The Online Photographer

Apple LED Cinema Display Brightness Control

Having problems with the brightness control on an external LED Cinema Display?

I'm posting this purely as a potential service for anyone who might be Googling for a solution to the same LED Cinema Display screen brightness problem I wrestled with last week.

When setting up a non-Thunderbolt Apple 27" LED Cinema Display as a secondary monitor for an iMac (mine is a 27" iMac 11,3, 2.8 GHz Intel Core i5, mid-2010), there can be a problem controlling brightness on the secondary monitor. There is no physical brightness control on the 27" LED Cinema Display, and when you connect the secondary monitor through the Mini DisplayPort, although everything else seems to work fine, there is no virtual brightness control for the second monitor in the System Prefs—>Displays panels either, regardless of how you have the monitors arranged.

The solution
With help from several experts, I tried about half a dozen possible solutions over several days. It stumped a number of Apple experts, to the point that the AppleCare Tech Support Supervisor was about to submit a help ticket to the Apple engineers in Cupertino. The solution is that, although the external monitor works in every other way with just the Mini DisplayPort cable connected, to restore the brightness control you ALSO have to connect the USB cable. (This also activates the USB ports on the external monitor, so it has that additional benefit.) The Brightness slider then magically shows up in the appropriate control panel.

Hope this helps someone out there at some point.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Scott: "Further, if you want fine control over brightness, as when profiling, and one 'block' is too much, push the Shift & Option keys as you push the brightness key and the levels go up and down in one quarter stops."

Patrick Perez: "So it has come to this: Mike Johnston is providing computer tech support/advice. I think I just saw a pale horse ride by. I kid! Thanks for another great year of reading here on TOP to Mike and his band of contributors, as well as the wonderful group that adds so much in the only comment section I regularly read on the web."

Mike replies: To your first point, I admit that that seems improbable, and, on the face of it, suspicious. But even I am capable of absorbing the relevant details in the direct wake of first person experience!

The Nice Price

I don't know about you, but from where I sit it's like the steady steam of deals-deals-deals has become a torrent. Every day my inbox is logjammed with the jolly invitations—scratch that, the desperate come-ons—of the season. Don't I want to review this or that gewgaw or app or bag or fundraising project? Wouldn't my readers want to know about this deal or that bargain or those savings?

People are getting sensitive, too. One...person (no insults, now, Mike) lambasted me yesterday for daring to link to that box of Dave Bruback CDs. I would have laughed, except my eyes were rolling so hard. Right, like I make a fortune on linking to ultra-budget $14 CD reissues far from the topic of this website...in an era when people hardly ever buy CDs at all any more anyway. Venal, moneygrubbing Mike. That's it.

Anyway, knowing that I am inviting a rain of scorn on my head, here are a few bargains you might actually want to know about: the splendidly solid, or solidly splendid, Canon EF 50mm ƒ/1.4 lens (not great wide open, but great from ƒ/2 on) for a nice-price $299, at Amazon; and the soon-to-be-late, not-so-popular Nikon 1"-sensor V1 with its 10–30mm lens for only $299 at B&H. That V1 kit is less than half the cost of its much-more-popular 1"-sensor main competitor, the Sony RX100. People evidently think the 1" sensor size is luxurious for an all-in-one digicam—accounting for the popularity of the Sony—but less than adequate for a more serious interchangeable-lens mirrorless camera—accounting for the unpopularity of the V1. But even for less than half the cost?

And for those who will jump on me saying that the slower Canon 50mm is even cheaper than the 50mm ƒ/1.4 on sale—yes, I know, but the ƒ/1.4 is a better lens.

Among B&H's many other deals, two that stand out for Mac fans are this Mac Mini (very popular as a music server, apropos Dave B.) with Applecare for $589, and this 13.3" MacBook Pro with retina display. I'll also link to this, just because I want one myself, even though the last documented case of a human on Planet Earth buying a tower computer happened back in 2009.

As for yesterday, here's the scoop (TMI? Maybe, but as I always say, quoting David Vestal, I'm in the disclosure business, so full steam ahead): I earned a tracked and documented total of $21.09 on the sale of Dave Brubeck CDs through my link yesterday.

If it makes anyone feel any better, I've donated the $21.09 to charity, so as not to be profiting from Dave's demise.

I'm sure it will come as a great satisfaction to my critic yesterday that TOP is having a bad Christmas season this year, and that I'm worried about it.

And yet, though this might come as a great shock to the cynics, I link to things primarily because I think people might be interested to know about them (my inbox be damned), not primarily to make a few bucks off them. Although that's necessary too. I thought a few people (19, as it turned out) might appreciate that Dave Brubeck box. When the same box set was on popmarket a few months ago, the price was so nice I bought three, and gave away two of them to friends.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Speed: "Writing this on the tower computer I bought just three months ago. I'd look like a squinty-eyed and hunchbacked medieval scribe if I had to work all day on a laptop. Also, it's hard to fit three drives and a high performance video card into a laptop. On the other hand, schlepping it to Starbucks is not fun."

