Category Archives: Photography

Olympus 17mm f/1.8 MFT Zuiko – Part III

Micro Four-Thirds, Photographs

Some snaps.

You can read my review of the Panasonic GX7 here.

Part II of this lens review is here.

AF speed:

By way of preface, I can state categorically that the AF focus speed of the Olympus lens on my GX7 body is as close to instantaneous as is possible regardless of the lighting. Whereas I had a 30% rejection rate with the 20mm Panasonic because the lens did not focus in time, the rejection rate with the Olympus, based on the 193 images I snapped the other day, none at an aperture smaller than f/2.5, was zero. Such rejects as there were resulted from poor composition, weak subject matter and so on.

For the street snapper little more need be said.

Flare:

Before getting into the serious street stuff, let’s dispel any issues concerning flare, the other debilitating ‘feature’ found in the Panasonic optic. This unexciting image was shot with the sun in the frame, shining directly into the lens:


Minimal flare.

No modern lens I own, not even the 35mm f/1.4 Sigma for the Nikon, can hold a candle to this performance. One other note. The Olympus 17mm f/1.8 lens delivers exceptionally high contrast images (which goes hand in hand with its outstanding flare resistance), so much so that I found that I often had to turn down contrast (Down with the Highlights slider, Up with the Shadows one) when processing the RAW images in Lightroom 5.

Sharpness:

Resolution? The only thing to report here is that 18″ x 24″ prints, a medium far more demanding than any electronic display, are par for the course at any aperture you care to use. Stopping the lens down need only be done when more depth of field is required.

Is the lens as sharp as Sigma’s monster 35mm f/1.4 on my (even more gigantic) Nikon D3x? No. I doubt anything is, if you have the patience to actually find an example of the Sigma whose AF is properly adjusted – it took me three before I got there. Then again, the Sigma with no camera body weighs more than the GX7/17mm combination and the Olympus focuses noticeably faster.

Is the Oly sharper than the Panny 20mm? Who knows, given the Panny’s inability to lock in sharp focus in a reasonable time?

Pictures:

Here are some snaps from my outing, all taken in San Francisco on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, the city alive with shoppers and tourists. All were taken between f/1.8 and f/2.8, using RAW originals processed in Lightroom 5, with ISO from 400 (Kodak TriX lives!) to 3200. Mostly these are straight out of the camera, with no post processing other than RAW conversion to JPG and automatic application of my lens correction profile :


Lighting up. Nothing beats a 35mm (FFE) lens on the streets.


Selfie. The GX7/17mm Oly combination is almost impossibly responsive.


$5 pup. I snapped five in five seconds here – a buck a snap – and the fourth
caught the dog just so. The truly silent electronic shutter in the GX7 is a boon.


These charmers were getting a lot of attention.


Carving my pastrami at Lefty O’Doul’s.
The rye bread here is beyond fresh.
At f/1.8, ISO3200.


Dining al fresco on Maiden Lane. Quite lovely colors here.


Impossible not to make a donation when visited with warmth like this.
At f/2.5 and ISO400, this one made a gorgeous 18″ x 24″ print.


Uh huh.


Tattoo dude.


Looking up.


Toothless in San Francisco.


What happens when you listen to sell side stock tips.


Shoeshine man. The electronic shutter is inaudible at any subject distance.


Porsche girl.


Alone.


The sales pitch here was “Jesus is a Negro”.


Ritz Carlton guards making out like the CIA.


Beautiful color rendering. The GX7’s in-body OIS works well – this was at 1/20th.


The shallow depth of field at large apertures comes in handy.
The Oly lens has excellent resolution.


Some faces leave no time for composition. The last snap of this outing
and I was half dead from exhaustion, but could not pass this by.

Color rendering:

The color rendering is really pleasing in these images. Whether that’s due to the camera, the lens or both I have no idea, but the combination is right up there with Bogart and Bacall, Astaire and Rogers, and JP Morgan and systemic corruption.

Aperture priority operation:

I used the ‘A’ exposure mode for all of these snaps, with the electronic (silent) shutter, meaning that the only thing I ever had to fiddle with was the control wheel to change apertures. Panny really needs to update its firmware to allow one stop intervals between clicks, here. Only gear fetishists need the default 1/3rd stop steps, which only serve to slow operation down.

