Tag Archives: problems

Reviews

Camera review: FujiFilm FinePix S9100

Bottom line: love the camera body and the user interface, good lens, good grip, but the CCD sensor is not as good as it should be. Read on for the details.

I won’t bore you with the specs, which you can check out for yourselves. I’m going to focus on real-world use. I purchased the FinePix S9100 because I wanted a good camera that would tide me over until I purchase a great DSLR (I’m eyeing the EOS 5D). I had no DSLR expectations from the S9100. I just wanted a decent digital camera with a good grip. I don’t like smallish cameras made for a woman’s hand, because they’re too light and don’t feel right in my hand. The S9100 was pretty close in dimensions to medium-sized DSLRs, and that was a strong selling point for me. I also liked the FinePix S line’s reputation. People kept saying these cameras take really good photos, and I wanted to see for myself. There were other selling points, such as the much-touted low light sensitivity, the 9 megapixel resolution, the 10x manual optical zoom, and the fact that it used AA batteries. I have a whole slew of rechargeable AA NiMH batteries at home, and I looked forward to the day when I could use them properly.

So, I got the camera this past Tuesday afternoon, and went out immediately to shoot with it. The menus of the S9100 were arranged very well, and I was able to find and set all of the options I wanted within minutes. Within 15 minutes of opening the box, I had the camera configured and the strap and lens cap attached. That made me pretty happy. I like cameras that are easy to use.

I started taking photos before getting out of the house, and that curbed my enthusiasm. The focus time was longer than I expected, comparable to and even longer than the focus on my Kodak EasyShare v610, which is a compact point and shoot. That didn’t bode well. At any rate, I pushed forward, and made it outside. The plan was to get sushi at a local restaurant with my wife, then go out into one of the local parks and take photos as the dark set in. This would give me a chance to shoot across the whole ISO range.

At the sushi place, I took more shots, and found two things that were pretty annoying. First, there was some serious lag time between shots. I shoot in RAW format, and the S9100 apparently takes a really long time to write the photo to the card. There’s no burst mode in RAW mode. You can only take one picture at a time, then wait until it gets processed and written to the card before you can take another one. I had to sit there counting second after second while the write light was on, unable to do anything else. And no, it wasn’t my card’s fault. I’ve used that card (120x CFII) with competent DSLRs like the Canon 30D and Olympus E-500, and it works beautifully. Second, when shooting at ISO 1600 inside the restaurant, there was a whole lot of noise in the shots. That really annoyed me, but I wanted to get out and take plenty of photos in the forest before I made a judgment call.

Once we got outside and I got more or less used to the long write times, using the camera was kind of nice. The flip screen was great. It allowed me to use some really interesting angles. I’d have had to guesstimate some of the shots if I only had a viewfinder to look through, since there was no way I could have craned my neck into those positions. I also liked the zoom lens. I like to twist lens barrels, I can’t help it. It gives me that tactile feel I need from my camera. The nice rubberized grip worked very well. Holding the camera in my hand, it was easy to forget that it wasn’t a DSLR. It feels very good, it’s balanced, and the buttons are just where they need to be. I had no problems using them. I loved their placement. I also loved the camera’s two Macro modes, one for closeup shots and one for really close shots of insects or other such tiny things. That’s a great feature!

As it got darker and darker, I switched to a higher ISO, and the camera worked decently up to 800 ISO in the twilight. Every time I’d switch to 1600 ISO, the noise was unbearable. But I figured, hey, I’m in the middle of a forest with no ambient light, and I’m also shooting handheld. Maybe this is to be expected. So I wrapped things up and we went back home. As we pulled into our garage, I looked at the lights in the parking lot and realized there was plenty of ambient light there to test out the 1600 ISO. I ran out, camera in hand, ready to test things, only to be disappointed once more. Every time I switched to 1600 ISO, the noise was too much, and there was serious pixel streaking going on. At the highest aperture (f2.8) and shutter speeds of 1/30 and above, there were no decent images to be gotten with the S9100, even if I stood right underneath a lamp post.