Bill Tyler: "I think you should stop making money from links on the same day that every one of your readers also renounce the horrendous practice of receiving income from their labors. It's truly reprehensible that your writing and publishing efforts should enable you to stay warm, dry, and fed. Since we all are forced, much against our will, to read your blog, and since we are all legally compelled to purchase whatever you link to, the idea of you actually benefitting from some third party in the way of referral fees is little short of criminal."

Bob Burnett: "Under the category of boxed sets via TOP, I very much enjoy the 'Lady Day: The Complete Columbia Golden Years' box you touted a few years back. Ten discs. Thirty dollars. I never would have known about it being such a flat- out value otherwise. All praise the mighty TOP music dept. and the 19 @ $1.11 each commissions. That's gotta get you about 1.5 Frescas per purchase in your pocket."

The Ultimate Photoshop Enhancement: The Electra MAX 3G 960GB SSD

By Ctein

Over the past several years, I've written four columns about upgrading my computer hardware to make Photoshop run faster without having to buy an entire new system. My last upgrade was an Other World Computing Seagate Momentus XT 500GB drive with 4GB of flash RAM cache, reviewed here.

You can trace the links back from there to the three columns that preceded that one if you want to read the whole saga. That's probably a good idea before hitting me with questions about what works best and what is most cost-effective.

Well, now I'm replacing that hard drive with an OWC Electra MAX 3G 960GB SSD [Ed. Note: See important addendum below]. This is the end of the line, because I honestly can't figure out any further enhancements to this machine.

There's a more general question I'm investigating, too: How much do you gain by trying to soup up an elderly machine with an SSD? We all know they make state-of-the-art machines astonishingly fast. Maybe, though, drive speed isn't the bottleneck in an older system. I've already souped up my 2007 2.2 GHz Core Duo MacBook Pro to the point where it's more than twice as fast as it was originally on Photoshoppy stuff. It performs comparably to a fast 2009 or a slow 2010 machine. That's a nice return on my investment, but maybe I've pushed it as far as it can go.

Understand that for most of you the Electra MAX 3G 960GB, priced at a whopping $1,045, is severe overkill. I had several reasons for testing this model, not the least of which is that my current 500 GB Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive is almost full, and configuring a 480 GB SSD in exactly the same way (so I could get meaningful comparison runs) would be a considerable headache. Most of you won't need this capacity, or the nifty fact that the 960 GB drive is actually two 480 GB drives, so you can configure it as a single drive (as I have) or as a 480 GB RAID1 array.

Furthermore, 6G SSDs are now insignificantly more expensive than 3G's. The extra performance won't do you any good in an older system with a 3G bus, but if you later recycle that drive into a 6G system, you'll pick up a substantial performance boost for free.

Finally, if you configure your machine for two internal hard drives, you can get by with an OWC 120 GB SSD ($129) that holds your operating system, applications, and scratch space, and you'll see almost as much performance improvement as having everything on the SSD.

But if you want a really honkin' big and fast drive, this baby is it.

So, why go this upgrade route in the first place? Why not just get a new machine? One reason is cost. Incrementally improving my machine has cost me much less than half what a new machine would run (up until this extravagance, and it would still be true if I had gone with a smaller drive), and it has extended the life of the system by several years.

Another reason may be compatibility. This laptop still runs Snow Leopard, which means it runs my business-critical software that will die on a newer Rosetta-less machine. A new machine may also have different I/O ports, demanding expensive or possibly even unavailable adapters for your peripherals.

Under those circumstances, maximizing the performance of an old system makes a lot of sense. But, maybe I've already taken it as far as it'll go? We're about to find out.

Since I was testing an older machine, it made sense to also test older software, so I looked at performance with both Photoshop CS4 Mac (which was severely limited in how much memory it could use) as well as CS6. I also compared it to our high-end 2009 27-inch iMac, whose quad-core processor, faster and more efficient processors, faster data buses and 16 GB of RAM can trounce my laptop (which only supports 6 GB RAM).

For general purpose tasks, the Electra MAX made things a bit peppier, but not by a lot. The SSD'd MacBook Pro booted in 25% less time and launched Photoshop in 30% less time, but my mail client, word processor, and voice dictation programs were not noticeably faster. Somehow, I expected more.

Running Lloyd Chambers' DiskTester revealed that the SATA bus in this old machine simply isn't up to supporting full 3G performance. It's not uncommon in older machines for the manufacturer to save money on I/O by using slower components. The Electra MAX clocked in at 120–128 MB per second, only half of what this SSD is capable of in a more modern system. Keep that in mind if you're souping up an old machine; you may not need the very best-performing SSD.

