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Related Entries:

• Mmmmm, Treo 800W....
• Ditching your iPod for a Treo 700P
• Pocket Tunes now plays music from Subscription-based services like Yahoo! Music
• Bluetooth Dial-up Networking (DUN) for the Treo 650
• New GSM Treo 650 and Sprint Firmware have arrived!

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Update: Well, wouldn't you know it! My auction went well, but the guy who won wanted to pay using bidpay. I had never heard of them, but apparently they use Western Union to transmit money. It looked legit so I said ok. But after he won and tried to send money, bidpay for some reason rejected the transfer. Twice. He asked to post it again so that he could start fresh and he would buy it and then try the same thing. I took a chance and did this. He bought it, tried to transfer money and again got rejected. Apparently this was the only way he could send money. He was located in the Ukraine. He had a perfect 60+ feedback, but go figure, this was the time his usual payment option decided to balk on him!

It reminds me of my first ever experience with eBay which soured me to it so much that I didn't use it for at least a year. It was back in 1997 and I sold an old VCR to a guy in Texas. I checked my bank account for days after I deposited his check and when I saw it listed, I thought it was a done deal. So I sent off the VCR. A week or so later I get a notice from the bank that the check had bounced and they were charging me $5. I wrote the guy who said that he was moving and so had to transfer money out of that bank, but put money back in so told me to ask them to try it again. I did, and the same thing happened. I tried reaching him again about it, but was not getting a response. I wanted a money order in order to guarentee payment. Finally he wrote back (this was probably about two months after he had won) to say that he was being harrassed and that I was somehow being a jerk for asking for my money. He said it was my fault for sending him the VCR before his check had really cleared! He said he still intended to send the money, but of course I never got either that nor any further correspondence. I even had a friend who was a lawyer send him a letter mentioning legal action if he didn't send the money, but still never got a penny. Thus I receive one of only two negative feedbacks on my account. The other one was from someone who bought something but never responded to several of my emails. I eventually had to give them negative feedback and of course they returned the favor. For this reason, I'm leary about leaving negative feedback unless someone does something really aggregious because it's almost a given that they will do the same to you, which will hurt your chances of selling things in the future.

Anyway, I had to go ahead and relist the Treo. This time I put a much lower Buy It Now price of $399.99, which is actually less than what the auction was won for last time. Here's a link just in case you still have interest in it:

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I just got some additional info from Epson about the P-2000 Multimedia Storage Viewer (AKA PhotoFine). I’ve written before about the P-2000, which to me looks like one of the best Personal Media Players out there because it not only caters to the general consumer, but to the high-end amateur, or even professional photographer. Here are a few new things that I hadn’t seen before:

• Ultra fine high precision processing for close positioning and alignment of pixels, thereby increasing pixel count to 256 per square inch for better resolution and detail (I can only imagine this will look very nice, and viewing a dvd video capture at full resolution on such a small screen should be quite impressive!)

• View images from memory card without downloading to the hard drive (I can see this being useful for some digital photographers. For example, say you don’t have the time to transfer all your images, but just want a quick way to view them (and show others) on the road. Instead of compromising your camera’s battery by having them view the images on the camera, simply transfer the memory card over to the P-2000 and view them on a much larger screen)

• NTSC or PAL (this is a nice feature so that one can hook the P-2000 up to TV’s and not have to worry about the compatibility with different TV signal standards in different parts of the world)

• Speaker: Dynamic (symbol) 28 x 1 (Mono) (I’m not really sure what this means except that maybe the P-2000 has a mono speaker on it, presumably for listening to sound files or the audio that accompanies the video files. While Stereo would have been better, it probably wouldn’t have made a huge difference coming out of a small speaker. Let’s face it, most of the time, you would probably use headphones for this purpose, but it’s nice to know that you can actually share the audio without having to go out and buy accessories like a portable speaker system.)

• 5.8” x 3.3” x 1.2” in. (W x H x D) Weight: 415 g or 1 lb. with battery (So, here we can finally compare it to other players. Let’s use the iPod Photo as an example. The iPod Photo measures 4.1 x 2.4 x .75 and weighs 6.4 oz. So, we’re talking about something almost twice as thick, almost 50% wider, and almost 50% longer. This isn’t a big shocker to me, because around 2/3 of the real-estate on the front is the screen. The screen measures 3.8 inches on the diagonal. Compare that to half that – 2 inches – for the iPod Photo, which takes up only about ¼ of the front. You also get 640 x 480 pixels, almost ten times the number of pixels as the 220 x 176 on the Photo iPod. So yes, it’s not going to fit nearly as well in your pocket as an iPod, and at twice the weight it will weight you down a bit more, but if your priority is actually viewing images on the device and not just using it as a portable hard drive or something to plug into a larger display like a TV, there’s just no question about which is the superior device).

This product category seems to be getting more and more filled with new devices, and I’ll be trying to cover some of the others as they emerge as well. I would love to do a hands on review of the P-2000, but unfortunately I’m still not mass-market enough for companies to be sending me loaners units and I don't have lots of disposable income lying around to buy new gadgets left and right. I’ll have to see how much access I can get to some of these devices at a local retail establishment and take a few furtive pictures with my camera phone!

