Category Archives: Hardware

Stuff

Click bait

Fuji, Hall of Shame

Thoroughly disingenuous.

‘Click bait’ is slang for web content with no substance with but one intention – to get viewers to your site and hopefully have them click through to something which earns you commission, even though the actual posting on your site has no substantive content.

Even quality sites are prey to this poor practice, and one of the worst examples I have seen is DPReview’s ‘Preview’ of the much anticipated Fuji X100. I’m not going to provide a link as the piece is so offensive as to discourage me from routing anyone else there but suffice it to say that, after allegedly handling an early prototype, which they laud endlessly for ‘feel’ and ‘quality” they failed to:

  • Take any pictures
  • Comment on responsiveness
  • Say anything about noise
  • Test the lens
  • Report on the quality of the sensor
  • …. and they even forgot to weigh the thing if, that is, they ever had it.

In other words, a marketing piece, pure and simple. Scandalous. DPReview is owned by Amazon and the latter, which prides itself on respecting its customers, can do better.

A far superior job (not difficult, given the hurdle posed by DPR) was done by the Norwegian site akam.no which not only got its hands on a very early prototype, but actually took real pictures with the camera and published them. While your Norwegian is likely no better than mine, you can still make sense of the test snaps on their site and suffice it to say that the definition of the lens and the high ISO performance both look very promising. Reading the related discussion at DPR discloses that the camera’s software is at a shockingly early stage of (in)completion, though it’s impossible to tell how old the prototype is. If it’s recent you can forget about seeing this camera on the market until the second half of 2011. The author of the Norwegian piece, Aethius, participates in the discussion which is well worth reading if you have any interest in the X100. He relates, among other things, that the software is so incomplete that the camera had to be restarted after every picture with many menu items garbled or missing! Not what I would call an alpha test model, let alone beta.

Click the picture for the akam.no review.

Aethius relates that this was an official tester from Fuji, his magazine having signed an NDA, which begs the question whether the CIA is in charge of Fuji’s marketing. It would take an organization which cannot distinguish Iraq from Australia to so bungle matters. Let’s see now – pre-release it in a nation where caribou outnumber humans, make sure it’s so buggy as to be scarcely worthy of attention, over promise and under deliver, raise the hype machine to the max practically guaranteeing dismay when the real thing hits retail, and make sure that only the worst things get said about it in the limited test and ensuing discussion. Buggy software, lens corrections yet to be completed and, worst of all for a camera whose primary (sole?) purpose is street snapping, it’s not especially fast or responsive according to Aethius’s comments in the discussion. Way to go, Fuji! Well, I suppose Leica needs the competition when it comes to rolling out buggy and costly hardware.

As for DPReview, you are a dishonorable entrant to this site’s Hall of Shame.

Voigtlander 25mm f/0.95 MFT lens

Hardware

Now that is fast!

Voigtlander (Cosina) has been making lenses for Leicas and a few other mounts for many years. Many of these appear to be derivatives of older Leitz designs and many have garnered positive reviews. For the most part they have been making lenses for full frame 35mm cameras so it was quite a surprise to see them come out with an MFT lens for the Panasonic and Olympus MFT bodies.

The Voigtlander 25mm f/0.95 MFT lens.

You can see more at Stephen Gandy’s Cameraquest site. Retailing at $900 in the US, the lens is sold out with new supplies expected in a month or so. There are some excellent pictures taken by Andrew Fildes using the Voigtlander on an Olympus E-P2 body here and in addition to being a fine photographer, Andrew has taken almost all the snaps at f/0.95 so you can get a sense of the depth of focus at full aperture. To put the aperture in perspective, the depth of field of a 25mm f/0.95 lens is identical to that of a 50mm f/1.9 on a full frame body, so it’s like using an f/2 lens wide open.

A couple of warnings. The lens is huge compared to regular MFT optics, it’s heavy as it’s all metal. It has zero automation. As regards aperture that’s hardly an issue. If you buy an f/0.95 lens you aren’t going to be using it at f/8. On the other hand, the lack of focus automation strikes me as a big negative in street work owing to the time delay from manual focusing, and you will have to focus fairly carefully on nearer subjects to make sure things are sharp.

