Category Archives: Hardware

Stuff

Two bargains from Panasonic

Micro Four-Thirds

Cheap lenses.

Aficionados of the MFT camera range from Panny (G1/G2/G10/GH1/GH2/GF1) can hardly complain about the prices of two of the most useful lens options – prices are from B&H in the US but doubtless can be matched elsewhere:

I have no special need for the first as the 14-45mm kit lens does it for me, and I wouldn’t use the fast aperture of this neat pancake lens, but I simply love the 45-200mm zoom for its OIS, low weight, small size and great performance.

I forget the prices of these when they were first announced, but suspect the above are much less.

The beauty of the promise of the MFT format is that it seems to me that the sensors will only get better, so these lenses will deliver better results from the next generation of bodies than they already do from the ones currently available.

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.