Moving on to Photoshop, I ran Lloyd's Photoshop benchmarks. As expected, there was very little difference with the Small benchmark, which mostly exercises the processor; it ran at most 10% faster under CS4 and CS6 with the SSD. The iMac ran that benchmark in 2/3rds the time under CS4 and 1/6th the time under CS6, which took full advantage of the iMac's 16 GB of RAM.

The Medium benchmark was another matter. The Electra MAX speeded my laptop up by 50–100%. The iMac was now only three times faster than my venerable laptop.

The Huge benchmark is representative of what happens when you see Photoshop's progress bar creeping along at a snail's pace, because you've started swapping a lot to the scratch disk. Under CS4 the iMac and the Momentus-configured laptop turned in nearly identical times, because their internal drives had similar throughput. Under CS6 the iMac turned in a time that was 40% less than the MacBook Pro, because the extra RAM did help. But it didn't blow away the MacBook.

So, what did the Electra MAX drive do to that benchmark? It aced it. It cut the time for running the Huge benchmark on my MacBook Pro nearly in half! Under CS4, the 2007 MacBook Pro left the 2009 iMac in the dust. Under CS6, it still beat it by about 10%.

Wow.

Now, that's the most extreme case. In my typical Photoshop use, the Electra MAX gave me a boost somewhere between the Small and Medium benchmarks. That's nice; I won't complain about trimming 25–35% off of times. It's not like buying a whole new system, but it pleases.

(Oh, and in case you're wondering how this compares to the state-of-the-art, the latest MacBook Pro Retina runs the Medium benchmark six times faster than my SSD'd laptop.)

The conclusion? Even in a fairly ancient machine with its very limited I/O, an OWC SSD is a very worthwhile upgrade to your system.

Ctein

IMPORTANT ADDENDUM Fri. Oct. 26: Murphy's Law always wins. After turning in this review, I took off on a one-week trip. Almost immediately, I started having corruption problems with the Electra MAX, with half my applications unrunnable and Disk Utility reporting unrepairable node damage. As soon as I got home, I copied off the new files I'd created on the trip and successfully reformatted and repartitioned the Electra MAX.

I attempted to restore my system and data two different ways:

—booting from the OS install disks and using Time Machine.

—booting externally using my Momentus HD in an external case and using Carbon Copy Cloner to port the HD over to the Electra MAX.

Both methods failed repeatedly, with no consistent stopping point over many, many attempts. The SSD would spontaneously dismount itself from the system in the middle of the process and remain invisible to the OS even after a reboot. It would reappear if I shut the laptop down entirely and restarted it.

I'm going to run some further tests to tell me if the drive is being inherently unreliable or just unreliable as an internal drive in my system.

This is the second sample of this drive that has misbehaved for me. The first failed almost out of the box, so I ignored it and got a replacement. It happens to reviewers on occasion and it's properly ignored unless it points to a deeper problem.

At this point, I think there's a deeper problem. I don't know if it's an incompatibility with my system or a more inherent flaw, but I can no longer recommend the Electra MAX 3G 960GB SSD at this time [the links have been removed from the article —Ed.].

This doesn't change any of my performance measurements nor conclusions about the value of an SSD; they still hold. Just not this SSD, for me, anyway.

This also doesn't change my very high opinion of Other World Computing or the general quality and reliability of their products. I've been buying their stuff for as long as I've owned Macs, and they will continue to be my preferred vendor. Their service and support have been consistently exceptional, too; their people are just wonderful. (And that's not me getting favorable treatment—I was buying from them long before they had any idea who I was or what I do for a living.)

Computer geek Ctein enhances your drive, vim, and vigor on TOP on Wednesdays.

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Joe Kashi: "Some SSD drives are faster and more reliable because they use better internal controller circuitry. I've been using Crucial M4 series SSDs for some time now and they have proven very reliable with Windows 7 Pro. The same drives were less reliable under prior OS versions and required reformatting to the new OS after a failure like Ctein describes.

"Hence, part of the problem may be generally OS related, part may be due to controller incompatibility with the OS or related problems, and part may have to do with the increased internal waste heat and/or noise arising from the higher chip densities of very high capacity drives.

"There's one final reliability-degrading factor with very high densities: Each bit has a finite chance of failure and it's an additive effect. Twice as much capacity means twice as many individual bits, which in turn means that the chance of failure doubles (or perhaps even more due to increased internal heat). Ideally, the controller should be able to map, relocate, and block any bits that show signs of incipient failure, but a particular internal controller may not do this efficiently or reliably and the SSD then becomes unreliable."

