Camera Totals

Not bragging but with the numbers on the SX260 my averages are way up on the last few years. I have renamed/reorganised the Picasa albums for Earthquake for this year all as general Christchurch albums instead. This is an important reflection on the fact that on discovering the many architectural gems hidden away within certain residential streets of the four avenues, I have packed many photos unrelated to the quakes into these albums especially of late and can’t be bothered separating them out of the earthquake ones. Also we are moving on and it is time to move on since the earthquakes.

SX260 – I think about 4800 photos since the beginning of June so about 200/week on average.

A2300 – just passed 700 photos in 22 weeks. For me this is a pretty low count for a camera. Now that I have the SX150 I could be back to taking a lot more photos on the camera I take with me everywhere because it has such greater capabilities (the 12x zoom lens and full manual exposure control are obvious examples).

S5 – the total for the SX260 just passed the S5 total. Considering I had the S5 for much longer, the last time I took any photos on it was almost a year ago, because its functions can be rolled into one of the other cameras. Fairly soon all my cameras will be almost as good as the S5 and two of them are already being used a lot more regularly. The S5 is going to be given away fairly soon and it will not feature any more.

HTC Windows Phone 8S Now Available in NZ

The HTC Windows Phone 8S is one of two offerings from HTC in the new Windows 8 ecosystem. The 8X is the higher spec version. Vodafone and Telecom will have the 8S filling out the low end of their Windows 8 product range in NZ. Both have released this in the last few weeks at $449. It has only 4 GB of internal storage, but unlike some of the more expensive Windows 8 phones from HTC and Nokia, it has one very useful feature, a micro SD card slot that can take up to a 32 GB card. At the moment I have decided to buy one of these later (once they are a bit more mature) and switch to the $65 Smart plan with the 12 month term that will give me 1 GB of data and $10 discount more or less straight away, with my current phone (HTC Trophy 7)  then I can get my home broadband onto Vodafone as well at the same $55 monthly price so my total bill will be about 2/3rds of what it is now.

Like many smartphones these days the HTC 8S has a sealed in battery, but the micro USB port allows an external battery to be connected. I would consider the Mophie Juicepack external battery (a bit pricey at $119 from the Apple shop) good to have as it can charge any Micro USB enabled device and has saved my bacon a number of times with the Trophy.

Powershot SX150 IS

Since I wrote about this a couple of weeks back, Noel Leemings and several other retailers put a bundle deal (the camera plus a case plus two batteries and a charger plus a card) out at $179-199. This sort of clinched my decision and I jumped in and picked one up at Leemings.

Apart from being able  to run on AA batteries the killer features are the 12x zoom lens and full PASM modes. This camera model has just been superseded and I had thought the pricing was an end of line deal, although they said it’s not. The main challenge is it is significantly more bulky than the SX260 meaning I will need to get a new pouch – the one that comes with it is a snug fit and doesn’t have any space for spare batteries or cards. It is a plastic camera and unfortunately it has a plastic tripod thread underneath. In spite of the finish it feels like a solid well made camera and the battery door is much more solid than the one on the A2300. I found that the A1200 was available from the official supply channel in NZ but has been superseded by the A1300 which has not been released in NZ so that option was ruled out.

As I’ve noted PASM exposure modes (and manual focus) are a killer feature. When Canon introduced the SX100 back in 2007, it brought in a new series of low cost PASM capable cameras, a feature which had been missing at the low price end of the Powershot range for several years. Back in the day, some of the more sophisticated A-series models had these higher end features and still managed to be affordable; for that reason they were commonly sought after by enthusiasts due to their unbeatable value for money. But then that part of the A series was discontinued and you had to pay quite a lot more to get the full exposure controls. When I bought my first Powershot compact, a A400, that was just after the PASM modes had been retired from that series. A more sophisticated (and much more expensive) model with them in would have been the likes of the S100 (now S110) and the middle priced option just would not have been available.

What has swung it for me, despite the inconvenience of having to buy that new pouch,  is the high cost of the lithium batteries and Canon’s limited charging options for them. I was going to buy a second battery at $85 for the SX260 but putting that money plus the cost of the 2nd battery for the A2300 towards the SX150 has pretty well paid most of its price. Although this package comes with two NiMH AAs and a little charger I won’t need them as I have a pile of batteries already. I also have an A2300 to give away to a good home (the school will get it). Giving that away does make the SX150 purchase justifiable.

I may have also mentioned plans to buy a DSLR at some stage. I’m rethinking that because it hasn’t been a high priority and keeps getting put off. Along with having three PASM cameras seems to be a bit of an overkill. As I will be giving away the S5 shortly however I will make a move towards buying a DSLR but it will probably now be the cheapest EOS1100 model. Although it lacks some of the more desirable features of the EOS600 or 650 which I have been hankering after, it will do for now and still offers quite a lot of functionality. A twin lens kit is about $875 which isn’t too hard to save up for, and still gives 12 “real” megapixels in that it performs a lot better than any compact of similar resolution with vastly superior low light performance, and of course a full optical viewfinder and a hotshoe for the Speedlite 430 I already own. The LCD screen only has a resolution of 230,000 pixels which isn’t much to write home about but largely irrelevant for previewing photos since the live view isn’t so much use for a camera that heavy. I have played with live view on DSLRs before but on a big camera with a heavy flash on top it makes the use of the camera quite awkward. Likewise the video capabilities aren’t all that special, but in truth it has been many years since I have shot any video clips with any camera at all and dedicated video cameras to record on SD these days are relatively cheap and superior in performance. The screen doesn’t articulate but again this is not a feature I have really missed since I started to use the SX260 instead of the S5 lately. It doesn’t have a sensor cleaning capability but of course you could manually clean it; dust is mapped out by software instead. The lithium battery does have an extremely good life and there isn’t any GPS capability.

Why is the Windows startup folder so hard to configure

This seems to get harder and harder to do with each edition of Windows. I might be missing something, but at least in XP, you could right click the Start button and get “Open” or “Open All Users” to browse the Start menu in Explorer. In Windows 7 these options have disappeared. In Windows 8, the Startup folder no longer appears on the Start screen.

In addition, in Windows 7 and 8, the Startup folders appear in these two hard-to-find and non-intuitive locations (a big change from XP):

• The all users startup folder which used to be in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu, got moved to C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\StartUp.
• The user’s own startup folder which used to be in %userprofile%\Start Menu, got moved to %userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu

I’m sure MS had a reason for moving these folders around – but they just made it harder to get to this folder, and Windows 8 exacerbates this by taking the Startup folder out of the Start screen. There is a Startup tab in the Task Manager, which lets you enable and disable startup shortcuts or registry keys. But, you can’t add entries. Another missed opportunity.

Forced restarts get worse under Windows 8

You might remember from Windows 7 that it can install updates on the fly and then tell you it wants to restart automatically within a certain timeframe. Usually it gives an option to postpone the restart. Under Windows 8 the system will not let you postpone these restarts indefinitely and will force your system to restart at a certain time, no ifs or buts. You can turn this off, but it rankles that this is actually the default setting for 8. It rankles even more that this is one of two ways when Windows can force your system to restart without asking you to save any work before it shuts down your computer. The other time is if an installation needs your computer to restart. For example I just installed a new version of iTunes, and it put up a restart dialog box. I accidentally clicked the button that said to restart the computer and Windows restarted immediately by terminating all the open windows without bothering to check if anything needed to be saved or not. When it came back, as usual, Excel had recovered files. That is all very well for Excel, but not every application has this capability. There have been enough times I have lost data from open applications because of the forced restart. It is total hypocrisy considering if you click Shutdown yourself, it asks applications if they want to save anything. (As it turned out, I did lose data from QGis because of the forced close. Not much data, but enough to make me really, really mad at Microsoft)

These are more reasons why Windows 8 is becoming a tiresome operating system to have on my home computer. In fact now that I have three computers, I am slowly coming to the point where I am considering wiping Windows 8 off the most expensive one, and reinstalling it on a server edition instead, or maybe Windows 7. The fact that Microsoft considers it acceptable to kill running applications without checking if they need to save first, is one of the reasons I am growing to hate Windows 8. Some of the other reasons have already been canvassed and they tend to go along the same lines. The overall theme of Windows 8 is that Microsoft owns your computer and can behave like they want with it. If you run an application that MS doesn’t approve of, the default smartscreen response is to say the app was blocked. It is only if you click on a non intuitive link for more details that you can get the app to be unblocked. Forcing your computer to be restarted by a certain time and date may be acceptable on a work computer but not on a home one. These are examples of how Microsoft considers that it owns your computer once you install their OS on it. They are all for a certain end. And the idiots at Redmond especially the moron Sinofsky whose head has just rolled and the chief jester Ballmer, should be really really really ashamed of themselves for putting this operating system out and foisting it on an unsuspecting public. And that view is without all the other reasons that people don’t like Windows 8. So far as I can see, Windows 8 is for tablets, not for anything you do any serious work on, and that is how people should treat it.