Finally, I switched it back to 100 ISO to try out some long exposure shots. I set it to a shutter speed of 4 seconds, and snuck it between the branches of a tree to stabilize it. The sky was filled with beautiful shades of blue that begged to be captured. After taking each photo, the preview screen, which is supposed to compensate for the shutter speed and show me what the photo will look like given my settings, showed me the sky exactly as I wanted it to look. I took a few shots, trying different angles, and according to the camera’s display, each photo looked fantastic. I couldn’t wait to get back inside and have a look at the photos on my computer.

After the shots were all loaded into Lightroom, Ligia and I sat at my laptop to have a look. What we noticed made us very unhappy. A lot of the shots were out of focus, even though they had seemed to be in focus on the camera’s screen. When we viewed the good shots at 100%, all of them were trashed. I have no better way of putting it. It looks like the sensor isn’t really meant for 9 megapixels. But that results in some really cheap-looking shots at full-size. Most of the detail is lost, and a whole lot of white pixels are seen instead. Really, the photos are that bad! To put things in perspective, the photos from my Kodak v610, which is a 6.1 megapixel camera released last summer, and my Panasonic Lumix FZ20K, which is a 5 megapixel camera that’s about three years old, are better than the photos from the S9100! Both of those cameras are less expensive than the S9100.

But wait, it gets better! I remembered that a cheap camera from Fuji, the FinePix A700, also uses the same 1.6-inch Super CCD HR sensor. Click on that link and see for yourselves. So what we’ve got here is a sensor from a $157 camera, being used in a camera that originally retailed for over $600. (Now it goes for about $420). That hardly seems appropriate to me, and as the say, the photos tell the truth. Have a look at a crop from one of the photos taken with the S9100 below. It’s a detail from a portrait, and it’s cropped directly in Photoshop, at 100%, with no other editing whatsoever.

Do you see what I mean? That photo’s no good, and every single one of the photos looks like this at 100%. All of the detail is gone because of that overworked sensor. Fuji might as well not have released the S9100. The inadequate sensor ruins it.

Oh, and remember those gorgeous long-exposure shots of the sky? They were all completely dark when I viewed them on my laptop. I mean pitch dark! And yet they appeared beautifully exposed on the camera’s screen. What happened? I’ll tell you: the camera can’t adjust the live preview accurately when composing the shot, and what’s worse, instead of reading the real image from the card and displaying it on the screen after taking it, it re-displays the stored live preview image instead. So I had no real way of knowing what those photos looked like when I took them. I suppose I could have switched to playback mode, but who’d have thought that the camera’s display would be this inaccurate?

After we saw all this, Ligia and I looked at each other, and we knew what had to be done. Even though I prefer to test out cameras for a month so I can get a really good feel for their usability, given the S9100’s shortcomings, there was nothing else to do but to wrap it back up and sit it nicely in its box. It’s going back. I was so disappointed. I loved the body, loved the grip, loved the zoom and ease of use, but when it came to its most important feature, the sensor, I just couldn’t live with it.

Here’s hoping Fuji sticks a good sensor in this camera at some point in the near future. Until then, my advice to you is to stay away from it.

Standard
Thoughts

It's got to be automated

I’ve just helped a friend get her laptop going again (I hope). She called me asking for help because Office couldn’t open some documents properly for her, and on top of that, her computer was acting strangely. It turned out she needed an extra feature from the Office CD installed, so I did it. But, while I did that, I discovered that she had a virus infection. When I connected her laptop to the Internet to update the antivirus definitions, it turned out that Symantec couldn’t update itself — possibly due to the virus. I decided to run a full system scan (she couldn’t remember the last time she did that), and found another virus. I left it running while I backed up some of her important documents to a flash drive and asked her to work on them on another computer. It remains to be seen whether that laptop will recover from the infection or not.

But this only served to underline the glaring problems of basic computer security that everyday users have to face. They may have antivirus software, but they don’t use it, nor do they update it regularly. They may have heard that it’s good to back up your files, but they don’t do it, or when they do it, it’s haphazard. A casual dragging of some files onto a flash drive, the burning of a CD with some important files, etc. They’ve also heard about spyware, but I guarantee you that most don’t have antispyware software installed, nor do they run it regularly. And that’s the rub! You can have even a brand new system, but it can still get infected and you can lose all your data. Or worse, some spyware will run through your files, picking out financial information, and you’ll find yourself with no money in the bank, or with your 401k account depleted. It’s happened, it’s been in the news, none of this should be new to anyone. But what do regular computer users (non-techies) do? They go right on using their computers as if they’re immune from this.

