A cornucopia of choices.

On the camera front this year choices, with one exception, have been modestly incremental. The flapping mirror DSLR is at the end of its life, obsoleted by electronic viewfinders, and will struggle on for a few more years in the hands of a few professional users who have yet to fully amortize their capital investment. Meanwhile, EVFs move to strength in the likes of the Sony NEX-7 and, of course, in the Panasonic G3 and GH1. All that’s needed to speed the demise of the clunky, bulky DSLR is a professional grade APS-C or MFT body and maybe a few faster lenses. Responsiveness will only improve, and the G3 has shown that autofocus is now as fast or faster with modern technologies than that offered in traditional bodies.

After an interminable wait, I finally got my G3 body, and while it compromises handling in the interest of an even smaller size, the sensor is two stops better than the one in the G1, and once the improved and more compact PZ kit lens arrives – back ordered for months now – the G1 and its excellent kit lens will move on. The sensor is now so good that I need nothing better. As I can reliably make perfect 18″ x 24″ prints from the G3’s files, I have no need for more pixels. Focusing speed is outstanding and while there are a few ergonomic quibbles, the overall package is a street snapper’s dream. Those needing more sophisticated movie functions will opt for the costlier GH2 body, with a similar sensor and better handling. The G3 + kit lens at $600 make a compelling case for junking all that bulky old gear. You know, that kit you increasingly leave behind because photography is meant to be fun, not a sore shoulder and bad back. 2012 may well see a pro-grade GH3 added to the mix. The MFT lens range is already vast with something for most tastes from several makers.

Hair replacement. Market Street, SF. G3, kit lens @16mm, 1/2500, f/5.6, ISO320.

The day when we will see a true modern version of the rangefinder Leica is now very close. Panny offers the operational speed, Sony the best EVF in the business, Fuji in its X100 and X10 has the form factor right, and lenses are getting smaller and lighter daily. With all this gear offering full automation the street snapper has never been better served.

The other incremental improvement in camera gear this year has been the addition of the splendid Sony lens to the latest iPhone, the 4S, along with much improved response times. While any cell phone is a handling disaster, owing to its form factor, the 4S really makes decent print sizes possible, and has a simple and practical UI. If only Apple would make a real camera the world would open its wallet. It’s a $20bn revenue opportunity waiting to capitalize on the sloth of Canon and Nikon, neither with any credible innovation or thinking to entice the more demanding user. I have 13″ x 19″ prints on the wall here made from the 4S and while the snaps were made in ideal lighting conditions, the very fact that a decent sized print can be made is a revelation, given how compact the camera is. And it even makes phone calls!

But by a considerable margin, my award for Hardware of the Year goes to Intel and its superb line of Sandy Bridge CPUs.

These come in many flavors at various prices, from the bottom of the line i3 2100 at $115, to the top of the line i7 2600K at $320. In 2012 the enhanced Ivy Bridge range will bring higher speeds yet still using the same socket, dictating but a BIOS update to work on your existing motherboard. All come with built in graphics, with select i3 and all i5 and i7 models including the better quality Intel Graphics 3000 GPU, so that the computer builder does not even have to use a separate graphics card. Power consumption is way down from the predecessor Core2Duo/Extreme/Quad lines, the prices continue to drop and the performance is significantly improved in all respects. For the novice computer builder, be it Windows or OS X or Linux, the only thing to fear is fear itself, with an abundance of excellent help sites on the web to speed your construction. Even hacking PC hardware to run OS X is now at the point where it’s almost trivial, and the alternatives simply do not solve. You can buy a pre-assembled piece of garbage from Dell or HP, or a piece of short-lived poorly designed but beautifully executed jewelry from Apple in the guise of an iMac, but given that any photographer today spends more time in front of a computer display than behind a camera, why not enjoy the best and build your own? Intel has never made it simpler, with their ‘K’ CPU models warranted for overclocking, so with a couple of key strokes the builder can increase CPU speed by 20-40%. Incremental cost? $zero.

