Re:Good.. we need Ideas, not just complaints
on
"Squishy" DRM?
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· Score: 2
provided the media is within its expected lifetime, and the customer has taken reasonable measures to protect it
I'm curious... what are "reasonable measures" to protect a Disney DVD from your 5-year-old? Have you seen what they do to DVDs or CDs?
You broke the jewel case? I'll give a "tough, too bad" to that.
Your kid scratched the DVD and now it won't play? Disney is selling a child's toy (a DVD movie for children) that does not stand up to normal treatment from children. If the consumer does not have a way to properly safeguard the product (make fully-functional inexpensive backups) then the product should be replaced by Disney at their expense.
Losing money...
on
"Squishy" DRM?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The industry isn't worried about "losing money" because they mostly know that they aren't really losing sales right now.
They are thinking about DRM in terms of increasing future revenue.
If you look at enough of these studies, music file trading doesn't generally cause fewer music cd sales. People with disposable income get exposed to more music, and buy more music. People without disposable income get access to music they wouldn't have paid for anyway. And, yes, some people with poor ethics take music they could pay for but just don't want to.
But this isn't about current sales, and the known-to-be-false belief that the record industry is losing sales. It isn't, really, even about preventing loss of revenue in the future.
This is about future control, and increasing revenue in the future.
As to workable forms of DRM... Loaning a physical music CD to a friend is perfectly acceptable and completely legal. The digital equivalent would be to "loan" a copy of a computer audio file to your friend, where your friend gets a copy of the music and you lose the ability to play that music until your friend returns or deletes his copy, or buys/licenses his own copy.
Now, this introduces a few problems.
If your music license server doesn't allow loaning, then, personally, you have a broken system, and I won't use it. But this is really a minor thing.
I have a larger issue with this. How do you support loaning in a digital environment? I backup my computer, "loan" a computer audio file to my friend, my local license is disabled until it is "returned" from my friend... and then I restore from my backup... I just got my license back, and my friend has it too.
To get around this, you either need an OS that doesn't let you backup/restore licenses, or a central server that controls and validates license backup/restores, or simply a central license server that you have to connect to periodically.
None of these are good solutions for the consumer, for a number of reasons. My OS on my computer should do what I say. If it doesn't do what I say, then the person/company that does control it should pay for my computer, because it obviously isn't mine.
But further than that... No central server, and no company, has any right no know what I'm listening to, or how often I'm listening to it. This is a privacy concern. This is one of the major reasons I hated Divx. (Circuit City's Divx, not the codec.)
DRM has major problems working in a way that supports privacy rights. This is *one* of the reasons why I don't now, and probably never will, support it.
BTW - I only shoot slow positives (slide film), never digital and blow up the traditional way.
Gosh, you're even more of a dinosaur than I am. I'm impressed.:)
I have a Canon A2 35mm SLR, and too many lenses for it. Mostly shoot negative film, though, because it is easier to pass pictures around to friends that way.
I agree, if the film were the limiting factor, doing MFT tests and LPI tests on lenses would be... most complicated.:)
I do have a few serious questions about lens effects on pictures. Given that you know the MTF function for the lens, and the light falloff at the corners, and any pincushion and barrel distortion effects... Given all of this characterization for a lens, with a digital SLR body...
Could you feed all of the pictures from this digital SLR with that specific lens through a filter program on the computer you download images to (or, eventually, on the SLR itself) that corrects for the known deficiencies of the lens to give you a "perfect" lens?
This is effectively what was done with the Hubble Space Telescope before NASA did the service call, isn't it? They fully characterized the defect, and then post-processed all images out of Hubble to correct for it.
That would be an interesting new filter for Photoshop. "Lens Correction - "
Your points are taken, but the above quote is *not* always true, IMO. This is why we have lens tests. You are probably used to a so called "normal" or 50mm (w/ 35mm film) lens. Generally telephoto lenses are much lower res and look soft compared to sharp photos.
And you are probably used to telephoto zoom lenses. Telephoto primes are usually *very* nice quality. You pay for it too.
From B&H... Canon Telephoto EF 400mm f/2.8L IS Image Stabilizer USM Autofocus Lens. Priced at a very reasonable $6,600 with a USA warranty. And the lens test is beautiful.
Or you could get a crappy 100-400mm f/4.8-6.7 zoom for about $300. And you get what you pay for. (But you also won't need a pack mule to lug it around for you...)
Nor is it clear that the lenses in optimal conditions (high shutter speed, f-stop sweet spot) have a 11 MP effective resolution.
It's a $6,000 Canon pro-level digital SLR...
Something tells me you'd be using L glass. 11MP effective resolution from L glass is reasonable, generally. (Note for non-Canon people... "L Glass" is the line of pro-level lenses Canon releases, usually with wider aperatures, exotic glass (UD, ED, FD glass), and better coatings.)
Even most of the primes are about this good. The 20mm f/2.8, the 50mm f/1.4, the 85mm f/1.8, the 100mm f/2, all of these non-L prime lenses have very good MTF graphs.
If you are buying a camera like this, you probably aren't using a crappy 28-200mm zoom.
More than likely, since this is a pro-level digital SLR, it uses a PCMCIA slot (Type II? hopefully Type III?) and will accept a notebook harddrive on a pcmcia card, giving 20gig or 30gig of storage.