Electronic shutter math:

One caution – as I always use the silent electronic shutter in the GX7 – doing so with fluorescent lighting as the sole light source is not a great idea. You will get stripes as the tubes flash on and off during the exposure, as here:


In the little boys’ room. f/1.8, ISO 3200. Spare GX7 battery
is in the coin pocket in my jeans. The excellent
slip proof Upstrap is on the camera.

Be sure to read the Comment below regarding the use of non-OEM batteries.

Assuming a 60Hz flash frequency (US mains) the five cycles seen here suggest that the electronic shutter takes 1/12th second (5/60) to traverse/scan the field of pixels, which is why you get noticeable distortion of moving images taken using this shutter. You can bet that the scan speed will increase in subsequent iterations of this design, making for less movement distortion.

For my preferred subject matter, movement distorion is not an issue. If it’s an issue for you, use the faster traversing mechanical shutter in the GX7, which is some ten times faster in this instance. Why anyone would need the primary benefit of the electronic shutter – silence – with a moving subject is beyond me, so I fail to see this as an issue.

What I write is genre specific:

In these articles it is not my goal to comment on anything other than taking street snaps and making nice, big, sharp prints from them. If movies, landscapes, birds, bugs or sports are your thing this is the worst place to look for guidance. If you want to learn about the mind numbing selection of exposure modes, issues like framing rates, white balance and sensor aberrations or how well this gear compares with dozens of competitors, there are any number of fellows with white lab coats and zero imagination out there whose site content you should be reading instead.

Controls and ergonomics:

The knurled ring surrounding the shutter button is programmed to change apertures, being faster in use than the rear control dial. Other than the shutter release, it’s the only control used in the field, along with the C1/C2/C3 top right dial settings which are programmed to ISO 400, 1200 and 3200, respectively. ISO 3200 is the maximum the electronic shutter works with, which is just fine at f/1.8 in poor light.

Panny has some silly statements in its instruction manual as to the largest prints which can be made at different ISOs – silly on the conservative side, that is. Anything up to ISO 3200 will, given a modicum of technical skill, yield prints of any size your heart desires. Panasonic has made steady progress from the sensor found in its groundbreaking G1 and is to be highly commended for its efforts.


Street snapper’s dream machine. Amateur looks, state-of-the-art responsiveness.

The nice chromed protective lens filter is a 46mm UV from B+W and is a recommended accessory given the relatively exposed front element which, like the rear element, is plane on the outside, being neither convex or concave.

Finally, note that I dispensed with the duct tape on the top plate holding the EVF in place, replacing it with some double-sided sticky tape below the eyepiece, where it’s invisible.

Conclusion:

For years I have dreamed of a small, fast, automated digital camera and fast prime wide angle lens to do what the Leica M did so well for me on the streets for over three decades. Small with instant response, silent, unobtrusive, sharp. And with autofocus, please! Let’s not forget in-body OIS. Don’t-care-if-it’s-stolen cheap would be nice, too.

In the Panasonic GX7 mated with the Olympus 17mm f/1.8 MFT lens, I rather fancy that my dreams have been granted, and for less money than a couple of hours on the local shrink’s couch for far greater benefit. The sheer ‘transparency’ of this combination, placing fewer obstacles between the eye, the brain and the recorded image than ever before, redefines the street snapping standard for this devotee of the genre.

Recommended without reservations for like minded photographers.

Olympus 17mm f/1.8 MFT Zuiko Part II

Micro Four-Thirds

Very promising.

You can read my review of the Panasonic GX7 here.

Part I of this lens review is here.

Chrome and small:

A chrome body deserves a chrome lens, so that’s the version I chose of the Olympus 17mm f/1.8 for my GX7.


On the GX7.

Compared with the (really excellent, though constrained by its slower apertures) 14-45mm Panasonic MFT kit zoom, the 17mm Olympus is noticeably more compact. Weight is about the same, the metal exteriors of the Olympus seeing to that. Is it meaningful that the finish is metal rather than resin? No. As long as the result is small, sharp, fast and cheap, who cares? And, as I will illustrate, the Oly is all of those things. Say what you may about the construction quality of Leica’s 35mm f/2 Aspherical Summicron, throw-away cheap it most certainly is not. You can buy eight of the Olys for one Summicron and still have dinner money left over, not to mention AF into the bargain.


Compared with the Panny kit zoom lens.

