Category Archives: Photography

Vizio E552VLE

Hardware

A bargain.

I wrote of the continuing price reductions in large LCD displays here. Now that I have received my 55″ Vizio E552VLE – the bottom of the line model – a few words are in order.

You can see how the predecessor 42″ version compares for size – the same model Border Terrier appears in each:



The HackMini is the silver box on the right. You can just make out the latest 1080p AppleTV (Version 3) below the left end of the set, the same location where the IR receiver in the TV resides.

While representing 72% more surface area, the practical reaction is that it’s a lot larger. Watching a movie is more involving. Anything closer than 9 feet for viewing distance is too close. The increase from 720p to 1080p resolution is not that big a deal. On the very highest quality programming you can just make out the difference, but it’s not startling. You will not know the difference on most content.

The practical reality is that for $700 you can have a really large screen TV which will do a fine job of showing movie and photographic content and should be easily good for five years.

The TV comes with internet apps like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon VOD, but these are not well implemented and I find accessing these services through my attached HackMini or the AppleTV to be the way to go. The TV has built-in 802/11n 5GHz wifi, which refused to connect wirelessly, but fired right up with an ethernet cable between the TV and the adjacent Apple Airport Extreme, requiring only that the password be entered to access Netflix. But, frankly, it’s really a solution, and a poor one at that, looking for a problem.

Rather than mess with a plethora of remotes, I am sticking with the $14 RCA RCRP05BR 5 Device Cable Replacement Universal Remote. This is a so called JP1 class remote, meaning that it can be programmed using a Windows PC connected to the socket in the battery compartment, or simply programmed using the keys on the remote itself. The latter is my choice as I do not use Windows. Every button on every TV remote issues a unique IR code, and these ‘extended function codes’ for current Vizio TVs appear in Post #21 on the RemotesCentral site. So for example if you want to program a key on the RCA to open the Vizio’s Input menu, knowing the EFC from the table is ‘00090’ allows you to assign that to any key. You can then string programmed keys together into actions (‘macros’) to permit emulation of all your many constituent remotes into one device. Very handy.

In this way I am able replace the AppleTV remote, the cable box and DVR remote, the Vizio TV remote and the Sony sound bar remote with just this one inexpensive RCA device. The RCA has a ‘learning’ mode where actions of other remotes can be ‘taught’ to the RCA. It works well, especially in those cases where the correct EFC cannot be divined.

Speaking of sound bars, I auditioned a couple to see if I could replace my separate Sony amplifier and bookshelf speakers with a sound bar. The Sony HT CT-60 spoke to my ears and wallet at $125 + tax, also from Costco. The best feature is that all I had to do was run one Toslink optical fiber cable from the Vizio output socket to the input in the sound bar. The latter comes with a small sub-woofer, a tad boomy unless turned down, and has a treble control. The result is excellent definition on speech, decent on music, but maybe not something which will render nuclear blasts or acid rock with the greatest fidelity. That assumes that fidelity is even a concept when it comes to electric guitars. Still, it’s a sight (and sound) better than the internal speakers in the TV set and a lot less clutter and wiring than the earlier amplifier/bookshelf speaker arrangement.


Sony HT CT-60 sound bar mounted on the wall above the TV. 37″ wide, weighing but 4lbs.

The best feature of the sound bar is that when switched to surround sound mode, you really get a much enhanced spatial picture of sound, even though this is not a surround sound system.

You can pay up to $4,000 for a 55″ TV. That will get you a speedier set with LED technology, inferior for off axis viewing to the older LCD technology used in the set described here. You will likely get slightly blacker blacks, the sound will be no better, and you will certainly burn a far larger hole in your wallet with no more assurance of a fault-free set on delivery than with the 5 Vizios the same money gets you. Well, OK, if you get five your chances of every one being bad will be 80% less. Best as I can tell, faulty sets account for some 10-15% of new ones sold, regardless of brand. I was lucky, and returning this behemoth would not be a lot of fun. Not one bad pixel of the one billion on display, no backlight bleeding, no colored patches, nothing. Costco doubles the maker’s warranty to two years, and allows local returns to your retail outlet of choice.

This is an outstanding value, has probably just been discontinued, and I recommend this set with no reservations.

A quick note on installation:

You can wall mount this set in which case you must make sure that the wall mount bracket is retained in wall studs, using a batten if necessary, or risk expensive damage. Mine is free standing and assembly required only the attachment of the very sturdy and very deep base with eight bolts and the allen wrench provided. The set is not all that heavy at 70lbs and here’s a safe and stress free way of getting this very bulky item onto its pedestal. Archimedes would have approved (“Give me a lever and I will move the world”).


