Category Archives: Photography

600,000 books. $10 monthly storage cost.

Photography

Amazon moves forward.

For $10 a month Amazon will allow you to read any one of some 600,000 titles for no additional charge. As I buy some 6 books a month from them this is a slam dunk.

The library as we know it has long been doomed, and this will only spur its demise. High time we redeveloped all that costly real estate and put it to better use. Yes, Hitler would be proud. Now we really can burn all those books with no feelings of remorse, together with the diseases they carry in their pages.

The next step will be to extend this service to art and photography books which take up the most space and poundage in the average home. Please, Amazon, get on it. And while you are at it, Mr. Bezos, wrest control of obscenely priced academic books from the likes of the thieves at Pearson and add them to your service.

Signing up is a one click thing and this is the result:

How to blow $7bn in 3 months

Computing

Monkey Boy rules!
All of the CEOs of Microsoft.

Microsoft closed its acquisition of a near-dead Nokia for $7bn in April, 2014.

Yesterday it announced 18,000 layoffs, mostly from the 25,000 Nokia workforce, cementing Ballmer’s achievement of perhaps the greatest waste of money in corporate history. And you thought the US military was a spendthrift?

New CEO Satya Nadella has a dream job. After all, how could anyone be worse than Ballmer?

Wall Street loved the move, naturally:

No need to get excited about anything MSFT makes. Yet. Excel is fine. Otherwise, fughedaboutit.

As for Ballmer, with a net worth of $18bn, he’s living proof of the dictum that has it “It’s who you know, not what you know”. Or should that be “Screw up and go up”?

Dirt cheap

Hardware

How much further can prices fall?

These seem to be falling faster in price than the Deutschemark in the Weimar Republic.

When I built the home theater in the vineyard home eight years ago, the 100″ screen with the overhead projector likely cost twice as much ….

There’s one born every minute

Lenses

A fool and his money ….


Click the image for Lomography’s site and hang on to your wallet.

Lomography specializes in selling plastic crap cameras to photographers idiots who desire to take crap pictures. It’s a winning combination, one must admit. The two are made for one another, proving yet again that not only is a fool and his money easily parted, but also that there are lots of fools.

Now the ‘anything to be different’ crowd who need technology, even if distinctly retro, to excuse their total lack of creativity and imagination can blow $600 on a lens first designed in 1840. This comes complete with the most ghastly rendering of OOF areas, dizzyingly bad, and with a set of drop in aperture stops because, let’s face it, for that sum of money who could possibly expect an adjustable iris diaphragm. (“Hang on love, gotta stop down. Dang, just dropped the stop in the cow patty.”)

Of course, if you dare use this on your digital Canon or Nikon, the self-combust device kicks in and your prized DSLR melts. You understand this is intended for film users only? But of course.

The future of ‘serious’ cameras

Cameras

Exceptional progress.


The Panasonic DMC-FZ1000. Click the image for the interactive Panny site.

This Panasonic fixed zoom lens DSLR is one of a handful of superzooms on the market (Sony’s RX10 is another) which heralds the demise not only of flapping mirror DSLRs but also the day of interchangeable lenses. It differs materially from earlier superzooms damned with small aperture and highly variable speed lenses, poor optical quality and minuscule sensors.

The sensor in this body is 1″ diagonally, and compares to the 1.80″ of FF and 1.25″ of MFT. Given that MFT (my reference is Panny’s GX7 which I use) easily prints to 18″ x 24″ the 1″ sensor in this body should be much the same, being fractionally smaller. And while the lens’s maximum aperture of f/2.8 drops to f/4 at the long end, only the churlish would complain once the realization dawns that the zoom range is a stunning 24-400mm. Early test site reports suggest the lens is excellent. All of this in a 1.2lb. package with 4K video included into the bargain for some $900. Stunning progress in machine and sensor design and construction.

Meanwhile, the duopoly of Nikon and Canon (no one can take Sony seriously as a pro FF competitor for their paucity of lenses and consumer image) insist on tinkering at the margins with their FF DSLR designs. They will milk those margins for as long as they can until one day they wake up and find their customers have left for greener pastures. By complacently avoiding ‘creative destruction’ they are sowing the seeds of their own demise.

Given the rapid advance in sensors I would expect a camera of like look and heft to sport an f/2.8 20-200mm world class lens with an EFT and 4K capability in a year or two, all at the cost of one used C or N ‘old tech’ DSLR FF body and with no more need for interchangeable lenses.