Now anything is smaller than a Nikon D2/3/4 body, short of a Mack truck, but you can get a sense of the diminutive size of the lens on the GX7 here:


The warbler and the cuckoo. The awful looking black electrician’s
tape was replaced with chrome duct tape, below.

Ergonomic fixes:

First, a couple of fixes with silver duct tape are called for to enhance the functionality of the GX7.

Because Olympus uses a snap-back focus collar allowing engagement of MF, a piece of tape is stuck to the underside of the lens to prevent accidental engagement of MF mode. The spring detent is relatively weak and MF makes absolutely no sense with this lens, though I can testify to the smoothness of the MF action, with proper infinity and closest focus stops and no feel of grinding gears:


Tape prevents engagement of MF mode. The big arrow upper
right makes it easier to open the battery/SD card cover.

Then the hard-to-see-who-would-ever-use-this pivoting EVF eyepiece is taped well and truly in the normal position as it has shown a frustrating preference for getting dislodged with the GX7 slung over the shoulder. I admit that the superglue option is tempting here. You snap the camera to the eye and the bloody eyepiece is pointing heavenwards, accomplishing the twin results of ensuring you miss the snap and making sure you look like a dork.


Tape keeps the eyepiece where it belongs.
This is tough silver duct tape.

Lens correction profile:

Next, I created a lens correction profile as none seems available from Adobe – probably because on Olympus bodies vignetting and distortion are automatically corrected, not something available to Panasonic body users.

You can find the profile here (scroll to near the end, past all the yummy MF Nikkor profiles), download it and install it where indicated. Thereafter, if your camera’s import profile is set to automatically apply the lens correction profile, you will see this once your images are imported to Lightroom (or Photoshop):


EXIF data in Lightroom,
using my profile.

Why create a lens correction profile? Because, through f/5.6, the 17mm Olympus shows noticeable vignetting on Panasonic bodies, especially from f/1.8 through f/2.8, together with very minor barrel distortion at all apertures.

Camera orientation sensor:

Yippee! One of my (minor) grumbles about the outstanding Olympus 9-18mm zoom lens was that the orientation sensor was missing. Import of images to Lightroom, where the camera was held in portrait mode, would import in landscape orientation, necessitating these all be highlighted in Grid view and turned through 90 degrees. Not a big deal, but an irritant. Well, when I imported my first images from the Oly 17mm on the GX7, portrait snaps came in correctly oriented. So I went back and checked the GX7 with the Oly 9-18mm and, blow me down, those came in correctly too. So the fault appears to lie in earlier Panasonic MFT bodies which did not play well with Oly optics in this regard, and it’s nice to see this has been fixed.

Manual vs. autofocus:

MF is there if you must, but quite why you would want to use it beats me. It’s rather like a stick shift in a modern car where automatic gearboxes are far faster than any manual shift possible. The focus speed with AF is instantaneous to all intents and purposes. Need to focus off center? Pre-focus on the area of interest then take a first pressure on the button to lock focus, recompose and click. What could be simpler, faster or more accurate?

The provision of near-instant AF with the GX7/17mm Oly combination does more to obsolete any thoughts of a digital Leica M/35mm Summicron than any consideration of price, sensor size, quality of manufacture, bragging rights, you name it. I’ll have taken five perfectly focused images while the Leica user is still futzing with his focus collar, trying to get those small rangefinder images superimposed. As a street snapper, the Leica is obsolete regardless of affordability. Period.

Comparing the Oly optic with the Panny 20mm is no contest. In addition to awful flare, the Panny adds to its woes by making a noticeable grinding noise while struggling toward the focus point, where the Olympus optic is dead silent, making the Oly especially useful for movie makers. Sure the Panny optic is sharp, once it gets there (just avoid sun anywhere near the optical axis), but it’s probably best destined for architecture and landscape snappers with a tripod where focus speed is irrelevant. Static subjects, in other words. For that matter, an FF DSLR is a far better choice for this sort of work where definition tends to be the be all and end all, and weight is rarely a consideration.

To enter MF mode, the focus collar is pulled back toward the body where it clicks into place, disclosing the useless depth-of-field scale but providing real hard stops at closest focus and infinity. Nicely done. Focus peaking on the GX7 works fine (and especially so in poor light for MF mavens) but, for the life of me, I cannot engage the enlarged center of image focus mode which is so well engineered with Panasonic lenses. Switching the GX7’s body lever to MF makes no difference. If it’s in the extended instruction manual I cannot find it, but even a Talmud scholar would struggle to find anything in that abomination. Panasonic continues to make the worst user manuals in the universe.

