The World's Most Expensive Point & Shoots?

Last year, I made the decision to get a Leica digital rangefinder. Most folks that know me, wonder what could have possessed me to invest that kind of money in what many consider to be a niche camera.

Well, I am not here to defend my decision. However, to put things in perspective, I present to you two cameras that make the price of the Leica M8 look like chump change.

These two cameras are examples of scale focused rangefinders. That is, cameras whose lenses must be focused by guessing at the distance from the camera to the subject. The viewfinders are for framing purposes only and play no part in the focusing process.

First up, we have the Alpa 12 TC from Switzerland. This camera is basically a frame that holds a lens in front of a medium format digital back. Top that off with a built-in spirit (bubble) level and an interchangeable viewfinder and you have yourself one really expensive piece of photo gear. The body is priced at roughly $1,800 USD (which is less than a Nikon D300). However, the lenses start at about $3,200 USD. The lenses are made by Alpa, Schneider, and Linhof/Rodestock - all German, all hand-made. Add to that the cost of a Viewfinder ($1,300 USD) and the cheapest compatible digital back you can find (Phase One P20+ costs $16,990) and you have just assembled a 16Mpix camera with no internal focusing mechanism and weighing in at $23,290.00 USD.

Next up, we have a similar offering: the Cambo WDC-MAfd from The Netherlands. Using a slightly more retro design than the Alpa, it has the advantage of moving the shutter release to a (at least in my opinion) more ergonomic spot. Prices for this body start at $4,099 with a Schneider Digitar 47mm XL lens.

Tack on a Viewfinder + mask for $910 and the PhaseOne P20+ at $16,990 and you have yourself another one of these monster point and shoots for $21,999.

Mind you, I am only configuring these with a 16Mpix digital back. You could go completly nuts and use a PhaseOne P45+ 39Mpix back instead. Doing this would increase the prices to $39,290 and $37,999, respectively.

So here you have a pair of cameras that cost as much as a loaded Mini Cooper S. And that is only with one lens. So who would be lunatic enough to buy one of these anyway?

Architectual and landscape photographers.

These systems have the ability to shift the lens in four directions (up, down, left and right) with respect to the digital back. This allows for distortion correction when shooting very wide angle photos. Ever see those amazing photos on the covers of the really fancy architectural magazines? They were most likely taken with one of these combinations. Granted, these are considered the travel models and are tiny by comparison to their wide and super-wide counterparts.

For more information (or to scare yourself silly at the prices) head over to the Alpa and Cambo websites. To see images taken by these cameras, head over to the Alpa Flickr Pool and shots from Luminous Landscape's Review. Many thanks to fine folks at LL for their review that inspired this article.

Zeiss unveils new 35mm ZM lens.

The legendary Carl Zeiss company has unveiled a new ZM lens (Leica M-mount), the Carl Zeiss C Biogon T* 2,8/35 ZM. The new lens is only f/2.8 which does not make it the fastest prime on the market. However, it competes directly with offerings from Leica in terms of lens speed and outperforms them on price. The new lens' estimated price is € 590 ($910 USD) compared to Leica's Summarit 35mm f/2.5 at $1,495 USD.

Oddly enough, Zeiss' parent company, Cosina of Japan, unveiled at PMA a 35mm f/1.4 M lens under its Voigtlander brand. The lens is 2 stops faster and retails for $519. How well all three render will be the determining factor.

Zeiss' other C lenses have reflected older lens designs and often have a rendition that has been called "painterly". In this digital age, sharpness is all the rage, but the informed still know that bokeh, or how a lens renders the out-of-focus areas just as important as the in-focus parts.

Here is the press release for those like this sort of thing:

Carl Zeiss: C Biogon T* 2,8/35 ZM

The New Carl Zeiss C Biogon T* 2,8/35 ZM Completes Any Compact Photography Equipment

OBERKOCHEN/Germany – March 19, 2008.

As the latest member of the ZM lens family, the C Biogon T* 2,8/35 ZM lens is the perfect addition to your light, mobile photo equipment. The C Biogon T* 2,8/35 ZM will inspire you with perfect images, even at full aperture. Together with the compact C Biogon T* 4,5/21 ZM, it creates the ideal equipment for a wide range of applications such as documentation and architecture photography.