Back to AA Battery camera

Somewhere back then I have most probably had a whinge about Canon and proprietary battery cameras. This year I bought two at once and both of them have been an issue as the battery tends to go flat at the most inconvenient time and with a new battery at around $70-80 I haven’t been in a hurry to buy two different batteries to go in two different chargers.

With the ongoing inconvenience, rather than buy two batteries at $150 I would rather replace the camera with one of two possible AA battery choices:

• Powershot A1200 at about the same price as the A2300 but slightly lower spec
• Powershot SX150IS at $230 which is considerably higher in spec, only just below the SX260

For the amount of use this 2nd camera gets it is hard to justify the extra cost of the SX150 so I think I would go for the cheaper option and still have the benefits of AA battery use. Still tossing up whether to buy the 2nd battery for the SX260 though. Just why in this day and age we cannot have external USB power or charging on these cameras is very hard to understand.

The A1200 is not officially released in NZ by Canon so I would be buying from a parallel importer instead.

Computing Update

The parts for Computer #3 arrived earlier this week along with the Raidon ST1000 removable drive bay for my main computer and I lost no time in installing everything. The main job of course was to put together Computer #3 by replacing its ancient Intel D915GAG mainboard with a brand new Intel D2700MUD Atom board with 4 GB of RAM.

The Atom board out of its packet, before I put in the memory which is in two SODIMM slots on the far side of the CPU (Which for the uninformed is that large black heatsink).

If you have seen a photo of the desk with the two computers hanging from the underside, then you can appreciate this photo which shows the insides of Computer #3 and how inaccessible they are. I opted to do the reboarding without changing anything shown in this picture, which meant I had to crawl under the table and reach around all the legs and things to get into the chassis.

This is a view of the two boards – old and new – side by side.

A view of the new board inside the cavernous chassis. The chassis fan on the right was removed as there is nowhere on this board to plug it in, so the one on the power supply, the black and white wires going diagonally across the picture, was plugged in instead. This thing actually doesn’t make that much heat anyway, so I also dispensed with the “Prescott” duct attached to the cover, which makes it easier to put it on and off. The memory can be seen in the overlapped SODIMM sockets at lower left. This board has only two SATA sockets and I am unsure whether to get a PCI card for two more or get a bigger HDD, I think my instinct will be for the former since a pair of HDDs (one for the OS and one for other stuff) is the better configuration. It having been decided this will be a Media PC rather than an earlier proposal to use it for work related purposes. Windows 8 x86 is installed because a 64 bit driver is not available for the onboard graphics – which are a non Intel chipset despite being branded as Intel GMA 3650.

A quirky experience this month has been finding that when I changed over the Powershot A2300’s clock to use Daylight Saving Time, I somehow knocked back the calendar by two days, meaning all photos over the last two months have been timestamped with the wrong date. This means I had to adjust the EXIF timestamp. To do this I used the ExifToolGui which is an interface onto Phil Harvey’s awesome ExifTool application. This certainly isn’t the first time I have had to play with EXIF data – I remember last year or maybe earlier forgetting to adjust one of the cameras time clock for daylight saving and then using Geosetter to adjust the time by the requisite hour in one direction.

Moment of truth

This week all the parts have arrived for my new computer. I worked on various aspects of it over several nights this week and the assembly was finished last evening. Having elected to build a fresh Windows 8 install, and the Windows 7 image  of my previous computer being on the disk I was putting into the new one, I used Ghost to do a direct disk to disk copy onto another disk. I then put this disk into the new computer and started setting it up. There have been a few hiccups, the first was when Windows 8 Setup generated the infamous “Can’t create or locate a partition” error. I thought at first it was a problem with the pen drive and external HDD I used to boot and run setup, but changing to a bootable DVD did not make the error go away. Eventually I discovered that removing the RAID controller card from the computer before running setup enabled it to work. The card was put back in once Windows 8 was running and with its drivers installed it functions flawlessly as should be expected. A second hiccup has been with the onboard USB3 controller which is an Intel Extensible Host Configuration Interface. When I plugged in an ext HDD to these ports it kept disconnecting itself after a short time, so I installed the 4 port USB3 PCIe x1 card that I had in the previous computer, as its drivers gave no trouble under Windows 8 on that computer. I have decided to keep this card in the computer regardless of whether Intel fixes their drivers or not, since I can always do with extra USB ports on the back of the computer, and because I don’t have any way at present of connecting anything to the USB3 connector on the board which would enable the onboard ports 11 and 12 to be used. Once I got the system up and running I set up Hyper-V Platform and have already created a couple of VMs to play with. I also have VMware Player installed. The rest of today has been spent on reinstalling software and working with the other computers.

The entire configuration is as follows, nearly all the items were purchased from Ascent or are available from them.