Spare battery: Goodness knows who the supply chain genius at Panasonic is – probably Tim Cook moonlighting – but spare batteries for the GX7 remain unavailable, and will run $60 when they finally arrive in the US. I bought a $15 Wasabi spare and it works perfectly, both in the camera and in the charger. A spare or two make sense with the GX7 whose small size dictates an even smaller battery. You will be luck to get 300 snaps on a charge and if you pixel peep or use the camera’s wi-fi 150 is more realistic. Not great.

In Part III I will report on use of this lens on the streets.

Here’s a first snap at f/2, ISO1250:


Waiting for my French coffee and croissant.

Trust me on this one, you will like what you see.

Olympus 17mm f/1.8 MFT Zuiko – Part I

Micro Four-Thirds

A fix for what ails the 20mm Panasonic lens?

You can read my review of the Panasonic GX7 here.

I just ordered a 17mmm f/1.8 Olympus Zuiko AF lens for my Panasonic GX7 body. As the GX7 adds in-body image stabilization and as the Olympus lens is reputed to have very fast and silent autofocus, the combination of the small body and the 35mm (FF equivalent) fast prime lens proved irresistible. I paid $400.


Olympus.

The standard for comparison here is, of course, the 35mm Leica rangefinder optic which graced my Leica M2 and M3 bodies for over three decades. Whether as a modest f/3.5 Summaron, a better f/2.8 Summaron, and even better f/2 8-element Summicron and, finally, the ne plus ultra f/2 Aspherical Summicron, ‘Leica M body’ and ’35mm lens’ simply go together. Until modern AF and digital sensors came along, a Leica rangefinder body and a 35mm MF lens were the street snapper’s ideal. Then prices went stratospheric and now only investment banksters can afford them, for display in their china cabinets along with their trophy wives.


Leica. Note the corrosion
on the brass helix.

The specifications are similar, but the Leica optic uses heavy chromed brass in its construction whereas the Olympus makes do with plastics for the most part, set in a light alloy metal barrel. Both lenses come with engraved DOF scales, both quite useless given that such calibration is meaningful for a specific print or display size only. ‘Retro chic’ is the best (?) you can say of it, disregard it and get down to snapping.

The Leica optic is 1.4″ long as is the Olympus, with diameters coming in at 2.0″ and 2.3″, respectively. But the German lens weighs 12.8 ozs compared with but 4.2 ozs for the Japanese one. The Summicron focuses to 28″ while the Olympus goes down to 10″.

And there are two other factors to consider. The dated, overpriced Leica M body has no AF, and a tired optical finder whereas the GX7 boasts a stabilized body with an excellent EVF and full AF and manual focus modes. Any Panny owner, however inept, with but a few snaps under his belt will beat the Leica investment banker to accurate focus every single time and his success rate will be 100%. Guaranteed. And with the electronic shutter option in the GX7 he can do so in total silence. The Panny operator will also be able to use 2-3 shutter speeds slower owing to the (excellent) Panny IBIS, negating the advantage the Leica’s bankster owner’s claims for his bigger …. errr …. sensor.

Silly me. How could I forget. There’s a third and overriding factor. When it comes to total weight and cost, there’s no comparison. How do $10,200/36.8 ozs versus $1,400/18.4 ozs sound for the camera and body ensemble? No prizes for guessing which is the MFT version.

In Part II I’ll take a look at some ergonomic issues and fixes for this combination. Long time readers will recall the massive disappointment I had with the Panasonic 20mm f/1.7 lens which was incapable of fast focus and made a lot of noise not getting there on time, only to deliver one of the most flare prone images I recall in any lens since my 1959 Kodak Brownie 620. That Panny lens was returned 400 images and one day later to B&H, in disgust. It’s since been updated in Version II with a metal focus collar but, by all accounts, remains every bit as flawed. The only consolation here is that the Olympus optic cannot possibly be worse. (Reminds me why I bought MSFT stock when Ballmer was finally booted out. His successor could not possibly be worse).

Flare – a sneak peek:

The reflected sunlight from the Transamerica building was so intense that it was impossible to look at, but if you can see any flare in the result your eyes are better than mine. OK, there is one pinhead sized flare spot visible in the top left of the building at the right if you look hard, but absolutely no overall veiling of the image. Remarkable.


