forcing the noun ‘task’ into service as a verb is enough to make anyone ill.

Well, that’s encouraging. A guy who has no idea points me to a product that does not exist with an unknown release date.

Here’s an extract of the brochure he points to:

The bottom line is EyeOne and Monaco Optix (and maybe ColorMunki and Huey – all come from xrite) colorimeter owners will need the i1BasicPro software which the fine print states is a Universal Mac app (meaning PPC or Intel machines are fine). The software is not available yet, there is no stated availability date that I can find and there is mention of costly upgrade coupons ($400!), though it’s unclear whether you will need one for this app. This all makes me feel about as confident in xrite as I feel about U.S. energy policy.

It’s taken xrite 6 years to not release an Intel version of their app so I wouldn’t be holding my breath. But I would be holding my wallet.

Read on.

A simple and cheap workaround to Xrite’s sloth:

It generally pays to upgrade to the latest version of any Mac OS, with the sole caveat that it also makes sense to wait a while for the first version (meaning Panther->Tiger->Leopard->Snow Leopard, etc.) of a major upgrade to gel, allowing any undiscovered bugs to surface and be quashed in the first amended release. So you will likely want to upgrade to Lion when it hits version 10.7.1, skipping 10.7.0. Thus you have a couple of months at least. I doubt xrite will have their product out by then.

There are a couple of simple solutions, as subtle as a sledgehammer, but you can be absolutely sure they will work and that your excellent EyeOne colorimeter will continue to do its job.

They cost $0-$60, depending on which you choose.

  • Buy a $20 8gB USB flash memory drive.
  • Buy a $40 250gB 3.5″ SATA HDD for your Mac. If you have slots in it, you can install it internally. If not, use a disk cradle or separate enclosure, another $20-30.
  • Buy a 2.5″ $25 100gB SATA notebook HDD (MacSales has them for that right now!) and an external enclosure if needed
  • The free option – repartition an existing HDD and set aside some space for your Snow Leopard + EyeOne install

In each case the process is simple as can be.

Format the USB stick or HDD and install Snow Leopard and the PPC EyeOne Match software on the device. Don’t forget to include the optional Rosetta installation! When it comes time to profile your monitor(s) restart the Mac while holding the Option key on the keyboard. Your display will give you a choice of start-up drives. Select the one with Snow Leopard on it (or Tiger or Leopard). Start EyeOne Match and do the profiling.

The Free option: This one is my favorite! If you have an existing back-up HDD with lots of free space, then you can repartition it, if you use Leopard or Snow Leopard, without losing any existing data. Go into Disk Utility, select the drive then drag the lower right corner of the drive map (after clicking on ‘Partition’) to reduce the size of the existing partition and create a new partition for your Snow Leopard + EyeOne Match installation. You can then rename the partitions to something sensible using Finder. The picture of Disk Utility below shows the result after creating a new partition of 50gB on a 500gB notebook drive, reducing the original single partition from 500gB to 450gB. The 50gB partition will be for SL + EyeOne Match. Data in the original partition was not lost or erased by doing this.

A new partition has been created on a back-up disk.

If you rename your original partition be sure to rename it also in any stored back-up scripts used with the likes of Carbon Copy Cloner or other back-up applications.

Finder will now report your back-up disk as two disks and you can install SL and EyeOne Match to the new partition. When you are done you can go back into Disk Utility and reduce the SL + EyeOne partition to the minimum necessary so as to make as much free space available in the main partition on the HDD. I have tested booting from this partition back-up, attached the EyeOne colorimeter, ran the EyeOne Match software and everything worked perfectly.

Your profiles will reside here on your new device:

The screen snap shows the latest profiles for my three Dell 2209WA displays used with my HackPro.

Now reboot starting from the regular OS Lion boot disk, leaving the profile device attached so that you can copy over the latest profiles to the like directory on your Lion HDD. Do the copy now. Erase the old profiles.

To check the correct profile is being used go to System Preferences->Displays. If you have multiple monitors, move the white bar in Arrangement to the monitor you are checking. In this case quit and restart System Preferences->Displays to make sure you are addressing the selected monitor (OS X does not do this without restarting System Preferences).

Check the ‘Show profiles for this display only’ as shown below:

If the correct profile is not selected (your naming convention used when you save the profile from EyeOne match should be clear and obvious – I use ‘Left’, Center’ and ‘Right’ for my three displays) select it now and repeat for all other displays.

You are done and you can disconnect your Snow Leopard drive and stop worrying about Hans, Fritz, Helmut, Adolf and their fellow duffers at xrite coming out with a new version of their application for your EyeOne or Monaco Optix colorimeter. And your wallet will be safe, too.