By contrast, the fortcoming Fuji X100 with it’s 23mm f/2 lens will have a depth of field equivalent to an f/4.5 50mm lens on a full frame body, so the Voigtlander has two stops less depth of field than the Fuji at maximum aperture. That’s significant and noticeable. Andrew Fildes’s pictures show the DOF well and it’s rare that you get a real photographer showing off gear so well. DPReview may be the best technical review site for hardware but it’s the very last place on earth you are going to go to for quality photography.

I have bought gear from Gandy in the past and he is honest and easy to deal with. He has been in business for ages.

New Panasonic fast standard lens:

Panasonic is rumored to be announcing a 25mm f/1.4 lens (50mm FFE) with full automation in February, and that sounds like a far more practical alternative to trying to manually focus the Voigltlander behemoth. The Panny will have the same depth of field as a 50mm f/2.8 on a full frame camera and sounds like just the ticket if the Fuji X100 disappoints. I rather miss out-of-focus backgrounds with the G1 owing to the smallish maximum aperture of the kit zoom. I would guess the price will be $700. There’s already a 25mm f/1.4 Leica Summilux for regular 4/3rds cameras at $900 but it’s bulky and not in keeping with the compact MFT design concept. The 20mm f/1.7 Panny is another option worth considering for the street snapper, at a fraction of cost of the X100.

Apple Magic Mouse

Macintosh

A trouble-free device.

For a company which prides itself on design, past mouse offerings from Apple have been pretty poor.

In the last decade we have had the clear plastic case single-click wired mouse which came with iMacs through maybe 2005. Then along came the Mighty Mouse with that neat little scroll sphere in the top and finally supporting left and right clicks. That one came in wired and wireless designs and after three of each I finally threw up my hands and gave up on the Apple Mouse. You see, the Magic Mouse worked fine until the scroll sphere would fail owing to the ingress of dirt and grease. While you could vigorously run the little ball around a bit on a piece of paper with the mouse held upside down, after about two or three attempts at this the scrolling feature would fail completely, and given that the mouse was sealed – except for the space around the ball – there was no realistic way of dismantling it to clean the innards. I even tried blasting contact cleaner into the small space around the ball and the thing would fail soon afterwards, shortly after my eyesight recovered from the backwash of toxic spray.

The Apple Mighty Mouse with the poorly designed scroll wheel.

One really nice feature of the Mighty Mouse was that when you squeezed the sides you could get enhanced actions; I had mine set to display the desktop. You could also program a push on the scroll ball to perform other actions and mine was set to display Dashboard widgets. Still, I thought no more of all these mouse failures until a MacMini came along to drive the home TV; Apple, squeezing the margins as usual, did not ship a mouse with the MacMini so I though, what the heck, I’ll give the new Magic Mouse a shot.

Like the Mighty Mouse the Magic Mouse uses a sensor for tracking. I wasn’t too impressed with the specifications on paper as all that multi-touch technology seemed counterintuitive on a mouse, but came to like the Magic Mouse when used on the sofa with the MacMini.

Apple Magic Mouse. No scroll wheel, no side buttons.

Scrolling with the MagicMouse is accomplished by dragging one finger vertically on the surface; side scrolling by swiping the same finger laterally. Only one finger is needed though Apple’s System Preferences ->Mouse pane shows two being used for sideways scrolling. When you are using a mouse to control a MacMini whose primary purpose is to play DVDs and Netflix, you don’t need to access features like the Desktop or the Dashboard with its widgets. On a desktop work computer these are very nice to have. Needless to add, curiosity got the better of me and I decided to try the Magic Mouse with my desktop HackPro – the desktop computer for the rest of us. At first, System Preferences->Mouse simply refused to recognize the Magic Mouse, even though System Profiler confirms that the minuscule IoGear Bluetooth adapter I have installed in one of the HackPro’s dozen USB ports enables Bluetooth. The HackPro runs OS Snow Leopard 10.6.6 and you need at least 10.6.4 for the Mighty Mouse.