Catch That Corruption Before It Catches You

Last week I got an e-mail from a reader that pointed at a serious problem he had. It seems to me more important to take this up in a column and push back the RAW column another week. This could save some people from serious grief.

Reader: Hi. I wonder if you have knowledge about corrupted photo files, why they occur, how to avoid and how to cure them. I am dealing with seemingly random corruption. Sometimes the files are a mess; sometimes a thumbnail appears but the file will not open. The programs that are advertised to deal with this problem get mixed—usually rotten—reviews.

Me: Dear Reader, If you're seeing lots of corrupted photo files (like more than one or two in your entire collection), that's evidence that there's something wrong with your computer system. If you have multiple hard drives, especially if they're on different data buses, and the corrupted files seem to be predominantly on one drive/data bus or another, that's a sign of trouble on that storage path.

It could be as simple as an inappropriate or slightly defective cable. Back in the old IDE/ATA days, I decided to replace the rats' nest of ribbon cables in my PC with more modern and orderly bundled types, and I ran into all sorts of corruption problems. The bundled cables had higher impedances and the driver circuitry on the motherboard simply wasn't up to pushing the data through the higher-impedance cables. "Better" in that case proved to be worse.

File corruption could also be evidence of an unreliable hard drive.

Another place to look for evidence of data path problems is in your backups. If you have a way of running verification or checksum passes on backups, enable that and see what you get. If the backup software reports back with occasional problems validating a backup, that says you have a problem. A corrupted backup is a much bigger problem that a corrupted photo file. You'd be surprised how many people get bit by this one because they just assume the backups are good, and then, when they need them....

There are also test utilities out there, either cheap or free, which will heavily exercise data paths and hard drives to try to find errors. Something you set up and let run overnight or even for a couple of days, while it shuffles terabytes back and forth, and then you look at the report. Can't recommend a specific product, but Google will be your friend in this area.

No, I don't know of any good repair programs. The best scheme is to just have a whole bunch of image processing programs, both high-end and low-end, that can read a whole bunch of file types and will tolerate screwed up files. The freeware ones are frequently better at this than the expensive ones; Photoshop is particularly fussy about file quality. It will often tell you that it cannot open a file at all that another program will open and find only a few bad pixels or one bad row in.

Reader: Ctein, thanks for this extensive comment. I am experiencing backup issues. Will check as you suggest. I begin to think that cloud storage is superior to multiple externals. Again, thanks. Much appreciated help.

Me: Dear Reader, Then you need to get on this sooner rather than later. The corruption isn't necessarily happening in a data path that can affect files that your system writes to and uses. But, if it is, eventually your OS will start misbehaving and possibly become entirely unbootable, and you will not have a trustworthy backup that you can restore it from.

I don't know what kind of system you have or your level of computer expertise, so I'll make these very general remarks. First, get one of those drive-exercising utilities so you can test as you go along. Next, decide if you're interested in figuring out exactly what is wrong or just fixing the problem.

If the former, you need to make a systematic changes to your hardware and run tests after each one, until you isolate the bad actor. Try replacing the drive cable, try using the drive on a different I/O port, try using a different drive, etc.

If you just want to fix the problem, the best way is to buy an external hard drive as different in every way from your current one as is possible. Buy it from a different manufacturer and use it with a different interface, assuming that your computer has more than one external interface. For example, if your current drive is a Seagate USB (Seagate drives, in my experience, are not reliable) get a different manufacturer's FireWire or eSATA drive (assuming you can support either of those). That should make your problems go away entirely. If you don't have a choice of interfaces, don't make yourself crazy; the most likely point of failure for external drives is the drive or cable, not the interface. Remember to buy a new cable to go with whatever drive you get.

You need to deal with this now. Cloud storage backup isn't going to fix anything that's wrong with your system.

•     •     •

That's it for this time. Next week should be the long-awaited RAW column, unless another fire turns up that needs putting out.

Ctein

Ctein (it's pronounced "kuh-TINE," and yes, it's his only name) ferrets out bad busses on Wednesdays on TOP.

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

robert e: "You and your reader probably looked into this already, but sometimes an unseated cable connector can cause intermittent file corruption and other disk problems. I've seen it happen (though that was in the old days of wide ribbon cables). A connector that was marginally seated (perhaps at the factory, or during an upgrade) could work fine for weeks or years before it worked loose to the point where problems happen. Connectors have improved, but you never know.

"So if you start having weird file problems, check all the cable connections you can get at comfortably. Really.

"If you're uncomfortable opening electronics in boxes, then it's good enough to narrow down the problem to a particular box or cable.

"But if your computer is a box that sits on the floor or a desk, it probably needs periodic cleaning inside anyway, whether it's done by you or a tech (whoever it is should know what they're doing). The last step to cleaning it out should be to check the cables and connections. Pay attention to fans, too. Dust buildup can make them vibrate, among other bad effects, which only helps connectors work loose.

