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August 2005 Archives
As Canon did announce two new dSLRs officially it's time to write some thoughts about the perfect digital camera for me.
Type
It should be a SLR definitely. I just like to have the oportunity to change the lens. And to change the body as well without buying new lenses necessarily.
Further it's nice to see exactly what you'll shoot. Now I already hear: “but you do see this on the monitor of any digital camera anyway”. Yes—but I like to have the camera at my eyes and not to hold it at armlong away. If I see all the people doing this, I don't wonder why so many pictures are not sharp. If you have much motion blur you don't need to focus very well anyway…
Concept
I like working with my Canon EOS 300. So it would be plus to have a similar concept (I don't like the way of the Minolta SLRs e.g.). But I think most actual dSLRs have good concepts which I could get used to.
The Sensor
A resolution of 8 MP would be nice, but is more really needed? Here more than resolution is important as the tests of magazines show. The amount of information of a 6 MP camera is not much lower compared to a 8 MP camera necessarily.
But what size for the sensor? Formerly I tended to say I want a full frame (35 mm) sensor, but I'm not sure any longer. All tests show that current full frame sensors can't cope with “normal” lenses very well. And the lenses they work well with are often too expensive… So now I tend more towards APS-C size sensors. The crop factor doesn't get too high and many consumer lenses are acceptable to use with theses sensors. Additionally there're already many new lenses designed specially for this sensor size on the market. You even get good wide-angle lenses for crop factors of 1.6. The lenses can be smaller and lighter as well, which is nice for carrying all the equipment.
What I'd be more interested in would be more cameras using the Foveon X3 chip. Sigma is supposed to announce a SD11 soon, but I don't like Sigma's concept of their (d)SLRs too much (and you don't get as many lenses as for Canon, Nikon, or Konica Minolta). And it would be very interesting to get chips that react more like film to the incidence of light.
Actually there're two other important or interesting points about the sensor. First to have an integrated cleaning device (like in Olympus' E-1). Second the anti-shake system of Konica Minolta is very nice.
Choices
Neither the Canon 5D, nor the 1D Mark IIN are serious candidates for me (much too expensive). The Canon 20D comes close, but I'm still waiting for the successor. With the 5D I expect this to happen next spring at the earliest.
The Konica Minolta 7D could be a good candidate as well, if it would have 8 MPs. And Olympus' FourThirds systems looks interesting as well, but there I miss the big variety of lenses I could choose from.
The tests in the German fotoMagazin show, that the Canon 20D would be a good choice indeed, and outperforms all alternatives I have, but still I'll wait a bit yet…
Finally I decided to buy a Terratec NOXON audio. It's quite a nice device to play audio streams and what's best, it can play internet radio streams directly using an internet connection (like a DSL router)—there's no need to run a pc if you only want to listen to internet radio!
Main features
<%image(misc/noxon_sm.jpg|300|202|Terratec NOXON audio)%>
Here's a picture of the main gadget. The size is about 16 cm × 10.5 cm × 4 cm. It supports playing MP3 and WMA streams. The only network connection is WLAN. Terratec claims to support 802.11g, but just with 11 Mbit/s and WEP encryption—so it's basicly 802.11b in reality (compability of 802.11g to 802.11b is defined by the standard, isn't it?). But at least it does support 104 bit/128 bit keys.
On the picture you can easily see the biggest problem of this device: it's blue display. It looks nice, yes, but as many others on the web already pointed out: you can't read it from the distance at all! And it is pretty slow.
Further on the body look quite cheap. So even as it is silver, it doesn't fit 100% beside the display and the center speaker of my Pioneer NS-DV990, which is real aluminium (at least the front is).
The power supply unit is an external one and, as usual, a traditional one (no switching power supply), so it gets quite warm and is pretty bulky and the NOXON can't be switched off completely (see below what's all running after “switching off”). For audio input there's a stereo jack to RCA jack cable included. So no digital output, but I think you don't need this for radio streams anyway.
