Archive for June, 2007

After my recent trip to South Africa, my Konica Minolta Dynax 7D digital SLR camera had a significant problem with dust on the sensor (5 or 6 spots very visible on clear skies or plain surfaces). I decided to go for the Sensor Swabs from Photographic Solutions Inc.

All in all, this is a very efficient solution. However, a few things must be kept in mind (like is noticed by all users according to what appears in digital photo forums):

• Never re-use a Sensor Swab (after the 2-pass operation, it would not bring positive cleaning, but just more junk on the sensor)
• Don’t over fill it with cleaning solution (a few drops on the part far from the end of the Swab will creep by capilarity; Too much of it leads to catastrophic -but easy to correct- results)
• Press firmly (but not too much, this is a sensitive device)
• If it does not work perfectly the first time, it’s OK to try again after a few seconds

Au total, pour mon premier essai (et pour confirmer ces règles), j’ai dû utiliser 4 Sensor Swab.

Recommended.

This is a sample movie showing most of environment and game play of BioShock, one of the next impressive FPS video games for PC.

Apparently, the images of the game will really be dark (compared to other games). But it’s true that everything is happening underwater in indoors.

Source: Voodoo Extreme.

HardwareLogic offers to go much further than the usual defragmentation offered in standard by Microsoft. In a detailled article, they describe the use of Contig (a Microsoft tool with an indigent command-line interface) and Power Defragmenter GUI (a software application that provides exactly the right human-readable interface for the previous one). Two free tools that seem quite powerful.

A very nice surprise at the foot of my condominium: A demonstration that gave me the opportunity to work on the subject of hands and body.

Hands	Hands
Hands	Hands
Neck
Doctor Tran	Doctor Tran
(Click on the thumbnails to see the larger image)

A thousand thanks to Doctor Tran.

Choosing a photographic inkjet printer able to produce high-end A3+ printsis not an easy task even though the list of candidates is much more limited than for A4+ sizes. Nevertheless, as prices are steep, it’s worth avoiding errors. This makes the comparison done by our firends at photo-i the more interesting.

They oppose three impressive printing machines:

• Epson Stylus Photo R2400
• HP Photosmart pro B9180
• Canon Pixma pro 9500

I will not hide the conclusion, the HP B 9180 runs ahead for its excellent price, its auto-calibration, its ability to keep heads unclogged by auto-cleaning every 6 hours, its Ethernet connectivity (on top of the USB) and its photo quality very similar to the others (the differences really became small at this level).

Link: Comparison of 3 A+ pigment inkjet printers.

This is far from a postcard catalog, but here are some images brought back from my recent trip to Porto Alegre and Gravatai. Not really time to shoot photos, but an improvised weekend in Porto Alegre and a few hours in the mountains 100 miles in the North (Gramado).

Details of Porto Alegre cathedral

Interior of the Porto Alegre cathedral


Interior of the Porto Alegre cathedral


Gargoyle of the Porto Alegre cathedral
(Click on the thumbnails to see the larger image)

Street of Porto Alegre

Street of Porto Alegre
(Click on the thumbnails to see the larger image)

Gramado, mountains

Gramado, mountains


Gramado, mountains


Gramado, mountains


Gramado, mountains
(Click on the thumbnails to see the larger image)

IDEC - Institute for Consumer Defense - is the largest consumer association in Brazil. It lauched a campaign against Digital Rights Management (DRM) titled “Tehcnological Restrictions - You pay for it, you get less“.

Always ready to produce enormous images, Scott Howard delivers a nice night view of the Chicago skyline. Zoom as much as you’ll want!

Source (from Belgium): Karakartal3.

Windows has supporting multi-monitor desktops for quite a long time. However, this could easily improved as many users noticed. UltraMon is bringing a masterful solution to this situation. Plenty of little improvements in terms of

• Intelligent task bar extended to all monitors
• Management of screen savers
• Management of desktop backgrounds
• Additional window icons

If you have several monitors on your Windows PC setup, UltraMon is a must have.

Download link.

Qtpfsgui is really the name of this utility program for GNU/Linux that allows to do High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography by grouping several images exposed differently to get a new image surprisingly clear and readble. Any Linux-loving digital photographer should try it.

I previously wrote about the various techniques used for inkjet printing, but a good reader (thanks Daniel!) made me notice that there is a technique less common than the usual dye-based or pigment inks. I admit easily that I did not know it before. But it is a slightly older technique that was used by Epson for desktop printers and that includes both a solvant and a heat-sensitive dye.

To use it, you absolutely need a paper whose special surface has been prepared taking that ink into account and making the surface relatively sensitive itself to heat (polyester cover) in order to open to heat (creating micropore allowing the ink to enter the paper, then closing behind it) or a very hard surface (metal or ceramics, for example, where the ink will be cooked on the surface). This is specifically the technology used in giclées (printing solutions using a surface that looks a lot like a painter canvas: sublimed ink on a canvas heavily coated with polyester).

Rather uncommon today on the desktop (both at home and in the office), this technique must be rather difficult to handle photo-quality colors (the importance of good ICC profiles cannot be stressed too much), forces to adapt to prepared papers (special surfaces like cotton are not usable) and must have a rather good shelf life (the ink is preserved at the bottom of the closed micropores).

Sources:

• Dye Sublimation information.
• Info sur la sublimation de colorant (giclée)

Complementary information about the possible use of such an ink on an Epson R800/R1800: These inks are supposed to be used with printers that never were designed for them (far from it!), UltraChrome ink Epson printers (R800/R1800). There, it smells really funny; The more because these good printers normally use a rather complex combination of inks including a varnish or “gloss optimizer” transparent ink used to manage correctly the bronzing effect so common on pigment inks. I would stay far from this odd combination (I would be afraid to damage my printer…)

The #1 problm of WiFi networks (well before the speed of data transfers)? Merely, the network range. There is always a corner of the office or of the house that is not reachable (or nearly not reachable) with your WiFi-enabled laptop: in the master’s room upstairs when the router is installed in the office downstairs, for example.

Solution #1: buy a range extender or a repeater. But this is usually very expensive (several hundred dollars).

Solution #2: reconfigure a 60-80$ router to transform it into a nice cheap WiFi repeater (a device that takes the WiFi signal, amplifies it, and re-broadcast it at full power to extend the available range).

I was thinking about this when I found the two interesting explanations describing how to install a new “DD-WRT” firmware on a consumer wireless network router (like a Linksys WRT54GL) and to configure it as a repeater:

• Turn your $60 router into a $600 router (LifeHacker)
• Universal Wireless Repeater (DD-WRT)

And it works even with a WiFi network that was correctly configured for security.