• CPU: Intel Pentium G2120 “Ivy Bridge”. This slots into the range below and at a cheaper price than the lowest spec Core i3 processor. It has 2 cores but is not hyperthreaded. It supports Intel VT-x and EPT for virtualisation, but not VT-d. I decided to save about $40 over the cheapest Core i3 processor with this but performance may be a little worse due to only 2 threads being supported instead of 4. Came in a boxed package with with a heatsink and fan. LGA1155.
• Mainboard: Intel DB75EN – 7 Series “Ivy Bridge”. A lower end board although it still has many useful features. 2x PCI slots, 1x PCIe x1 slot, 1x PCIe x16 slot, 5x SATA ports, 12 USB ports, VGA and DVI ports, parallel port, 1x PS/2 port, 1x serial port. 4x DIMM slots. 1x CPU socket LGA1155. All SATA ports can be configured for hot plug. Parallel port is interesting, to see these appearing in boards again. Single PS/2 port for either a keyboard or a mouse, or both with a splitter (I have used USB for years so this doesn’t bother me). The CPU socket is a bit different from the LGA775 with the load plate on top being secured differently and another metal plate underneath the board, which helps to prevent the board from bowing when the heatsink is put on. One of the things I thought quite interesting when I built my LGA775 system was how much the board inevitably bowed because of the pressure on the top of the CPU from the heatsink which is attached by four posts to the board. It was quite different with Socket 7 where the heatsink was attached by metal spring clips to the socket itself. These clips were very difficult to attach and I once blew up a board by gouging a track next to the socket while trying to get the clip on or off. The attachment system with posts onto the board as used for some years now is much easier. The heatsink itself is about half the height of the one on my oldest computer’s current “Prescott” CPU, due to the great improvements in the more recent CPU generations in reducing the power usage of the CPU. Onboard Intel HD3650 graphics which is dual headed with the two connectors.
• Memory: 2x Kingston KVR1333D3N9H/4G, 4GB, DDR3-1333, PC3-10600, CL9. I had planned to buy one 8GB DIMM but they were out of stock of these so the pair has been put in instead at slightly higher cost. Although the board will support up to 1600 MHz memory, in practice this is hard to come by. As the board supports dual memory channels having a minimum of two DIMMs installed it is possibly somewhat faster than a single device. Both CPU and board support up to 32 GB which is achievable with all four slots containing 8 GB DIMMs.
• Chassis: Inwin C583 Mid Tower chassis. 3x 5.25” external bays, 2x 3.5” external bays, 3x 3.5” internal bays. Comes with Powerman 400W AXT12V power supply (which I exchanged with the Enermax Tomahawk supply in the previous computer). Some of the bays are toolless with pins instead of screws to hold devices in place. The front panel and sides simply clip on and off, and clips are used rather than screws on some of the card slots. It is a clean modern design but only has a pair of USB2  ports and two audio ports on the front panel. A card reader will fit into the 3.5” external bay without any adaption, whereas I had to modify the Foxconn TS001’s bays to fit the card reader in the previous computer. All the bays which use pins allow the pin spacing to be adjusted to suit different devices. The internal drive bays swing out for easy installation/removal.
• Power supply: As mentioned the Enermax Tomahawk 405W ATX12V supply. Plenty of connectors although we could do with fewer Molex and more SATA power connectors as not one single device in this computer (so far) needs a Molex connector and I have had to use at least one Molex to SATA adapter. This supply is enclosed in a black case.
• Card reader: Hewlett-Packard AR941AA with slots for CF, xD, microSD, SD/MMC, MS. Requires one USB2 dual header on the mainboard for the captive cable supplied. USB2 external socket on front panel. Maps to 5 drive letters by default but can be remapped to 5 folders on an existing hard drive under NTFS. Having a microSD slot means you don’t have to use a flaky adapter. It comes in a 3.5” form factor with a mounting kit for a 5.25” bay.
• Drives: Boot drive is a Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 of 250 GB. Data is stored on a pair of WD Caviar Black 1 TB drives connected to a Promise TX2300 controller (PCI slot) in a RAID-1 array. The system will soon have a Raidon InTank ST1000 removable drive bay installed. The internal eSATA port is connected to a rear panel slot connector. The InTank will probably be connected to one of the standard SATA ports and it configured for hotplug as provided for in the Bios. ASUS lightscribe capable SATA DVD drive.
• USB: The board provides six rear panel USB connectors (pair of USB3 and four USB2). Onboard headers provide for four more USB2 and two more USB3 ports. Due to driver problems with the USB3 ports I currently use a Megapower MC1A-00188-G00 PCIe x1 card (Dynamix AOC-PE-U34P) which has an ETron onboard controller and provides four USB3 ports on the rear panel). With one of the onboard USB headers required by the card reader, I opted to put a 2 port USB2 slot adapter on the back of the computer instead of connecting the chassis’s pair of front panel USB2 sockets, as the card reader provides a USB2 socket of its own on the front panel. It could be that in time especially if I can get those two rear USB3 ports working reliably I will connect up the two front USB2 ports or perhaps there will be a drive bay adapter for two front USB3 ports to connect to the unused board header.

The assembly was fairly straightforward. The trickiest part is always going to be installing the CPU. Because the CPU goes into a socket with over a thousand pins on it, you just have to be very careful to put the CPU in place to avoid bending any of those pins, and you don’t want to be clumsy and drop the CPU while you are at it. Then carefully close the load plate and locking lever. Phew. I elected to build the board outside the chassis to check it was going before I put the power supply and assembled board into the chassis. The Inwin C583 has nine standoffs built into it, 6 of which were needed while 2 standard brass standoffs had to be screwed in place for the remaining pair of mounting holes. At least there are not any mounting holes under a CPU socket these days, there was at least one Socket 7 board produced by Asus or someone which had this “feature”. This board at least has mounting holes in line with the main power connector, on the DG41RQ pushing in the power plug will bend the board unless you make sure to support it because the mounting holes are set back from that edge.

The assembled board before installation in the chassis.

The completed chassis. A little different now with the USB3 card installed and down to one DVD drive. Plenty of fans, the power supply and chassis both have 120 mm fans to help remove heat.

Intel Mini-ITX Boards with embedded Atom CPU

An interesting range of product can be found in Intel’s lineup of Mini-ITX boards with the NM10 chipset. These have an Atom CPU embedded on the board and the price is about the same as a current B75 chipset board like the one I am buying for my new computer. There is quite a lot in favour of upspeccing an old worn out system like my Intel D915GAG which was what I had before the one I have now (the DG41RQ) to something that has years of life left in it and can run the latest OS without too many problems. The NM10 chipset is the first real effort by Intel to make a decent low power system. The Atom appears to be made with embedded in mind, I didn’t see anything that looked like a socketed chip or board looking at Ascent’s web page. The board I settled on is the D2700MUD with 2 SO-DIMM slots for maximum of 4 GB @ DDR3-1066, 1 PCI slot and 1 PCI Express Full Mini slot, onboard VGA and DVI, onboard 5.1 audio, onboard 1Gbps networking, 2 SATA ports and 7 USB 2.0 ports. The specs tell me it is 64 bit capable although this is a moot point with the memory limitation.  The board measures a measly 17 x 17 cm. The kicker is that it will fit into any Micro-ATX chassis as well, because Intel has designed Mini-ITX as a subset of Micro-ATX, meaning the mounting holes, expansion slots and I/O ports are in the same place as the larger board; and its power supply requirements should work with an older ATX12V 1.2 supply like my old computer has. The specs say a 2 x 10 power plug can be used, which is what that Enermax supply has (it works just fine with the D915GAG which has a 2 x 12 socket, like the D2700MUD) and so that is quite a saving in cost to begin with, being able to use an old chassis and its power supply as well.

What do people use these systems for? The typical system of this type is used for home theatre because with no fans needed for cooling, these systems can be extremely quiet. As it happens of course the hard drive and the power supply’s fan will make a bit of noise. In my case I want to use the system for a test platform for work related purposes. Pretty soon I will have a system that can build and run virtual servers. At that point I really also need a desktop I can hook up to a virtual server and test stuff with it. The board costs around $130 at today’s prices and with the 4 GB of RAM being the only other item needed, at around $30, the all up cost is very low and favourable for a brand new system. However its performance won’t be much better than what it replaces and therefore it really is only useful for testing and not really serious work.

Computer Upgrade Plan [2]

Well doing the specs and it looks like the lowest spec CPU is going to be a Core i3. It looks like SLAT (which Intel calls Extended Page Tables or EPT) is part of VT-x by default now, but I will have to do some more research on that. The cheapest of this CPU is around $190 at current prices, the model in question being the i3-2120 which is 3.3 GHz and comes in a box with a fan. It has on-board graphics which is all I would need. 

The next question is to find a suitable board. The most likely models so far are:

• DB75EN - 4x memory slots up to 32 GB, 1600 MHz memspeed, 2x PCI slots, 1x PCI-e x1 slot, 1x PCI-e x16 slot, onboard VGA/DVI, 8x USB2 ports, 4x USB3 ports, 1x eSATA port, $129

• DH77EB -  4x memory slots up to 32 GB, 1600 MHz memspeed, 3x PCI-e x1 slot, 1x PCI-e x16 slot, 1x PCI-e Mini Card slot, onboard DVI/HDMI, 10x USB2 ports, 4x USB3 ports, 1x eSATA port, onboard RAID, $163
• DZ77SL-50K - 4x memory slots up to 32 GB, 1600 MHz memspeed, 3 PCI slots, 1x PCI-e x1 slot, 1x PCI-e x4 slot, 1x PCI-e x16 slot, 1x PCI-e Mini Card slot, onboard HDMI, 10x USB2 ports, 4x USB3 ports, 1x eSATA port, onboard RAID, $177

Points to note:

• Although Intel has quite a range of models I decided to make my choices simpler at this stage by limiting to the B75/H77/Z77 chipsets which support 1600MHz memory, and rule out the 1333MHz chipsets. 
• The DH77EB is probably the best combination all round if you don't need PCI slots. I would rather have more PCI-e slots these days. But it is a tough call as I have a separate RAID-1 controller card which is PCI and might choose to keep using it to increase the number of SATA ports. And then that DB75EN might be a slightly better choice. 
• Three PCI slots is a bit of an overkill these days so the DZ77SLK-50 apart from only having the HDMI graphics connector onboard, might not be so desirable apart from the highest price. 
• All of these boards have a gigabit network adapter and some form of onboard sound. 
• They all have five internal SATA ports, one of which supports eSATA, and these ports are various combinations of 3Gbps and 6Gbps. I haven't focused too much on that because even SATA 1.5 Gbps will keep up with most average hard drives, and the RAID controller only has 3Gbps ports that will easily be fast enough, anyway the Caviar Blacks only support 3Gbps. 
• As I stated the board has to have 4 memory slots and therefore support plenty of memory, there are boards around that can only do 8 GB max, and plenty of models that only have 2 slots. Due to my bad experience last time of choosing a board that could effectively support only a maximum of 4 GB, I have made a special focus of this specification this time around.