But yes... a 15MB compressed RAW file eats up a lot of space, doesn't it? On a 30gig harddrive, 15MB per image gives you... about 2,000 pictures. Not too bad. How many times do you have to change the batteries to shoot that many pictures?
We'll know in 2 weeks when they formally unveil it at Photokina.
Got the same camera and a 1gb microdrive also... I usually shoot in best jpeg... 2MB 4Megapixel jpeg image is good enough for me, and no special software to convert the image format.
I do wonder... does the camera come with a DVD burner as an almost-acceptable offline storage method?:)
This whole "get more money through pay-per-use" makes the assumption that you don't have a strict entertainment budget. A lot of people have only so much money they can spend on entertainment, whether that's music, movies, video games, internet access, theme parks, or scuba diving.
The basis for pay-per-use of music and movies seems to be that consumers have an unlimited entertainment budget, or that they are willing to sacrifice some other form of entertainment to be allowed to listen to the same music over and over.
I don't believe either of these to really be true. I have a set amount of money I'm willing to spend on music in a given year. I'll spend that much, and then I'll stop, because I have to budget for other expenses. Doesn't matter if I am buying unlimited-play music CDs, or pay-per-play music. Once I hit that magic dollar amount, I'm done. If I spent it on unlimited-play music CDs, I'll just keep listening to those for the rest of the year, and not get new ones. If I did pay-per-play music, I'll find other forms of entertainment.
The budget only stretches so far, and there are a lot of things competing for my entertainment dollar.
CDs or some other kind of optical would be a better bet than any kind of magnetic media for long-term.
I agree with this, but want it stated more clearly.
Pressed CDs can be better than magnetic for long-term. This excludes any kind of writeable CD format, like CD-R or CD-RW. If you want long-term storage for CD, pay to get a pressed CD on aluminum. Not a burned CD on organic dye. There are companies around that will do very small production runs for backup/archive for a not-too-unreasonable cost. (That "not-too-unreasonable" assumes your data is significantly important to you.)
It's worth it.
It's interesting seeing the difference between "offline storage", "backup" and "archive" stuff. It's mostly driven by how long the data has to last. Couple of months, couple of years, couple of decades, is basically how it goes.
Just from curiosity, what is the power cost for running this for a year?
I assume it will be running with the LCD active 24/7. Nothing seemed to imply a normal time-based shutdown (as if anyone here keeps "normal" hours anyway...) so that seems a valid assumption.
That said, what's the power usage for this, and therefore what is the approximate cost to run this for a year?
No, I'm not an eco-freak, I just like to know how much something will cost before before I jump in and do it.
I have a 4MP camera and love it. Don't shoot anything other than 4MP highest-quality-jpeg.
However...
What pixel range you need is not a function of "equivalent to" but is instead a function of "used for".
If all you want are 4"x6" prints, 300dpi for prints is about the same as what you get from your standard cheap 35mm film developer/printer. Think Walmart photofinishing here. 300dpi at 4"x6" == 300 x 300 x 24 == 2.2MP. Most photographers and magazines (I believe) will talk about 240dpi, though. That's 240x240x4x6=1.4MP.
I've done 4"x6" prints from my 4MP camera. It looks *good*. I am more than satisfied, for that use. (It does nice 5"x7"s too.)
I wouldn't really want to use a 4MP camera for an 8"x10" print, though it would look okay. For that, I'll wait for a 20MP camera. 8"x10" x 300dpi = 7.2MP. Not enough of a change from what I have now. So instead... Doing an 11"x17" print is 11x17x300x300=16.8MP So assuming I don't break this one, my next digital camera will be in the 20MP range.
For showing on a screen? 1600x1200 is enough, and for a lot of people 1024x768 is actually what they run. Both of those are noticably under 2MP. Good reason to use less than the max resolution.
For showing on a web site? Unless it is a page background, you probably don't want anything bigger than 800x600, and maybe only half that size.
Yes, you'll probably get better results by taking the 4MP picture and downsampling in Photoshop or whatever, but that's an awful lot of effort for something where the camera can do almost as good a job itself, using less storage space, taking less time to transfer results, and less of your time in on-computer editing afterwards.
Figure out what your use is, and make selections based on that.
For my use? As I said up top, I never shoot at anything except the max resolution the camera supports.
Cameras are plenty small with onboard storage. Look at the ultra-thin cameras out there, they have fairly standard storage options, CompactFlash, SmartMedia, MMC/SD, or memory sticks. Space for storage isn't that big a concern, really, when you can fit 1GB on a standard CompactFlash card (either a ibm microdrive, or 1GB of flash memory).
The issue is really batteries. Those ultra-thin cameras get about 30 pictures on a charge.
Driving the LCD display takes a lot of juice. Putting in batteries that can drive the display for a reasonable amount of time takes more space than you want it to.
My Canon S40 can take about 70 pictures with the LCD on (low brightness level) and a mix of flash and non-flash. About 80 pictures with the LCD on, and no flash use at all.
Turn the LCD off and that jumps to about 150 pictures on a battery charge.