I upgraded my three display HackPro stalwart from a Core2Quad to a Core i5-2500K, overclocked a modest 21%, and am enjoying response and video framing rates nothing short of astounding. Memory speed with the latest RAM sticks is twice that of the predecessor, with some 16gB running a mere $70. You can view the results by clicking Links->Videos on this site. So enthused was I by the price:performance equation, that I junked my old Intel Atom-powered stock quotes Hack and replaced it with an inexpensive i3 2100 machine, with a speedy Nvidia GT430 GPU, and two inexpensive 1920×1080 displays. Why, and the US taxpayer subsidized me for half the cost, the lot being a deductible business expense.

And finally, I replaced one of the worst pieces of hardware I have ever used, the late-2009 MacMini, with a HackMini, also using the i3 and the same GPU as a movie server and home theater PC. I have never been happier. Movies are ripped/compressed with no stress, there is a total absence of all those start up errors the Mini came with as stock, it does not overheat, and the DVD player is a real machine with an extending tray, not the terminally doomed slot-loading excrescence in the Mini. Yes, Virginia, consumers still watch DVDs, much as Apple would tell you otherwise. My gift-to-self this Christmas is a 35 DVD box of Clint Eastwood’s Warner Brothers movies, for the grand sum of $77 from Amazon. These will be ripped and stored to my server boxes in no time and watching them will come without all those offensive commercials modern DVDs include. Go ahead, make my day. And “I’m paying for this microphone, Mr. Chairman”, as a one time presidential candidate remarked. Don’t ask me to pay to watch your advertising. Finally, the Hack Mini has USB sockets and a card reader where you can actually access them – on the front – nor hidden away among the mess of cables and spider webs in the MacMini.

Reliability of these machines? All are on 7/24 and the only time I restart is when an application upgrade dictates that be done. All run OS X Lion.

Do yourself a big favor. Junk your desktop and replace it with something bespoke which you have built yourself. If you get really stuck, ask your 9 year old to do the assembly.

An interesting development.

When a reader pointed the new Sony NEX-7 out to me I brushed it off with the rebuff that cameras without proper viewfinders hold no interest for me. Yes, I use an iPhone 4S which lacks one, but that’s hardly for ‘serious’ snapping. It’s all I can do to hold that gadget when taking a snap without dropping it.

Well, I was wrong. Not only does the flood-delayed NEX-7, when it emerges from Thailand, have a viewfinder, it’s a high pixel density EVF, on paper an improvement over the one in the Panny G3 and GH2. And Sony has dropped the ridiculous prism ‘bump’ which Panny insists on including in its DSLRs.

From pictures it’s a little hard to reconcile the seemingly gargantuan lenses, mostly in garish, shiny chrome, with the small body, and the alternative of using adapted Leica M optics is simply not an alternative. No auto focus and silly prices make it so.

But it’s an interesting entry from Sony and one which boasts a high megapixel sensor. If responsiveness and the UI are half decent, it will be a meaningful entry into the APS-C marketplace. However, at $1200 for the body + kit lens, I doubt Panasonic is losing any sleep over it.

Seemingly gargantuan kit lens in place.

A quick fix for a dead HDD.

A new Samsung HE103UJ 1tB disk drive runs some $240, a great deal more than the $120 I paid for mine, the immediately previous generation HD103UH with the same specs – 32mB cache, 7200 rpm, 3mb/s SATAII data transfer rate. At that replacement cost I reckoned there was no downside to taking it apart and seeing if something obvious was the cause. The drive would not be recognized by OS X’s Finder but would pop up in Disk Utility. However, Disk Utility could neither repair or erase the drive, those options remaining greyed out.

Yes, there are cheaper drives out there, but as a reader commented on yesterday’s column, recent drive failure rates seem to be skyrocketing. The Sammy is a known, high quality drive, mine being 3.5 years old. I own a dozen of these 1tB drives and this is the first to fail. Most have over 3 years’ use, often 7/24.

The controller board on the back of these is retained with five T8 Torx screws and I had it off in a couple of minutes. It makes contact with the drive’s innards in two areas – a multi-contact connector and a two point one – both circled below:

Even to the naked eye it was obvious that the multi-contact connector was heavily oxidized, though there were no signs of heat damage anywhere on the board and the drive neither overheated or made strange noises which would suggest mechanical issues. A couple of seconds cleaning the contacts with my son’s school eraser, the board was replaced and guess what?