This is why I applaud both Microsoft and Apple for introducing software that backs up files automatically, and also runs regular antivirus and antispyware checks (these last two features only apply to Microsoft’s software). Microsoft introduced OneCare Live late last year, and it does everything regular users need it to do. I actually run it on my own laptop as well. Not only does it do all this automatically, but it’ll nag the user if there’s some action that needs to happen on their part. For example, it nagged me that I wasn’t backing up my files, and it continued to do so until I connected a USB drive to my laptop and set it to back them up to that location automatically. On top of all this, it also runs a defrag and cleans up my laptop of temp files. OneCare’s messages are color-coded, so even the simplest of users can figure out when something’s wrong. When everything’s fine, it’s green. When something needs to happen, it’s yellow. When things are bad, it’s red. It’s hard to miss the point.

When Apple releases the next version of OS X (code-named Leopard), it’ll include automatic backup software that’ll let you go back in time to various versions of files, or recover deleted files. It’s a huge step in the right direction (the interface itself is fantastic) considering that Apple has so far had only .Mac and its Backup software, but you had to pay $99 for .Mac to be able to use Backup. That was a silly arrangement. Apple’s also been lucky so far because there are very few viruses and spyware built for OS X, but that will by no means be the norm as their platform gains more users. I also don’t like the fact that there’s no defrag software built into OS X. Apple actually advises against defragmentation. Well, whether they want to recognize it or not, the contents of the hard drive will get fragmented over time, and it doesn’t matter whether a computer runs Windows, OS X or Linux; it’ll need to be defragmented sooner or later. I’d like to see some defrag utility from Apple, sooner rather than later. I’d rather not have to reformat the computer in order to get my bits organized.

I also appreciate that both Apple and Microsoft have moved to delivering critical system updates automatically. Apple will prompt you to download and install them, while Microsoft gives you the chance to automatically install them or to choose when you want to do it.

Regardless of the computing platform you or John, Jane or Mikey down the block uses, it’s all got to be automated. Each OS has to do all of the tasks that are vital for the well-functioning of that platform, automatically, by default, and to nag the user constantly when there’s an action to be taken. Sure, the nagging may get annoying for techies like me, but it’s vitally important for the normal users that don’t know what’s involved with keeping their system up to date… or else…

Standard
Thoughts

Photoshop erases EXIF and IPTC data when saving for web

Photoshop CS2A couple of weeks ago, after carefully editing the IPTC information for one of my photos in Photoshop CS2, I was shocked to find out that it disappeared when I used the Save for Web option.

I thought I was alone, till I discovered others are aware of this problem; see this Google search for plenty of links. Apparently using ImageReady to save the image preserves the EXIF data, but it does not preserve the IPTC data. Saving the image directly from Photoshop preserves both EXIF and IPTC data, but robs the user of examining and tweaking the quality and resolution of the JPG file before pressing the Save button. But, neither option preservers vendor-specific EXIF tags, like the ISO tag writen by Nikon cameras.

Seems to me users shouldn’t have to dance around Photoshop and ImageReady in order to preserve the vital information present in the EXIF and IPTC data of their photos. It’s pretty sad that Adobe hasn’t standardized the photo data options in Photoshop and ImageReady. Why is it that only ImageReady has the extra option for the meta data, and why does it only save the EXIF data instead of both EXIF and IPTC data? Furthermore, I can’t believe an easy option for preserving EXIF and IPTC data isn’t made available in the Save for Web option. Don’t tell me it’s because of file size, because I’m not going to buy that argument. A few kilobytes here and there simply don’t matter nowadays, and besides, users should be able to make that decision, not the software. And don’t tell me it’s too expensive to do it. Exifer is free.

Bottom line: we deserve to have the option to preserve the extra data in our photos.