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Oh I suppose there is the user interface to consider.  It’s hard to beat Apple in that area.  But the UI on the P-2000 would have to be mighty clunky to opt for an iPod.  Also, what about Apple's online digital music store iTunes?  For those who have downloaded a bunch of songs or hope to in the future, will this device be able to?  It’s unclear.  It is supposed to support AAC files, which is the format Apple uses with iTunes, but it’s not clear if that automatically means it can support iTunes specific DRM.  I’m sure Apple controls which devices can and can’t access their DRM’d files and so far there’s been no mention from any camp.  There is one more issue which probably is not a big one for most but is for me, and that is that I use the iPod primarily to listen to audio books that I download from Audible.com.  These also have a proprietary DRM and while they can be played on an iPod, that also doesn’t mean by extension that they can be played by any device that can play an AAC file.  I’ve been attempting to get answers to these questions from the various parties and I will post any information as soon as I get it.

Link to Gizmodo

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Well, maybe I should say "less expensive" huh?  The Fuji S3 Pro, Fuji's top-of-the-line digital SLR announced last month and due to come out in November, is apparently going to be priced at $2,499.  This is at least $500 cheaper than earlier estimates and almost half of the $4,000 that original rumors had said.  With this kind of price tag, I think it will be even more irresistible to budget-conscious pros or even some amateurs who have a little more pocket change.  The big difference that it will have even over the most recently announced Nikon D2X DSLR and Canon EOS 1DS Mark II, other than the vastly lower price tag, will be the newly designed sensor which according to Fuji expands the dynamic range of the images to be closer to film.  (Briefly "dynamic range" relatest to how large a range of levels one has between black and white - the more levels, or the larger the range, the more ability to capture scenes with lots of contrast without either under or overexposing the picture) While it may not be as capable in other areas, like continuous shot speed, battery options, even sensor size and megapixels, this increased dynamic range could make it a must have even for Nikon afficianados (it takes Nikon lenses) who want to replace their backup film cameras and use it as a complement to their D2H or D2X.  Unfortunately my wife reads my blog and I just know that this entry is going to have her wanting to start working a second job so that she can buy one of these (she has the current Fuji S2)!

Link to Photography Blog

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Now, the one qualification that I should mention is that none of these have undergone any “post-processing” (editing to make them look better), other than converting them to jpegs from their original RAW format with Breezebrowser, which also does some noise reduction in the process.

This brings me to something I’ve mentioned on the D70 Yahoo! Group recently.  Basically, I’m the type of person who likes to procrastinate.  I have another tendency towards perfectionism in some things (certainly not everything!), so when mixed they can often cause lots of delay.  This is the case when it comes to taking pictures with the D70.  I know a fair degree about photography, but this is my first digital SLR.  So I had to read the manual from cover to cover, and then got Thom Hogan’s Excellent eBook and read that as well.  Then I started in on Deke McLelland’s Adobe Photoshop CS One-on-One, which I’m about ¾ of the way done reading.  Next is Scott Kelby’s Adobe Photoshop CS for Digital Photographers, which I’ve heard great things about, and finally Bruce Fraser’s Real World Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS.   I could probably buy another 100 books on Adobe Photoshop and photography, but at least for now I wanted to get through as much of that stuff before taking lots of pictures.  I have this fear that I will take lots of pictures which will add to my growing collection of stuff that I still have yet to do any post-processing on because I don’t feel I know how best to make an image look its best – more on this below.  Luckily I was able to put that aside over the weekend and took over a hundred shots.  Still nothing huge compared to many, but not bad considering I don’t normally take tons of shots of the same thing the way a lot of people do.

As I’ve been going through Deke’s book, I’ve learned a lot about various tools and methods in Photoshop, but the one thing that’s nagged me the whole time is that I never got a sense of why I was doing certain things, and then it hit me!  I am, as I may have mentioned here before, color blind.  There are various types of color-blindness and I don’t have the very rare type where you can’t see any color.  I have the much more common type (apparently 10% of men have this) where one set of the color-recepter “cones” in my eyes are not as sensitive to their given wavelength of light that they are supposed to be.  Like with monitors and image sensors in digital cameras, humans have receptors for the red, green, and blue components of light.  Apparently either my red or green cones (or perhaps both) aren’t quite up to the job.  This doesn’t mean I don’t see colors, but it’s harder for me to tell the difference between certain reds and greens.  A blue that might have a little red in it, making it violet, I will see as just blue.  This also means that certain colors that have read and/or green may look darker to me than they would to someone else. 

It’s all very interesting, but I was hoping that it would not mean that I couldn’t effectively work with Photoshop, since I’ve found it a really fun learning experience, and it would be great to take images that don’t look all that great in their original form and really make them into something stunning.  I was sent to this site that had a Photoshop plug-in, but apparently it was only to show a normal person how something might look to a color-blind person.  I needed the opposite, but such a plug-in has not been created yet, although they do have web applications that emulate it.  Even so, I began to wondering how it would work.  Color is such a subjective thing to begin with.  If I get something that allows me to see with “normal” vision, won’t it look “wrong” to me?  When I make corrections, won’t some of them be to make the image look more like what it does when I view it in real life, in which case I will actually be making it look wrong for those with normal vision?  Wouldn’t it make more sense to work on it without filters?  Then again, if a green to me looks dark to me because my eyes aren’t picking up the light, and I push the brightness up in order to make it more visible, it will probably look positively radioactive for a person with normal sight!   