The “C” in the title indicates another outstanding feature: rather unusual for a lens of this performance class, its moderate speed of 1:2.8 permits an exceptionally compact construction. The symmetrical Biogon construction with 7 lens elements in 5 groups allows for practically distortion-free images.

The ZM lens series from Carl Zeiss is suitable for cameras with M-bayonet. As with the other lenses in this line, the C Biogon T* 2,8/35 ZM features an intuitive operating concept, a robust all-metal frame and a precise, noticeable click in 1/3 aperture stops.

Delivery of this lens is scheduled to begin in mid 2008:

C Biogon T* 2,8/35 ZM: Approx. € 590.00 (excluding VAT)

Moving back to the Mac: Background noise

Now that the R800 mystery was solved, I carried on my merry way customizing the system to my tastes. One of my idiosyncrasies is to place all of my personal background images in their own folder in the Pictures folder. That way I can easily use a special Export Preset in Lightroom to easily create background (wallpaper in Windows terms) images and not have to fiddle with System folders.

In the System Preferences there is a control called Desktop & Screen saver whose job is to control desktop background images and screen savers (doh!). However, my setup was listing Aperture 2 folders twice and any attempt to add my Backgrounds folder resulted in the system informing me that it was already there.

Relying upon my mad Google-Fu skills, I uncovered that this problem can be solved by opening iPhoto once. This recreates the list adding the iPhoto Library to it, removing the duplicate entry for Aperture 2 and exposing the folders already added to the list.

Simple solutions (however odd they may seem) are always the best. I am also including a screengrab of the way the control should look after you run iPhoto for the first time.

Moving back to Mac: Fun with networked printers

As my little journey continued, I began connecting my Mac to the Windows network that already exists in my home. I was already connected to the IP network, so I tested the waters hooking up networked printers and connecting to shared drives.

I have three shared printers in my home network: two HP LaserJets (one color, one B&W) and an Epson Stylus Photo R800 USB inkjet printer I use for printing photos. 

The LaserJets (a color 2605dn and a 5) both have built-in JetDirect interface cards allowing them to be plugged directly into an Ethernet switch. The Color LaserJet 2605dn even has a built-in Bonjour print server. Bonjour is Apple's Zero-configuration technology that can be applied to a wide variety of hardware devices. They even have a version for Windows. (There is a 64-bit version here.)

Suffice it to say, the HP 2605dn was as close to a brainless install as one could dare hope for. The LaserJet 5 was a tiny bit trickier as I needed the IP address of the printer in order to point to it. Since I am the network admin, I had that information. You can also get it from the printer by printing it's Configuration Page.

The Epson Stylus Photo R800 was another story. If the above two were stories, they were written by Dr. Seuss. Setting them up was that easy, I kid you not. The Epson's story, however, was written by Clive Barker (I still see Cenobites creeping out of the corners of my home office).

I originally had the Epson connected via USB to my Windows 2003 Server (R2, Service Pack 2, 64-bit) and shared. For 64-bit Windows clients this is great as the workstation uses the server's printer driver. Everyone else is forced to install a local copy of the driver for their platform. Leopard provides a mechanism to connect to Windows based printers and I was able to connect easily enough to the shared device. The bundled print driver is from the GutenPrint project (formerly GIMP-Print) an Open Source printer driver. Lo and behold, the GutenPrint driver included support for the Epson R800!

Unfortunately, the support is only minimal so that made the GutenPrint driver a Doesn'tPrint

 driver. Not to worry, Epson has drivers for Mac OS X Leopard on their site. So I happily downloaded those and set about installing them and using them on the shared printer. Here's where Clive comes into the story.

The Epson driver for Mac OS X hasn't really been updated for a little over a year. Epson has no plans on updating it either. The drivers are for USB connection only. So I went and unplugged the R800 from my server and plugged it directly into my Mac. The mojo happened again and a print queue, complete with the factory drivers I just installed, miraculously appeared in my system. Shot off a jpg to the R800 and it printed normally.