Standard
Thoughts

A doctor's view on "free lunches" and politicians

The following open letter from Dr. Sanford Siegel, President of the Chesapeake Urology Associates, to Rep. Henry Waxman (R-CA), was pointed out to me this morning. I asked Dr. Siegel’s permission to post it in its entirety on ComeAcross, and he agreed. I’m struck by how true this letter rings. My father is a doctor. He works hard, seven days a week. He wakes up at 5 in the morning and usually works till 10 or 11 at night. Whatever “free lunches” he gets when he goes to get CMEs (Continuing Medical Education) or to attend conferences and seminars in order to become a better doctor are well deserved. On the other hand, I’m not so sure how well deserved the salaries of our politicians really are, considering their work ethic, isolation from public sentiment, and openness to lobbyists. But then again, the tactic of distracting the public has been employed by politicians for ages, so this should be no surprise. Read Dr. Siegel’s letter, it’s an eye opener!

Dear Mr. Representative,

On Saturday July 29, 2006, there was an article on the front page of The Baltimore Sun entitled “Medical Salesmen Prescribe Lunches.” This article describes how the pharmaceutical representatives use free lunches to gain access to Doctors. In this article, you are quoted to say, “It’s obvious that drug companies provide these free lunches so their sales reps can get the Doctor’s ear and influence the prescribing practice. That’s not the way it should be done. Physicians should get their information from peer review and objective sources.” I am a physician, and we do get our information from peer reviewed journals and continuous medical education meetings. We are required to have 50 hours a year of continuing medical education. The reps simply supply valuable prescribing information about the use of the
drugs and their benefits.

Instead of insinuating impropriety on the part of Doctors and Pharmaceutical reps, maybe you should look into how your Congress functions. You are a member of the most abusive Congress in history. You are a member of Congress that will only work 76 days this entire year. That is the lowest number of days in history. They call this Congress, affectionately, the “Tuesday to Thursday Club,” as the Representatives come to work on Tuesday and leave Thursday afternoon. The lowest salary paid to a Congressman is $165,200/year. If you think I am misinformed, please refer to the ABC news report done on Saturday July 29th. They did the piece on, “Are we getting our monies worth?” Obviously, we are not.

The average salary for a Pediatrician is less than $100,000/year. They work 7-days-a- week, 48 to 50 weeks a year. They have not had a pay raise in 15 years. When was your last pay raise? We get “free” lunches from these Pharma Reps so we can learn about new drugs, their benefit to our patients, and where they will be harmful. Most of us will take 10-15 minutes a day for lunch, and most days we do not get lunch. We cannot see them during office time. Our days start at 7-8 in the morning and don’t end like other people’s work days. When we finish office hours, we go to the Hospital to see patients, and it does not end there, either. We then can go home and make phone calls to patients for an hour. We do this every day, 5-6 days a week. That is a far cry from your 76 days a year.

Your quote makes reference to the influence they have on us to use their drugs. Are you so naive to believe that a turkey wrap or a piece of dried out chicken parmesan will make us use a drug which we do not feel will be beneficial to our patients? Why is it legal for the airlines to give frequent flier miles for inducement to people to use that airline or for the restaurants who provide these Doctor lunches to have “frequent buyer” programs where “each dollar spent earns points that can be exchanged for movie tickets, gift certificates to Home Depot or Nordstrom or an ‘executive spa treatment,'” for the Reps who buy them? Should I believe that the junkets to Scotland for your colleagues to play golf, the lavish dinners they throw for members of Congress, the free airplane tickets or Super Bowl tickets, etc., do not influence you and your votes? Are you getting your information from, as you said, those “objective sources, the highly paid lobbyist?” How can you be so self-righteous? I am so insulted by your comments.

Like most Congressmen, Doctors are honest, hard-working people and dedicated to the people they serve. We do not abuse or take advantage of the system. Tell me what you would do without us? There may be a few bad apples, but the medical care in the United States is second to none. Is it made worse by these lunches? We have been hammered with 40% to 50% cuts in our reimbursement over the last 15 years. The Doctors share of the health care pie has shrunk from 30% to 8%. Overhead continues to soar. Healthcare insurance rates to my employees rose 24% this July. Two weeks later, I got a letter telling me this same company was reducing our reimbursement by 21%.