Maybe there just is no way to get around it except for some future implanted video filtering system that would pump up red and/or green light in my optic nerve enough to compensate.  But I can’t even contemplate laser surgery for near-sightedness, let alone something more invasive.  Maybe they will build something into glasses or contacts that will eliminate color-blindness.  But then it’s a matter of rewiring the brain to accept the new information as normal.  I just wonder if the brain, not seeing what it’s used to, will actually change my perception of the colors in order to make them look more normal.  I remember hearing back in high school about how the eye actually sees things upside down but the brain turns it right side up in order to make more sense of it.  They apparently did experiments where they gave people glasses with lenses that turned things upside down again and after living with these glasses on day and night for an extended period, their brains again rewired in order to make their vision right-side up.  Then when they removed the glasses, the normal vision of the people was upside down!  Until of course their brains had time to rewire themselves yet again.  It’s enough to give you headache thinking about this stuff! 

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There have been rumors over the past few years about Apple coming out with a new iPod with a color screen that can display photos as well as do all the other iPod stuff.  Well, it seems as if this rumor has popped up again and the sites commenting about it seem somewhat convinced that it is likely to be true.  The new iPod is rumored to have a 60GB hard drive (which is supposed to hold upwards of 20,000 songs or 25,000 images), and a color screen that is the same size as current iPod screens.  If this proves to be true, I’m glad that Apple is finally getting into the PMP market, since it will just add to overall competition that is good for consumers.

According to the rumor, the new iPod has something that most PMP’s don’t, the ability to take memory cards.  The article lists “memory stick slots.”  What I take this to mean is that it has more than one memory card slot.  I think the author was using “memory stick” to mean the general memory card rather than what memory sticks are – the specific format that only Sony devices use.  Otherwise, the usefulness of the slot would be relegated to Sony digital cameras, no doubt a sizeable chunk of the digicam market, but still a minority of that market as a whole.  No word on the iPod being able to play video formats.  If it did, my guess is that it would probably only support Quicktime video, another Apple format. 

The rumors about the new iPod make it out to be more of a way to view pictures, but with the screen being pretty small, its more likely to be something that you hook up to a TV at a friend’s house rather than doing a lot of viewing on the device itself.  The P-2000 on the other hand seems to be trying to merge the more consumer-oriented PMP market with one that might be more geared to serious photographers.  Although prices for memory cards have been sliding at an ever-faster rate, the higher-capacity cards (2GB and up) are still pretty pricey, especially if you compare them to the capacities of these PMP’s of 20GB to now possibly 60GB.  With file sizes increasing due to higher resolution capabilities and some people using RAW formats that take up more space than jpeg, cards can get filled up pretty quickly.  This is especially true when you’re on travel, or filming a big event like a wedding.  You can always take a laptop with you to dump your pictures onto the hard drive so that you can reuse the card for taking more pictures, but laptops aren’t nearly as portable as something the size of a PMP, and are usually a lot more expensive.  But add the capacity of direct print, being able to view multiple RAW format files, and you can see that the P-2000 is geared a bit more toward the photographer rather than the general consumer.  But the P-2000 also has MPEG-4, MP3, and AAC support, so it’s certainly attractive to the general consumer as well. 

Of course, we don’t really know enough about the new iPod  - even if it exists! – to say whether it how well or poorly it will compete, but I’m sure it will do well if for no other reason than it is an iPod.  The large userbase of those who are familiar with the platform will motivate a lot of sales, in addition to it inevitably synching with iPhoto, a very popular image-cataloging program for Macs.  Simply the Apple name will probably give it a lot of clout, as there are few big names in the PMP arena.  Sure Epson is a big name in printers, but not in other consumer electronics.  Archos is well known among those who follow the portable music or media markets, but that’s it.  So many people may use the respected brand name of Apple to finally get into this product category.

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The device, called the P-2000 Photo Fine Player, looks like it is designed primarily to view and download images.  It looks like one possible feature may be to allow the user to zoom in to a smaller area within a picture and move around,  as well as getting a kind of contact sheet of multiple images so that one can quickly move to the an image and display it.  Apparently the device can display RAW image files from a series of Nikon and Canon cameras, but no Fuji or Olympus RAW, at least not listed.  It looks like one can also hook the device directly to a TV or monitor for displaying pictures or other media, as well as hook the device to a printer (at least one that uses Epson’s USB Direct Print protocol) for printing things without involving a separate computer.

As far as this “other media” goes, all I can see is the mention of MPEG-4, a type of video format that allows for very good compression rates, and QuickTime, which MPEG-4 is based on.  There’s also a mention of “motion jpeg” which displays full jpeg images as movies, thus is compressed only to the point that individual jpegs are compressed – it’s not a scheme in use nearly to the extent that QuickTime or MPEG-4 are.

The device also plays audio.  MP3 is mentioned as well as AAC.  AAC is a file format that like MP3 is lossy, but whose compression scheme is better, allowing for higher quality audio even with higher compression rates.  The other big advantage to having AAC support is that this is the format Apple uses for it’s iTunes downloadable music files.  However, I’m not sure whether simply supporting AAC also means that one can play such files on this device, since the AAC files that Apple provides have a copy-protection mechanism built in which may not be supported by the device.