The two black boxes which hide behind the set are Mediasonic
enclosures storing 24 terabytes of movies.

The set is picked up by the short end which is placed on one chair cushion. The other end is then picked up and the second chair moved into place. The base is then attached and the whole is gently tilted backwards onto the pedestal. With two people neither is ever lifitng more than 20lbs. Stress and risk free.

Costco: I bought the TV from Costco in Foster City on the SF Peninsula. An excellent buying experience. Knowledgeable in-store help, easy online ordering and delivery in exactly the 10 days promised, shipped from Atlanta at no charge. One day before the day of delivery I was called to schedule a delivery time and then was called again when the truck was getting close. A final call was received when the truck was in the driveway. Very impressive and recommended. I gave the two delivery men $10 each to hump the set to the upper level. I did assembly and installation myself, taking some 30 minutes all told. For an extra charge Costco will do all of this for you, which rather takes the fun out of it.

Disclosure: No interest in any of the above mentioned public companies.

Update April 15, 2015:

Two years of ownership and daily use, and the set functions as perfectly as it was new, delivering a stellar image and great sound over the Sony sound bar. 4K is not remotely ready for prime time, so if you can hunt one like this down, it is highly recommended.

Update January 11, 2018:

After five trouble free years, the Vizio has migrated to the patio where it continues delivering a fine picture. Details of its replacement, a 65″ LG OLED TV, can be found here, complemented by a high end sound system and the latest AppleTV 4K for streaming 4K content.

The BTS steadicam

Hardware, Movies

Prces fall.

While film director Stanley Kubrick was not the first to use the gyro-stabilized Steadicam rig to allow hand-held vibration-free movie making, his terrifying movie The Shining, using a Steadicam with a low level attachment, redefined movie making. Anyone who has seen the scene with the child riding the tricycle down the dingy hotel corridor will have had a flashback whenever checking into a hotel.

The Steadicam is not cheap, starting at $11,000. Now a new competitor, the Mōvi has hit the market, and my attention was drawn to it by my nephew who is a professional film cameraman. It’s rumored that the first $15,000 version will be complemented by a $7,500 one soon. Doubtless there will be a burgeoning rental market, as that’s a lot of money to have tied up in gear.

You can see the capabilities of this device by clicking the image below. Watch especially for the part where the operator on roller blades (!) hangs onto a moving New York City cab. The camera used is the new and very exciting Canon 1D C, specially made for movie making. That body offers 4K resolution, meaning 4096 x 2160 pixels per frame. Still image quality in a movie camera.


Click the picture for the video.

The director/videographer is Vince Laforet who has been featured here before.

Haswell

Computing

No more discrete GPU.

Intel’s Haswell CPU will be released in a few weeks and it shows the direction in which integrated graphics processors are heading. Not only will the Haswell CPU – the latest variant of the i3/i5/i7 common in desktop and laptop computers – use less power than its Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge predecessors, it will also feature a substantially beefed up integrated graphics processor which should obviate the need for a separate graphics card in heavy-duty computers. Intel has made great strides in integrated GPUs and Haswell builds on that with a greater than ever amount of integrated GPU RAM. Specifications suggest that this will be more than enough for all but sophisticated gaming, meaning that the newest versions of PCs, Macs and Hackintoshes will be housed in far smaller enclosures, likely with cool and power frugal SSDs for storage and no need for fan cooling.

No more big boxes the volume of a handful of bricks, just a small device with HDMI and Light Peak/Thunderbolt sockets to connect to your computer display or large screen TV.

The estimable tech site AnandTech has a fascinating article on Haswell which you can read by clicking the image below:


Click the picture.

The erudite and informed Comments to that piece repay reading if GPU/CPU performance is your thing.

I expect the next HackMini chez Pindelski to be the volume of a few sticks of butter, and silent as the grave. Pricing? I would expect the usual i3/i5/i7 pricing – $130/$230/$330 for the regular Haswell, $50 more for the ones with the enhanced GPU. That’s a lot less than a discrete GT650 GPU card which runs twice that amount.