My Olympus Stylus point-n-shoot 35mm camera gets about 20 rolls of film on a disposable lithium battery 1/3 the size of the rechargable lithium the S40 uses.
You want smaller digital cameras, don't worry about the storage medium... Make a battery with 10 times the energy density. Or get the OLEDs working, they are supposed to be very low energy usage, aren't they?
Though otherwise, I tend to agree... a wireless link to a bluetooth harddrive you stuck in your backpack would give you effectively unlimited storage. But with my 1GB microdrive... I switch batteries 8 times before I fill up my storage media, so that really doesn't help me all that much.
1. It's too short. For full-body shots, this is much less of a concern. Yes, if you are trying to take head-shots, you don't wnat to do that from waist level. But then, if people are sitting down, you're at about the right height.
2. It's digital... crap Current digital SLRs are pretty good quality, actually. 6MP is not at all bad, and only costs about $3k including storage media. This will give you something about equivalent to 35mm photography. Not 6x6/6x7/6x9 Hasselbrad, but a lot of wedding photography isn't done on medium format. Also, note that this was for unposed pics of the guests, not posed pics of the wedding party. It isn't replacing the wedding photographer (yet). On this topic, I have a 4MP point-n-shoot digital camera (Canon S40), and it does very acceptable 5"x7" prints. I'll replace it when 20MP digital cameras come out that will do acceptable 8"x10" prints. Until then, it won't be worth it to me.
3. "Let's push over R2D2!" Yes, this is a problem. Make it heavy enough and you'll use more battery just moving.
4. Good wedding photography... making art As stated, this is currently for candid shots of the guests, not the posed wedding party pictures. But even so... a lot of wedding photog "art" is still following simple rules. (And a lot of wedding photogs can't follow even those rules, ending up with some really bad wedding pictures I've seen.)
I don't dispute that the system has limitations. And using a video camera for captures is not my first choice either (though it's probably easier for the subject-recognition system... constant video capture). But it's a concept system. Give them a couple years to turn it into a product, and (aside from "Let's tip over R2D2") it can be a decent system for its intended purpose.
Correlation, not causation
on
Want Freedom?
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· Score: 2
I suspect you are having a problem here with activities that happen at the same time, but are not dependent on each other.
Richer societies also are safer.
Societies based on industry and factories are also safer, in general, than agricultural societies.
Do either of these directly result in safer societies? Probably not. Richer, maybe.
This is correlation, not causation.
Incorporated amendments
on
Want Freedom?
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· Score: 2
Taken literally (and as the Founding Fathers intended!) this means that most of these freedoms we take for granted were never intended to be freedoms at the level they are, but rather issues left to the individual states!
Some amendments are interpretted to be binding on states, and same aren't. Those amendments that are binding on states as well as the federal government are "incorporated".
For example, the 4th Amendment is incorporated. No state can conduct an unreasaonble search and seizure, just like no branch of the federal government can.
The 1st Amendment is incorporated also. Look them up, there's some good discussion of this.
I do tend to agree otherwise, we've put a lot of interpretation into a not-so-short sentence. But then, that *is* the job of the Supreme Court, to interpret the Constitution.
Re:"I wasn't using my civil liberties, anyway"
on
Want Freedom?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I was too.
Why, just yesterday I was watching Crossfire, and it was great entertainment listening to them basically saying Bush is an idiot.
I want my civil liberties so I can keep laughing at my elected leaders in public.
(In private, I cry because I helped elect some of them.)
Learn something about how statistics are collected and how to apply them.
I don't dispute your basic statement that average life expectancy 200-300 years ago was about 30 years. However, you need to look at what that number means.
200-300 years ago a *lot* of people died of childhood diseases. Once you made it past about age 15, you had a reasonable chance of living to see 50, and 70 wasn't completely unreasonable for the non-poor.
The "average life expectancy of 30 years" combined with "most people that live past 18 live to see 50" means that a good third of all people never lived through childhood, and most of these died before age 9.
A large percentage of women died in childbirth also. (It's amazing how that percentage dropped drastically when doctors simply started washing their hands.)
When 1/3 of your population lives to average 5, and 1/3 of your population lives to average about 35 (those childbirth deaths for women pull their average down) and 1/3 of the population lives to about 55...
Gives you an average life expectancy of about 30.
But if you lived to see 15, you had a reasonable chance of living to see 50 and beyond.
We haven't really done too much to extend life. Our average life expectancy has gone up so drastically in the last 100 years because we have beaten most childhood diseases, and reduced the childbirth-related deaths in women.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
It's not so much that I object to people lying with statistics... just be aware when you are doing it, okay?:)
I *almost* welcome these types of schemes... I'm waiting for one of them to actually work.
I'm going to be hopelessly optimistic here.
When one of these copy-protection schemes finally works, software manufacturers will suddenly make it much easier to get extra CDs of their software. You pay for the license, the media should be provided at or around cost, right? So you buy your software in a store, register/activate it, call them up and say your 4-year-old scratched the CD playing with his toy hammer, please send you another.
The next week, you call them up and ask for another, cause you dropped the 2nd one in the parking lot and stepped on it when you burned yourself with that hot cup of coffee as you were cursing your clumsiness.
The next week, you call them up and get another, cause this one got sat on and scratched by the arm of your favorite office chair. (By the way, will you people pay to get the scratch taken out of my chair???)