"External drives, too, can have cabling inside, and sometimes fans, and dust. Even laptop drives often depend on cable connections—these are usually accessible through a hatch."

David Dyer-Bennet: "I've been scanning 1960s photos since mid August, and let me tell you, the bit rot is terrible. Neither I nor the other photographer whose work I was scanning appear to have had water filters in our darkroom, and commercial processing wasn't any better. And, now, there are layers of scratches on top of all that. I've spent over an hour spotting out crap on a few of the shots (ones I have some plans for and think are worth the effort; it's essentially a restoration job even though I have the original negatives for my own work). As a general rule, I advise against inventing organization and storage schemes for negatives if you haven't had any experience in darkroom work. (But, you'll notice, I still have the negatives from snapshots I took in second grade, which puts me ahead of most people.)"

iPad Followup

By Ctein

Since my review of the new iPad, I've revised some opinions and found a very useful free app to recommend.

Let's be clear; in no way am I going to tell you why you should have an iPad. If you think you need one, fine. If you can't see any use for the device, fine. I'm not out to persuade you differently. You can read my previous articles to find out why I value the iPad, but as for whether or not you should get one you're on your own. Now, on to the updates.

After thoroughly trashing the usability of the camera in the new iPad, I found myself using it on rare occasion. Consequently, I will raise its ergonomics rating from –273 to a more modest –100.

One of the least exotic of the dishes at Travail (halibut, sunchoke, roasted tomato and pearl onion). No tweaks, no adjustments, just cropped. Even with a splash of direct sunlight, awfully good exposure and color.

In April, my friend Beth Friedman and I were having our second dinner at the fabulous and surprisingly inexpensive molecular gastronomy restaurant, Travail, near Minneapolis. (If you don't know what molecular gastronomy is, Google it. I will not even try to explain.) We take notes when we order the tasters' dinner, because there's no way we will remember the wonderful and imaginative dishes we've been eating. I typed into Notability on the iPad and, in a flash of inspiration, decided to see if I could use the built-in camera to photograph some of the tapas-sized courses. It worked astoundingly well, even with highly uneven and very mixed lighting and white china. Two of the photographs are reproduced here, with nothing done to them save some cropping.

Absent direct sunlight, the results were even better. Despite the mixed light sources, the color balance and exposure were excellent. Again, no tweaks.

The built-in dictation feature has worked even better than I expected. I wrote and edited my entire column about printing for Ronny sitting in the car one evening while on a trip, using the iPad's dictation. If this ever becomes user customizable, it will be my favoritest program, ever.

On the minus side, the runtime/recharge time issues have been more of an aggravation than I thought they'd be. In the bright light circumstances where I'm likely to use my iPad, I rarely get to turn down the brightness much. Since that's the main determiner of run time, I rarely get anywhere near 10 hours usage; it's more like seven or eight, at best. When I'm using Google maps in an automobile, 20% of the battery life can get sucked away in an hour. I bought one of those little $10 cigarette lighter USB chargers so I could keep the iPad plugged in while driving.

Because the new battery pack has such long charge times and the iPad has such high power consumption, plugging it in for short periods of time doesn't get you much. The calculus is pretty straightforward: with the old iPad, one hour of plug-in time would buy you about three hours of run time. With the new iPad, it may only buy you a little more than one hour of runtime.

The bottom line is that you're going to run out of power more frequently and more inconveniently, and it's going to be harder to do anything about it.

I'm still pleased that I got the new iPad, but if longer runtimes and more convenient recharging is important to what you do, and you don't really need the new and improved features, you'd be better served by a new or secondhand iPad2.

An app that helps
Lastly, I found a nifty new app for printing. It started when Walgreens advertised the Canon iP2702 printer for $19.95. It seemed like as good an opportunity as any to replace our ancient DeskJet 970. Paula asked me, "If we get this, will I be able to use it to print from my iPad?"

After some research, the answer came up no. After some further research, though, I stumbled across Airprint Activator, a program for the Mac that lets you access any printer that's hooked up to your Mac as an Airprint printer. Currently it is free and fully enabled, although a donation would be much appreciated.

It works like a charm. I can print to not just the Canon but the Epson 3880 as well; heck, I could print to the 9800 if I had a reason to do so.

I sent the author $10. It was worth it.

Sadly, I don't own any iPad apps that are particularly smart about printing; they lack controls for paper size, type or print quality. That's not an Airprint problem; Airprint is just a way of getting data to the printer. The application still has to tell the printer what to do. Consequently, I have no control over formatting at this time and all I can get out is plain paper quality. But I can print with no hassle and no fuss.

Maybe I should be shopping around for a few smarter apps.