Dr. McGuire, the CEO of United Healthcare, was paid 1.6 BILLION (yes Billion) dollars last year. You must know that because CALPERS was so incensed they have filed a grievance with United Healthcare. Have you looked at them? Don’t you think that is just a tad more egregious than chicken parmesan?

This article has stirred a fire in me. I am angry that people of such influence, such as you, could attack us for something like lunches. There are so many important issues to address. Fix health care for the poor; bring peace to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Middle East. Do something meaningful about these problems, and the historically low approval rating (26%) for this Congress may improve.

If you’d like to contact me to discuss this matter further, I can be reached at ssiegel585 [at] gmail.com or 410-581-1600.

Very Sincerely,

Sanford Siegel
President, Chesapeake Urology Associates

cc. Members of the 109th Congress
The Baltimore Sun
The Baltimore Examiner
Baltimore Business Journal
Washington Post
Washington Times
The New York Times

Standard
How To

When it comes to home computers, k.i.s.s. and forget it

I’ve been learning a hard lesson these past few weeks, as my parents go through a time of computer trouble, and since I’m the one who purchased their computer equipment and set up their network, it’s up to me to get things right again.

What’s the lesson, you ask? As encapsulated in the title of this post, and as I’ve been yelling it at myself in quiet moments, it’s: keep it simple. 

Here’s how their setup looks:

  1. Cable internet connection
  2. Wireless router
  3. Vonage box hooked up to router, in turn hooked up to phone w/ answering machine, and multi-function printer/fax/copier/scanner
  4. Same multi-function printer/fax/copier/scanner also hooked up to router because it’s networkable
  5. Older desktop hooked up to router, another printer through parallel port, and to the multi-function machine through the network
  6. Laptop with wireless card, using the wireless router, configured to the networkable multi-function machine through the network

Where should I begin? Gee, let me start with WPA. Why? Because that’s how I had their wireless router set up. And every time something happened with the connection, they either couldn’t find the passphrase, or for some reason the laptop’s card didn’t feel like connecting to the router. Lesson learned: ditch encryption, just set up MAC filtering. That way, they can connect on the go, and don’t have to bother with WEP or WPA, which is a real hassle unles you’re a geek. Plus, with MAC filtering, unless someone can spoof a MAC address, they can’t connect to the network. And if they can spoof a MAC address, there’s a good chance they know how to get in even if encryption is enabled. Yes, I know the traffic can be sniffed if the encryption isn’t enabled, but who cares? Even WPA encryption can be sniffed and decrypted with readily available utilities. So why bother with it?

As I banged my head against the wall, I rued the day I set up their multi-function machine through the network. Why? Because if you have to delete it and re-install the printers, or you have to re-format the OS (Thanks, Windows, for the crappy OS, and thanks, driver manufacturers, for the horrible, latrine-worthy job you do writing those drivers – for all devices, not just printers!) you can never find the machine on the network so you can re-configure it, and you spend hours re-setting it to factory defaults through the printer’s LCD menu, then hunting for it on the network. Have you ever tried to walk someone through a printer’s LCD menu when you can’t remember the options, and they’re not familiar with it? It’s not fun. Lesson learned: install through USB, and set up local printers.

Quick question: if you unplug your printer’s or computer’s network cables from the wireless router, can you plug them into the IP telephony router? I guarantee you your parents or friends won’t know the difference, and they’ll plug them into it, then wonder why they can’t get on the Internet or connect to their printer. Lesson learned: forget IP telephony devices like Vonage. It may be cool for us youngsters to brag about how we slashed our phone bill by switching to Vonage or just using Skype, but it’s not cool for your parents when they can’t receive phone calls or faxes. (Yes, I’m talking to you, Vonage, with your awkward and arcane programming steps (or rather, button dances) so I can get my printer to send/receive faxes through your connection! Forget that!) Just set your parents up with a dedicated fax machine, plugged into a wall phone outlet, then sit back and relax, because they won’t call about it! And it’s the same with the phone! Leave it plugged into the wall! Forget saving $5 or $10 a month just for IP telephony. It’ll cost you and your parents much more in stress when their phone doesn’t work.