And how much will 8 GB of memory cost? Probably about $75. This pushes our total price to around $400 which is not too bad for essentially a brand new computer. Assuming the chassis and PSU are up to it.

A reasonable SSD is going to cost around $180. Its main claim to fame is a fast startup time. At the moment this isn't important enough and that would be better spent on a Caviar Black. So the boot drive would be the Barracuda 7200.12 250GB drive I currently have. For my personal stuff I have the two Caviar Black 1 TB drives in the RAID-1 array. And then 4th disk drive quite possibly in a removable cartridge bay, maybe 500 GB, or for work purposes I might borrow one of theirs whenever it is needed.

Computer Upgrade Plan, Mobile Phone Plan

OK so now I have decided at last what I am going to do upgrade-wise, and it will be implemented over the rest of this year, I hope. The plan is simply to upgrade in that Foxconn TS001 chassis by replacing the mainboard, CPU and RAM. I will possibly buy a SSD and maybe replace the 4th HDD with a bigger one. There are a number of different options I can have, but for working on server builds, Windows 8 has Hyper-V built into it, which offers enough functionality to build and maintain servers if you wish, or you could dual boot to Windows Server on the same machine and run Hyper-V on that. The big problem I just discovered with my current PC is that the CPU, while it is 64 bit capable and has VT-x built in, does not support SLAT, which is now the minimum standard for Hyper-V on the latest edition of Windows. Therefore while this computer can run Windows 8 OK it is not much use for anything else and doesn't really have enough RAM to do Hyper-V while Windows 8 is running. Therefore I'm going for the cheapest upgrade option, which I will get prices for and then implement by buying the components needed over coming months. The current plan for the old board, CPU and memory is to scrounge an old desktop chassis from somewhere and have an actual physical computer running Windows 8 at one of my workplaces to work with instead of a thin client remotely logging in. It turns out that SLAT wasn't introduced until the Intel core i7 desktop CPU. I hope that the CPU is not going to be too dear, but when I set up this computer a couple of years ago, LGA1155 looked too dear overall which was why I went for LGA775, now that is obsolete.

At the moment I am without broadband at home and this will continue probably for several more days. In the block of flats I am in, the phone cable goes through the ceilings of other flats to get to mine. Apparently someone has damaged or cut through the cable in one of the other flats, probably when repairs were being done over the last few days. Chorus have to be able to get into those other flats to be able to fix the cable before they can get my broadband on which could take several days to organise. I found that my phone can be used as a mobile wireless access point which saved me a lot of inconvenience last evening, but the data is quite expensive. As my current mobile plan expires soon it's time to start looking for something else and perhaps I should be going onto a Vodafone plan instead of Telstra, as they are the same thing now anyway. Probably the best option will be $55 naked broadband and $40 basic mobile smart plan together. This only gives 250 MB a month which is slightly more than what I get now. Going onto their broadband will have to wait until the Telstraclear contract period under which the modem was supplied free, expires, unless they allow me to transfer it. The next option up for data is $70 per month for 1 GB, or alternatively, buying extra data casually when needed. The same sort thing can be done by buying a Vodem, the latter has the advantage that it doesn't tie up the phone and run its battery down and will work on any computer. It might be worth buying a Vodem and using it on prepay for those times when broadband fails, especially good option if I don't have a landline any more. These days we have lots more options for when power fails and so on, so in the event of another big earthquake I would have the ability to do a lot more things than I could before, but of course we always hope such a thing never happens.

Meanwhile, here’s Windows 8…

While I haven’t yet figured out whether to buy a new computer or whatever, the old one is getting packed to the gills with everything I can do with it to make it more useful. So, today, I decided I could make it dual boot Windows 7 with Windows 8, just until I figure out if I can do everything I need on Windows 8. That meant putting in another hard drive, along with the 4 port USB3 card which I bought recently and which arrived yesterday. So the computer now has every slot filled and every bay filled and the biggest mess of cables you could imagine inside. The Foxconn TS001 chassis isn’t especially spacious, with three 5 1/4” external bays, two 3.5” external bays and two 3.5” internal bays. At the moment this computer has four hard drives and two DVD writers and a card reader filling up every single bay. And the DG41RQ motherboard has only two PCI slots which have the modem and RAID-1 controller in them (with two of the disks in an array), and one PCI Express x16 slot, which has the USB3 card in it. The biggest issue up until now has been a shortage of USB ports. This board has four on the back and connectors on the board for four more. The case has two on the front with cables to connect to that board. However I decided I would rather have two more on the back with a slot socket pair, and the other two connections are used by the card reader although it does bring out a USB port on its front panel. So putting in that 4 port card will give me enough ports, and even better, they will be USB3 ports, as for some reason even though this board isn’t very old it doesn’t have any USB3 functionality. The USB peripherals I do have now are external drive enclosures. I have three so far and am buying another one next month, although that will be three in use with a flimsy plastic one being kept just as a spare. USB3 means the backups that I do on two of them will be quite fast hopefully. The third one is going to be in an eSata enclosure for work related use as quite a few of our work laptops these days have eSata ports and that should make it nice and quick when transferring data.

Anyway I burned Windows 8 onto a DVD at work and brought it home. This doesn’t seem to be a bootable DVD so I had to boot the computer off a 64 bit Windows PE pen drive I use at work, and then run setup.exe off the DVD, which was perfectly satisfactory. Some screenshots are below.

This is what Windows 8 installation screen looks like. Not much different from 7.

The progress screen during the installation. Just different ways of saying the same thing.

This is the Windows 8 boot menu. For some reason this graphical menu seems to be quite slow to come up compared to the text based menu, which you can still have if you make Windows 7 the default OS.

This is part of the initial setup and is a good example of the way it has all been graphically focused.

This photo was taken earlier at work and it shows the basic Start screen. It took me a while to figure out how to get from here to the regular desktop. In fact, all you have to do is click on that Desktop tile at the lower left. Obviously one of the things that is hard to get used to is the lack of a Start button – instead put the mouse into the bottom left corner and one pops up. Put the mouse into the bottom right corner and you get what they call the “charms bar” which has things like the start screen button, search and settings on it. I had a play with the Mail app but pretty soon I went to the regular desktop to install Windows Live Mail (along with Writer, which I am using to write this). As you can see from photo timestamps the installation only took about 15 minutes to complete all up. That was about two hours ago and since then I have been installing device drivers and the Windows Live suite. Tomorrow I’ll look at other software.