While there are other “PMP” (Personal Media Player) devices out there that serve those who want to want to both listen to music, watch movies, and view pictures on the go, this is the first one that I’ve seen that also seems to add the functionality that is critical for serious digital photographers – the ability to directly download pictures from memory cards.  The large capacity can hold over 6,000 of the largest files my 6-Megapixel D70 can produce, making it a pretty long-term portable storage device if one can’t take an actual laptop on location or load up on hundreds or even thousands of dollars worth of storage cards.  Also the ability to hold the files on a more portable device than the camera itself with what looks like a larger screen and the ability to manage the images to some extent would just make this all the better.

A couple of pertinent questions come to mind other than the most obvious ones of whether it will actually be sold outside of Japan and if so when.  First, the rate at which various other card reader/storage solutions like this can download images seems to vary quite a bit.  Belkin makes a couple of devices for the iPod that will do basically everything this will but without any viewing capability.  The main problem with it and the reason I haven’t bought it is that the speed they transfer images is exceedingly slow, upwards of a half hour for a 512MB card with 80 pictures.  This may be ok for a lot of people, but if you are doing some moderately heavy shooting where hundreds of pictures and several 512MB cards are necessary, this sped just won’t cut it.  Aside from which apparently transferring even one 512MB card depletes the iPod’s battery so much that you really can’t use it for more than this without then charging it for a much longer period of time before the next card is downloaded.  Other dedicated devices, such as the Flashtrax, are said to be a lot faster. 

Then there’s the little question of price.   If this thing is priced at a hefty $700 or more, which isn’t beyond the realm of possibility given all its capabilities, this could put it out of reach for a most people.  Of course professional photographers will probably not be as fazed, since it’s easy to pay twice this for a really good lense, let alone a DSLR camera body.  But the average consumer could get just as much use out of this as a professional or serious amateur photographer, since a huge number of people now have digital cameras and it only takes a long vacation to demonstrate how quickly memory cards can be eaten up unless you take your laptop and do daily dumps of your images onto it.

I for one love to see such devices and hope more companies come out with them.  One wonderful feature I can think of would be a keyboard so that one can either rename images easily, or change metadata for a given image.  The ability to hook the device to a cell phone (via wires or wireless) to upload your images online would be great, although even for one 6MB file, this might take an excruciatingly long period of time with current mobile phone speeds.  Eventually, I would hope one could go into a Blockbuster or other such place and download any movie one desires via a kiosk.  But I guess such kiosks could be placed anywhere and could also offer any music as well as movie or tv show.  Pairing such a device eventually with a smartphone and giving it the ability to communicate via Wimax and/or Wireless USB would enable buying and downloading media virtually anywhere.  This is all pretty far away, but maybe not as far away as it seems.  The technologies all exist in one for or another and except for the expense in creating such a device and the need for it to be relatively small, it could be created right now, more or less.

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Adobe, the makers of the premier digital photopraphy editing tool, Photoshop, has come out with a standard format for RAW files.  RAW files are a type of file that more advanced digital cameras use to save raw data from the image sensor.  The advantage over the much more common jpeg format is that the file is usually basically the exact information that the sensor received when taking the picture, whereas jpeg is a “developed” or “processed” interpretation of this data.  So, with a raw file you can change settings as if you were still in the process of taking the picture.  You can change white balance, sharpness, exposure, etc., and it’s as if you changed these things before you actually hit the shutter.  This is very useful for digital photographers because it gives them the power to kind of “go back in time” if you will and correct incorrectly made settings.  One CAN correct these things in a jpeg, but it’s not nearly as effective because the jpeg has already been processed.  Think of it as making a copy of a copy, although it’s not quite that bad.  RAW files are truly the digital equivalent of a negative, and this is aptly what Adobe is calling their new standard format. The .DNG extension obviously stands for “Digital Negative…” what?  Graphics?  Not sure.  In any case, Adobe has made this format free of restrictions or royalties.  Doing otherwise would have killed such a nascent standard.  Hopefully everyone’s learned the lesson of CompuServe and the .gif format.  Of course, the only programs that will currently support this DNG file are Adobe products like Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, and Acrobat, so we will have to see whether it is adopted by other software makers as well as camera manufacturers (currently it’s not supported by anyone but Adobe, although one can convert one’s old RAW files to the new format via a tool that Adobe has made available).  Let’s hope so.  This will make it a whole lot easier for software makers to concentrate on features and not have to deal with converter intricacies every time a new camera comes out.

In other news Fuji, Konica Minolta, and Kodak have decided to form a standards body called the “Picture Archiving and Sharing Group” or PASSG. This group aims to develop standards around not just digital photography, but audio and video as well.  For digital photographers (and I assume for videographers as well), one of the most challenging parts of the job (or hobby) is what’s referred to as “digital workflow.”  This means refers to how the image goes from the shutter release to the end product, whether that’s a print, a web page, or what have you.  It involves the process of transferring the file from the camera to a computer, editing the file, or converting it to different formats, archiving it for posterity in various forms and places, sending it to labs, or to a local printer, posting it to an image hosting site or to a more standard website, etc.  As you can see, this can become a complex process with many steps many different options and decisions to make along the way.  Different people have very different workflows depending on the size of their business (if they have one at all), how they run their business, what they want to do with their photos, or simply their personal style.  Having a set of standards around workflow, I would think, can only serve to make it more manageable.  This is one of the areas where more choice can be a double-edged sword.  Choice in and of itself is good, but too much of a good thing isn’t always a good thing.  You can get overwhelmed and this can make developing a simple and straightforward workflow extremely challenging and time consuming.