Experiences
<%image(misc/noxon_rc_sm.png|75|299|NOXON remote control)%>
The installation was quite painless. I had to set up my Fritz!Box SL WLAN for the WLAN and after that connecting the NOXON was not a big problem. OK, entering the WEP key using the remote control (see left) isn't much fun, but you have to do this only once, normally. ;-)
BTW, the remote control doesn't look very sophisticated but it's very functional and pretty ergonomic.
After an initial update of the list of internet radio stations you can start listening. To find a nice station you can browse by genre or by country. This takes quite a while, as there are so many stations. Once you found one just press play, after that you can save it to one of the numeric keys for very fast access or add it to the favourites. The favourites can be edited using the web interface.
Web interface?
Yes, you read correctly. The NOXON has a (very simple) web interface. There you can see firmware version, network settings, WLAN status, all network profiles, and your favourites. Unfortunately you can just edit the favourites, but no network settings. And the editing of the favourites is needed, but doesn't work very well (see below).
And I just discoverd one (not so) funny thing: you can access the NOXON even if it is switched of (but has power)! So this means, that switching off just stops playback and shuts down the display?
Quirks
The NOXON has quite some quirks. So saving favourites is not very good for many radio stations, because if the radio station is including the current artist and title the favourite will be saved using this and not the radio station name! It's even a bit worse for m3u sources, which are listed in the radio station list as well. If you save these, not the m3u will be saved, but the actual mp3 currently played! So you have to edit your favourites quite often. As I'm running Linux exclusively I just can use the web interface (it's good that this even exists). And for me it just works in 1 out of 5 times to delete or add a favourite and unfortunately you can't edit a favourite but you have to delete it first and add it again using the new name afterwards (or did I just miss something?).
The display isn't readable and much too slow. It neither plays OGG nor RealAudio streams (OK, I didn't find an interesting station just broadcasting one of this yet and all the RealAudio streams didn't sound too good anyway, but the 160 kbit/s OGG stream of Virgin Radio sounds very good). If you're browsing for a radio station and press play on a menu entry (a genre or country e.g.) the NOXON tries to play this, but it can't (this should be easy to fix). Otherwise it's nice that the stream is not stopped while you're looking for another station.
One nice thing to know is, that if you press the “i” button you can easily switch back to the menu where you've been before, but if you press the radio browsing button, you'll always start from the begining! If you want to test some stations it's nice to remember that. ;-)
Another “quirk” is, that there hasn't been a firmware update yet, though Terratec says that the NOXON can update itself over WLAN directly. But hey, this is only a feature, if it is used.
And please, shutdown the WLAN module on switch off in a new firmware release! True, this way the NOXON is already connected on switch on, but I don't think thats needed.
Further it would be nice to have the last station played on switch on and then to display the info screen (or at least an option to activate this).
Conclusion
It's a nice device for me, but it's clearly still a geeky gadget. I didn't test to replay streams served by my computer, but as others wrote, this works using Linux as well (Terratec even provides some documentation how to set up this). I rather listen to my CDs and SACDs directly. What I really like, is, that this is an audio only device and that it can play internet radio streams without additional software on a pc (there're not so many devices which can do that). I decided not to buy the Philips Streamium SL 400i as this gadget needs a TV at least for setup (and I don't have one). The SL 300i is even worse: there's no display integrated and you need a TV anytime to run it.
For my next big HiFi investment it would be nice to have an integrated system playing CDs, SACDs, DVDs, radio (digital and analog), as well as MP3s, and OGGs (files and streams) whith LAN and WLAN integration. So Pionieer: how about a NS DV995 available as upgrade to the NS DV990 without speaker (but a new display for more information)? I know, the NS DV990 isn't sold in Germany any longer, but in America as HTZ-940DV it's the top home theater sytem currently…
As I don't list referrers here currently, just one interesting picked out for you: Something New Every Day. On Silver Silicon you can find quite a bunch of information and interesting links about photography—and the every day new list. It's an honour for me to get linked there.