Yup, Disk Utility erased and formatted the drive immediately and the Repair function found no errors. The drive also now appeared in Finder.

Sammy must have sold millions of these and they have a deservedly great reputation, so before applying a sledgehammer to your blown one, as long as the heads are not clicking like mad, the bearing is not screaming and it can still be seen in Disk Utility, try this quick fix. I checked a couple of other 3.5″ SATA drives from other makers and the mechanics seem much the same, with the controller board attached with a few screws.

Spinning discs rule – if only just.

First, a few words about large traditional spinning disk (HDD) external drive enclosures. These are still the cheapest way to store large amounts of data. The recent floods in Thailand, which accounts for one third of global drive manufacturing, have increased prices from as low as 9 cents/gB to maybe 11 cents/gB for the slower drives, but that still puts SSDs to shame, with prices around $3/gB, or 25x as much. And SSD capacities are atill low. A 1tB Western Digital Caviar Green HDD runs some $130 today.

My rule is that if you buy a single traditional HDD for storage you are playing with fire. Drives simply must be duplicated as one or the other will eventually fail. A device whose multiple platters spin at a minimum of 5,400rpm – that’s 2.84 billion revolutions a year if left on – and whose data heads fly back and forth at insane speeds, is a modern miracle which works awfully hard. So matched pairs it is. Further, I don’t buy ‘passive cooling’ arguments, where fins are claimed to conduct heat away. Nope, if it doesn’t have a fan I’m not interested. And finally, I don’t trust RAID. A simple copy works for me, not yet more technology waiting to go wrong. I use Carbon Copy Cloner for automated overnight backups so that there’s nothing to forget.

When one of my OWC/MacSales enclosures recently failed, just out of warranty (naturally), a failure that was the driver for yesterday’s column, I ordered a like replacement from OWC. These are not cheap at $120 each but they are well made, beautifully finished in unpainted aluminum and as only one of the five I have owned for years had failed I didn’t particularly want to explore alternatives. But OWC has changed the design and the latest variant which ships without drives has deleted the internal dip switches which permitted setting the box to recognize the two drives inside as individual devices. The current version permits RAID only. Back it went. OWC told me they only sell these with pre-installed HDDs of their make of choice for individual drive setups, as some makers’ drives are too temperamental to be thus recognized. I had two good drives, so an empty enclosure was what I required.

So I shopped around for a dual drive, fan cooled enclosure, which permitted the two drives to be recognized as separate devices, and settled a tad reluctantly on the Vantec NexStar MX. The low price was troubling – just $45 from Amazon USA. Further, the Amazon reviews complained about the fan noise but I reckoned at that price there was little to lose. Well, it turns out this is a fine enclosure. While it comes in black only, the drive mounting scheme is far superior to the fiddly cables used by OWC. The drives simply slide in, there are no cables, and each is retained with the screws provided. Four more small Philips screws hold the enclosure together and you are in business. The enclosure is beautifully made, requiring no excuses. This is USB2 only, so high data transfer rates will not happen here, but for mass storage of photographs or movies, these are just the ticket. The drive enclosure is 12 feet away from where I work so fan noise is not an issue. If it is you could probably hack away the grille to reduce it or reduce the fan speed as one Amazon reviewer did. He soldered a 120 ohm resistor in series with the power supply cable to the fan. The trade off is that the enclosure will run hotter.

There’s a green power light and a blue LED for each HDD to denote activity.

Rear view. The stand need not be used in practice and is removable.

The drives simply slide in. No cables required.

The manual specifically states that the capacity is 2 x 1tB HDDs. Amazon reviewers suggest that 2 x 1.5tB is possible although new drivers may have to be installed. I don’t know if this enclosure will support larger drives. I doubt it. So if you are happy with two 1tB HDDs, this is fine. Anything larger, do your research first. 2tB drives currnetly offer the lowest data storage cost per byte. I rather suspect that if you partition these into two 1tB partitions they will work fine, as I am guessing that the enclosure’s drive controller chip is choking at anything larger than a 1tB partition, but I do not know. Finally, this enclosure will not support the higher data transfer rates offered by the latest SATAIII HDDs. It supports SATAI and II only. If you can live with those limitations it’s a fine and inexpensive solution for large volume data storage needs.