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DPReview.com

The Fuji S3 was originally announced in February with a release date of the second half of the year.  However, Fuji hinted at releasing the camera in August, then September, and finally October, so it is nice to finally see at least a preview of this camera which means that it is hopefully very close to mass production.

The S3 is an 8 Megapixel camera (the S2 is 6MP), but this step up in resolution is not why many professionals have been eagerly awaiting this camera’s arrival.  There is a quality of digital cameras which until the S3 has not really been addressed in all the upgrades from one camera model to the next.  In the consumer/prosumer models, you see bright decals on the camera proclaiming “6 Megapixels!” or “10X Optical Zoom!”  But no matter how high the resolution (and actually if you keep cramming more onto the same size of CCD you run into increased digital noise), one of the big limitations of digitals over film is something called “Dynamic Range.”

Film can capture many fine levels between the blackest black and the whitest white – around 11 stops to be more precise.  Each stop in photography is twice as luminous or half as luminous as the last, so 11 stops means the 2 to the power of 11 or 2048 – light is 2048 times as bright as black.  Current digitals have only 6 stops at most of dynamic range, which comes out to a piddly 64 times brighter.  The S3 is the first camera to directly address this issue by another CCD design innovation that actually already exists in one of its prosumer models, but has been enhanced for the S3.  The newer CCD actually has a separate set of picture elements specifically for handling the highlights (brightest parts) of an image, with which digital normally has a hard time avoiding overexposure.  The claim is that this new technology adds a couple of stops of dynamic range, so the brightest parts can now be 256 times brighter than the darkest.

For those who aren’t big photography hobbyists or professionals, dynamic range may not seem that important.  But for those in the know, it makes a huge different because it means that one can take a much wider range of images without fear of overexposing or underexposing.  Any image with a huge amount of contrast is currently very difficult for digitals.  An event as common as a wedding will see groomsman in dark suits and the bride in a white that can turn out to be hundreds of times brighter than the dark suits.  Without complete control of lighting as in a studio, it become extremely easy to get one of those extremes off enough to where either shadow detail is lost or highlight detail is lost.

Unfortunately DPReview did not actually take any images, so that was disappointing.  I really want to see that difference in dynamic range in a photo – and it would be easier to understand to see it visually for most people.  A few other things I noticed from the preview:  The S3, while able to take continuous pictures faster than the S2, still is no match for my D70, a camera that costs only $1000 compared to the S3’s $3000 or more.  Also, the S3 still does not take a rechargeable lithium ion battery, something that many prosumer and digital SLR cameras have at least as one option.  I’ve always been partial to these over multiple AA’s, as they are easier to handle as just one piece and tend to give much longer battery life.  Other than these two items nothing really caught my eye.  There are some interface improvements, but since I’m not intimately familiar with the S2, I may not pick up on some of the new stuff that S2 owners will.

There still is no word on exactly what the price will be for the S3.  It was originally going to be $4,000, but since prices have come down in the digital SLR Market over the last year or so, it seemed likely that this price would drop to $3,500 or even $3,000.  Also no further word on when the camera will hit the streets, although the latest quoted date as far as I know is “late October.”

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For those unfamiliar with the term, “moblogging” is short for mobile blogging and involves posting blog entries, often with images, but not necessarily, from your mobile phone, which is much more portable than even a laptop.  Then again, taking pictures on your digital camera, downloading them to the PC, then emailing them, especially if you normally take them in RAW format, can be a very time-consuming process that works against the whole idea of blogging while on travel. 

While I’m sure people have been doing this for a few years now (that is sending images and blog entries from their phone), it really hasn’t caught on until this last 6-12 months due to camera’s on phones either not being very good, or not even existing!  In fact, my Color Sidekick’s camera, even though it was much better than the old one on the Black and White Sidekick I had initially, still produced a pathetically bad picture.  It was only when I obtained my Treo 600 a couple of months ago that I had at my disposal a camera that I could actually bear to look at its 640 x 480 images (0.3 megapixel).  Even so, they are pretty darn small and poor quality compared even to my first 1.3 megapixel camera that I got back in 2000.  Suffice it to say I can’t wait until then next version of the Treo comes out which rumor has it contains a real 1 megapixel camera.  I would be happy with just a half a megapixel (or 800 x 600), but I’ll take a full MP, as long as it doesn’t seriously tax the processor.  I’m just afraid that pushing up the resolution too much may require many more seconds to record an image, thus making it hard to take very many pictures in a given period of time, so you could miss out on a bunch of great shots.  A secondary issue for some may be the text entry process.  Most phones are horrible at this and it will take you forever just to write a sentence.  More specialized devices with keyboards like the Treo, the Blackberry, and the Sidekick, have keyboards that allow for much easier typing, although still not as easy as a full-sized keyboard.

