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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.

Fuji X100 battery

Fuji

Don’t get ripped off.

The rumors about the battery life of the Fuji X100 are all over the place. Some say it’s 200 snaps, others twice that.

I have no idea what to believe but a spare makes sense.

You can buy the real thing at Amazon by searching on ‘Ricoh GXR’ which uses the same battery:

The Ricoh GXR rip-off.

Or get ripped-off a little less by searching on ‘Fuji F30’ which also uses the same one:

The Fuji rip-off.

Finally, best of all, search for ‘NP95 Li-on’ and you get this 1800 mAh variant, which is the same capacity as the one which comes with the X100:

The real thing with a cheap label ….

No prizes for guessing which I ordered. I don’t propose to pay $30 for a label. Guess where all three are made? Yup. Same place as your brand new shiny ‘American’ iPad.

The main risk here is that Fuji has included (no indication of that yet), or will include, a ROM to make their battery the only one that works with the X100 – Panny tried this dirty trick with the G series, only to have that hacked soon after. Many printer manufacturers try that with their overpriced ink cartridges and ROM setting tools abound to stop that little bit of greed. So hardly a concern, especially at the price asked.

Fuji X100 brochure

Fuji

Things I noticed.

The Fuji X100 brochure is now available from Fuji and as these things have a way of disappearing like all those test shots in early reviews, I have placed it on my file server and you can download it by clicking below:

Click to download the X100 brochure.

I’ll put aside any comments on the sheer vacuity of the puffery, which is at least written by an English speaker not by Google Translate, but there is some gold among the dross, and here’s what I spotted (page references are to pages as numbered using Apple’s Preview PDF viewer and 2-page display – the page numbering in the original is poor and incomplete):

My comments are aimed at the primary target for this camera – street snappers. If you are into landscapes or bugs, I recommend you read elsewhere and buy something else.

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Page 4 – The user is clueless how to hold a camera with an optical finder. The lens should be supported from below with the left hand, not obscuring the finder.

Page 6 – The top plate engraving quality is a whole lot better than on my Leica M2 and M3.

Page 8 – The OVF displays vary between pictures confirming that you can tailor these extensively. The finder magnification is only 0.5x, a bit disappointing. The Leica M2’s 0.72x would have been better. The 1.44 mp definition of the eye-level EVF is identical to that of the Panasonic G1. That’s excellent. Diopter adjustment is -2 to +1 and the finder has a long eye point of 15mm meaning that eyeglass wearers like me will not struggle to see the full frame. One key aspect of the OVF is being able to see outside the frame lines, anticipating objects coming into the field of view.

Page 9 – The OVF can show under/exposure compensation, set on the top dial. Nice. It will also show DOF – useless, in my opinion. The AF target mark is a nice size compromise between spot and overall. The brightness of the displayed data varies with scene brightness. Really nice. There’s a proximity sensor, like in the iPhone, which switches off the LCD when the camera is brought to eye level. There’s also reference to a ‘Power Control System’ which suggests that you can switch off the dumb-as-it-gets LCD screen to conserve power. Any street snapper will immediately do this, not to conserve power, but to turn off the single device which has made nearly every point-and-shoot useless until now. An LCD screen is incapable of being a useful viewfinder in daylight. There’s a reference to ‘Page 25’ for more details, but that page is missing, their numbering jumping from 24 to 26 in the original document. Anyway, anything around 300-500 is fine and spare batteries are dirt cheap.

Page 10 – The lens charts show the lens peaks at f/4-5.6, just like Leica’s 35mm Summicron. The built in ND filter reduces sensor sensitivity by 3 stops. Handy when you want to use a slow shutter speed or large aperture but the light is otherwise too bright. For those who think they should be wasting their money on an X100 to take pictures of flowers, the LCD finder will allow framing down to 4″ (10cm).