IoGear Bluetooth adapter – smaller than a fingernail.

So I resorted to that repository of all that is Apple OS hacking, InsanelyMac, and one suggested solution was to install the SteerMouse utility; this I duly did, rebooted as instructed and, lo and behold, the MagicMouse was now recognized as a Bluetooth device, even though I did not even enable the SteerMouse utility, which appears in the Systems Preferences pane. So now I had a working MagicMouse but still no easy way of accessing the desktop or Dashboard using the mouse, as the side buttons of the old Mighty Mouse were no longer available to do this. Well, I had never used the ‘Active Screen Corners’ function of OS X, found in System Preferences->Exposé & Spaces->Exposé. It takes seconds to do and you get many choices for what each screen corner does.

Active screen corners in OS X

Now when I drag the mouse cursor over one of the screen corners the related action is invoked. Lower left gets me the Desktop and so on. I use a three display installation with the HackPro so ‘corner’ means the outside corners of the left- and right-handmost displays. It works well, but takes a bit of getting used to. I’m getting the hang of it.

Why use the MagicMouse in preference to the excellent RF Microsoft Mouse I have been using for well over a year now? (Yes, I know, ‘excellent’ as an adjective for a Microsoft product is not something you see that often). Mostly because the cursor action is smoother and because you don’t get the occasional bout of wild behavior which has the cursor become very jerky. This seems to occur when Time Machine is running one of its incremental backups, suggesting some sort of interference with CPU or GPU cycles. The MagicMouse does not display this erratic behavior.

The MagicMouse comes with new iMacs and only you can decide whether its shape and workings are right for your hands. One thing you can be sure of – there’s no scroll wheel to go wrong.

MagicPrefs: If you want a whole order of magnitude more programmability for your MagicMouse, download and install MagicPrefs. This utility installs in the System Preferences pane and gives you more options than you can shake a stick at. How is this possible? Well, the MagicMouse is really a touchpad, like the one on your laptop. It senses touch electrostatically, meaning that every square millimeter of its surface has an ‘address’ whose actions can be tailored. Using MagicPrefs, first you can crank up the cursor speed beyond the poky maximum Apple give you. If you use two or more displays, it’s worth it. Second, you can program gestures to access functions. For example, I have the middle click (where the scroll ball used to be) set to show the desktop and a single tap just above the Apple logo to display the Dashboard. The programmability is vast and there’s something for everyone. Do it right and you will no longer miss the side buttons of the older Mighty Mouse.

MagicPrefs at work.

In other MagicPrefs panes you can even define the location of scroll zones, meaning that left handed users can program scroll and touch zones to suit their dominant hand, as well as reversing left and right clicks. There is also a host of Drag, Pinch and Swipe motions. Extraordinary and free.

Disclosure: Long AAPL call options.

Digital hits a wall

Hardware

CES dismays.

The Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show extravaganza last week underwhelmed mightily when it came to digital still camera innovation.

Most journalists are naming the new Olympus XZ-1 as the best of show (how many did Olympus have to ‘donate’ to effect this result?) but I really can’t get too excited over yet another point-and-shoot with a microscopic sensor and a crappy LCD screen passing for a viewfinder, even if the maximum aperture never falls below f/2.5. Didn’t Panasonic do this with the LX5 ages ago, with like manual controls? Gee, I just can’t wait to see the image quality at f/2.5.

Yawn. Olympus XZ-1.

Eye One soldiers on with its wifi SDHC cards; having concluded that these are worthless for transmitting decent sized RAW files over the air as they are bog slow, they are now promising you can send your snaps to your iPhone for onwards relay. What? Why not use the iPhone to snap the picture in the first place? A solution looking for a problem.

What is really lacking here is any form of innovative thinking. And no, 3D is not about to happen big time when you have to watch your TV with special glasses. That failed in the US cinemas of the 1950s and will fail in US homes of the 2010s.

Apple is focusing on its iEverything ecosystem and sadly has no time to devote its design genius to making a truly innovative digital Apple camera. Panasonic has totally dropped the ball with the GF2, refusing to integrate a small EVF into a neat body design, in lieu of the faux prism hump on the G2/GH2 designs.