Well – it’s an interesting OS. Very different from Windows 7 of course. Has to be in order to be both slate and desktop compatible. I think that all things considered, MS has made a credible effort to bridge that gap, and of course they are doing something no one else has really tried – even Apple has separate OSs for the mobile and desktop markets. If it can run every single bit of software that I was using on 7 then I will be switching to it pretty quickly and leaving 7 behind. It is available in 32 and 64 bit installs. I chose 64 bit as my computer has 4 GB of RAM. However at that amount the potential for improvement is pretty hard to realise because there is overhead from running the 32 bit subsystem for most applications and this has an effect on overall performance.  This is no different than Windows 7 of course – I was well aware of this, still I have decided to go with 64 bit as it will be easier to migrate to the new computer which will have more RAM in it.

At this stage I’m not spending any more money on hardware for this computer. I considered buying a new hard disk but ended up putting in an older one to run Windows 8. As I would rather put the money towards an SSD. But that will probably be in the next computer, not this one.

New computer or slate or phone or … ?

About three weeks ago I wrote that I planned to build up a new computer. Since then a few other options have come to the fore. Windows 8 and the Surface RT slate are being released at the end of October and Windows Phone 8 is being released shortly thereafter. This brings up the options of buying a slate and/or a phone, or both.

Whether I buy a new phone will depend on whether a model equivalent in price to the current Nokia Lumia 710 ($399) comes in. At the moment Nokia have the 820 and 920 coming out. The current models 800 however is priced at $899 which is far too much to pay for a phone. The sort of plan that would fit me would shave $100 off any handset price. If Microsoft wants their phones to be competitive then manufacturers will have to produce models that are in the $399 range which is competitive with the lowest iPhone model currently on the market. Samsung like Nokia have a current model in a similar price range to the 710 which is available in NZ, and like Nokia they have just released new Windows Phone models. It remains therefore to be seen what will come out for that sort of a price when 8 is released. A suitable phone plan would be around $40 and would be similar to my current (free) plan from Telstraclear (which is actually in fact subsidised by my home line cost) and knocks around $100 off the phone’s price. This sort of plan will give me only 250MB of data which is what I currently get for an extra $20 on Telstra. However in that Telstra plan I pay 19c per minute for most calls. The $45 plan would give me free minutes so it could be much of a muchness really.

Supposing the cheapest Surface comes in at the equivalent of US$199 which some are suggesting it will sell for in the States. It depends on whether it is mobile or Wifi only. If it has a USB socket then you could plug in a Vodem which will cost $30 for each 512MB of data bought casually. This is a substantial cost, so I can understand why many people have chosen to buy Wifi only devices which are a lot cheaper to run. I would probably look at the mobile option but prefer Wifi within sites like everyone and be on a casual data plan rather than a monthly one. Tethering to a mobile is an interesting option if it is possible and allows the data to be shared.

The costings for a new computer or the parts thereof on the other hand probably come in at about $700 but will need to be nailed down. I can buy it gradually a part at a time.

So at the moment a lot depends on a lot of things and I haven’t really shifted my priorities much, we will have to see how things pan out over the next 8 weeks or so.

New computer

With the imminent release of Windows 8 it’s time to look at a new computer, and that will be just three years after putting together the last one. When I rebuilt this computer I expected it to be like its predecessor, perhaps good for five years. That expectation hasn’t been met, but I also want to have a second computer I can use as a low end server for work related stuff. So it isn’t all just about this computer being too slow or whatever. Although that is an important part of it. When I put this together I used an old tower chassis (Foxconn TS001) left over at work but that wasn’t an issue because I put a brand new ATX12V power supply into it. The main problem is that I used the cheapest board and CPU I could get, and that must have been relevant. Although the Intel CPU model was carefully selected to have hardware virtualisation, both it and the board are LGA775, from near the end of that era. LGA 1155 was only just coming out and a bit too dear. In retrospect it would have been better to have waited until LGA1155 was more dominant and had come down in price a bit. The board can only take 4 GB maximum of RAM. Actually that’s not quite accurate. The board has only 2 memory slots and the maximum RAM size for DDR2 is 2 GB per DIMM, unless you are prepared to spend an exorbitant amount of money for a rare and expensive 4 GB device.

The system’s performance is not quite what I had hoped for and it won’t be good enough for five years, but it could have been if it could have more memory put into it. To put things in perspective, its predecessor which ran an Intel D915GAG board, had 2 GB of RAM in its four slots. Another limit of this board (Intel DG41RQ) is the relatively small number of USB sockets. There are four on the back and pins for four more. I put a backplane adapter in to get two more on the back of the computer, and the card reader uses the other two, although it exposes one socket itself, but with all the devices and cables that is a severe limit. I am just about to put in a four port USB3 card. That’s another thing. All the sockets are USB2. Another limit is only four SATA ports. This sounds like it shouldn’t be an issue but with two DVD-RW drives and two internal hard drives that limit has been reached. I’m about to put in a 2 port RAID controller card with two Caviar Black 1 TB drives that will be in RAID-1 but this is not going to release ports for e-SATA because the onboard probably doesn’t support hotplug. I would hope that a new board would have an eSata port internally for a hotplug. I don’t really know what out there actually supports this but USB 3 has hotplug designed in from the start as well as supplying power, and some Intel boards in the past have had eSata ports onboard. The move towards a new computer has been gradual, starting from the memory limit, through the USB port limit, slot limit, lack of eSata and now running out of disk space. The more parts I buy, the more sense it makes to start putting a new computer together, from scratch so I can keep the old one and use it. This is probably what it will consist of:

• Inwin C583 mid tower chassis – the same as some of the very newest Cyclone computers at one of the schools I work at. A well designed chassis with plenty of internal bays. Probably stick with the supplied PSU.
• Board – not sure of yet but it could be a $150 Gigabyte. Must have 12 USB ports supported if at all possible and hopefully an eSata port.
• CPU – not sure yet but at least $150
• RAM – at least 8 GB, maybe 16. Hope the board can support 32.
• Hard disks – that pair of 1 TBs with the RAID controller card. Also the DVD writers from the old computer.
• Slots – at least one PCI and at least a couple of usable PCI-e, depending on number of lanes. Four memory slots.
• Graphics – probably the onboard if it is good enough. I have had a card in the current PC but it was apparently too cheap to make much difference to performance. DVI port, even though my 22” monitor only has a VGA socket – just have to cater for the future – the current computer only has a VGA socket on board. Sound is not that important and onboard will probably do.
• Windows 8 Pro – 64 bit.

It won’t be happening till next year when I get another project out of the way, so for now the current PC has to keep going, which it is going to be doing with those two 1 TB disks I just ordered, the RAID-1 controller card and the 4 port USB3 card I have on order. That means reorganising things inside. I can’t remember what slots there are but I know I do have in there the graphics card that is two slots wide, sitting in the  x16 PCI-e slot and blocking one of the other slots as well. The dialup modem is also sitting in a PCI slot. There are in fact internally only the one PCI-e slot and two PCI slots. They are all used because the graphics card overflows over one of the PCI slots. The card has to come out regardless to make way for the PCI-e USB 3 controller, but that is probably only a x1 card so it’s a waste to have it in a x16 slot, but that’s just the way things are, there are no other PCI-e slots on that board. Then the RAID controller will fit in the freed up PCI slot. Getting four more USB ports is a massive boost letting me have more USB devices connected like an external USB3 hard drive as well as leaving cables connected for the cameras and phone like I do now. I did look at just getting a USB hub but the card was more attractive because it is USB 3 and I already have a couple of disk enclosures that can go at that speed. In a few weeks I will be buying another backup hard drive, a 1 TB laptop drive, to go into a USB 3 and eSata enclosure I recently bought. At the moment I have a 500 GB disk which is almost full.

In saying I am planning to build a new desktop, I have for the present flagged the idea of buying a Windows 8 slate. This is still an attractive option both for work and home use. However it remains to be seen what will be available after 8 ships and at what price. It may be that I will still buy a slate in a year or two, but I may just as easily not do so, because I have a work laptop and that does everything I need for work purposes and gets used at home as well. In general I don’t really have a pressing need to carry a slate around everywhere and while I know they do some great things, I can get by with just a phone and separate camera the way I do now.