When my parents lost data because their laptop crashed and had to be reformatted, I realized the value of setting them up with automatic, regular data backup, the kind that just works. You know, you don’t think twice about setting up backups in the server room, but somehow you think the data on your laptop or desktop will take care of itself… Unfortunately, Windows doesn’t come with an easy backup program. Lesson learned: buy a big external hard drive, and set up automatic, regular backup jobs to it. It’s preferable to get a drive that comes bundled with a backup utility. Have any of you used the Windows Backup utility? What a stinker! How do you edit scheduled jobs? First, you can’t edit their every aspect after you’ve created them, and second, who’d think to look under a completely different app, called Scheduled Tasks, to find them there? Really, would anyone other than a geek know that? Why in the world aren’t the jobs available for editing within the Backup utility? It’s just plain dumb design.

As I had to re-educate my parents about the various ways of doing things on the computer, I came to realize (duh!) that I should have spent more time training them at the outset. Yeah, it seems like a no-brainer now, but back when you’ve just spent a couple of days transferring all their stuff and settings from the old computer onto the new one, do you really feel like spending another half day training them on the new machine? No, you just sit them down in front of it, point out the highlights, and tell them to enjoy it! Well, you pay for it later. Lesson learned: spend time training the user at the outset – you’ll avoid problems down the road. And define simple pathways for them, stuff like:

  1. This is where you save your documents.
  2. This is where your email archive gets stored.
  3. This is how your email account is set up. Make sure the settings stay this way!
  4. This is how to back up your bookmarks.
  5. These are the passwords and simple access instructions for the firewall, router, computer accounts, etc.
  6. This is where the photos get stored. Use this application to manage them. Download the photos from your digital camera this way…
  7. This is where the music gets stored. Use this application to manage it. This is how to sync the iPod…
  8. This is where the videos get stored. Use this application to download the videos from your camcorder to the computer. Here’s a simple way to make a DVD from a video…

It’s stuff like this that saves you countless headaches. If you need to, make screen-capture movies and put them on a “how to” DVD for them. Or write instructions, with screenshots. But make it simple, or you’ll pay for it!

Finally, as I troubleshooted why the laptop kept crashing because of obscure driver errors (everything was up to date, and the latest driver versions were installed), I learned the following three things:

  1. Buy a good brand. Don’t get a cheap brand. My parents have an Averatec laptop. That thing clonked out from the start. It was supposed to be able to output video to a TV through an S-video port, and it wasn’t even able to do that. When I called Averatec support, their advice, right off the bat, was to reformat the laptop. Great, the panacea fix used by all lazy tech support people! Then, after the 1-year warranty expired, it started to crash unexpectedly, even though there were no viruses and no spyware on the computer. It didn’t have any weird applications installed, either, just mass apps like Office, Firefox, iTunes, Picasa. So, don’t buy Averatec.
  2. Get an extended support plan. Don’t get cheap when you shouldn’t! Get that support plan, and make sure it includes accidental damage coverage, as well. You’ll be thanking yourself when you have someone to call if the hardware goes bad, or you need help with the system.
  3. Don’t buy Windows. Sounds harsh, doesn’t it? But it’s true. People who aren’t geeks need a simple operating system that’s not fragile – one that doesn’t crash or is susceptible to hundreds of thousands of viruses and malware. Windows may be good for developers who are shackled to it by the work they do (like me), and it may work fine at the office, (where you have a Help Desk department, and you’ve got an industrial-strength firewall and anti-virus thin clients pushed out to all the client computers, with the latest virus definitions,) but it’s not good at home – not for people who are at a loss when they need to tell a bad file apart from a good file. The choice becomes pretty simple: Mac OS! Just get a Mac for your parents, or tell your non-geek friends to get one. Then, when they don’t call you to complain that it keeps crashing, you’ll get some time to pat yourself on the back.

I hope this helps you streamline your work as you set up your parents’ or your friends’ machines. I sure wish someone shoved this under my nose when I started to set up my parents with new computer equipment.

Standard