It’s common to see Intel being written off as yesterday’s news, but I would say “Not so fast”. Serious photo and video processing is not about to migrate to tablets, not just yet. We will soon be accessing Haswell-powered servers for every web search. Ostensibly only available in OEM motherboards as it’s a soldered-on design, you can bet that the smart people at Asus/Acer/Gigabyte/Zotac/PNY etc. will be making mobos with these installed for the PC and Hack builder. If I were Nvidia, the leading maker of discrete GPUs, I would be a tad concerned. And you can also bet that Apple – assuming they are not asleep, not necessarily a valid assumption – will be making a MacMini or enhanced AppleTV with this Haswell variant on board. It seems the performance will be better than the Nvidia GT650M already found in many MacBook Pros, a very decent GPU indeed.

As for my use, I can see the excellent 11″ 2012 MacBook Air moving on in favor of a Haswell powered 2013 model, the significant gain being in lower power use in a device whose battery life could always be better. Given the high resale value of these machines the net upgrade cost comes to a modest $300.

Contax II

Cameras

Zeiss Ikon’s finest.

Zeiss’s finest rangefinder 35mm film camera, the Contax II, was manufactured in Germany between 1936 and 1941. I was lucky to borrow a used one from a camera store I worked in during my student days, along with the contemporary Leica IIIc, the Contax with the 50mm Sonnar, the Leica with the 50mm Summar. The Sonnar was far the better lens at f/2 and f/2.8.

The cameras were night and day. One version has it that Zeiss was determined to best the Leica with a more modern design. Another maintains that they had to change the design dramatically to avoid patent infringement. One thing is certain. The Zeiss business dwarfed that of Ernst Leitz, Wetzlar in wealth and breadth, so starting with a blank sheet of paper on the drawing board was no big deal, given Zeiss’s resources.

What emerged was a camera of quite exceptional elegance. Compare with the Leica IIIC:

Where the Leica is all knobs and dials and busyness, the Contax is an integrated whole. The Leica is an unfinished engineer’s design, the Contax a Bauhaus aetheticist’s dream. Not until 1954, when Leitz released the greatest 35mm rangefinder design in history, the Leica M3, was anything comparable to the Contax made.

What prompts this piece is my recent article on The Mexican Suitcase and mention therein of the great war photographer Robert Capa. For when Capa landed on Omaha Beach on D Day in 1944, he was armed with two Contax II cameras and a Rolleiflex. The few images which survived from that reportage are among the most famous war pictures made:


Robert Capa’s unforgettable image of the American
Normandy landing on D Day.

The Leica user of that time had to focus through a rangefinder eyepiece, then change his view to the (awful) viewfinder, using a separate eyepiece. Slow shutter speeds had to be set on the small front dial, after setting the upper dial to a specific index. When the Leica’s shutter was released the upper dial rotated – interfere with it and your exposure would be off. The Leica’s lens had to be screwed in. You had no choice but to rewind the film when your 36 exposures were made.

The Contax changed all that. The rangefinder was brilliantly integrated as a central patch in the viewfinder, one eyepiece for both. All the shutter speeds from 1/2 to 1/1250th (!) of a second were on one large click-stopped dial concentric with the wind-on knob, with the release button elegantly integrated into the center. The clunky ‘lift-turn-drop’ miniscule main shutter speed dial of the Leica with its irregularly spaced settings, which could only be set accurately with the film advanced, was history. Interchangeable film cassettes could be loaded in both the feed and receiving bays, requiring no rewinding. Where the Leica used a horizontally running shutter made of rubberized cloth, the Contax ingeniously opted for a vertically running assembly of interlocking metal slats which permitted faster flash synchronization speeds, though factory flash synch was not added until the post-war Contax IIa/IIIa were released. Copal of Japan were to adapt the design to many Japanese cameras much later.


The Contax II shutter. Click the image for
Mike Elek’s excellent Contax repair site.

You can get a good sense of the quality of the camera’s engineering from Mike Elek’s site.

The lens used a bayonet mount – actually a dual bayonet mount. Shorter lenses fit in the inner mount focused with the small geared wheel in front of the wind-on knob, whereas longer, bulkier ones used the external bayonet claws you can see above, focused with a regular focus collar on the lens. Canon later used the same idea in its post-war Canon 7, where the external mount was used exclusively for its extraordinary f/0.95 50mm optic. The inner Leica screw thread mount used by Canon was too small to accommodate the huge f/0.95 lens.

A modern analogy is apposite. When the iPhone was released in July, 2007 it was a Contax II to every predecessor’s Leica IIIc. Function and form were one.