Ctein

Ctein's weekly column appears on TOP on Wednesdays.

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by -et-: "With your background, I suspect that I am about to mention something that you have already considered. However, we all have moments when we overlook the obvious, so I'll go ahead anyway.

"All of the 'standard' cigarette lighter adapter (CLA) chargers have a built-in limit of 0.5 amps current flow to a USB connection. The iPad needs (and can accept) a current flow of 2.1 amps to keep up with the power drain while operating. If the iPad is not operating, it will just charge more quickly with a 2.1 amp CLA than with a 0.5 amp CLA.

"There are CLAs that can provide this amperage, but you have to look for them carefully. (There are some CLAs with two USB outlets that deceptively claim to provide the amperage, but when you read closely you find that they provide this as a total amperage—but split between the two outlets. So read the fine print.)

"Additional misleading factors are that most of the USB outlets on computers are also limited to 0.5 amps charging current, and that all USB cables are not equal. The 'standard' cables will not tell the charger that it should provide more than 0.5 amps—even if it is capable of doing so.

"I do not have an iPad, but I do have a Nexus 7 that needs and can accept more than 0.5 amps. I looked at CLA options for some time. and ended up purchasing a TomTom Hi Speed Multi-Charger from Amazon for $20. It has been very satisfactory for me, but YMMV."

Shiny New Apples

Just FYI, B&H now has all the new Apple gear: the MacBooks with Retina displays, desktops, the new MacBook Airs and MacBook Pros, and even some deals on previous models.

Mike

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

The 2012 iPad, Part II: Bigger Display, Better Camera

By Ctein

(Part I is here)

This is the second part of my review of new iPad. I strongly recommend the first part and my previous iPad reviews to understand where I'm coming from with this device. I'm reviewing only the features that I care about, as there are an unlimited number of other reviews out there.

Resuming right from where I left off, last column...

Ultra-high-resolution displays like the iPad's can't reasonably portray graphics at their "native" resolutions, if those graphics were designed to look good on normal displays. Ordinary displays have resolutions of 100–150 ppi; the Retina displays easily double that. Consequently, if I design a thumbnail for my website that's, oh, say, 170 by 135 pixels I'd expect it to take up 1 inch square or so or so on a normal display. On a new iPad it would come out something more like 1 cm square.

iPad's rendering software upsamples the graphic to display it a more plausible size in layouts suitable for normal human beings instead of Lilliputians. Unfortunately, the upsampling looks lousy. Even my 768x1024 pixel "fullscreen" images look mediocre. The thumbnails look like, well, total crap.

For those who want technical details on dealing with this, read this. I'll be taking the brute force approach; e.g., leave the image tag heighth and width attributes alone (e.g., 170x135 px) but upload double-resolution (340x270 px) JPEGs and just let the receiving device cope.

My test page now looks great on all screens. It's going to be a lot of work, since I don't have high resolution versions of most of the full-screen images; it's back to square one to re-create them. The thumbnails, at least, I can up-rez relatively efficiently (a few minutes work apiece) from existing resources.

The problem isn't pressing; currently this matters only for the new iPad. Still, the handwriting's on the wall; it's not going to be too many years before everybody is running high-resolution displays. Consider yourself warned.

Now, let's talk about the camera.

I need to bring up ergonomics, a very subjective matter. I ask you to imagine the very best-handling digital camera/phone/whatever you've used and rated as a 10 and the very worst as a 1. Ready? Where would the new iPad fall on that scale?

About –273.

There's just about no way it's good. The iPad is too heavy and awkwardly shaped to comfortably hold in camera-using position. You can select what point to focus on and set the exposure for by touching the screen, but then you're gripping one-handed, and that hand'll cramp up really quickly. In landscape mode, the lens is at the lower right corner, where it is very easily accidentally touched while holding the iPad in a way that places your hand near the shutter button. Voila, a smear of finger grease on the camera cover glass! Rotating the iPad 180° places the shutter button right next to the "exit this application" button. Guess which one you'll be hitting by accident? Portrait mode is better but still difficult.

How does the camera perform? As the photograph of the Macbeth chart (above) shows, color rendition is really excellent. It is slightly too saturated, but the hues are spot on. A good digital camera will do better, but this is more accurate color than any film can provide (says the guy who's tested most of them). Under non-daylight conditions, such as fluorescent or incandescent light, there is a slight color cast, orangish for incandescent lamps and yellowish for compact fluorescents. It is usually ignorable. It could easily be corrected; even Mac OS's Preview is sufficient for this task.

