Why computer magazines shouldn't review cameras [reprise]

Nikon D70sNikon EOS 350D Rebel

To further emphasize last week’s tirade, PC Magazine usurps C|Net’s position as poster child for digital photography review incompetence. This time it is a review of the Nikon D70s, a small upgrade of my Nikon D70.

Check out this gem:

We love the D70s’ feel and design as much as we did the D70’s, and for those with larger hands, these two models may be preferable to the lighter Canon Rebel XT. The Rebel XT, however, ups the capacity ante to 8MP, which gives you the ability to print very large images, still besting the 6.1MP Nikons. The Canon kit (lens and body) is also cheaper than the D70s kit, although the Nikon lens is longer.

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Posted on by tychay 10

Blog comment logic…

book burning

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

—Ray Bradbury

When John Dvorak visited my workplace, I was introduced as “the Mac guy.”—the split second double-take on his part was funny. But he was amused that a coworker had programmed an old Apple //c we had lying around to generate ASCII art so it’s all good. He did tell me to read his blog.

I can’t keep up with him. He’s the Steven King of the tech world. But every so often I click on a random entry from him to see what is interesting out there.
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Posted on by tychay 7

Buying photography equipment

In 2001, I tried to purchase an Epson 1280 I found at a good price. Instead of the product, I got a “hard sell” over the phone trying for ink and a USB cable at an outrageous price—they didn’t want to ship me just the 1280. I had them cancel my order and went to MicroCenter.

That was my first exposure to the dark underbelly of Brooklyn camera dealers. After that experience, a network search told me my experience was a common modus operandi.

DigiexpoOften when buying photography and video gear the best price you see often isn’t. What goes on is you try to purchase something from them at the price listed, and they’ll try to do things like sell you parts that are supposed to be bundled with the product or other accessories that you don’t want or don’t need.

Even when you find multiple similar (but not the same) prices for the same product from different stores, it turns out the stores are actually the same store—the DNS records and web design offer a clue. Also, these places will spam the merchant review sites to artificially pump up their ratings. It takes a lot of work to winnow the good from the bad.
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Posted on by tychay 8

PTMac

I stitched my first panoramic shot in 1994. I had just gotten an IS-10 and went to the top of the Duquesne incline plane and took a picture of Pittsburgh. I then digitized the photos with a scanner and stitched it together using my limited Photoshop skills. (360 degree panoramas aren’t the only use, there are some amazing wide aspect ratio shots that are impossible to get otherwise.)

Now things have improved greatly for me. I own a a real camera and a auto-leveling tripod with a panoramic head. So it is time to do some panoramic photography again.

When I first started digital photography, the software to use for stitching panoramas is the Apple Quicktime VR Authoring Studio ($400) which is still sold by Apple even though the web page for it has disappeared from Apple’s website and hasn’t been changed in 5_ years. Unfortunately, it stitched and blended really well, many commercial programs today can’t compare to it.

Well the lack of Mac OS X support is a deal killer (along with its exorbitant price). Time to look for another solution.

I decided to try PTMac.
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Posted on by tychay 3

What camera should I buy?

Since I take a lot of photographs with a dSLR, I’m often asked by others for advice on camera purchases.

I think if they saw my photo album, they’d not be asking such questions. In fact, a digital SLR photographer is the last person you should be asking for advice as their needs are different from yours.

But since it was my brother’s wedding and the cell phone just wasn’t cutting it for snapshots, I was enlisted again to advise on a digital camera for the wedding registry.

ken, mia, cellphone camera
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Posted on by tychay 19

Reloading Dashboard Widgets

One of the new features of Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) is Dashboard. Instead of talking about what Dashboard is, I want to show you a poorly documented feature (and nice eye-candy) that Apple placed in the Dashboard.

While I’m told to think of them as desk accessories/Konfabulator for Mac OS X, I prefer to think of them as Sherlock 2/Watson done right. That is because Dashboard widgets are basically HTML web pages + Javascript + optional Cocoa binding. As such, most dashboard widgets are simply web views. This means that sometimes your dashboard widget may be displaying something that needs updating from the web and it isn’t. Instead of complaining to that the widget developer was too moronic to include a control for widget reloading, you can reload your widget manually by hitting Apple-R.

When you do so you’ll be given a nice little Core Video eye-candy (click the picture below to “get” it).

Posted on by tychay 0