The old computer as I suggest will probably be reused as a small server. As its CPU has hardware virtualisation it will be able to run Server 2008 R2 in the virtualisation role and therefore be useful for building up or upgrading virtual servers at home. I don’t intend to actually have a server running anything at home at this stage, or having it able to be accessed remotely.

Camera Totals

Borrowed EOS 450D: About 600 photos a month ago. Must get myself one of these.
SX260: 1400 photos so far – 10 weeks so 140/week or about 470/month.
A2300: 165 photos so far – 8 weeks so 20/week or about 85/month.

The lack of photos on the A2300 is a combination of many factors – chief of them is that I don’t take anything like as many photos at work as I used to when I worked fulltime at Hillview. Secondly that the SX260 being just as portable gets the nod for recreational photography.

The S5 got a very small amount of use alongside the EOS that I borrowed. The EOS was so superior that I have no qualms at all about letting the S5 go. Currently I’m planning to let this happen around the end of the year – but I will be keeping the flash for when I get my own EOS, and in the meantime for use on any of about three I could borrow. I let the A2000 go about a month ago.

Canon announces EF-M series mirrorless interchangeable lens compact

An interesting piece of news I picked up today was the introduction of the Canon EF-M lens mount and the MILC it was designed to be a part of. The camera is called the EOS M and is quite similar to the Sony Alpha NEX series. Canon has taken a long time to get around to addressing this segment of the market but they have done a good job of it. Here is the preview from DPreview’s website. Although it is a nice piece of work I won’t be buying one because the optical viewfinder on the standard EOS is much prized for taking photos in low light conditions which is the main reason I would be buying a DSLR in the first place. Canon is pretty much the last DSLR manufacturer to produce a MILC showing how much they don’t want to threaten their traditional digital SLR market at all, but since Micro Four Thirds was created just about everyone else has produced cameras so they have no choice but to go with it. The EOS M is not going to be the cheapest model in their range that’s for sure.

There are two EOS-M lenses being offered, a 18-55 mm zoom and a 22 mm prime. The EF-M mount is developed exclusively for the EOS M, but the EF/EF-S lenses can also be fitted with a very expensive adapter; Canon seems to want to discourage anyone from using the standard D-SLR lenses with this camera. Just like the high price of the camera itself (769 pounds in the UK); the excuse for there being only one model of camera of this type is that they aren’t actually that popular anyway. I think this is nonsense, the Sony NEX and some of the others like the Olympus models are pretty popular. The camera has a fairly minimalist design with most features accessed through a touchscreen instead of the usual controls. There is a GPS receiver available as an accessory that mounts on the hotshoe and geotags pictures automatically. As far as the touchscreen goes, it will be nice if you like them, as I do, but I think I would still prefer the controls on the standard EOS like the dual wheels to adjust aperture and shutter separately in manual mode – rather than doing everything by touchscreen – the other problem is while you can turn the standard camera’s LCD off to save power there’s no way you can do that with the M because there is no alternative.

One thing Canon have absolutely no excuse for is the glaring failure to provide USB based charging and get us away from the tyranny of their expensive proprietary battery formats with very limited charging options. You will recall I mentioned this when I reviewed my Powershot SX260. Here was a golden opportunity to be dragged kicking and screaming into the real world where I want to be able to plug in my JuiceStation to top up the camera’s battery if through some oversight I run out of charged batteries. I can do this with my smartphone so why this is not an option for a brand new camera design in 2012 is completely inexcusable. The European Commission needs to start heavying camera manufacturers like they did with smartphones a few years ago. I can’t even get a car charger for the SX260’s batteries. Who would want to spend $2000 probably on this camera then find you are so limited in power options for it. Oh, and it uses a new proprietary battery design, too. At least I could buy a battery grip for a standard EOS. And it still uses Mini-USB instead of Micro-USB connector. Ridiculous.

There is one area where Canon have the jump on their rivals – this camera uses an APS-C sensor (the usual DSLR size) while standard Four Thirds sensors are smaller. Part of the reason for this is that APS-C like film has a 3:2 aspect ratio rather than 4:3 and therefore is wider. Still, it’s known that Canon has been most disdainful of the MILC concept in the past, and this explains why it has taken them so long to produce this camera. OK now that I say it – what is the advantage of MILCs? Generally they are offering DSLR image quality and interchangeable DSLR quality lenses while the body is smaller and lighter than the DSLR, they should also be cheaper as well. The big downside is no optical viewfinder, in low light conditions that would be significant. I know that the optical finder is the main reason I would want to use a DSLR in the first place, because it is so much easier to use for the types of photography where the DSLR’s technological superiority really matters – like fast moving subjects in the dark. The MILC is best seen as a high end compact – typically these have not had interchangeable lenses.

Radiant heaters get a bad press

Here is my newest heater, a Goldair GIR350 which sells for about $120 or so. It is a radiant heater that is also designed to be a convector as it has a grill in the top to let air go around the elements and out the grill. So it does both.

Radiants are supposed to be unsuitable for anything except spot heating but as I found out in the cold snap when we had snow they are absolutely the best heater because it takes a lot more time to heat up a room and even when it is not super cold waiting for the room to warm up is hard. When the cold came the convector heater that I used in the small study, which I thought was a really good heater for that, was totally a waste of time because it couldn’t warm the room up fast enough. And convectors of any kind like my previous oil columns were completely useless in the living room where there is too much air escaping for them to keep up anyway.

This radiant tries to be like a typical convector and has the same type of tall narrow shape, some funny metal chines on the reflector to supposedly channel air upwards, and it has a tilt switch in it like lots of these Goldair heaters, in fact it was the convector that didn’t have one, the fan heater and all the radiants all have some kind of tilt switch even if it is a foot switch in the cheaper ones, the bigger radiants like this one and the fan assisted one have mercury or pendulum switches because they rattle if you shake the heater. There are also wheels to move it round which is quite useful. Three heat settings from four bars.

When I grew up we had Conray heaters that worked the same way, a bright orange radiant glow and they also warmed up the room with convection heat from air moving round the elements. So I am not sure why other types of heaters are supposed to be better or more suitable. Oil columns are better because they don’t get so hot, but not because they are better heating. Panel heaters are nice and flat to go on a wall, but not better heating. Box convectors work differently but aren’t actually better. Radiants are really good for both heating you up and also heating the room up, as mine have shown, even the smallest one I’ve got will get the room warm at the same time as drying me after a shower, just leave it on a bit and the air temperature soon comes up.

So now I have radiants for three rooms and a fan heater for the rest and that is all a much better set up than oil columns that take too long to heat themselves and heat the room and can’t cope with draughty rooms or cold snaps. I just sold two oil columns. I also sold the three month old De Longhi convector because it can’t do a good job in really cold conditions. I only got $30 for all three heaters about a tenth of what they would all have cost originally. No one wants to pay a reasonable price for a second hand heater these days.

Canon Powershot A2300

The Powershot A2300 is a conglomerate of a lot of good common sense and a paradox or two. Having just acquired one as my second camera with its current retail price around $150, this neat little camera at the bottom end of Canon’s official NZ range surprises and pleases in many ways. First impressions are generally favourable. Canon have exploited to considerable advantage the changeover of nearly all the Powershot range to proprietary lithium batteries in place of AAs to produce one of the best balances of smallness and price I have ever seen in a digital camera, and at that, one which has a front made out of metal. Although the rest of the A2300 is plastic, it still manages to feel surprisingly solid and well-made for such a low budget item. A 5x zoom lens is a welcome touch along with a simple and easy to use interface which has a very and welcome new beginner-focused feature, a dedicated Help button labelled with a question mark. With this you can almost excuse the lack of an “Easy” mode on this camera which has been a highly desirable idiot-proofing feature of many of the Powershots over the past three years or so. Although the camera has with it the same limitation of other cameras of having to reset the date and time for daylight saving, a particular improvement is to add a daylight saving on/off setting to make such adjustment very quick and easy to do. One thing a lot of people find difficult with smaller cameras these days is finding some way to hold them due to the tendency of manufacturers to omit raised handgrips due to the visual clash they produce. Canon has however cleverly catered for this with a raised edge on the right hand side of the LCD screen that is just made for your thumb. In practice this worked surprisingly well even if a little bit of the screen is blocked from view.