I measure the resolution at about 1200 lines by 1600 lines. That's roughly a 2-megapixel equivalent, a bit low for a 5-megapixel camera. In film terms, that's roughly like getting 25 lp/mm from a 35mm point-and-shoot camera. Not quite at the level of "acceptable sharpness" in an 8x10 print, but close. Indeed, such prints made from the iPad's photos are passably sharp; just don't scrutinize them too closely. Remarkably, sharpness is entirely uniform from center to corner; that new five-element lens really is remarkable. It does show a bit of pincushion distortion.

The camera will focus close enough to cover smaller than a 3x4" area; on the iPad's screen, it's more than a 2X enlargement from life-size. Even with relatively low resolution, you can photograph detail as fine as the naked eye can see.

Figure 2

The iPad's exposure range measures only seven stops. This is definitely an expose-for-the-highlights camera. Let the shadows go. Automatically-determined exposure usually works well, as figure 2 indicates, but there will be times when you'll need to dial it down by tapping the screen in a brighter area. Figure 2 show off both the accurate color and short exposure range. Elmo's almond eyes and the slight pinkish tinge to the skin around his eye are faithfully reproduced while the feathers are pleasantly close to the proper shade of gray.

Figure 3

Zooming in on figure 2 to 100% (figure 3) shows the ointment's big fly. Extremely aggressive noise reduction produces that undesirable "watercolor" look. The fine detail in the feathers on Elmo's throat pops in and out of existence depending on whether it has enough contrast to survive the noise-reduction algorithm's not-so-tender ministrations. At low light levels the noise really becomes unacceptable, viz. figure 4 (100% scale). It's tolerable on the iPad screen and might be acceptable in a "drugstore" sized print. It's ugly in anything larger.

Figure 4

Even in direct sunlight, the photographs aren't noise-free, as you can see in figure 5 (full frame) and figure 6 (100% scale). The noise is fine-grained; in a print, it looks about what you'd expect from a fine-grain 35mm film. Entirely acceptable to most viewers, even me, but well below what digital cameras can deliver today. Subject matter with bold edges and tones won't suffer much from the noise issues, as figure 7 (full frame) nicely demonstrates. Although it lacks tack-sharpness, it makes an attractive 8x 10print.

Figure 5

Figure 6

Figure 7

All in all, I'd say the iPad camera's quality is vaguely comparable to a middlin' 35mm point-and-shoot (better in some ways, worse in others). That puts it well below today's good digicams and the iPhone 4S. But the camera's usable, if you don't get your expectations too high; that certainly couldn't be said of the one in the iPad2.

Ctein

Note: None of the illustrations here were massaged or enhanced, save for a slight exposure adjustment to figure 1 so that it would properly match the Macbeth chart.

Ctein's regular weekly column on TOP appears on Wednesdays.

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The 2012 iPad, Part I: A Distinct Step Upwards

By Ctein

This is the latest in what will obviously be an indefinite series of reviews of new versions of the iPad as they come out. Apparently I'm hooked on upgrading. I'm okay with that.

I recommend readers look at my previous two reviews to understand where I'm coming from with this device: Why I Needed an iPad and Why I'm Getting an iPad 2. This is not a general purpose review. I'm reviewing the features that I care about and/or I think will matter to other photographers. There are an unlimited number of other reviews out there, so feel free to browse to your heart's content.

I didn't recommend the iPad 2 as an upgrade from the original iPad (even though I upgraded), nor did I see that it brought much to the table for people who weren't interested in the iPad originally. The 2012 iPad is a different beast. I think it's a worthwhile upgrade from an older iPad, with some distinctly interesting new features.

The first is one that is near and dear to my heart and obvious to me, yet invisible to you. I'm dictating this column on the iPad. The new iPad offers voice transcription so long as you are connected to the net (via either Wi-Fi or cellular) and it works extraordinarily well, considering that there is almost no way to customize vocabulary or user settings.

In fact, even though I make extensive use of specialized vocabulary, it may prove to be a more efficient way for me to write than using Dragon Dictate on my MacBook Pro. Dragon is prone to all sorts of idiosyncratic errors, including orthography (not following the normal conventions for when to spell out numbers or write them as numbers, issues with punctuation and capitalization, etc.) I spend an inordinate amount of time cleaning up Dragon's mistakes. Apple's Dictation feature seems to get all this stuff perfectly. Plus, the recognition accuracy is truly extraordinary, the best I've ever seen.

The second big win for me is that the new iPad can function as a personal Wi-Fi hotspot for up to five other devices. Currently, Verizon supports that in their contract, while AT&T doesn't. I imagine AT&T will come on board, but I wasn't willing to wait, so I bought the Verizon model this time around. I don't use a lot of cellular data. Previously, I used the cheapest AT&T plan that provided 250 MB a month. A couple of times a year, when I would travel, I would kick up to the next highest (2GB) tier in AT&T. So I used to spend about $200 a year for connectivity. Verizon offers a $20 a month data plan that gets me a gigabyte per month, but it's going to save me money. A lot of the times when I travel I have to pay for Wi-Fi at a hotel for my MacBook Pro. I will not have to do that in the future, so I expect I'll save something on the order of $75 a year, along with getting about twice as much data on the iPad as I was getting the old way.