So far so good, I went and unplugged the printer, deleted the local queue and reattached it to my server. I then added the shared printer and when I went to select the Epson driver, the only one I could find was the GutenPrint one. O_o?!? I searched high and low on that hard drive, in every frickin' folder I could think of, but I could not locate the Epson driver that was installed when the printer was attached locally. Frustrated, I turned to the Internet.

I Googled around ALOT. I checked in all manner of support forums, PC, Mac, and even photographic ones. Nothing panned out. As an Official Minion of Steve Jobs (Mac owner), I tried the support forums at Apple. Lots of complaints, but no answers. Most of the folks gave up and got a better printer. Lord knows, I would like an Epson Stylus Pro 3800 (if anyone from Epson is reading this, I will gladly review it for you or the new model that will replace it), but I just dropped a bit of scratch for the Mac Pro and my wife would have me strung up if I came to her with this. 

I called Epson Technical Support and they basically gave me a  "doe in the headlights" look regarding this problem. "We are going to escalate it to a higher level of tech support" they told me. I suggested they escalate it to a driver developer to get it fixed.

I then reattached the printer to my Mac and tried sharing it with my wife's XP machine. Seemed straightforward enough. I installed Bonjour for Windows and her box spotted my shared queue easy as pie. I loaded her up with the latest Epson drivers for Windows and all seemed cool. When I fired off a test print from her box, everything seemed to be going smoothly, but nothing happened in the printer. WTF? I checked the queue in my machine and it was empty. Leaving the queue monitor up, I resubmitted the test. The job appeared in the queue and then vanished. Flitted off to bit-bucket heaven.

So, flexing my powers as a Minion of Steve, I went to the Apple Store where I bought the unit and signed up to chat with a Genius at the Genius Bar. There was a two-day wait. Wishing to make the most of the time before the meeting, I set about learning to look at the logs for the printing system (Mac OS X is Unix based and there is no escaping the amount of logging that goes on in the background. The trick is learning to "open the Mac's kimono" and get to the underlying Unix.) There I discovered that the print jobs I was sending from my wife's machine were failing silently with some sort of authentication error. I printed the log file (just the relevant part, not the whole thing) and waited patiently for my appointment with the Genius.

You know, it has always bothered me when marketing types get too involved with things like tech support. Sure giving them cool names like "Genius Bar" or "GeekSquad" or even "Firedog" (I would really like to know what they were smoking when they came up with that one.) makes them more appealing to the population in general, but it puts undue stress on the poor guys and gals who are only trying to be helpful. 

Client - "You're supposed to be a [Pick one: Genius, Geek, Firedog] why can't you fix my iPod?"

Hapless Tech - "Sir, you're trying to load 328GB of music and videos and it's an 8GB Nano."

Client - "Don't give me that double-talk! I waited three days for you to fix this so I can load Heroes Season One into it! Some [Pick One: Genius, Geek, Firedog] you are! Ha!"

Saturday rolled around (I had made the appointment the previous Thursday) and I gathered all of my notes, screenshots, log printouts, and Tums for the trip to see the Genius. On the way, I took my kids to see "Horton Hears a Who" at the local theater and I have to admit it put me in the right frame of mind for what was coming.

I will admit the whole experience there at the Apple Store was very pleasant. Buying a Mac is like buying a Mercedes Benz or a BMW: you get a lot of TLC along with a really cool product. I was greeted by the Concierge who checked my appointment and I pulled up a stool to wait my turn. I was second in line. The guy ahead of me failed to show up, but the staff had to wait to see if he was going to show up so I ended up waiting 15-20 min. I walked to the Genius Bar and proceeded to tell this story.

The tech (Chris) tried very hard to find an answer, I will give him that. He more than likely hit all of the same things I did when I searched for myself (I pride myself on having mad google-fu skills), but he gave me a response that usually takes care of most printer problems in Leopard. And the number to a consultant in case that didn't work.

It didn't work.

As I was wondering which car I was going to have to sell to pay for the consultant, The Answer showed up from the question I had posted in the Apple Support Forum. I was advised to update the GutenPrint drivers to the latest versions. Those were the drivers that had to be used for networked Epson printers. The factory drivers were USB only.