In any case, after getting my Treo and starting to explore the wide world of applications out there, I came across a category of blogging tools.  I tried a couple out, but didn’t get all that far.  The ones I tried out really only let you send plain text and maybe upload an image, but you couldn’t submit html which would allow you to create links.  Of course, I’ve only played with a couple of these, so I still need to do a lot more searching.   In the mean time, I heard about these moblog sites that are specifically set up for mobile blogging.  I found probably a good half dozen of these sites and culled this number down to a couple that looked like they were nicely polished, slick, and had lots of features and which you didn’t have to pay for – or at least there was a free account option in addition to payed premium account options.  Those two moblog sites are Buzznet and TextAmerica.

My idea was to pick one and take pictures on my recent trip to North Carolina and send the pictures. Of course, things were just too busy before the trip and during to figure out which site would work best, so I ended up just deciding to take a few pictures and then wait till I got back and had a bit of free time to explore these sites more. Now that I’m back, that’s just what I’m doing:

Buzznet – So far, Buzznet is free, but will supposedly be unveiling a paid service in the future which will affect what they offer for the free account.  Their interface to me is a little more intuitive and it’s less JavaScript-intensive which just means that I might be able to access it via the web browser on my Treo as opposed to TextAmerica which might not work.  Their user pages (where your photos show up) look a whole lot nicer than the default you get with (the free version of ) TextAmerica. The one problem I’ve had with Buzznet so far is that it seems to be slow, both when you go to their site, but more importantly in actually posting images.  When I posted a test image to both sites via email, the one TextAmerica image came up immediately whereas I had to wait a couple of minutes for Buzznet to display it.  Then I tried a couple more and nothing happened!  Eventually – like 20 or 30 minutes later – I got replies from Buzznet with some error messages, but then when I checked the images were finally visible.  Another downside is that Buzznet only allows you to post 10 images per day and 200 per month (for now),  The other not so great thing about Buzznet is that there’s very little in the way of support.  They have an FAQ and some help information on some of the screens, but this doesn’t amount to much.  There are no support forums or a support page, or even an email for support.  This is really important in my opinion and a company that doesn’t set up a support infrastructure to help their users and for their users to help each other is, I think, shooting itself in the foot.  The one thing that makes Buzznet usable for me, though, is that they let you syndicate your content very easily.  They provide feed files in a bunch of different formats and also provide a JavaScript tag that just lets you embed the content.  Here, though, we again come to the weakness in not having adequate support info: apparently you can customize how your content is formatted where it’s being syndicated, but there’s no information on how to actually modify the feeds or the JavaScript.  Nevertheless, the default is decent enough that I have added it to the right side of my blog here.  If you don’t see it, scroll up or down a bit and you should see the last 5 images from my Buzznet moblog (I’ve only put two in so far as of this writing).  You can click on these images to get a title and more detailed description.  What I would like to customize is just to be able to include the title with the image here on the right…

TextAmerica – TextAmerica seems to have a lot of strengths where Buzznet is weak and visa versa.  As mentioned, the initial image I posted came up immediately after it was sent.  The main pages and the admin pages are very slick looking, but individual moblog pages seem very plain in comparison.  For some, this may actually be preferable, but not for others.  Unlike Buzznet, TextAmerica has extensive help information in their user guide.  In addition to this they have an FAQ, and moblog hosted by their technical support person which includes updates on features and fixes as they are made.  Finally, they actually have someone you can IM with questions to get immediate help (although when I looked this screen name was not logged in.  The free service comes with 25MB of storage, enough for at least 500 small images, and a lot more if they are compressed enough.  Unfortunately, going up one level to the paid service will jump you up to $7/month.  This provides a bunch of additional features, twice the storage and additional bandwidth.  The main thing that I wanted to do, though, has eluded me so far with TextAmerica.  They say on their FAQ that there is code available that will let you syndicate your moblog, but they don’t provide it there and a search in their userguide also turned up nothing, so for now this pretty much eliminates TextAmerica as far as I’m concerned, but I am going to try to get in touch with them to see if I can get this code from them to syndicate here.

There’s something else that these sites offer for some people which is just as important as the functionality of posting your pictures – a community.  People get to link to each other, label themselves as friends of another user, comment on their entries, etc. - genuinely picture-sharing sites.  While definitely an interesting function, and very useful for some, it isn’t really something I want to use it for.  I have a blog here at blog city and do all my writing here, so why have another just for photos?  My inclination is to basically stick to one host for everything.  I know people who have blogs, Livejournal journals, moblogs, and more where you can find their various kinds of content.  To me, though, it’s a lot easier if I have a central place to go to for everything and I think easier for others as well.  So why would I then go to another service for moblogging?  Well, while Blog City, my blog host, does have SOME of the functionality of a moblog.  I can email text entries from my phone and have the show up in my blog.  I can also email an address at Blog City with an attached image and it will show up in my photo album.  But unfortunately so far you cannot post an entry with both text and an image in it via an email with an attached photo and some text, which is what you would need to emulate the functionality of a moblog.  I’ve contacted Blog City and as usual they were very receptive about the idea, but who knows how hard it is to implement and thus when (or if) it will.  All I know is if it is offered then I can actually ditch the separate moblogs and use Blog City exclusively, which would be a whole lot simpler!