And Fuji, proclaiming itself to be ‘surprised and delighted’ with advance reactions to its FX100 didn’t as much as show a prototype, meaning I won’t be holding my breath over its imminent arrival. Excuse me, but how can reactions be so positive to something which, for all practical purposes, does not exist? Maybe that piece of mine all those years ago on Label drinkers needs to be refreshed? The new version will be titled ‘Spec drinkers’. I’m more excited than most over this large sensor, fixed focal length offering, as street snapping is my thing and the specs seem suited to that genre, but until the camera has actually been subjected to real, un-conflicted field tests (meaning no freebies or advertising $$$) it’s hardly something to be excited about.

There’s still tons of room for innovation in the small camera digital field. Developments such as water lenses in eyeglasses, where the lens’ shape and focal length can be changed manually, are crying out for incorporation in compact camera designs. Only the clunky Leica M9 brings a full frame sensor to a (not so) compact street snapper and that with a dated and inept optical viewfinder and mostly oversized lens options, with everything at silly prices and build quality and robustness more GM than Toyota. Where are the higher definition, lower noise EVFs building on the example set by the Panasonic G1? Where is built in 802.11n or, better, 802.11x, wifi for sending large RAW files to your server of choice with big buffers to negate the drawbacks of slow wifi or 3G? How about automated HDR to overcome the limited dynamic range bugaboo which haunts digital sensors? Pentax had a go at this in its DSLRs but it needs better implementation. Where are the f/1.0 lenses? I would much rather have to tote two small fixed focal length cameras, with say 35mm f/1 and a 90mm f/2 fast lenses, than one with a slow superzoom. Where is the circuitry to impose selective focus through software and processing, as Topaz Labs’ ReMask claims to do (slow, overhyped, overpriced and buggy as with every Topaz product I have tried, by the way)?

Lots of ideas, with little innovation. Digital seems to have hit the wall of a lack of imagination in its designers’ labs.

iPad alternatives

iPad

Why I’m in no hurry to buy iPad2.

Owing to some ego bruising slight, real or imagined, Steve Jobs has refused to let Adobe’s Flash videos and graphics run on the iPad. Putting aside the mindless apologia from Apple’s fan boys, this is in fact a significant limitation for a business user. While I enjoy Netflix and news readers on the iPad as much as the next guy, a lot of business press is coded using Flash, meaning I cannot view it on the device. This is insanely frustrating, as you will be reading a business piece which has an embedded video, the latter key to the piece, and it will not run. Or there’s a stock chart you cannot read. The most used publically available US stock charting service is the free one at Yahoo and if you opt for the interactive version of a chart it cannot be viewed on the iPad, as the system uses Flash to deliver content.

This has translated into my using the MacBook Air (MBA) for most of my business reading when not at my desktop Mac, clunky as a laptop is for this sort of thing. The iPad is used for viewing photographs (at least on Flash-free sites), reading books and watching Netflix. But it means I have two portable devices where one should be sufficient.

The simple answer would be to have Apple include a toggle under ‘Settings’ which allows the user to decide whether to use Flash or not. All that talk of Flash locking up your machine and burning up the battery is so much rot. I have yet to experience any lock-ups on my MBA or HackPro. Further, I use Click to Flash on the MBA so that there is no Flash code constantly running in the background using up battery power. With this great little utility, Flash content is designated as such and a logo superimposed thereon is clicked to allow the content to be viewed.

All of this preamble is to say that I am more than a little interested in an alternative to the iPad which runs Flash, so the one hundred (!) or so tablets being rolled out at the annual CES electronics show this past week in Las Vegas were of more than passing interest to me.

First, I do think Jobs is exactly wrong in stating that the 7″ tablet is ‘DOA’, as he did on Apple’s last earnings conference call. Amazon is rumored to have sold some 8 million of its underwhelming, one-use Kindle book readers in 2010 and believe me, having used one for 30 days before returning it, the 7″ format is just fine for reading. And while at 1.5lbs the iPad is no heavyweight, the 7″ tablet weighs half that. Less weight is always a good thing for portable devices. No, Jobs’s DOA statement is nothing more than lashing out at a missed market opportunity and I wouldn’t be in the least surprised to see a 7″ offering from Apple in 2011, called something dumb like iPodTouch Super to cover for the Great Leader’s error of judgement.