(A2300 vs A450)

The formfactor of the recent low-end Powershots, freed from the encumbrances of AA batteries, has in recent years tended towards smaller and lighter cameras, always a desirable development for occasional users who will make up the majority of purchasers. For people like myself who simply want a cheap camera as ubiquitous as a cellphone and with much greater photographic performance, the Powershot A2300 will serve to take hundreds or thousands of photos with considerable competence despite its inherent limitations. My first camera in this class was a Powershot A400, followed by the A450, A460 and then A2000 models. The latter was a bit dearer and more capable because it was desirable to have a more featured camera that could fit in a pocket and be used in even more situations. Now that I have the highly capable Powershot SX260 coming in at the top of that spec and formfactor with high grade features and functionality, I can afford to go back to the cheapest model at the bottom of the range to carry about with me everywhere and fill in every mundane day to day photographic need.

(A2300 vs A2000. The well worn A2000 (three years old)  illustrates the intended ubiquity and heavy use its replacement will get)

Naturally not everything is perfectly as one could wish with such a budget model camera. The power button is easy to reach on top, but also very easy to accidentally press when turning the camera over to open the battery / card compartment. I hope it will not get too many inadvertent presses when getting the camera into or out of its pouch as the accompanying lens extension will make such a manoeuvre very tricky. So far the back panel controls have been a little tricky with it a bit too easy to press the wrong button on the four way controller. This camera uses the NB-11L type battery, one of at least 11 different compact camera battery formfactors produced by Canon, and which comes with its own unique charger which I presume only fits that battery type. Hence I already have two different battery chargers and two batteries which are not interchangeable. At least with AA batteries I could have only one battery type and one charger (even though I actually have three of the latter) and more importantly I could also substitute alkaline dry cells for rechargeables if the latter ran out. Which brings me to my next beef, the lack of in-camera charging in much of the Canon range. The EU as mentioned previously has championed Micro USB Charging for smartphones, and camera manufacturers need to get on board with this pretty quickly, because there is just no opportunity of mitigating the possibility of a flat battery by being able to charge it any of the myriad of ways that most smartphone users can utilise.

The last issue and a considerable paradox is noticed when you turn the camera over and look at the bottom. Here you find a metal tripod thread and a flimsy plastic battery door. Canon has wavered quite considerably on low end Powershot tripod threads of recent years, but also on some of their higher priced models as well. I seem to recall even the S2 IS was shipped with a plastic thread very quickly returned to metal in the S3. I’m quite used to seeing plastic threads in the low end models (like the A400, A450 and A460) so seeing one made of metal is quite a surprise on the A2300. Unfortunately this seems to have won the obvious and unequal tradeoff between a solid tripod thread, which hardly anyone will take advantage of, and a flimsy battery door that everyone must use. On this camera the door is noticeably lightweight and raises serious and valid concerns about just how well it will last under heavy use, even although it is far less stressed than AA-battery cameras as the battery is secured in place by its own clip and does not require pressure from the door to keep it in place. Having a metal plate incorporated like on the SX260 would have gone a long way to addressing my concerns. I confidently predict the successor to the A2300 will beef up this door and perhaps go back to a plastic tripod thread again, although I can understand Canon are trying to address the possibility users of this camera will make use of the screw-on accessory flash units the HF-DC1 and HF-DC2. The only good thing you can really say about the battery door is that if it does break it won’t stop the camera from working – unlike the AA-battery models which depend on it to connect the batteries together and stop them from falling out.

(A2300 first photo. Not as good as the SX260 but still a very respectable effort for such a budget model)

One thing I’ll say about this camera is that it takes me back to my first pocket digital, the Powershot A400. Here are shots side by side of the pair for comparison:
(Hopefully the proportions are about right)

The formfactors between the two cameras are a little bit different. As you can see, the A400 has a neat little lens that just pops out when you turn on the power. The A400 lens was simpler because it was only a 2.2x zoom. The A2300 has a similar sort of aesthetic; those three rings you can see all fold quite flat into the body when you turn it off. The A400 had to be a bit thicker due to its two AA batteries, which load in sideways at the end opposite the lens. Both cameras are small, light and easy to handle, and dare I say it, cute. Whilst I am sure I value the capabilities of my higher-end cameras like the Powershot SX260 or a (currently) borrowed EOS, these bottom-of-the-range point-and-shoot snappers do a great job of taking pictures under less-demanding everyday situations, and I’ve shot many thousands of photos on cheap little digitals like these over the last 7 years, so I expect that neat little A2300 will be just as ubiqitous for me as the A400 and the other models I’ve had in between.

Camera totals:
All time total for the A2000 (now I am giving it away) is 7733 pictures from 3 years and 1 day of usage. An average 215 pictures per month.

SX260: So far around 500 pictures in two weeks. We shall have to see how that will turn out over the coming months.

Out & About with the Powershot SX260HS [2]

Today I had the second instance of use of my new toy. I went into town and took some red zone pictures. The camera’s battery couldn’t last the distance, although I haven’t charged it after the last time I used it, so in theory it should have been about half used. I did manage to squeeze 200 shots out of it which makes for 300 all up on the first charge, a pretty good effort considering its rating. The point of that was that I wanted to see how it would last, and how good the battery meter is. In fact the battery meter is pretty disappointing: it shows three bars when full, then it dropped down to two bars, then at one bar it basically starts to flash red and warn you. At that point I started to turn the camera off after every shot instead of leaving it on until the next shot. Not sure how long this got me but it could have been worth as much as another hundred photos from the time the meter first started to flash. Right at the end though the camera was turning itself off and telling me to change the battery, I would leave it a few minutes then turn it on again for a very quick shot and then off again just as quick. So I really did push that battery to the limit because I had no other battery with me (and won’t for a few weeks yet). But next time I go out I will have it charged up beforehand.

Of course the charge would not be an issue if the power issues with these cameras were not such a limitation. As far as Canon goes you can only fit the camera with their proprietary battery and the only charger available for it runs off the mains. There is an AC adapter available as well, and that’s it for power choices. And this story would be repeated all across the Canon range. So with Micro USB being adopted as a standard for power and charging for smartphones, we want to see camera manufacturers following suit and allowing batteries to be charged in-camera so how about it Canon. There are third party chargers available for the battery type but so far I only found ones that can charge off a car.  USB charging is a big thing in the EU because they want to eliminate the need for manufacturers to produce proprietary chargers. This would eliminate the separate battery charger that many Canon models now ship with, in favour of in-camera charging via a USB socket. Ideally an external charger also USB powered would be an option for charging without the camera. This is all very relevant because Canon has made a strategic decision to change nearly all their P&S camera range away from AA batteries to lithium. The latter locks you into proprietary batteries with limited charging choices unlike AAs. If I buy an A2200 as I currently am considering, there is another battery type with its own charger.  I would not buy any additional batteries for this camera to save on costs. I could then eliminate the need for AAs and chargers but would be locked out of the versatility from them. We have come a long way since the time when nearly all Canon’s P&S range used AAs, even four at a time in the S1 and S5 for example.

Almost all of today’s photos were taken on Manual. Among other things you have complete control over the ISO setting. On the Powershot A2000 there are two different auto ISO settings. There is the standard one which keeps the range of auto ISO low, and there is the ISO HIGH setting which can bump it up a lot higher if it’s too dark. On this camera there is only one Auto setting and it can push as high as it wants, this is how it works on Auto or PAS modes. But on Manual it stays at whatever you set it to, in this case 100. So I put the camera on Manual and dialled in a shutter speed each time, leaving the aperture fixed at whatever it was. Sure, you have to make the adjustment before each shot, but that’s pretty easy with the turn ring on this camera. So that is how the 200 photos went today.