Panasonic GX7, 17mm f/1.8 Olympus MFT at f/2.8. No filter used.

More on flare – or rather on its absence – later. No, I did not use the silly-priced $60 Olympus lens hood (maybe Leica makes it?) as I do not own it. Cheaper aftermarket versions exist but I will pass in the name of compactness.

Part II is here.

Mac Pro buying opportunities

Mac Pro

Looking better and better.


The best desktop computer from Apple. Ever.

The new Mac Pro:

With the new Mac Pro (the small, cylindrical one) due out very soon, the 2009-2012 models will become even better bargains. There are very few performance metrics yet available for the nMP and while it’s reasonable to guess that CPU and GPU performance will be fine, there remains a big question over cooling efficiency. Apple has gone from 7 (or 8, if your GPU has two) large fans to one small one to cool the nMP and having had three iBooks and two iMacs literally melt their GPU chips in my household, owing to Apple’s compromised heat engineering, you can understand my sensitivity about proper thermal design.

Further, quite why Apple has relegated storage to external devices with the nMP and focused on making a professional machine as small as possible quite defeats me. The small size is a solution in search of a problem (do you hear production pros complaining that their computers are too big?) but early adopters of the nMP will only do photographers a favor by flooding the market with the older machines and driving prices down in the process. Right now supply of the old 2009 Mac Pros appears tight as the word gets out just how special these Mac Pros are, but I expect that situation to change markedly in favor of abundant supplies in the near future.

The new machine will start at $3,000 (4 core) to $4,000 (6 core) and I would be prepared to wager that a loaded 6 core machine will easily hit 5 figures.

The old MacPro:

A mint 2009 can currently be had for $700 (one CPU) or $1,100 (two CPUs) and as I have illustrated at length on my blog these machines can be easily and cheaply enhanced with better CPUs, SATA III drives, SSDs, USB3, RAM, Blu-Ray DVD drives, etc. It would be hard to spend a total of much more than $2,000 on a loaded dual CPU machine which comes with more internal storage and expandability than you can shake a stick at. There is no point in getting anything other than an absolutely mint machine. The thought of waking up to a beater for the next 2,000 or so days of ownership and heavy use makes no sense for the insignificant amount saved. $100 off for scratches and bruises? Are you kidding me?

Earlier models of the Mac Pro are not a good investment at any price. The 2008 is marginal as additional RAM is costly, being of a special design, though it will at least run 64-bit applications using its slow CPUs. 2007 and prior are obsolete owing to their 32 bit designs which deny the best performance in the latest applications. The 2009 Mac Pro, single or dual CPU, is very much in the sweet spot for price/performance/upgradability. The 2010 and 2012 later models added faster CPUs and better graphics cards at significant increases in cost. Otherwise they are identical to the 2009, with the sole exception of the unique CPU socket design in the 2009 dual CPU model.

CPU upgrades:

The most cost effective CPU upgrades are currently the (non-Xeon) Core i7-980 6-core for the single CPU Mac Pro ($330 used – a far better bargain than the $600+ used Xeon W3680 with the same functionality and speed) and the Xeon W5590 3.33GHz 8-core for the dual CPU Mac Pro ($400 for a used pair). Either option increases CPU speed by 50%.

We can expect to see prices on 12-core paired X5680 (3.33GHz) and X5690 (3.46GHz) CPUs to come down quickly as these CPUs are discontinued and server room upgrades see a flood coming to the market. Google alone probably has a million awaiting sale …. Currently, for dual CPU machines the 12-core CPU pairs run $1,200 and up, making the modest performance boost over the W5590 a poor return on investment. I see no significant risk to buying used, with the better bulk recyclers offering money back guarantees. I lose count of how many used CPUs I have purchased and have yet to get a bad one.

While CPU upgrades in the 2009 dual CPU machines are tricky owing to the unique design of the CPU sockets, you can pay experts (like me – click here for details of my upgrade service) to do it right on a turnkey basis and take out risk from the equation.

Alternatively, for the DIY set, buy faster CPUs from my colleague Paul Opsahl who modifies CPUs for the 2009 dual CPU Mac Pros for very modest outlay using costly lab tools, making for a drop-in replacement.

Either approach is cost-effective for a machine which easily has a 5 year life expectancy with no excuses necessary for performance.

USB3 built in?

Adding powered USB3 through a PCIe card is simple, as I illustrate, but Paul is also working on a custom modification to the front panel USB2 sockets to make them USB3 and I hope to showcase his work here down the road.

