AlexHopmann.com

Fun, I think I just got my first push poll. Whats especially surprising is that it seems like the Sierra Club or their allies are the ones paying for what is considered a fairly slimy tactic.

I received a call that asked me to spend 4 minutes participating in a poll that wouldn’t need my name. Why not I figure? The first questions is pretty simple, how do you plan on voting on the ballot issue #1 (the levy for road + transit construction in the Puget Sound area). I press something.

Next they say something about how “did you know that this measure is opposed by the Sierra Club because its a bad solution to Washington’s traffic problems and creates more global warming? Knowing this how would you vote?” At this point its clearly not trying to get any real scientific data- rather in the phrasing of the question they are trying to state certain controversial issues as facts. They went on to ask another couple of questions, each really unloading dumps of toxic sewage on the ballot measure.

Hmmm. With this kind of slimy tactic, it sure makes me want to vote for it.

Because it can capture full resolution images at such a high rate, when you half-press the button it starts continuously capturing them. Then when you do a full press it can record an image that was slightly in the past so you get the exact moment you wanted. Even better than 0 shutter delay, you get an effective -.1 second shutter delay to compensate for your reaction time.

Looks like the next couple of years are going to continue to be very cool for digital cameras. With 32GB+ SD cards coming out, high quality video, and more. The key thing about this Casio prototype is that it shows the industry moving past the mega-pixel race into things that really improve the pratical issues with photography.

Now if it can only capture decent low-light images… But I suspect that is too much to ask.

Casio has some demos out of a next generation camera that can shoot 60 frames per seconds at full 6 megapixels or 300 frames per second at normal high quality video. The demos look incredible. With 12x zoom I expect you will need a good tripod to have this work well even with the promised image stabilization. Still, it looks awesome.

I’ve been playing with Sharpcast a bit the last few days and even signed up for their premium service. The key hook there is that they offer to “backup” full-resolution copies of your images on their servers. The current offer has no quota associated with it which makes the $6/month very attractive. Uploading photos in one photo is really easy but it takes a bunch more work to upload a bunch of different folders. Still, as long as the unlimited photos thing holds out, it seems like a very nice service.

I’ve been playing with various ideas in this space and the Sharpcast guys have overall done a very good job. Nice client to web-site integration. Fairly good upload, although it will consume all available bandwidth if it can (be careful running it on a work network since you don’t want to bring everyone’s network to a grinding halt).

All the same there are some pretty key missing features. Its still early so I hope they will add these soon. I really miss being able to assign star-ratings to photos and to filter by the star ratings. For example I like to have available all the photos of a given event but usually just share out / use a slide show the 4-5 star ones. The client is also able to show composite albums/slideshows with sub-folders but the web-site can’t.

I just discovered an article on Tom’s Hardware that compares the NVidia vs ATI (AMD) video decode quality . Unfortunately although it was just back in January its based on the previous generation GPUs so the results are fairly obsolete already. Hopefully they will update it soon for the new GPUs.

I took some video with my Canon TX1 flying back from Bend yesterday and have seen an interesting implication of the advances in video technology- when I shoot with the 720p (highest quality) video settings I can’t play it back on any of my computers without dropping frames. So this stuff does matter.

Another aspect is that the configuration of how all this video stuff works together on a given machine is a total mess. There are all these different encoding formats and codecs and its almost impossible to tell which is being used where. I’d love to discover a good utility that lets me easily-

1) Check a video file and tell me what it really is. What video codec, what enclosure type and what bit-rates are all the pieces.

2) Check a machine and tell me what codecs are installed and help me figure out which will be used by Windows Media Player, Media Center, etc. Also make sure that all the right “enable hardware acceleration” settings are on- as the Tom’s Hardware article points out these are sometimes disabled by default which is really strange.

I’ve had the new Canon TX1 out of its box for all of an hour now so this is a very quick set of first impressions. When people see it their first reaction is that its a video camera. Its interesting that this form factor looks like video camera first and people are surprised that its a capable still-photo camera too.

First a couple of reactions about the form factor. This is a little bit of a disappointment. Because the camera is so small you only have room for about two fingers to hold it under the lens. The power button is in a weird spot on the side and much worse the trigger is in a weird spot on the top. To shoot still photos I need to hold it with what feels like a very unnatural grip. For shooting movies the controls feel a bit better since the record button is on the back right where your thumb would be and so is the wide angle/telephoto toggle.

Overall still photo quality seems good. Low light seems a bit better than my previous camera (Canon SD550) although still far from even acceptable. There is a special indoor mode that helped a bit more too. The test photos I took were much better in terms of reduced bluring- the image stabalization seems to be working really well (or maybe that is some placebo effect). I did have a problem using the zoom indoors with it not focusing correctly.

There is a new super-macro mode that lets you focus from 0-10cm. I took a couple of test shots with this and it is pretty damn awesome. Should be great for some of the flower and food photos that I like to take.

I shot a couple of test movies and the results looked pretty great. I bought a 8GB flash card for $60 from NewEgg but its the slow kind so in the HD mode I can only shoot about 30 seconds before it quits. Unlike the old camera it at least gives you a nice display of how close you are getting to running out of buffer.
At maximum quality settings I can get a bit more than 27 minutes of HD video onto one flash card and the bandwidth is high enough that as far as I can tell Windows Media Player couldn’t keep up with the 30fps on my laptop (Core Duo 2ghz). At least so far I tend to not shoot video for more than small clips so the size shouldn’t be an issue, although I do wonder if 32GB SDHC cards will be out soon.

I just got a notice from Amazon that they shipped my Canon TX1 today. I’ll be reporting back tomorrow on my experiences with it in the flesh…

When I first placed my order for my Canon TX1 on Amazon they listed the release date as March 31st. About a week later that changed to May 31st and the wait is really gnawing at me. Dell lists the camera as shipping in 1-2 weeks but I’ve seen them be totally full of it on those estimates before. There are some online forums where some people suggested that it would start shipping next week, but I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.

I ordered 2 spare batteries for $20 each from some online cheap battery place and a slow 8GB memory card for $60. I figure with 8GB of memory I’ll usually be running out of batteries long before I run out of storage space. The I calculated that I probably need memory that runs at about 4MB/second to shoot continuous video so I’ll probably have to get another faster memory card later, but they aren’t out yet (and look like they will be 4x the price of the existing memory cards). I’m also a little skeptical about whether the cheap batteries are any good- its one of those things where they cost 1/3 the price of the official ones, and they might be crap or they might be 100% the same item with just different printing on the label. I’ll post back here once I found out how it all works.