How long before they just send you a 10-pack of media? (Opps, I put the mail down by the fireplace, and they all melted.... Send me another 10-pack?)
If these companies are serious about selling licenses, and not little disks of plastic and aluminum, they should have no problem with this. Right?
Right?
(Of course, the record companies should also provice you, for a nominal fee, with a CD version of the White album that you already bought as vinyl *and* cassette tape, because, after all, they sell licenses for music, not pieces of plastic, right? And ditto with their media replacement policy.)
Thanks, you said that much better than I did, obviously. (Geez, looking back over what I wrote, it looks like I went trolling. Wish I'd done that on purpose, it would have been more fun. This was just sad.)
Of course, all of this is beside the point... The universe came into existence fully-formed when I was born, and will disappear without even a puff of smoke when I die. Very nice of you all to pretend you don't know this. All this "history" stuff is a really nice fiction.:)
Prove neutrons exist. Bonus points for doing this without some "magic" machine no one really understands anyway.:)
Prove NASA *didn't* fake the moon landings.
Prove computers work by electricity, and not magic.
Prove these things to someone that starts off thinking you're a flake anyway, and just *knows* you're making this stuff up from some fantasy books you read somewhere. (That's all high-energy physics is, right? Fantasy and magic.)
Now, tell me again about proving religious beliefs.
No, I'm not very religous, but I recognize the danger of saying "prove it" for anything you choose not to believe. At the same time, accepting any screwy thing your local psychotic tells you is just plain silly.
This being Sony, I would *guess* that the MP3 player is upload-only. Once you put an MP3 on the player, you can play it on the MP3 player, or you can delete it.
I'll bet you can't download that MP3 to another computer, using the player as a drive to transport music.
No, I don't know this, but since it's from Sony, I'd be willing to bet that's how it works.
Something must be wrong somewhere if the bandwidth cost for a consumer is so much lower than for the producer.
Kind of. The consumer bandwidth cost for a cablemodem is priced on the assumption that you will mostly be using it for faster web browsing. It isn't really priced with the expectation you will use it 24 hours a day at anything approaching full utilization.
This is part of why some cablemodem ISPs are starting to move to a bit more honesty in their contracts... "The first 10GB is included in your $40/month cost, after that you pay more, or we cut you off." That's about 1% utilization of your cablemodem (downstream capacity).
Cablemodems were never really meant to be unlimited use, they were just not advertised honestly.
When did this become the day of "let the marketplace decide"???
The software industry wants UCITA.
The power companies want to be allowed to ignore the Clean Air Act.
The Big 3 Detroit auto makers are trying to ignore fuel economy requirements in cars.
Major airlines have how many billions in government-guaranteed loans? (Of course, this industry has been losing money since it started 70 years ago.)
When was the last time you saw a major highway building contract awarded without bribes and kickbacks?
At least the media companies aren't alone in *not* wanting to let the marketplace decide. *Everyone* gets special treatment. That's the whole point in buying congressmen. Well, okay, renting them for a little while.
Try that with a real business connection. Say a T3.
A T3 is 45mbit/sec, and costs about $20,000 per month.
Assuming you actually have it running at 50% utilization 24 hours a day... (Couldn't tell you what a reasonable utilization is, but for this I'd hope it would be closer to 80%...)
That's 58,320,000 megabits in a month. Divide by 8 to get megabytes... 7,290,000 megabytes/month.
I'd like some decent quality songs... 256kbps MP3s. If I'm going to pay for them, I want them good.
Side Note: Personally, I'd rather get them at 3 quality levels, for the same price. 128kbps for my mp3 player in the gym, where the background noise makes that bitrate acceptable. 256kpbs for my crappy PC speakers in an otherwise quiet environment, and 320kbps for burning to an audio cd for listening to in the car.
But I'll leave it at 256kpbs MP3s. That's about 8MB per song. 7,290,000 megabytes/month divided by 8MB/song
That's 911,250 songs per month, for $20,000 in bandwidth costs.
Or about 2.2 cents per song in bandwidth costs.
If you do my 3 versions for the same price... that increases to about 6 cents per song in bandwidth costs.
Is that reasonable, when selling a song for 25 cents? I dunno, you tell me.
I assume someone will tell me if I made a silly math error.
I don't really have a problem with you liking BS, or the other pop music groups/people. Your tastes are your own, enjoy them.
However, I have to disagree with your comment about the 80s music stations. Or, rather, "classic rock" stations. More specifically, the Clear Channel classic rock stations.
They are very nearly as limited in their playlists as the Top 40s and pop music stations are. I used to like Pink Floyd. I spent too much time listening to the local classic rock station. I can't stand hearing Dark Side of the Moon any more. They didn't play it every day (I think)... but I heard it 20 times a month, at a minimum. I can only take that so long.
I've stopped listening to music on the radio, mostly. I've switched over to NPR, and a local college station that plays mostly classical stuff.
How do I hear new music now? I mostly don't, unless a friend sends me an mp3. My CD buying has gone down a lot. If I'm going to listen to the same stuff recycled over and over again... I'll listen to my own CDs, and not have to put up with radio ads.