Page 11 – Like on the Leica M8/9, peripheral photosite lenses on the sensor are inclined inward to minimize edge optical aberrations. There is some sort of dynamic range enhancement built in to reduce highlight burn out.

Page 12 – The top and bottom casings are die-cast magnesium. That beats a cheap pressing though I would have preferred plastic, owing to its greater shock resistance and flexibility when struck. They claim the lens engravings are hand-filled with enamel. Whatever. The reference to “Made in Japan” is so duplicitous you can bet the thing is made in China. The body covering is plastic. The smooth rubber from the G1 would have been better, if less sexy. The clear intent here is to mimic early Leica M bodies, though those used vulcanite which cracks and peels with age. There’s a dumb-as-it-gets male thread on the front of the lens with a decorative cover ring. You have to remove this and fit an adapter for a protective 49mm filter. As most 49mm filters have a front thread, it may be possible to simply screw one on reversed, but that would require the thread pitch on the lens to be identical to that used in filters. I don’t know if that is the case. There’s an optional leather case which no sane snapper will come within 100 miles of. There’s also an optional lens hood for those with more money than sense. Also an optional TTL flash for the same set.

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Page 13 – The rear thumb wheel allows 1/3rd stop adjustments compared with 1 stop for the shutter dial on the top and aperture ring on the lens. Not sure how this interacts with what the mechanical dials show. The AE/AF button can be set to lock just AE or just AF. I cannot figure out whether a first pressure on the shutter release locks focus (which I like) and if so, that means I’ll be setting the AE/AF button to AE only, like on my G1. I have no comments on manual focus as I cannot see any use for it in street shots where time is of the essence. Those who like manual gearshifts in cars can get off on the options here. There’s a RAW button if you want to shoot in RAW and the camera is set to JPG. Who cares? Set the camera to RAW. There’s a bunch of stuff on white balance but as that’s all in Lightroom I don’t care. You can use sRGB or AdobeRGB gamuts. 5 shots per second bursts are limited to 2 seconds, 10 shots. Lots of bracketing options – AE, ISO setting, and film simulation (footnoted on p.14) – between Provia (natural), Velvia (garish) and Astia (flat). These purportedly emulate Fuji’s film emulsions. Nothing you can’t so in Lightroom or Photoshop.

Metering is selectable between multi metering (meaning you are clueless what is being measured), spot (2%) and average. The latter, used with RAW, is just what the doctor ordered for street snaps.

There’s an AF assist lamp for slow scenes as in “Hey! I’m over here! Can you see me now?”.

ISO top speed can be pushed to 12,800 from 6,400, a choice which can be assigned to the Fn button. Smart. Auto ISO works between 200 and 3200.

The reference to 0.01 second Shutter Time Lag is pure BS. They are trying to mislead by referring to VF display response not shutter lag. Every consumer camera on earth has a shutter lag dozens of times slower and the X100 will be no exception.

Here’s a show stopper. The included (and crappy) Silkypix software works with Winblows only! Wouldn’t do to realize that 99% of all creative people use Macs now, would it? This means that if you shoot RAW, like I do, you will have to use Windows with an emulator (I use the free VirtualBox from Sun and Wincrap XP) to process the images using SilkyPix until Adobe and Apple come up with RAW converters for Photoshop, Elements, Lightroom, iPhoto and Aperture. Ugh!

Page 14 – Built in Yellow, Red and Green filters for those who like to shoot in monochrome and don’t know how to use color or Lightroom. Beyond pretentious. The illustrations are so poor it’s hard to make out any difference. There’s some sort of dynamic range control for high contrast situations. If you like to get hosed down and buy the lens hood, it comes with the filter adapter ring.

No mention of movie mode anywhere which spares me additional vituperation. This is emphatically not a movie camera, having just two uses. One is for street snaps. The other is for the insecure – the types who put stickers in their rear windows saying which university they attended – to show their wealth. Those are the ones who will happily buy the silly leather case.

But, overall, this looks promising.

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