Archive for October, 2007

For the time being the exact characteristics of the upcoming replacement of the Canon EOS 5D (the grand-daddy of all Full Frame digital SLRs) are not known. Even the name is not that certain.

Expected specification:

• 16 MP full frame CMOS sensor
• Up to 6400 ISO
• Significant mechanical evolution, with the arrival of weather-proofing of the body (it was missing in the EOS 5D)
• Dust reduction herited from EOS 400D and EOS 40D

Two bits of news today that are quite significant of what happens with most of today’s high-end cameras.

• First, Sony just announced a firmware upgrade for the just-launched Alpha 700 professional photo camera. Some reviewers (like Chasseur d’Images) had noticed that the excellent sensor was not giving its best with the tested cameras (low-contrast foliage was easily blurred by the noise reduction algorithm). Not surprisingly, Sony presents an upgrade to v1 firmware “improving image sharpness and noise performance as well as tweaking flash performance with non-ADI lenses.”
• Second, Canon UK stopped shipping of EOS-1D Mark III and initiated a recall of unsold cameras pending an official announcement by Canon related to camera repairs/replacements of the autofocus system.

All this points to excellent cameras that arrived a little too early on the market. The pressure to be right in time for the big year’s end sales seems to be forcing these apparently serious manufacturers into technologico-marketing limbo. Will we have to apply the automotive market adage of “never buy a car within less than 6 months of its launch”?

The Sony upgrade is only for to early production cameras with v1 firmware (press the Menu and Display buttons simultaneously to check your firmware version).

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Last minute update: Canon issued an official statement indicating that the issue comes from an AF mirror adjustement problem and that repairs will start in November 2007. If the serial number on the bottom of the camera is between 501001 and 546561, the camera might require an adjustment of its AF mirror mechanism.

Canon official statement.

Here is a web site with nice photos of chalk works for optical illusions.

From MOI

Graphic animation to be seen at least once.

link

Born in the Berlin zoo.

Markus Schreiber

Year after year, there are a few photo images that wrote History. LukeProg found 52 of them. The choice is always subjective, but most of them really hit the public.

Whoever has been using DirectX software on Windows (and this means PC gamers, and only them) knows that you simultaneously need to continuously install new upgrades of the humongous software package from Microsoft in order to keep the best performance out of the PC games and the will to uninstall it or to come back to an older version of it.

Unfortunately, there are problems:

• DirectX is ever bigger and needs a lot of disk space (not counting some memory too)
• DirectX is virtually useless to anybody not playing games on their PC
• DirectX has incompatibilities with some games or some games have incompatibilities with some versions of DirectX

So, you are constantly oscillating between the will to have the latest version and to come back to an older one. Unfortunately, this is at least difficult and even sometimes downright impossible for the normal PC user.

Here comes a nice little shareware program, DirectX Happy Uninstall. It brings the possibility to move forward and backward into the wealth of installed DirectX versions and configurations. Uninstall, re-install, that’s just $12.95.

We are told that the demo for the Crysis PC video game will be available tomorow (Saturday) on a large number of game web sites.

Update: The demo is now available. Beware! It’s no less than 1.7GB of a download. Go and fetch it from one of the following sites:

• FileFront
• Worthplaying
• Gamershell
• 3D Downloads
• ActionTrip
• Fragland
• GGMania
• Computer Games.ro
• PixelRage
• GameSpot

This is still only the DX9 version, but it has been said that the DX10 version would soon be available from nZone, the nVidia web site.

Furthermore, we already know that the performance required from the PC will be relatively (too?) high.

System Requirements (minimum):
OS Windows XP or Windows Vista
Processor 2.8 GHz or faster (XP) or 3.2 GHz or faster (Vista)
DRAM Memory 1.0 GB RAM (XP) or 1.5 GB RAM (Vista)
Video Card 256 MB
Hard Drive 12GB
Sound Card DirectX 9.0c compatible

Supported Processors:
AMD Athlon 2800+ (3200+ for Vista) or faster
Intel Core 2.0 GHz (2.2 GHz for Vista) or faster
Intel Pentium 4 2.8 GHz (3.2 GHz for Vista) or faster

Supported Video Cards:
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT or greater; ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (Radeon X800 Pro for Vista) or greater. Laptop versions of these chipsets may work but are not supported. Integrated chipsets are not supported.

Updates to the video card and the sound card drivers may be required.

System Requirements (recommended):
OS Windows XP / Vista
Processor Intel Core 2 DUO @ 2.2GHz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+
Memory 2.0 GB RAM
GPU NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS/640 or similar

In my eyes, this is more or less what was to be expected. A double-core PC with a 8800 GTS/640 is a pretty good machine todya, but it can be bought by the more intensive (or best paid) players. The minimum is really accessible (nothing worse than what is required by all the games from the last six months).

Tom’s Hardware just compared 7 online services for online storage of data.

Take your storage online

I am in love with the Opera web browser. I use it for 99% of my web browsing, so it is also the tool I use when writing posts for the roumazeilles.net web site. The only thing that I did not have right out-of-the-box after download was the ability of checking my spelling (and several people noticed a few typos in my posts along with some of my bad English).

So I decided to add a spell checker to Opera (a plug-in to limit the risks of my own typos). I found a pretty simple one: Aspell for Windows that Opera will automatically recognize when it is installed. It has dictionaries for many languages (it is easy to create one from a mere word list in your own language if you need to). It supports several languages at the same time.

The only drawback is that it is not working in real-time, but you have to call it from a right-click on the mouse into the post box. I would have preferred an active underlining of wrongly-spelled words (like in Word or OpenOffice-Write).

May be you know a better one that you would like to share…

Note for new bloggers: Even if I have been waiting long for this, typos in your posts just pushes forward a bad image for your own web site. Go and correct this now.

Source: http://www.opera.com/support/tutorials/opera/spell check/.

Olympus launches a new digital photo SLR for the 4/3 format. This already produced a small flood of tests, analysis and commentaries on the Internet. Here is my selection:

• Olympus E-3: assurant et rassurant (DigitLife - Français)
• Olympus E-3, enfin (DigitLife - Français)
• DPreview (English)
• Photography blog (English)
• PopPhoto (English)
• Think Camera, commentary (English)
• Think Camera, unveiled (English)
• VR Zone (English)
• ePhotozine (English)

What happens when you translate English to Chinese to English? This is the question that should have been asked before translating the subtitles to Star Wars, the revenge of the Sith (or is it Star War, the backstroke of the West?)

It’s so bad, that it may have been good to store it under “culture”.

Source (with many more examples): DynamicDiscord.