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provided the media is within its expected lifetime, and the customer has taken reasonable measures to protect it
I'm curious... what are "reasonable measures" to protect a Disney DVD from your 5-year-old? Have you seen what they do to DVDs or CDs?
You broke the jewel case? I'll give a "tough, too bad" to that.
Your kid scratched the DVD and now it won't play? Disney is selling a child's toy (a DVD movie for children) that does not stand up to normal treatment from children. If the consumer does not have a way to properly safeguard the product (make fully-functional inexpensive backups) then the product should be replaced by Disney at their expense.
The industry isn't worried about "losing money" because they mostly know that they aren't really losing sales right now.
They are thinking about DRM in terms of increasing future revenue.
If you look at enough of these studies, music file trading doesn't generally cause fewer music cd sales. People with disposable income get exposed to more music, and buy more music. People without disposable income get access to music they wouldn't have paid for anyway. And, yes, some people with poor ethics take music they could pay for but just don't want to.
But this isn't about current sales, and the known-to-be-false belief that the record industry is losing sales. It isn't, really, even about preventing loss of revenue in the future.
This is about future control, and increasing revenue in the future.
As to workable forms of DRM... Loaning a physical music CD to a friend is perfectly acceptable and completely legal. The digital equivalent would be to "loan" a copy of a computer audio file to your friend, where your friend gets a copy of the music and you lose the ability to play that music until your friend returns or deletes his copy, or buys/licenses his own copy.
Now, this introduces a few problems.
If your music license server doesn't allow loaning, then, personally, you have a broken system, and I won't use it. But this is really a minor thing.
I have a larger issue with this. How do you support loaning in a digital environment? I backup my computer, "loan" a computer audio file to my friend, my local license is disabled until it is "returned" from my friend... and then I restore from my backup... I just got my license back, and my friend has it too.
To get around this, you either need an OS that doesn't let you backup/restore licenses, or a central server that controls and validates license backup/restores, or simply a central license server that you have to connect to periodically.
None of these are good solutions for the consumer, for a number of reasons. My OS on my computer should do what I say. If it doesn't do what I say, then the person/company that does control it should pay for my computer, because it obviously isn't mine.
But further than that... No central server, and no company, has any right no know what I'm listening to, or how often I'm listening to it. This is a privacy concern. This is one of the major reasons I hated Divx. (Circuit City's Divx, not the codec.)
DRM has major problems working in a way that supports privacy rights. This is *one* of the reasons why I don't now, and probably never will, support it.
BTW - I only shoot slow positives (slide film), never digital and blow up the traditional way.
:)
:)
Gosh, you're even more of a dinosaur than I am. I'm impressed.
I have a Canon A2 35mm SLR, and too many lenses for it. Mostly shoot negative film, though, because it is easier to pass pictures around to friends that way.
I agree, if the film were the limiting factor, doing MFT tests and LPI tests on lenses would be... most complicated.
I do have a few serious questions about lens effects on pictures. Given that you know the MTF function for the lens, and the light falloff at the corners, and any pincushion and barrel distortion effects... Given all of this characterization for a lens, with a digital SLR body...
Could you feed all of the pictures from this digital SLR with that specific lens through a filter program on the computer you download images to (or, eventually, on the SLR itself) that corrects for the known deficiencies of the lens to give you a "perfect" lens?
This is effectively what was done with the Hubble Space Telescope before NASA did the service call, isn't it? They fully characterized the defect, and then post-processed all images out of Hubble to correct for it.
That would be an interesting new filter for Photoshop. "Lens Correction - "
Your points are taken, but the above quote is *not* always true, IMO. This is why we have lens tests. You are probably used to a so called "normal" or 50mm (w/ 35mm film) lens. Generally telephoto lenses are much lower res and look soft compared to sharp photos.
And you are probably used to telephoto zoom lenses. Telephoto primes are usually *very* nice quality. You pay for it too.
From B&H... Canon Telephoto EF 400mm f/2.8L IS Image Stabilizer USM Autofocus Lens. Priced at a very reasonable $6,600 with a USA warranty. And the lens test is beautiful.
Or you could get a crappy 100-400mm f/4.8-6.7 zoom for about $300. And you get what you pay for. (But you also won't need a pack mule to lug it around for you...)
Nor is it clear that the lenses in optimal conditions (high shutter speed, f-stop sweet spot) have a 11 MP effective resolution.
It's a $6,000 Canon pro-level digital SLR...
Something tells me you'd be using L glass. 11MP effective resolution from L glass is reasonable, generally. (Note for non-Canon people... "L Glass" is the line of pro-level lenses Canon releases, usually with wider aperatures, exotic glass (UD, ED, FD glass), and better coatings.)
Even most of the primes are about this good. The 20mm f/2.8, the 50mm f/1.4, the 85mm f/1.8, the 100mm f/2, all of these non-L prime lenses have very good MTF graphs.
If you are buying a camera like this, you probably aren't using a crappy 28-200mm zoom.
More than likely, since this is a pro-level digital SLR, it uses a PCMCIA slot (Type II? hopefully Type III?) and will accept a notebook harddrive on a pcmcia card, giving 20gig or 30gig of storage.