Now, if the price of this camera is a bit steep, I just checked out the specs for the Powershot SX150 today, and it’s basically the budget version of this camera, and well worth looking at if you want something cheaper (it costs about 60% of the price of the SX260). For that you get a shorter lens (12x), lower end processor and probably the sensor too, uses AAs instead of the lithium battery, made of plastic, bulkier, lower res display, no GPS… on the creative side you get full PASM modes and manual focus just like the SX260. It’s quite a few year since Canon made such a cheap camera with the PASM and manual focus capabilities (I can still remember how disappointed the market was when the budget A-series PASM cameras got dropped from the line. Canon had nothing anything like $300 that could do manual exposure and focus).

Have a look at my photo blog for pictures. I’ve started migrating my albums to my new Google profile as well. We will have to see how that goes because of the 1 GB per month upload limit which I might have almost used up already. It will take the rest of the year to get all the albums uploaded, for sure, but there could also be a problem with getting photos I take this month uploaded if I already used up my cap.

Powershot SX260 vs Powershot S5 / SX40

Having both of these model cameras invites a comparison, although the S5 should be substituted by the current equivalent the SX40. The S5/SX series cameras are much more bulky, mainly it is a bigger lens that justifies that bulk. The substantial handgrip on the S5 conceals the four AA batteries that power it. Some extra features of the S5/SX series apart from the lens are the flash hotshoe, articulating LCD screen and a viewfinder, while the SX40 steps up from the S5 notably in the use of proprietary lithium battery power. The 35x lens on the SX40 gets you to an equivalent of 840 mm (compared to 35 mm film format lenses), although the SX260 is reasonably well ahead of the S5 going out to 500 mm equivalent. It looks like the same 12 MP sensor is present in both the SX260 and the SX40, whereas the S5 gave us 8 MP.

My personal thoughts are there would be few times when more than 500 mm equivalent would be useful (how often do you hear of people having a lens that long for their SLR) so I would be unlikely to buy this camera for that functionality. It is about $150 dearer than the SX260. For me the SX260 wins hands down due to being such a compact camera. While the SX40 is still half the price of an entry level DSLR I am prepared to go up to the extra dosh for the massive improvement in low light performance on the EOS. At the moment the S5 is going to get used less because it only has small advantages over the SX260 and I’d rather go for a low end EOS than another superzoom.

Out & About with the Powershot SX260HS

Well today was my first day out with the Powershot SX260HS. May as well have a quick look at the evolution of this camera series. Canon’s big zooms prior to this range were the Powershot S1 to S3 and S5 series of cameras. Powershot S series are a bit confusing because there have been three S-ranges. Apart from the S1-S2-S3-S5 series superzooms from 2004 through to 2007, there has also been the high-end compact S series starting with the S10 in 1997 and continuing through to the S100 today, and another S-series of IXUS models starting with (confusingly) S100 in 2002.  I have owned a Powershot S1 which was my first digital camera back in 2005, and currently own a Powershot S5 which was gifted to me in 2008. After the S5 Canon faced the inevitability of running out of model numbers and the range was forked into two series: The SX1/SX10 continuing in the same “mini SLR-style” form factor as the S5, and the SX100 compact superzoom format. The former jumped from 12x zoom on the S5 to 20x zoom lens.

The SX100 was Canon’s first effort to produce a compact superzoom and the series is inspired by Panasonic’s TZ or “travel zoom” series. I remember when the first Panasonic model the TZ1 came out in 2006 and how groundbreaking it was to have a 10x zoom lens in such a compact package. Canon’s first effort to challenge this was the vertical-formfactor TX, a bit like a conventional camera turned on its side with the lens on the side, this let them get the 10x lens without too much of the TZ1’s wizardry but it failed on ergonomics and never really took off. So then I decided I would wait until Canon could produce something as good as the TZ series. The SX100 actually came out not that much later, in 2007, and has been followed by the SX110, SX120 and SX130, while another range, the SX200, 210, 220 / 230 and now  240 / 260 series started in 2009. The SX100 series cameras were bulkier, cheaper built and used AA batteries, compared to the SX200 series which are more compact, higher finish metal cameras using proprietary batteries. I have looked at the SX100 / SX200 series for a few years now and was considering buying an SX230 last year, until the earthquake disrupted things. The SX240 / SX260 is the cheapest Canon model that has full manual controls, which is a key purchasing point for me with my strong interest in creative photography particularly in low light conditions. Like the SX230 before it, the SX260 is a GPS equipped camera, the non GPS equivalents (slightly cheaper) being the SX220 and SX240 respectively. There are still only two or three GPS cameras in the Powershot range.

So out and let’s see how easy it is to use and how well it works. The first thing I really noticed was waiting for the GPS to get itself set up. Obviously it will have to get a fix from the nearest satellites, and that can take a few minutes to happen, meanwhile all you know is that the symbol on the display shows the GPS is not operating. Once the GPS had set itself up the first time it pretty well stayed on with all of the subsequent on/off cycles of the camera as I moved around the area where I was photographing, so there wasn’t any additional delay. Picture taking is very snappy and smooth, I was pleased at how quickly it responded to the press of the shutter. The Power button is nicely recessed and hard to push accidentally which is good. I remember one of my earlier cameras I used to push Power accidentally all the time, even when it was in the pouch. Well no more of that. Could be even a little hard to press at times. The LCD is very bright and clear and produces a nice sharp picture, you can even see the blur in it at review time when camera shake occurred at low shutter speeds. The four way controller works a bit differently from my previous camera; for example, when adjusting exposure compensation you would first press the button for this function, and then use the left and right buttons on the controller to decrease or increase compensation, now you press the +/- button to select the adjustment and turn the wheel to increase or decrease. This takes a little bit of getting used to. It makes multiple adjustments a lot easier when you are in, for example, manual mode. You press the +/- button to select either Shutter or Aperture adjustment and then turn the wheel to make the adjustment. This was a lot quicker and easier than repeatedly pressing the controller buttons.

Probably the best ease of use I found with the camera was in more difficult lighting conditions. Due to it being late in the day when I was taking my photos, a lot of what I was shooting was in the shadow. With cheaper auto-only digicams, you will be able to adjust for at most two stops of exposure in either direction with the exposure compensation setting. With full manual control that limitation doesn’t exist; you can set both of the aperture and shutter to anything you like and get a lot more stops “over” or “under” as you see fit. So I used this to great effect to get the picture looking much brighter to the point where you would hardly know there was any shadow. The great strength of the digicam is being able to see exactly what result the adjustments will produce instantly, and you are very reliant on the screen to help you gauge this, so having a screen that gives you a good picture is essential; the SX260 excels here. The second aspect of difficult lighting that I found worked very well was hand-holding the camera at relatively long zoom ranges and slow shutter speeds. Somehow I managed to get the shot shown below with the camera handheld at 1/8th of a second with the zoom at 10x or 45 mm. That is no mean feat for any camera, digital or not. Somehow the ergonomics, balance and weight of the camera come together really well with two hands in such conditions and it is relatively easy to hold the camera still without blurring the shot. Whilst this is not the sharpest picture I have ever taken it is actually very difficult to tell whether the issue is blur or poor lighting.

The old Christchurch railway station which is soon to be demolished.
Here is another low light shot taken at the same time which again has worked out surprisingly well. This photo at 1/6 second exposure and 53 mm zoom pushed the camera envelope even more. Again a very creditable performance for a handheld shot with no bracing.

Clarendon Towers in the central city, under demolition. Again a very good performance in quite low lighting.
So overall, I’m very pleased with the camera so far. The only pity is you can’t get it in the colour range that is available overseas, we can only get the black model.