Equalling Thunderbolt speed in the old Mac Pro:

About the only modification you cannot currently make to the ‘old’ Mac Pro is the addition of Thunderbolt connectivity for external devices. The technology seems to be centered on the motherboard and no cards are available for use in PCIe slots.

However, once you break through all the hype surrounding Thunderbolt (cost is high – reckon on $1,100 for a TB disk enclosure and cables compared with $200 for USB3), you realize that you can easily approach or exceed TB speeds through the simple expedient of pairing two SATAIII drives using an Apricorn card and striping them in RAID0 using Apple’s Disk Utility. Bingo! TB speeds at USB3 prices. So the non-availability of TB is hardly a deal breaker here.


Two old RAID0 120GB SATAII SSDs running in my Mac Pro.

The above shows speed test results for two RAID0 SATAII ancient SSDs inside my 2009 Mac Pro. Were these SATAIII drives attached to an internal Apricorn card ($50) then Read and Write speeds would double, with the results comparable to or superior to Thunderbolt.

Airport wi-fi upgrades:


A Broadcomm (Airport) card installed on the motherboard in a Mac Pro.
PCs use the same 802.11n card.

As regards wi-fi, the newest 802.11ac protocol found in the latest laptops, iMacs and the new Mac Pro should become readily available using plug-in USB ‘dongles’ before long. There are one or two out there already but early reports suggest some problems remain to be resolved. But I believe it’s just a matter of time before aftermarket solutions become available. Whether we will ever see a plug-in card for use in the motherboard of the old Mac Pro (and PCs for that matter, the socket being a standard PCMCIA one shared with PCs) remains to be seen. Now that would be nice as the user would get an integrated Airport-style solution, rather than having to use an auxiliary utility application.

Performance and life expectancy:

For even the most demanding users, I expect that the performance of a suitably modified 2009 Mac Pro will remain satisfactory for photographers of all kinds over the next five years. Maybe longer.

PCs have very much hit the wall of technological progress with innovation increasingly focused on mobile devices and applications. With PC sales and demand falling and with performance improvements stalling, the ‘old’ Mac Pro may have a very long life indeed ahead of it.

Parts supplies are not an issue. So many of these machines were made (I would guess production numbers in the low hundreds of thousands) that both used and new parts are easily found with the most common wear items – those with moving parts like fans, DVD drives, power supplies and disk drives – abundantly available.

Except for the 2009 dual CPU motherboard with its unique CPU sockets, parts for the 2009/2010/2012 Mac Pros are identical, though the single CPU versions use unique heat sinks and motherboards (‘backplane’ boards in Applespeak).


The 2009/2010/2012 Mac Pro – a machine of (very) few parts.

The best way to describe the fit and finish of these machines is to compare them with the 1959 Nikon F film SLR. Both are made to survive combat and neither should be dropped on your toe.

Apropos nothing

Photography

Simple and trustworthy.

Sometimes something so simple, so elegant and so well designed crops up that though it does not involve photography, I feel duty bound to report on it to my readers.

The shining exemplar of that class is the Bic ball pen about which I waxed lyrical some six years ago. It remains the only writing instrument I use.

Another accoutrement which I have long taken for granted reminded me of its great design this week when it finally failed. After 20 years my Hartmann credit card holder split a seam and said ‘No more’. Had it not been for this failure I would never have thought to remark on how wonderful this simple tool is.

Hartmann rather quaintly style it the ‘Belting Leather Calling Card Case’ which conjurs up images of visiting the Astors on Fifth Avenue in the Gilded Age to present one’s credentials. In a world where cellphones have taken the place of calling cards the name may be dated, but the utility value of this Hartmann case remains as great as ever.

There are five divisions in all, one central and two on either side. Mine gobbles up a driver’s license, a credit card, my AAA card, two flat car keys with holders, a health insurance card, one blank cheque, an ATM card and one of those ‘in case of emergency contact the nearest morgue’ cards. Nothing can fall out and nothing has these past 20 years.

Amazon carries it for all of $30 here; if I recall, the original cost me $18 in 1993, which my HP12C (another all time classic) informs me represents a compound annual inflation rate of 2.587%. Not half bad. I suspect Chinese cows provide the leather today, but the replacement looks every bit as well made as the original. The wasteful, profligate packaging is the only shame here.