Only when the Leica M3 came along were all these modern features (save the dual bayonet mount – one bayonet sufficed) incorporated by Wetzlar, who also greatly improved the rangefinder by adding sharply defined edges to the rangefinder patch, suspended finder frames for three focal lengths, and an ingenious parallax compensation mechanism. That was 18 years and a world war later.

While some aver that the shutter in the Contax was more fragile, as the horizontal slats were connected with thin silk tapes which age poorly, contemporary users had no complaints, nor did I when I used this wonderful camera.

Contax simultaneously released the Contax III which added a non-coupled selenium cell exposure meter on the top plate, deemed revolutionary at the time, but in practice it ruined the lovely lines of the model II’s body.

After the war Zeiss released the IIa/IIIa pairing, much the same but maybe even better made. The basic body design was retained through the Contarex SLR range whose complexity and high manufacturing cost did a lot to bankrupt the Zeiss Ikon of old. Those Contarexes retained the dual reloadable cassette chambers, and updated the advance knob with a lever, but the design heritage was obvious for all to see. When the greatest film SLR of all time, the Nikon F, was released many years later that same dual locking/removable baseplate design was retained. It was not ideal – you sometimes wanted a third hand to change film – but it was solid, simple and robust. Compare that to the film baseplate slot-loading mechanism in every film Leica through the last model, the M7, and you will be in no doubt which is the superior system.

Amazingly, Cosina released the Voigtländer R2C in recent years sporting a Contax lens mount along with TTL metering, even if the body was an ugly duckling. The Zeiss aficionado could find new use for his classic Zeiss Ikon lenses:

A handful of modern lenses was also released in the classic Contax mount and adapters are available to use old Voigtländer Prominent lenses – here’s the Prominent’s 50mm f/1.5 Nokton in a handsome semi-matte chrome finish on a Contax II body:

The Contax worked fine for Capa and no one reading this can lay claim to being a better photographer – or a more courageous one. The Contax II is one of the great classics of the 35mm rangefinder camera world.

Update July 203: I just added a Contax IIa, the post-war version, to my home theater display.

The LCD price spiral continues

Photography

Lower and lower.

I wrote about my WalMart Superbowl special, the 42″ LCD TV I bought in March 2008, here. I had opted for the then little know Vizio brand, now a household name and very much the price leader to this day. The cost was $900 ex-tax.

That TV is 42″ and 720p/1080i. 1080p was just becoming affordable at that time but still cost $200-300 more at that size and after checking them in the Paso Robes WalMart I simply could not tell the difference at that size.


Vizio VW42L, 720p and $900 in 2008.
Five happy years of service at $15/month.

Well, prices have continued dropping and as with disk drive makers, the manufacture of large display panels has consolidated so that there are maybe three makers left – Samsung and LG of Korea and Sharp in Japan. Sharp has been flirting with bankruptcy for some two years now and Sony’s pride saw it loses tens of billions of dollars on their LCDs before they finally threw up their hands and gave up. Pretty expensive loss of face for a business which cannot forget its pioneering Trinitron cathode ray tube designs.

The value proposition saw me looking for a larger screen over the past few months, though it was not remotely sourced from dismay with the 42″ Vizio. Superb in every way it has never missed a beat. The only change I made was to add a pair of truly ancient (and truly excellent) B+W bookshelf speakers in lieu of the smallish ones built into the set. The latter are not bad as the TV’s design was before the current Jobsian obsession with all that is slim and trim in electronics, meaning that the internal speakers are actually a decent size with sound to match.

A friend counselled a local purchase owing to the ease of return if something went wrong, and pointed me to Costco as they double the standard warranty to 2 years and as with most things, TVs tend to fail when very young or very old. Amazon is not remotely competitive on price, selling the same set for 20% more. So I toddled off to the local Costco warehouse store to compare picture quality, having determined that 55″ – 72% more screen area than with a 42″ – was the most my viewing area could handle. Some dozen large screen sets were on display, all fed from the same high quality BluRay DVD source, making critical A-B comparisons easy. Matters were further helped by a knowledgeable salesman who candidly told me that return rates for LG, Samsung and Vizio are the same and that LED adds nothing to image quality, as I could see for myself.