:)
But yes... a 15MB compressed RAW file eats up a lot of space, doesn't it? On a 30gig harddrive, 15MB per image gives you... about 2,000 pictures. Not too bad. How many times do you have to change the batteries to shoot that many pictures?
We'll know in 2 weeks when they formally unveil it at Photokina.
Got the same camera and a 1gb microdrive also... I usually shoot in best jpeg... 2MB 4Megapixel jpeg image is good enough for me, and no special software to convert the image format.
I do wonder... does the camera come with a DVD burner as an almost-acceptable offline storage method?
This whole "get more money through pay-per-use" makes the assumption that you don't have a strict entertainment budget. A lot of people have only so much money they can spend on entertainment, whether that's music, movies, video games, internet access, theme parks, or scuba diving.
The basis for pay-per-use of music and movies seems to be that consumers have an unlimited entertainment budget, or that they are willing to sacrifice some other form of entertainment to be allowed to listen to the same music over and over.
I don't believe either of these to really be true. I have a set amount of money I'm willing to spend on music in a given year. I'll spend that much, and then I'll stop, because I have to budget for other expenses. Doesn't matter if I am buying unlimited-play music CDs, or pay-per-play music. Once I hit that magic dollar amount, I'm done. If I spent it on unlimited-play music CDs, I'll just keep listening to those for the rest of the year, and not get new ones. If I did pay-per-play music, I'll find other forms of entertainment.
The budget only stretches so far, and there are a lot of things competing for my entertainment dollar.
I agree with this, but want it stated more clearly.
Pressed CDs can be better than magnetic for long-term. This excludes any kind of writeable CD format, like CD-R or CD-RW. If you want long-term storage for CD, pay to get a pressed CD on aluminum. Not a burned CD on organic dye. There are companies around that will do very small production runs for backup/archive for a not-too-unreasonable cost. (That "not-too-unreasonable" assumes your data is significantly important to you.)
It's worth it.
It's interesting seeing the difference between "offline storage", "backup" and "archive" stuff. It's mostly driven by how long the data has to last. Couple of months, couple of years, couple of decades, is basically how it goes.
Just from curiosity, what is the power cost for running this for a year?
I assume it will be running with the LCD active 24/7. Nothing seemed to imply a normal time-based shutdown (as if anyone here keeps "normal" hours anyway...) so that seems a valid assumption.
That said, what's the power usage for this, and therefore what is the approximate cost to run this for a year?
No, I'm not an eco-freak, I just like to know how much something will cost before before I jump in and do it.
This says 36Watts for the Duo 2300C. Okay.
36 * 24hours = 864watt-hours.
365 days of this = 315360 watt-hours, about 315kilowatt-hours.
My power company charges me about 6 cents per kilowatt-hour. This will cost about $19 per year in energy costs for me.
Amazing, that's actually low enough to be acceptable.
I have a 4MP camera and love it. Don't shoot anything other than 4MP highest-quality-jpeg.
However...
What pixel range you need is not a function of "equivalent to" but is instead a function of "used for".
If all you want are 4"x6" prints, 300dpi for prints is about the same as what you get from your standard cheap 35mm film developer/printer. Think Walmart photofinishing here. 300dpi at 4"x6" == 300 x 300 x 24 == 2.2MP. Most photographers and magazines (I believe) will talk about 240dpi, though. That's 240x240x4x6=1.4MP.
I've done 4"x6" prints from my 4MP camera. It looks *good*. I am more than satisfied, for that use. (It does nice 5"x7"s too.)
I wouldn't really want to use a 4MP camera for an 8"x10" print, though it would look okay. For that, I'll wait for a 20MP camera. 8"x10" x 300dpi = 7.2MP. Not enough of a change from what I have now. So instead... Doing an 11"x17" print is 11x17x300x300=16.8MP So assuming I don't break this one, my next digital camera will be in the 20MP range.
For showing on a screen? 1600x1200 is enough, and for a lot of people 1024x768 is actually what they run. Both of those are noticably under 2MP. Good reason to use less than the max resolution.
For showing on a web site? Unless it is a page background, you probably don't want anything bigger than 800x600, and maybe only half that size.
Yes, you'll probably get better results by taking the 4MP picture and downsampling in Photoshop or whatever, but that's an awful lot of effort for something where the camera can do almost as good a job itself, using less storage space, taking less time to transfer results, and less of your time in on-computer editing afterwards.
Figure out what your use is, and make selections based on that.
For my use? As I said up top, I never shoot at anything except the max resolution the camera supports.
Cameras are plenty small with onboard storage. Look at the ultra-thin cameras out there, they have fairly standard storage options, CompactFlash, SmartMedia, MMC/SD, or memory sticks. Space for storage isn't that big a concern, really, when you can fit 1GB on a standard CompactFlash card (either a ibm microdrive, or 1GB of flash memory).
The issue is really batteries. Those ultra-thin cameras get about 30 pictures on a charge.
Driving the LCD display takes a lot of juice. Putting in batteries that can drive the display for a reasonable amount of time takes more space than you want it to.
My Canon S40 can take about 70 pictures with the LCD on (low brightness level) and a mix of flash and non-flash. About 80 pictures with the LCD on, and no flash use at all.
Turn the LCD off and that jumps to about 150 pictures on a battery charge.
