Imaging Vista

In Windows XP the only kind of built in imaging technology we have is through RIS, when we run riprep and send the machine image back to the RIS server for deployment. Hence, we would use Ghost or another product to make images for deployment by some other means than RIS. Ghost commonly is used to multicast or unicast over the network, but we can also load an image from a DVD or external HDD.

Windows Vista for the first time provides us with the general purpose imaging tools that can be used with the network, hard disk, DVD or whatever. One of my goals this year is to learn how to use these technologies. We don't have very many Vista machines just yet and probably won't so WDS might be off the agenda since it will have a new learning curve to follow. For the majority of deployments expected in the coming year I will be happy just to use an external HDD to load the image to a PC.

To begin with, this is the basic guide for learning how to image a Vista PC and load that image on another PC. I'll see how it goes and get back with progress reports:

http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsVista/en/library/88f80cb7-d44f-47f7-a10d-e23dd53bc3fa1033.mspx?mfr=true

A Tale of Two Cameras [2]

After writing the previous article I decided I had been a little hard on the S1 - after all, it has all these manual settings that you can use to speed up the time it takes to trip the shutter. So again I took my two cameras along on another train ride. The S1 was set up for manual exposure and manual focus. The result was that I found that much of the time the camera would take the photo very quickly once the shutter release was pressed. On this, shorter, trip, I took even more photos (about 50% more) and 75% of them with the S1. A few little design glitches and issues showed up with the way the camera worked on manual focus; I hope Canon has fixed them in the S5. The biggest problem is still the zoom. It just takes a lot longer to position the lens to the right place than it does to press the zoom rocker and step through seven zones on the A450.

The biggest issue overall on both trips has not been the camera's fault; it came down to that perennial problem of batteries. Basically, NiMH batteries are sold under various brands, many of the bigger names made by Sanyo of Japan, and others not. They claim several hundred charge/discharge cycles. I started off with Energizers and found that they were good for perhaps a year and then they started to lose their capacity quite seriously. After trying a few things I bought a lot of replacement batteries. After about a year they are also failing. Most of these batteries in the S1 have had just a handful of charge/discharge cycles, well under a hundred. The ones in the A450 get charged probably alternate weeks on average. Still not more than a hundred times in total. What I have been able to read from other users' experience is similar. There is a great deal of doubt that NiMH batteries last very long, or certainly for any number of cycles.

In future I expect I will replace all my NiMH batteries annually. Having tried all the recommended brands, Sanyo Eneloop will be the next one. These claim a very low self discharge rate which I will be trying out. After going very quickly through three sets of NiMH batteries on the S1 (two of which lasted for 10 shots each) I bit the bullet and put in the backup set of Energizer Lithiums that I always carry. These produced such a good result that I believe I could have taken all 405 S1 photos just using them. However of course, the Lithiums are very expensive; currently $25 for a set of four. On Thursday the A450 finished up the day on a set of ordinary alkalines due to exhausting all of its batteries. Today I managed to get through only 100 pictures on just the four rechargeables I always use with it. Still, if I had used it more then it would have been better to have a pair of lithiums at hand to use it with.

A Tale of Two Cameras

Once upon a time there was a computer technician, who decided to go on a train ride to Picton and back, which is a round trip of 700 km. He enjoyed a photographic hobby and he knew that this train had an observation carriage which would be great for taking photos from the train as it passed by different places. So he decided to take two digital compact cameras along:

1. A Canon Powershot S1 with lots of super duper features and a 10 times zoom lens, originally costing $700 new.
2. A Canon Powershot A450, a basic model costing less than $200 in 1997.

Which camera did he expect to use the most? Well, he figured that with its superior capabilities, the long lens, all the options and tricks that it could do, the Powershot S1 would be taking most of the photos.

Guess what? He was wrong. He took over 300 pictures on the little cheap handheld A450 and less than 100 on the expensive S1. Why was this?

Well, the A450 is a compact lightweight camera that can be held and operated with one hand. It has a big 5 cm LCD screen that gives a very good view of the subject. It has a 4x zoom lens that zooms in only about seven steps. It has some most-used settings directly accessible on the back panel, and it has a manual mode that remembers more useful settings such as EV compensation and flash on or off. One of the other useful settings that can be enabled on the A450 is the displaying the picture just taken for a brief period before taking the next one.

While the S1 and later models of that series are more powerful, this adds up to more challenges. Firstly the greater size and weight of this camera make it more difficult to use one-handed. The zoom controller has to be turned very precisely to zoom quickly or slowly and it has a long zoom range. Useful functions like macro and flash cancel are not on the back panel. The 3.75 cm LCD screen is more difficult to see the picture on. Using viewfinder instead has the difficulty of trying to keep up with the scenery flashing by while setting the camera at the same time.

It may be that the later models of the S series overcome some of these limitations. But I was surprised that the little cheap second camera has proved so much better. The main reason why is that on a moving train you have to hang on with one hand. Then you need a camera that can be operated with one hand, that has a good screen, and that doesn't take long to zoom in. In fact, most of the pictures I took were on the minimum zoom setting. The A450 can get through its zoom range faster, I think. It's horses for courses, I suppose. The more expensive camera with the bigger lens is superior in some situations, like long distances or special exposure settings. For a lot of situations like rapidly moving subjects or close-range stuff, you might yet find as I did that the basic cheap model is easier.