This CrunchGear announcing the Olympus E-510 is the height of moronitude.
Basically he doesn’t like this 4-3 10 megapixel wonder child because it cost $100 more than the E 410 sister camera with only one difference: image stabilization.
“Now, who’s willing to pay $100 more for image stabilization?”
Let us deconstruct shall we?
[First blush on the Olympus after the jump]Continue reading
This is a shameless plug for my friend Andrei.
Andrei is writing something that forms the very essence of my future employment: PHP 6, and more specifically, unicode support in PHP 6. ICU in PHP is three meaningless letters about three other meaningless letters to most of you. I get that. Even though this meaninglessness stuff has 60% market share and powers sites like Yahoo!, Wikipedia, WordPress, Facebook… (The “Vote for Andrei” generator above was written in PHP. It powers the websites for JPG Magazine and Flickr below.)
So when I say that it’s really important to keep this guy happy, please believe me. Think about the last time that you visited to the above websites. You wouldn’t want them to suck do you? If your native language is not English, then you would want them to work in your country right?
Luckily, photography is infinitely more accessible than the stuff that pays the bills. So please, take some time off from your day of ignoring my blog posts to do the world a favor and vote for this photo on JPG magazine (and tell your friends to too):
It’s a great photo and utterly appropriate with the theme of the month. My only complaint with it is he should have gotten with the bandwagon on photos like this and LOMO’d the sucker beyond recognition. I can almost recognize what it is.
[Andrei and photography after the jump.]Continue reading
Gizmodo and others are unhappy that the new Canon 40D is the 30D with 10 megapixels and dust shake.
I have to wonder what the hell they were expecting?
[The 40D is a good camera after the jump]
“Sara would read anything you handed her…She read upon waking, sitting on the toilet, stretched out in the backseat of the car…If there was nothing else she would consume all the magazines and newspapers in the house—reading, to her, was a kind of pyromania—and when these ran out she would reach for insurance brochures, hotel prospectuses and product warranties, advertising circulars, sheets of coupon. Once I had come upon the spectacle of Sara, finished with the volume of C. P. Snow while only partway through on of the long baths she took for her bad back, desperately scanning the label on a bottle of Listerine.”
—Michael Chabon, “Wonder Boys”
I can relate.
This leads to the famous line in the movie: “She was a junkie for the
printed word. Lucky for me, I manufactured her drug of choice.”
It always annoys me when Gizmodo writes about digital photography. Mostly because they get almost nothing right.
Case in point: their article on today’s Lexar UDMA CF cards, which has three egregious errors.
First, I would believe that CF at PIO-5 (aka 133x) is already close to SDHC’s theoretical max speed and faster than any SDHC card out there, so it’s hardly “playing catchup.”
Second, there is already a camera that supports this card: the Hasselblad H2D and H3D. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the MF digital backs support UDMA. Sure they’re expensive, but they are not “theoretical.”
Third, UDMA is supported in the newest CF reader from SanDisk. This means that you have a practical advantage today in download speed to an external reader. Who would have thunk?
I know if they had bothered to read an article I wrote last year, they could have avoided foot-in-mouth disease.
Toyota ultimately decided to pursue customers it calls “true truckers.” True truckers aren’t ordinary pickup owners; rather, these men are the Platonic ideal of truck-driving authenticity. They might work on the ranch or the construction site; they might fish for bass every weekend. “They’re the taste makers, the influentials,” Ernest Bastien, a vice president of vehicle operations, told me in San Antonio. “I think all consumers are influenced by professionals. The professional uses a certain tool, and then they want it, too.”
—Jon Gertner, “From 0 to 60 to World Domination, The New York Times
I noticed recently at Costco that they’re selling the Canon Rebel XTi with 18-55mm and the Nikon D80 with two lenses kit.
That’s silly. The D80 + 2 lenses (28-70 and 70-300) cannot compete against the Rebel XTi (+ 18-55) in a store like that. For one thing, they’re the same 10 megapixels. The D80 kit works out to be much more expensive (around $1200 vs $900). Sure there are differences, but the lenses aren’t even connected to the cameras so who is going to notice the larger and brighter viewfinder or better construction? And really, is this market going to care about those things? All your typical Costco buyer is going to see is that the D80 looks to be the same camera for a lot more, breaking the $1000 barrier is a big deal nowadays
It should come as no surprise that last time I passed by, the XTi was sold out.
OSCON proposals are due in 20 minutes. I submitted something just now. That’s like 10 minutes sooner than last time. I am improving. 🙂
The last talk new talk I gave was at OSCON so I had to come up with something new. Since I just changed jobs and actually spent the afternoon B.S.ing one of Dave’s submissions (in exchange, he was the one who reminded me (multiple times) that proposals are due), I had to keep things sort of vague but possibly interesting at the same time.
That was a challenge.
[My proposal after the jump.]Continue reading
Olympus released a whole slew of new cameras today, but I thought I’d pick up two because they have interesting approaches worth mentioning.
[Two cameras after the jump.]
Continue reading
I received a slightly over-direct e-mail from Nicholas at Copper Hill Images concerning a recent post I made about sensor cleaning.
I won’t post a private e-mail here without permission. The gist of it I’ll get into below but this is as good a place as any to leave some room to talk about sensor cleaning.
[How to clean sensors after the jump.]Continue reading