My Olympus Stylus point-n-shoot 35mm camera gets about 20 rolls of film on a disposable lithium battery 1/3 the size of the rechargable lithium the S40 uses.
You want smaller digital cameras, don't worry about the storage medium... Make a battery with 10 times the energy density. Or get the OLEDs working, they are supposed to be very low energy usage, aren't they?
Though otherwise, I tend to agree... a wireless link to a bluetooth harddrive you stuck in your backpack would give you effectively unlimited storage. But with my 1GB microdrive... I switch batteries 8 times before I fill up my storage media, so that really doesn't help me all that much.
Some obvious replies...
... crap
... making art
1. It's too short.
For full-body shots, this is much less of a concern. Yes, if you are trying to take head-shots, you don't wnat to do that from waist level. But then, if people are sitting down, you're at about the right height.
2. It's digital
Current digital SLRs are pretty good quality, actually. 6MP is not at all bad, and only costs about $3k including storage media. This will give you something about equivalent to 35mm photography. Not 6x6/6x7/6x9 Hasselbrad, but a lot of wedding photography isn't done on medium format.
Also, note that this was for unposed pics of the guests, not posed pics of the wedding party. It isn't replacing the wedding photographer (yet).
On this topic, I have a 4MP point-n-shoot digital camera (Canon S40), and it does very acceptable 5"x7" prints. I'll replace it when 20MP digital cameras come out that will do acceptable 8"x10" prints. Until then, it won't be worth it to me.
3. "Let's push over R2D2!"
Yes, this is a problem. Make it heavy enough and you'll use more battery just moving.
4. Good wedding photography
As stated, this is currently for candid shots of the guests, not the posed wedding party pictures. But even so... a lot of wedding photog "art" is still following simple rules. (And a lot of wedding photogs can't follow even those rules, ending up with some really bad wedding pictures I've seen.)
I don't dispute that the system has limitations. And using a video camera for captures is not my first choice either (though it's probably easier for the subject-recognition system... constant video capture). But it's a concept system. Give them a couple years to turn it into a product, and (aside from "Let's tip over R2D2") it can be a decent system for its intended purpose.
I suspect you are having a problem here with activities that happen at the same time, but are not dependent on each other.
Richer societies also are safer.
Societies based on industry and factories are also safer, in general, than agricultural societies.
Do either of these directly result in safer societies? Probably not. Richer, maybe.
This is correlation, not causation.
Some amendments are interpretted to be binding on states, and same aren't. Those amendments that are binding on states as well as the federal government are "incorporated".
For example, the 4th Amendment is incorporated. No state can conduct an unreasaonble search and seizure, just like no branch of the federal government can.
The 1st Amendment is incorporated also. Look them up, there's some good discussion of this.
I do tend to agree otherwise, we've put a lot of interpretation into a not-so-short sentence. But then, that *is* the job of the Supreme Court, to interpret the Constitution.
I was too.
Why, just yesterday I was watching Crossfire, and it was great entertainment listening to them basically saying Bush is an idiot.
I want my civil liberties so I can keep laughing at my elected leaders in public.
(In private, I cry because I helped elect some of them.)
Learn something about how statistics are collected and how to apply them.
:)
I don't dispute your basic statement that average life expectancy 200-300 years ago was about 30 years. However, you need to look at what that number means.
200-300 years ago a *lot* of people died of childhood diseases. Once you made it past about age 15, you had a reasonable chance of living to see 50, and 70 wasn't completely unreasonable for the non-poor.
The "average life expectancy of 30 years" combined with "most people that live past 18 live to see 50" means that a good third of all people never lived through childhood, and most of these died before age 9.
A large percentage of women died in childbirth also. (It's amazing how that percentage dropped drastically when doctors simply started washing their hands.)
When 1/3 of your population lives to average 5, and 1/3 of your population lives to average about 35 (those childbirth deaths for women pull their average down) and 1/3 of the population lives to about 55...
Gives you an average life expectancy of about 30.
But if you lived to see 15, you had a reasonable chance of living to see 50 and beyond.
We haven't really done too much to extend life. Our average life expectancy has gone up so drastically in the last 100 years because we have beaten most childhood diseases, and reduced the childbirth-related deaths in women.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
It's not so much that I object to people lying with statistics... just be aware when you are doing it, okay?
That's just about my favorite key sequence in Windows NT4 and Windows 2000.
That doesn't reboot the machine. It screenlocks it. Very useful.
I *almost* welcome these types of schemes... I'm waiting for one of them to actually work.
I'm going to be hopelessly optimistic here.
When one of these copy-protection schemes finally works, software manufacturers will suddenly make it much easier to get extra CDs of their software. You pay for the license, the media should be provided at or around cost, right? So you buy your software in a store, register/activate it, call them up and say your 4-year-old scratched the CD playing with his toy hammer, please send you another.
The next week, you call them up and ask for another, cause you dropped the 2nd one in the parking lot and stepped on it when you burned yourself with that hot cup of coffee as you were cursing your clumsiness.
The next week, you call them up and get another, cause this one got sat on and scratched by the arm of your favorite office chair. (By the way, will you people pay to get the scratch taken out of my chair???)
How long before they just send you a 10-pack of media? (Opps, I put the mail down by the fireplace, and they all melted.... Send me another 10-pack?)