As you can tell, I am still really feeling my way through this whole phenomenon, and I may be missing a lot of things that some moblog veterans out there may be shaking their heads at.  All I can say is – please correct me!  Anything that I don’t have right, or that’s incomplete, please enlighten me (us) as to what the real deal is.  If you have additional suggestions or corrections, I want to hear them!

Update:  I finally got ahold of the TextAmerica support person via AIM and they said that syndication was only available on "upgraded" (read paid) accounts.  Free accounts do not provide this, so I think it looks like Buzznet for now unless I come accross another moblog host that was previously unknown to me that provides even more for free...

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I’m always amazed at my wife’s photographs, which she’s taken primarily on SLR’s – first a 35mm film Nikon F1, and more recently on a digital Fuji S2.  Most of this is due to her skill at capturing things at the right moment, framing shots perfectly, and doing all the technical meatering stuff that I’m still too lazy to do.  But also, part of it is the lenses she uses, which give her much wider leeway in terms of zooming and especially depth of field than are possible with the S50’s small lens. 

In the last year or so there have been a lot more prosumer digicams coming on the market with longer lenses that have at least much more powerful optical zooms, but most of these are almost as expensive if not more so than the D70's body (lenses of course can mutilply it's price by leaps and bounds), and the lower priced ones simply don't have half the control and functionality of the D70.  When the Canon Rebel digital SLR came out last year and was the first digital SLR for under $1,000, I started salivating!  Here was a camera within reach, at least theoretically, but an actual SLR.  Reading the reviews, I was a bit disappointed.  It seemed that Cannon had intentionally crippled the camera’s capabilities by simply turning off certain functionality that was available.  This was done for marketing reasons as their higher-priced pro DSLR, the 10D, would have been outclassed at least in a lot of ways, and the 10D is a lot more expensive.  Even some of the functionality that I’d had my small S50 would not be available on this SLR.  So, I used that as a good excuse to not get too serious about looking to get one.  Then the D70 came out this year, and according to the reviews it not only had many of the things that the Rebel lacked, but it was even superior to more expensive cameras in some ways – like in lag time.  I decided that the D70 would be my next camera.  I didn’t expect to get it by the summer, but figured that with some luck I’d have it by the end of the year.   Well, as it turned out, the summer isn't even halfway over and the D70 is in my hands, and while I'm very happy, I’m also a bit overwhelmed!  It's one thing if I could spend 30 hours a week playing with this thing, but with a new house, a full-time job, etc., I'll be lucky to spend a quarter of that time playing with it!

Not only am I going from a compact prosumer digicam to a full-sized SLR, but I am also going from one brand, Canon, to another, Nikon.  I’ve used Canons exclusively now for almost 3 years, so this is going to be as much of an adjustment as going to an SLR, since menu items are different, buttons are different, and of course the software is different.  I’ve just started playing with the D70 and it feels so much more solid than any of the prosumer digicams I’ve had.  It weighs more, of course, especially with a larger lens, and this just makes it feel less like a toy and more like a professional piece of equipment.

Other than the sheer size, the additional functionality, and all the different menus and buttons, I also have to deal with new software, or at least I may.  For most of the time I’ve owned Canons, I’ve been using a program called Breezebrowser, which is highly regarded image management program built primarily for Canon digital cameras, although it does support other brands to a lesser extent.  It has more features than Canon’s own software, particularly when it comes to RAW files.  The canon S50 is a 5 megapixel camera and the Nikon is 6 megapixel, so one wouldn’t think the files would be that much bigger with a 1 megapixel jump, but they are.  According to the D70, a 512MB compact flash card will only allow me to take about 47 pictures in its RAW format, while the S50 will give me twice that number!  So I’m not sure whether to continue using RAW as I had been exclusively with the Canons.    RAW is definitely the most flexible format, but if each raw file takes up over 10MB of space, I just don’t know if I can manage that on the storage devices at my disposal, and I don't feel like laying out yet more money for gobs more storage or blank dvd's to hold the results of each time I go out to shoot!  So I may have to go back to Jpeg.  Breezebrowser is a very nice program not just for converting but also for viewing, organizing, etc., and a companion product called Downloader Pro is the only one I’ve seen that allows you an incredible level of control over how images are downloaded and saved from a camera.  I store my images in folders that coincide with when they were taken, so /2004/07/18/ would hold the files I took on July 18, 2004.  Maybe not the best way of organizing, but I’ve gotten used to it.  Nikon’s Picture Project, which comes with the D70, seems like a decent piece of software for making different sets of albums, allowing one to make different logical album categorizations without actually creating multiple copies of the images in those albums.  Nikon Capture is a highly rated piece of software, but I’m not sure exactly its purpose yet.  It only comes as a trial for the D70.  Looks like it is maybe mostly for converting RAW images and editing images.  I need to do some serious research and narrow down what the best software to use is so that I don’t have to go about learning half a dozen different packages!

Thom Hogan has an eBook about the D70 and I’ve ordered it because while the D70 manual is ok as far as digicam manuals go... it is a digicam manual!  It gives you the basics, explains certain things that really don’t need explaining, and then shows you lots of LCD diagrams that  make no visual sense.  It doesn’t go into great detail on more advanced functionality either. 