Second, iOS on the iPad may be excellent, but Android is coming along fast and the new Tablet version, named Honeycomb, will likely fix what ails the much adapted cell phone OS, which tablet makers are hacking to provide a half decent user experience on their large screen devices.

Third, I want a built in SDHC or SDXC card reader on my tablet. Telling me about Jobs’s fetishes about smooth surfaces and so on is noise. A small slot for the card is trivial to add.

Fourth, forget about the 250,000 apps available for the iPad. For a serious user maybe a dozen or two of these make any sense. There are two or three RSS feed readers of note (I use Reeder), a couple of dedicated subscription readers (Bloomberg and the Financial Times – excellent, WSJ – weak), Zinio to read magazines until iBooks adds this function, IMDB and Netflix for movies, iBooks and Kindle for book reading, LogMeIn for remote access to your desktop, Tunein Radio for global internet radio, 1Password for all your logins, etc. and ZumoCast to watch movies from the home file server. Those make up 95% of my use and I’ll bet that your experience is similar, a few apps providing most of the functionality needed. So forget about 250,000 apps. 100 or so will satisfy 99% of users.

Fifth, games. Games are for children and those like minded, and are not a decision factor for me when it comes to tablets. I watch our 8 year old son play games on the iPad and I have yet to detect one scintilla of increase in his IQ as a result. Any adult who plays games on a computer likely has little interest in business, so I’m not going to comment further.

So what are the most exciting alternatives about to arrive in the stores? It’s a tough call as the iPad has a huge lead but a couple prospects stick out:

The Xoom from Motorola: MOT, newly reorganized into two companies, one doing cellular technology the other traditional construction site and police radios, has new leadership and an exciting product in the Xoom. Plays Flash, runs Android Honeycomb, has a dual core CPU for speed and multi-tasking, twin cameras for recording and video conferencing. Doesn’t appear to have a card reader. Availability some time in Q1/2, 2011. You think Xoom is a dumb name? How about iPad then?

Motorola Xoom.

Blackberry Playbook: RIM may be late to the party with its 7″ Playbook and had to buy yet another OS to run the thing, but their user base in business is large and sticky and they have a lot riding on this one. Every time Wall Street says the game is up for RIMM they come back with stronger earnings, so I dare you to short the stock. Weighs a scant 14 ozs., runs Flash and like the Xoom has 1gB of RAM compared to the 256mB of the iPad. No sign of a GPS model but with an inspired device like the MiFi who cares? Apparently no card slot but will run Flash. RIMM has confirmed an 8 hour battery life, and have stated that the Playbook will provide synchronization with Blackberry contacts, etc. I think this will be a strong entrant despite Jobs’s slagging of the company on the recent AAPL earnings call. This sort of outburst suggests the man has no taste which, amusingly, is a criticism he used to level at MSFT years ago. AAPL, the new MSFT.

Waiting to eat Jobs’s lunch.

Samsung Galaxy: Only a fool would discount Samsung, the world’s largest makers of displays and supplier to AAPL among others. Their 7″ tablet is selling well and has a microSD card slot for memory expansion, but no SDHC card slot for retrieving data as far as I can see. Pricing is silly with a two year 3G contract required from your local unfriendly cell provider making the two year cost over $2,500, but hopefully they will see the light and make that an option. Runs hacked cell phone Android 2.2 but should be upgraded to Honeycomb soon. They claim to have sold over a million in 2010 (3 months) compared to maybe 12 million for the iPad (9 months) so the low $200 subsidized cost of entry is fooling a lot of consumers.