If these companies are serious about selling licenses, and not little disks of plastic and aluminum, they should have no problem with this. Right?
Right?
(Of course, the record companies should also provice you, for a nominal fee, with a CD version of the White album that you already bought as vinyl *and* cassette tape, because, after all, they sell licenses for music, not pieces of plastic, right? And ditto with their media replacement policy.)
Hey, I said hopelessly optimistic, didn't I?
Karlm,
:)
Thanks, you said that much better than I did, obviously. (Geez, looking back over what I wrote, it looks like I went trolling. Wish I'd done that on purpose, it would have been more fun. This was just sad.)
Of course, all of this is beside the point... The universe came into existence fully-formed when I was born, and will disappear without even a puff of smoke when I die. Very nice of you all to pretend you don't know this. All this "history" stuff is a really nice fiction.
Prove the earth revolves around the sun.
:)
Prove neutrons exist. Bonus points for doing this without some "magic" machine no one really understands anyway.
Prove NASA *didn't* fake the moon landings.
Prove computers work by electricity, and not magic.
Prove these things to someone that starts off thinking you're a flake anyway, and just *knows* you're making this stuff up from some fantasy books you read somewhere. (That's all high-energy physics is, right? Fantasy and magic.)
Now, tell me again about proving religious beliefs.
No, I'm not very religous, but I recognize the danger of saying "prove it" for anything you choose not to believe. At the same time, accepting any screwy thing your local psychotic tells you is just plain silly.
This being Sony, I would *guess* that the MP3 player is upload-only. Once you put an MP3 on the player, you can play it on the MP3 player, or you can delete it.
I'll bet you can't download that MP3 to another computer, using the player as a drive to transport music.
No, I don't know this, but since it's from Sony, I'd be willing to bet that's how it works.
Yes, Sony is a big believer in DRM.
Kind of. The consumer bandwidth cost for a cablemodem is priced on the assumption that you will mostly be using it for faster web browsing. It isn't really priced with the expectation you will use it 24 hours a day at anything approaching full utilization.
This is part of why some cablemodem ISPs are starting to move to a bit more honesty in their contracts... "The first 10GB is included in your $40/month cost, after that you pay more, or we cut you off." That's about 1% utilization of your cablemodem (downstream capacity).
Cablemodems were never really meant to be unlimited use, they were just not advertised honestly.
When did this become the day of "let the marketplace decide"???
The software industry wants UCITA.
The power companies want to be allowed to ignore the Clean Air Act.
The Big 3 Detroit auto makers are trying to ignore fuel economy requirements in cars.
Major airlines have how many billions in government-guaranteed loans? (Of course, this industry has been losing money since it started 70 years ago.)
When was the last time you saw a major highway building contract awarded without bribes and kickbacks?
At least the media companies aren't alone in *not* wanting to let the marketplace decide. *Everyone* gets special treatment. That's the whole point in buying congressmen. Well, okay, renting them for a little while.
Try that with a real business connection. Say a T3.
A T3 is 45mbit/sec, and costs about $20,000 per month.
Assuming you actually have it running at 50% utilization 24 hours a day... (Couldn't tell you what a reasonable utilization is, but for this I'd hope it would be closer to 80%...)
22.5mbit/sec * 60 seconds/minute * 60minutes/hour * 24hours/day * 30days/month
That's 58,320,000 megabits in a month. Divide by 8 to get megabytes... 7,290,000 megabytes/month.
I'd like some decent quality songs... 256kbps MP3s. If I'm going to pay for them, I want them good.
Side Note: Personally, I'd rather get them at 3 quality levels, for the same price. 128kbps for my mp3 player in the gym, where the background noise makes that bitrate acceptable. 256kpbs for my crappy PC speakers in an otherwise quiet environment, and 320kbps for burning to an audio cd for listening to in the car.
But I'll leave it at 256kpbs MP3s. That's about 8MB per song. 7,290,000 megabytes/month divided by 8MB/song
That's 911,250 songs per month, for $20,000 in bandwidth costs.
Or about 2.2 cents per song in bandwidth costs.
If you do my 3 versions for the same price... that increases to about 6 cents per song in bandwidth costs.
Is that reasonable, when selling a song for 25 cents? I dunno, you tell me.
I assume someone will tell me if I made a silly math error.
I don't really have a problem with you liking BS, or the other pop music groups/people. Your tastes are your own, enjoy them.
However, I have to disagree with your comment about the 80s music stations. Or, rather, "classic rock" stations. More specifically, the Clear Channel classic rock stations.
They are very nearly as limited in their playlists as the Top 40s and pop music stations are. I used to like Pink Floyd. I spent too much time listening to the local classic rock station. I can't stand hearing Dark Side of the Moon any more. They didn't play it every day (I think)... but I heard it 20 times a month, at a minimum. I can only take that so long.
I've stopped listening to music on the radio, mostly. I've switched over to NPR, and a local college station that plays mostly classical stuff.
How do I hear new music now? I mostly don't, unless a friend sends me an mp3. My CD buying has gone down a lot. If I'm going to listen to the same stuff recycled over and over again... I'll listen to my own CDs, and not have to put up with radio ads.