No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster. It's already listed there, but to edit some settings and so on…
I printed a much better version of the San Francisco MoMa—Hallway Cyanotype.
First I solved the problem with the vertical stripes doing a “head alignment session” (as there's no program for Linux which can do this for an Epson R200 I had to borrow a laptop from my work…).
Second I think this print is much more interesting with masked margins. The rugged margins of the former version are a bit distracting. Now I even think, that the slight assymetrical perspective isn't so bad at all…
You can still see the old version in the original post and at flickr. But I posted the new version to flickr as well.
And another new Cyanotype added to my gallery:
This shot “happend” while resting on the top of Vulcano. This is a small island in the north-eastern shore of Sicily, which is a small vulcano basically (Stromboli belongs to the same group of islands, but is much farther away from Sicily). Vulcano, the vulcan itself, is still slightly active (it rather smells of old eggs) and it's an easy hike to the top and you'll have a nice look into the crater.
This is one of my favourites and I think a candidate for frameing…
And again I posted this to flickr as well.
Since yesterday I'm online using a 2 Mbit/s DSL connection. The up-stream is “just” 200 kbit/s, but even that is so much more than the 30 something kbit/s of a V90 modem. ;-)
And as I have a flat rate, I can even listen to decent radio stations. I'm just thinking about buying a WLAN audio player to listen to internet radio in my living room as well (something like the Terratec Noxon, or a Philips Streamium SL 400i).
It's so much less troublesome just to go online, without thinking how long you'll be online and what tariff to use (and then discovering that they switch the cheap and very expensive period :-()…
Quite a few people in the Windows world seem to have problems with tgz, so here's NP_MemberInfo-1.0.zip
Today a tram passed that was covered with advertisement for “Dresdner Christstollen” completely (that's a special cake for christmas).
Okay, the weather is more like October or November, so maybe I just…?
It's been quite a long time since I posted my last Cyanotype. Finally here's a new one:
Actually I like this one quite well, even though it is not perfect. First the shot is slightly off centre. Caused by this the bridge above seems to be tilted slightly e.g. This happened, because I didn't take enough time to compose this shot (as it happens too often) and I didn't have a tripod with me (would they have liked that?). But I was quite happy, not to have any people on it…
Another matter that makes the print not perfect at all, are the stripes visible in the centre of the image. This is some weird artefact I get with my printer currently for many negatives and I didn't find a solution yet.
Once in a while I have to clean my keyboard, as it gets really sticky even if I'm very cautious. ;-)
The last time I cleaned was quite a while ago (I reckon about 1 and a half years), so I did dismantle it completly—it was necessary! All the outer parts went into the dishwasher: the keys in the basket for the cutlery, the top cover on the top pullout. The bottom cover was pretty clean (after pouring out all the dust), so it was treated by hand.
And now it's shining again. For it's almost ten years (the testing date inside was of April 1995 ;-) it's in a pretty good shape.
But it would really be interesting to have a good keyboard which is completely sealed, maybe even to the extend that you can put it into the dishwasher altogether…
As there seem to bee too many candidate for the status of 10th planet of our solar system. So the discussion start about the qualifications for an object to be called planet. The consequences might be, that Pluto won't be called planet any longer. If a definition for planet is done, it should be consistent, that means if Pluto doesn't match, Pluto should be “dropped” as planet. Maybe there'll be found a definition not primarily based on size (and that the object isn't orbiting another planet), so that Pluto will still be planet, but any other object won't be.
Actually I can't think of something right now which would include Pluto and nothing else. A good definition could be to say it has to have a certain minimum size and to circle our sun primarily. Maybe some additional condition about the shape of the orbit, but here Pluto could get into problems as well…
So bye bye Rupert for now (I still think the 10th planet should be called Rupert).