In any case, here are a few of the first pictures I’ve taken with the D70:

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I only recently discovered Wil Wheaton’s blog, and although I haven’t read every entry since, I have read a good number.  He’s a good writer, but I’m not always in the mood for his sometimes very sentimental stuff about his family.  Nevertheless, I was very interested in reading more about his time growing up on the set of Star Trek The Next Generation and Stand By Me, and so was happy to receive Dancing Barefoot, which is a collection of short pieces that got axed from Wheaton’s full-sized book, Just A Geek.

A large bulk of the book revolves around Star Trek.  There is a recounting of when Wheaton meets one of his idols, William Shatner, for the first time, when Shatner was directing Star Trek V on a set next to where they were filming The Next Generation, which Wheaton was in.  Shatner was apparently a real asshole to Wheaton, who was then just 15, and henceforth is known in what Wheaton writes as William Fucking Shatner, or WFS.  Another story is about a Star Trek convention in which Wheaton participated in September, 2001 in Las Vegas to celebrate Star Trek’s 35th anniversary.  It was a fascinating look at the Con experience from one of the actual performers, as opposed to a fan or objective observer.  Wheaton pulls no punches, neither towards himself nor towards some of the more disturbing fans.  One thing that Wheaton is good at is giving you his very personal perspective on things. 

I am often amazed that even now after 15 years of getting beaten up by some of his fan base, he still hasn’t hardened into a pompous jerk or a recluse.  Instead, he seems just as if not more sensitive as he recounts he was growing up.  He wears his heart on his sleeve, so to speak, and is still hurt by those who display insensitivity.  He still manages to be self-conscious about his identity as Wesley Crusher, despite proving himself over and over to be much more than that poorly written character.  Of course he talks about this in his blog, but it’s something that he seems to have to continually remind himself and his readers.

I for one never despised his character the way some did.  I felt the first two years of The Next Generation, in comparison to the rest of the series, were just not all that well written in general.  I loved them all the same when I first saw them, but compared to later seasons they just seemed “cheesy,” kind of along the lines of the olds series, but just updated with better special effects.  I was much more annoyed with Marina Sirtis’s character Troy, who seemed to only be there to have a large set of breasts on the bridge and whose comments about a foe’s emotional state seemed ridiculously obvious to anyone with a brain.  But apparently some of the nuttier Star Trek fans who can’t separate reality from fantasy, took their hatred for the character Wheaton played and projected it onto the actor himself.  This is ridiculous to begin with, but the fact they took out their anger on a 15-year-old kid is despicable, and apparently those wounds still haven’t healed for Wheaton and we get the sense they never will heal fully.  In that respect I do have one thing in common with Wheaton, since I was teased and ostracized relentlessly as a kid for being short, chubby, and socially awkward.

One of the stories in Dancing Barefoot is about Wheaton going to his recently deceased aunt’s house for the last time, a house he went to on countless occasions.  It’s a very heartfelt story about how this wonderful woman was going to be missed terribly.  This was reminiscent for me in a couple of ways.  Firstly, my wife’s aunt died just before we started dating, and she was a woman who was central to her entire family.  Her home was where people would gather.  Her death took a horrible toll on my wife and others who loved her dearly.  Her house sat vacant for at least a year until it was finally bought by one of her nephews and is in the process of being renovated.  The day after receiving Dancing Barefoot (and having finished the entire 115 pages of it), it so happened that we were going up to visit my own uncle and aunt in Orangeburg, NY.  They had just sold their house that they had owned for somewhere around forty years and are moving into a condo in a retirement community.  They wanted us to come and see the house for one last time and since we were more than happy to honor the suggestion.  This is a house that I spent countless Passovers and Thanksgivings at, hanging out with my aunt Evelyn, uncle Nat, and various cousins, 2nd cousins and extended family.  I remember one occasion where my uncle gave me a driving lesson around the neighborhood, and of course all the food.  The ritual passover meal was not complete until my uncle had spilled wine on my grandfather, which we always suspected was a diversionary tactic that would help him hide the matzoh.  The bus rides home from the house clutching my stomach in agony from all the excess food I’d eaten because it was so delicious I couldn’t stop when I was just full.  I took some final pictures of the house and my uncle and aunt, so I thought I’d share them here:

Dancing Barefoot is a quick and interesting read, and gives one a flavor of Wheaton’s writing that one can get loads of off his blog – and for free!  Still, I will most assuredly pick up Just a Geek real soon.

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I definitely have thought about eating them, because they are likely to be excellent sources of protein, vitamins, and minerals, but even though I can be somewhat adventurous, somehow I can't see actually bringing these things into the house.  This guy tried some and ended up in the hospital, but unless you have food allergies, the worste you will probably get is nausea or indegestion.

Last night we went out into the back yard and the grass was literally crawling with the things, which were heading toward the nearest tree.  It was too dark to take any good shots last night, but I finally got around to taking a few this morning.  I'm going to try again tomorrow maybe, since these were taken in a hurry, and are not the best shots.  Also, I don't have the software here at work to get anything other than the imbedded 640x480 jpeg, whereas most of the shots I have available for viewing are 800x600, so once I get the chance I will get these replaced by larger shots.

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