I did this and tremulously fired a test print to the R800. Hokey Smokes it worked! So there is the answer kids: download the latest drivers from GutenPrint. I highly recommend reading all of the docs that come with it so you understand how to configure them.

The End.

PS: I visited the Apple Store today (Monday) at the request of the Store Manager to discuss my experience with the Genius Bar and to see what else they could do to help me out. I happily reported the solution I had found and asked the Manager to let Chris know so he (and the rest of the support team) will be able to help others with this problem in the future. Got to hand it to Apple: no one does "warm and fuzzy" customer support like they do.

PPS: My Epson R800, ungrateful bastard that it is, up and died on me after all of the trouble I went through to get it working on my heterogeneous network. Paper feed mechanism broke down. Ordered an HP B9180 from Buydig which has a built-in network adapter and Bonjour server.

Going back to my roots (computer-wise)

Like author Alex Haley, I have gone on a quest to rediscover my "Roots". No, I am not looking for some familial contemporary of Kunta Kinte. I have decided to go back to the company that got me started in computing: Apple.

In high school, my parents bought me an Apple ][e which got me on the road to a computer career. Later, I bought myself a Fat Mac and then a Mac SE. Things were going great until I got my first job in IT. Initially, my work centered around IBM mainframe computers (which was a bit of a learning curve since my college work was all done on Unisys mainframes and DEC VAX systems), but being an IBM shop. it was a matter of time before PC's started appearing and soon after that customers were requesting that custom applications be designed to take advantage of the new platform. My Mac got pushed aside by a work-issued PC and Windows started taking over my life.

Now, after almost 20 years, I have decided to return to my roots. I bought a Mac. Those who know me think I have completely lost my marbles. "Why would you want to buy an overpriced Mac when you get PC's sent to you for free?" Oddly enough, it is precisely for that reason that I did it.

Look at it this way, when we get review kit in, we have to test it, analyze the results and prepare a report for publishing. However, there is immense temptation to take that kit and bolt it onto your primary computer (the one you do all of your work on) and run with it. Great idea, when the stuff works. Sometimes you get bits of kit that are of preproduction quality and using it is like playing russian roulette. The last time I tried this I was offline for about two weeks over the holidays.

By switching my primary computer to a Mac, I remove the temptation to bolt on the latest bit of tech shunted my way and will always have a stable system to be able to write these nuggets of wisdom.

Now I just have to build a workbench in my garage for the test PC's. After I clean it out of course. 

Planning for Halloween 2008

I have decided this year to make my own costume for Halloween. Not the usual stuff either. Last year, I dressed up as kung fu hero and that worked out well. This year I want something people will remember, so I have decided to do a wizard costume. However, as a twist this will be a steampunk sorcerer.

Partly inspired by Phil Foglio's excellent Girl Genius webcomic, and partly from "Manga" Doctor Strange from Marvel Comics' Mangaverse Limited Series by Ben Dunn a few years ago, I am planning to include some custom prop pieces complete with special effects. I wonder if this is going to embarrass my children? Probably.

Intel taps the power of the Atom

Intel has just issued a press release announcing their newest low power processor for mobile devices: Atom. While processors for mobile devices are not a new product for Intel, Atom represents a radical departure from the traditional mobile device CPU. Up till now MD processors were essentially incompatible with laptop/desktop/server processor architectures, making it extremely difficult to produce a program from a single codebase that could scale from handheld to server levels of hardware. Atom changes the playing field by creating a multicore (up to 11 on a single die) processor that is compatible with Core2 Duo. This allows programs written for desktop environments to run essentially unchanged in handheld/settop/embedded environments. What this buys the handheld device is an internet experience similar to what is currently had on larger devices. Whereas the iPhone (ARM based) uses a port of Mac OS X to support versions of popular Mac applications (Safari, iTunes, etc), said apps must be adjusted and recompiled for the environment. Atom would allow OS and apps to run virtually unchanged. The implications of this bode well for the consumer, assuming that programmers remember that mobile devices won't have several gigabytes of RAM handy and that secondary storage will be limited as well. Lean and fast will be the order of the day. Intel has entered the Atom Age. Here's hoping they don't blow up and take us with them...