Comparing the two very costly Samsungs with the two far cheaper Vizios I could tell no material difference absent the usual color mismatches which are easily cured through proper tuning. As the 42″ Vizio has proved as reliable as a brick, it came down to a $700 LCD model and an $800 LED model. LED sets are a relatively new development, replacing the backlit LCD panel with a myriad of light emitting diodes. All sets on display were 1080p, and the four I compared all sported 120Hz refresh rates, adequate to avoid motion blur on all but the fastest moving content. Given that the image quality on the two Vizios was identical, the only difference was one of weight – the LED being 5 lbs lighter, an irrelevancy – and thickness. Now why anyone should care whether their large screen TV is 6″ thick or 2″ thick beats me, so I went for the older $700 LCD model, whose bezel is also a tad wider. No biggie. The LED version uses $6 more power annually, something it would take over a decade to recover based on the $100 higher asking price.


The 42″ Vizio’s home screen driven by the HackMini running OS Lion 10.7.4.
DVDpedia allows one click access to movies stored on large capacity HDD boxes.

The Vizios also had one feature missing from the Samsungs – an old fashioned VGA socket for a PC. My TV uses three input sources – the cable company’s feed/DVR, an AppleTV and the HackMini for stored movies/BBC iPlayer/Netflix/Amazon VOD. The last uses a VGA cable and while it would be easy to adapt that to HDMI, it means one less thing to worry about, given the availability of the VGA socket.

Vizio’s web site says this model is discontinued and I would expect the price to drop further as inventory is remaindered. Note the inclusion of web apps for Hulu, Netflix, etc.

Free delivery is scheduled for next week at which time I have updated this piece with my first impressions. Whether a BluRay player makes sense remains to be seen. On the 42″ model I could not tell the difference between BR and standard DVDs. The speakers in the 55″ one appear to be smaller than those in the 42″, suggesting poorer sound quality, but I will again bypass these in favor of the external bookshelf speakers, driven by an old Sony amplifier.

Bottom line? 72% more screen area for 22% less cost in nominal dollars – call it 35% after inflation – and with 2.3 times the number of pixels per unit area (1920 x 1080 compared with 1280 x 720) speaks to the continuing spiralling down of selling prices over the past five years. So even though making a 100″ screen is more than twice as difficult as making a 50″ one, owing to higher rejection rates as size increases, I do rather think that a 100″ screen for under $5,000 in five years is a realistic expectation. Read on.

Bigger and bigger:

About the time I wrote the piece linked above, Pioneer released a 104″ plasma set at some $100,000 a pop. You see these in TV studios and corporate settings now and then, and the price has now come down to some $75,000. Not realistic for home use at that price. Further, plasma screens use far more power and sport a glossy glass front, just like the ghastly displays in iMacs. The last thing you want in a TV is a reflective surface.

However, looking at that same Costco site, you can now get something almost as large for a very affordable price with a matte LCD panel:

While that’s a lot of money, it argues strongly as a preferred alternative to the projector/screen approach. The latter is damned by the need for a darkened room, as projectors are not that bright, and involves extensive installation intricacies. I rather doubt that my landlady will take well to a chassis suspended from the ceiling along with holes for all the cables! Reckon on $4,000 for a quality projector and $5-6,000 when all is said and done. A high quality screen will run you some $1,000, a retractable one even more. So that 90″ Sharp LCD is not only competitive, you can bet prices will fall. Further, you can view the Sharp comfortably in broad daylight.

All these devices are a wonderful way of displaying photographs as well as movies. Because the normal viewing distance for 42″ to 55″ displays is 7-11 feet or so, even a 2 megapixel original will look wonderful as the inclination to pixel peep a large TV screen is generally missing for all but the certifiably insane. I would not be surprised if my next TV, five years hence, was a $5,000 100″ LCD model, but first I will have to buy a house to accommodate it!

Calibration? Easy. I will simply use the EyeOne colorimeter via the HackMini to tune the colors just so.

That old 42″ Vizio? Still in perfect order, it was given to that same friend who so smartly pointed me to Costco, though I did have to pay the $55 annual ‘membership’ fee, a sunk cost for one who does not propose to buy his beef by the cow, which seems to be the most common package size for meat at the Costco warehouse. And as for Costco, clearly they are doing most things right:

4K TV panels:

4K panels are now coming to market, boasting 2160p definition, twice that of 1080p. They are still expensive and use upscaling to make use of that definition, which is comparable to Retina Displays on MacBook Pros. Whether this is a solution looking for a problem is unclear, but they may pose an affordable alternative to large computer displays for use with desktop OS X or Windows machines. Prices will only come down – Amazon lists a Seiki 50″ set for under $1,400.