And whatever you do, keep that Snow Leopard install disk or buy one now ($29) before Lion comes out, if you have lost your original!

Mac OS Lion

Hackintosh

Two new features of note. And one great loss.

Like many, I use Macs not for the hardware – which my many years of use have shown to be generally poorly designed and unreliable – but for the operating system which is robust and largely trouble free. Indeed, my home brew Hackpro has shown that not only are PC hardware components dead reliable, they are also far cheaper and more easily replaced than anything in a Mac. The last major upgrade to OS X was Snow Leopard (June, 2009) and while it introduced no exciting new features the reliability improved on its already excellent predecessors Leopard and Tiger. Snow Leopard is so solid that the only time I reboot any Mac running it is when a software upgrade dictates that process.

Now that the next release of the Mac OS X operating system is out in beta test, details are beginning to leak. Snow Leopard will soon be replaced by Lion and here are a couple of substantive features that have caught my eye:

Recovery partition support: Lion will place a separate partition on your start-up drive with a complete installable copy of the Mac OS in it. This means that if the regular boot partition gets corrupted in some way, you will simply be able to restart your Mac while holding down the Option key and will be presented with a choice of boot drive. You elect the Recovery partition and are up and running in no time. Of course, if your whole drive is hosed, that will not help, but the increasing incidence of Solid State Drives (SSDs), as used in the MacBook Air and some MacBook Pros, makes this much more useful as the chances of ‘mechanical’ failure in an SSD are low. I suppose a massive blow would do it but the SSD would be the least of your worries in that case.

I hope that the version of the OS in the Recovery Partition is updated at the time the user updates the OS in the boot partition down the road. I can’t determine if that is the case

TRIM support for SSDs: Because an SSD can sustain fewer read/write cycles to any one internal location the OS has to move data around to maximize life. It’s not that big a deal as it’s likely your Mac will be obsolete before you exceed the number of permitted cycles, but it’s still a fact of life which may affect a very small percentage of users. Further, one dirty little secret of SSDs is that they do a poor job of managing garbage like deleted files (hitting ‘Delete’ does not delete the file, just the file name which appears in Finder, removing the total file size from the ‘space remaining’ statistic only), so they tend to lose storage capacity over time in the absence of TRIM technology.

Here’s a System Profiler snap from my 11″, 2010 MBA running Snow Leopard:

As you can see, it does not support TRIM, which is a technology which cleverly manages garbage to keep storage capacity at a maximum.

OS Lion, SSD + Recovery Partition + TRIM: Put those together and you get three benefits:

  • Fast SSD read and write speeds
  • Ability to restart even with a blown boot drive OS
  • Efficient management of dead space on a costly SSD

This leads to a couple of thoughts. If I can get Lion to run on the local workhorse here, my HackPro, then the next logical step is to add a small SSD to become the start-up drive with OS Lion on it and to store the Applications and Library directories on that SSD. Data files will continue to reside on traditional spinning disk drives until SSDs become larger and much cheaper. MacPro users could do this also given the machine’s ability to contain multiple disk drives. MacBook Pro users whose disk drive is of the spinning traditional type can get a kit to replace the increasingly useless optical disk drive with an SSD – Mac Sales has them – thus running two drives inside their laptop. I’m not sure about iMacs; there’s an option to buy these with an HDD plus an SSD but whether it’s possible to retrofit machines with an additional SSD which came without one is not something I have researched. Nor will I, given the poor heat design of the iMac which saw two die prematurely here, and the ghastly glossy screen.

I added up the size of those directories and here is what I got:

So that little lot totals less than half the capacity of a 120gB SSD. Here’s the current pricing of SSDs at MacSales – these come in a 2.5″ drive size so add $20 for the cradle to adapt the SSD to a full size machine which takes 3.5″ drives:

So the 120gB is in the gB/$ sweet spot and just the right size for my purposes.

MacSales’s web site makes the point that applications like Photoshop still do a lot of disk swapping when processing, so doing this using an SSD is going to result in far faster performance when doing complex processing. And my experience with the SSD in my MacBook Air tells me that PS and LR3 work super fast, especially when it comes to start-up times. Typically these applications start in half the time on the MBA compared with the HackPro with its 8gB of RAM and 1tB Samsung 7200rpm traditional HDD boot drive.