HP Slate2: Slate1 crashed and burned and there is no specific information from HP as to what v2 will bring. Hardly surprising from America’s most dysfunctional large technology company. But walk into any computer store and you will mostly see HP desktops, laptops and printers. The company has a lock on the Windows/PC world. More significantly, HP paid an arm and several legs for near-bankrupt Palm a year ago and in the process acquired one of the best mobile OSs on the planet, the Palm OS. That move was made by a very capable HP CEO whom, needless to add, HP subsequently fired because he is alleged to have diddled some stripper, or something. Like, what has that to do with creating shareholder value? So HPQ will come out with a tablet, and I am willing to bet it will be a good one, but the timing is unknown, not least to HP’s board of directors. And you can be sure it will run Flash. HP has some of the best tech minds on the planet, despite having done its level best over the past decade to get rid of them by creating an unfriendly workplace.

Notion Ink Adam: This one has been rumored for so long it’s hard to know what to believe, the maker claiming it’s been in development for three years. It’s 10.1″ like the iPad, but unlike the iPad it’s widescreen, has a nice ergonomic design (thicker at one long end than the other) and runs cell phone Android with a custom skin which the maker claims will make upgrades to Honeycomb easy. It’s rumored to be dirt cheap at $375 for the wifi-only regular LCD version or $500 with an enhanced display claimed to have exceptionally low power draw, resulting in a 16 hour battery life, compared with 11 hours for the iPad. It runs the dual core ARM A9 CPU which will likely be found in this spring’s iPad2 also – when Jobs will claim it’s been ‘specially designed by Apple’ – and 1gB of RAM is standard. The camera swivels which is clever. Little is known about the Indian manufacturer and its ability to bring sufficient capital to the game of survival, a question which is a non-issue for the likes of AAPL, HPQ, RIMM and Samsung. The Adam has an SDHC card slot – hooray! – and no fewer than three USB sockets. Someone is thinking here. For hard core Unix types it’s rumored to run the Ubuntu OS as an option, and video output is a full 1080p (iPad – 720p) if that turns your crank. With its speedy Nvidia Tegra graphics processor, enhanced display, competitive price and a raft of ports and slots, this seems to be the most exciting tablet coming to the market in 2011. For those who like to trust their data to a company which specializes in evil, it’s also rumored to run Google’s cloud-based Chrome OS.

Thinking different. The NotionInk Adam tablet. eInk switch circled.

I think the Adam looks great! The best feature of the Adam? The enhanced display uses a version of the eInk technology in the Kindle meaning that you can switch to outdoors mode for reading in sun – there’s a physical switch to do this on the side not some silly touchscreen button you cannot see outdoors. The brighter the ambient light the better. By contrast, traditional screens, like the one in the iPad, are useless outdoors. Weight is the same as the iPad, but it’s less slim, like I care. An elegant looking design which, of course, runs Flash. The inclusion of a card slot, USB ports, stereo speakers and lots of memory for processing makes this one sound very appealing to photographers and video makers. The asymmetrical thickness is good ergonomic design – in landscape mode the thick part is at the top and in portrait mode the thicker edge affords a better hold. Let’s hope they have the capital to survive, as it’s rumored to be shipping ‘any day now’, a status prevailing for some 7 months at the time of writing.

Microsoft tablets: Last and least, there are sure to be some tablets running Windows in 2011. As long as MSFT has an orangutan in the corner office I propose to waste no time on these.

Apple is on top of the world right now. Great products across the board, no big losers, global distribution, great management. But that strong streak of arrogance in a less than healthy CEO, which has him dictating what the user will be allowed to run, is not promising. The iPad’s sales have shown that consumers prefer simple, limited functionality if the ease of use is there, but denying them Flash is simply an invitation to the competition. Add a Flash toggle on the iPad and all of the above goes away. Fail to do so and I will remain in line for an alternative.

iPad2: I see no way on earth that this spring’s iPad2 with its added cameras, lighter weight, dual core CPU, more RAM and more storage will allow Flash to run, given Jobs’s egotistical stance, so unless a simple iPad hack comes along (and I don’t mean that external browser/conversion thing which is conceptually deeply flawed) you can bet that this time next year will see a couple new tablets in my home and office, and neither will have a fruit logo on it.

Disclosure: Long AAPL call options.