Today even the MacBook Pro laptop computer reports faster benchmark results than the HackPro despite the latter’s four core CPU, fast Nvidia 9800+ GPU and 8gB of RAM. But, then again, I can get faster to the grocery store on my push bike than you can in your Ferrari. Raw speed tests are not everything. Constraining factors like a slow internet connection can make all that speed of little use in many real world uses. The SSD addresses one of those bottlenecks, the slow read/write times of conventional hard disk drives, so for a modest investment of $270 + OS Lion I expect that the HackPro will once again jump to the forefront of effective speed in practical use which, for me, means less time spent processing photographs. That’s always a good thing as I much prefer pressing the button to messing about with a mouse.

Thunderbolt: Never missing an opportunity for hype, Apple has just added Intel’s Light Peak technology to the newest MacBook Pros fancifully naming it Thunderbolt. Please. This has nothing to do with OS Lion but is a wire or optical connector which permits far higher data transfer rates than USB2 or the nascent USB3, as well as supporting many peripherals like external drives, displays, etc. on one connector. The MBP version does not use optical fibers but you can bet those will be coming soon. There has been some confusing press stating that Thunderbolt will be exclusive to Macs for a year but I think that cannot be correct. It makes no sense for Intel to destroy its market for this exciting technology by limiting sales to a vendor who commands 5-10% of the non-tablet computer market. Accordingly, I expect that we will see aftermarket PCIe plug-in Light Peak cards for PCs and MacPros soon. It will be interesting to see how this works out but hopefully all those sockets on computers will disappear in favor on one, two or three Light Peak connectors. Light Peak supports serial connections (simply string your peripherals together end-to-end) and offers mainframe communication speeds to the PC market and I wouldn’t be making any investment in USB3 peripherals if I were you. USB3 is DOA.

No more Rosetta: Now here’s the bad news. Lion will not include Rosetta so PowerPC apps, like my Photoshop CS2, will no longer run. That’s a shame and I fail to see why Apple would delete this feature. Still, for the first time in ages, Apple has made Adobe happy given how many people will have to upgrade to the outrageously overpriced CS5.

The more troubling implication is for EyeOne Match which is the application used with the Eye One colorimeter to profile displays. Even though PPC hardware has been discontinued for years, x-rite has yet to update EyeOne Match to work on Intel machines; it needs Rosetta to work.

I have written to xrite and will publish their reply if I get one. Here’s what I wrote:

Gentlemen – I use your EyeOne colorimeter with your EyeOne Match software on my Macs for photo processing. I use v. 3.6.3 which is the current version of EyeOne Match, I believe. This application requires Rosetta to run in OS Snow Leopard as it is a PowerPC app and appears not to have been updated to run natively on Intel Macs. As you know PPC Macs have not been made for many years. EyeOne Match runs fine on my Macs using Rosetta.

However, the next version of Mac OS X, Lion, which will be introduced shortly, will no longer support Rosetta/PPC apps. So my question is:

“When can we expect an Intel version of Eye One Match which will work on the latest Macs running Lion?”

Not upgrading the Mac OS is not an option as all new Macs will come with Lion only; unless you upgrade your EyeOne Match software your device will cease to function on new Macs and your sales to Mac users will cease.

Thank you.

Until I get a positive response with a committed date from xrite I no longer recommend the Eye One for photographers and have updated my review to that effect. Indeed, the Mac user contemplating purchase of any xrite colorimeter should first address this issue and, if the software runs in Rosetta/PPC emulation mode only, buy something else.

xrite follow up: Correspondence with fellow photographer Roy Hammans has disclosed that others are onto this issue. It seems that Monaco Optix has the same problem and I wouldn’t be surprised if ColorMunki has it also – all three colorimeters are sold by xrite.

Meanwhile, assuming xrite is lazy/slow/dumb (which history suggests) it occurs to me that there is a workaround. The Mac user would keep a working installation of Snow Leopard in a separate partition on his boot drive and start from that, perform a profile update then simply copy the profiles created over to the Lion partition. Then reboot from Lion. Even easier, create a bootable version of Snow Leopard (with Rosetta) on an SDHC card or an inexpensive USB thumb drive, and install the EyeOne Rosetta software there. An 8gB drive should be ample as OS X uses under 5gB.

Your display profiles reside here on your Mac:

If it comes to this, as I suspect it will, then I will post a piece here explaining how to accomplish the workaround, allowing users to update to Lion and still retain the ability to use the EyeOne to profile their displays.

TurboTax: While not germane to photography, US users of TurboTax should also think before moving to Lion. Through and including tax year 2005, TurboTax for Macs was a PPC application and needs Rosetta to run. So if you need to access tax returns prepared using TurboTax for tax years 2005 or earlier on your Mac, make sure to keep a Mac running nothing later than Snow Leopard handy for that purpose.