Now, about the display, which I know you've been wondering when I would get to. I did not order a new iPad in advance for the simple reason that while more pixels are nice (and the new iPad has plenty more), I'm a lot more concerned with pixel quality than with quantity. I bought my original iPad (see my first column) because I could use it as a near-studio-quality monitor in the field. If the new iPad compromised tone or color quality in any way it was likely to be a fail for me, no matter how attractive it seemed otherwise.

Well, quite the opposite! The new iPad display is better in every respect. Not only does it offer twice the resolution, which certainly is wonderful to behold, it renders exactly 100% of sRGB color space, in comparison with 70% on the old iPad. Apple has also tweaked the contrast, so the contrast curve is also now a perfect match for standard sRGB; previously it was too high. It's also slightly warmer than the old iPad's display, which was a little bit cooler than standard D65. Consequently, right out of the box, the new iPad display looks fabulous. After running it through a custom profiling in Air Display with ColorMunki, it looks even better. I am a very happy camper.

And, yes, all those extra pixels are really, really nice when reading the morning paper.

There are significant downsides to the display. The power consumption is way up on this model of the iPad, which means the standard 10W charger takes considerably longer to bring the unit to a full charge. Think something like six and half hours. With the old iPad, giving it a one-hour "quickie" over lunch would get you through the rest of the work day. No more of that (sigh). The additional power consumption also means that the unit charges extremely slowly or not at all if you are using it while it's plugged into the charger. Finally, run life is now most dependent upon screen brightness rather than CPU usage. At maximum brightness, the runtime is barely six hours. It still remains 10 hours or more at more normal brightness levels, but this is of concern if you're trying to work in extremely bright light or outdoors.

There are also some important, possibly unexpected, implications for photographers. I'll cover those next week, along with my review of the new iPad's camera.

Ctein

(Continued in Part II)

Ctein's iColumn—sorry, column—appears on TOP on Wednesdays.

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More Planned Obsolescence: Evil Lion

By Ctein

[Before we get started...want to help me do some research? I'm studying printer variability and I'm looking for owners of Epson 3880 printers who are willing to make a couple of 8.5 x 11" prints for me to my specifications. If you're willing to help out, please e-mail me at ctein@pobox.com with the approximate purchase date of your printer. I'll get back to you with details. Thanks!

We now return to the usual program in progress.]

If you're a long-time Mac user and you upgrade to Lion (OS X 10.7.x), there's a good chance at least one of your programs or peripherals will stop working. Lion will not run PowerPC-coded programs because Apple decided to eliminate the Rosetta translator.

This will be old news to some of you, but not all. To find out if this is going to affect you before you upgrade, launch About This Mac/More Info...and click on Software/Applications. Click the Kind column and your applications will be sorted by type. Scroll down the list and look for anything that says PowerPC. You may well be unpleasantly surprised.

Drivers for older peripheral equipment—scanners, printers, cameras, etc.—may never been rewritten for Intel processors. Older applications may also turn out to be PowerPC. You may, but not always, be able to upgrade them to Intel versions for some outlay of money.

This is an unsatisfactory situation, he said with extreme understatement. Apple's behavior around this one has been cheap, mean, and, frankly, stupid.

Any time there's a major OS or application rewrite, stuff breaks, and sometimes it is very difficult to repair. See Windows Vista, Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite. Mind you, I'm not going to stop railing against that progressive obsolescence, but I do understand why it happens. There was the year Apple eliminated the Classic compatibility box from OS X. I've had to keep an old Mac running OS 9.2 around for the small amount of business-critical software I have that never got upgraded to OS X by the manufacturer. Part of the problem for Apple was that Classic mode never was fully functional, even in its final incarnation. When Apple decided to migrate to the Intel platform and rewrite all its core functionality for 64-bit, it's easy to see how the problems of even keeping Classic compatibility working as not-very-well as it did could became overwhelming. It interacts intimately with OS X functionality.

Rosetta is another matter. It's a translator; it converts PowerPC code to Intel code. It's dealings with OS X are much more constrained. Frankly, if I were to imagine a technical need to eliminate Rosetta, it would've happened when Apple moved from OS X 10.4 to 10.5. There was major recoding of the core functionality. But 10.6 to 10.7? This is an evolutionary product, and there are only modest issues involved in ensuring Rosetta compatibility.

This wasn't a case of Apple saying, "This is going to be really tough to do," it was a case of them saying "Screw you, we can't be bothered." That's the cheap part. I'll get to the mean and stupid part presently.

First let's dispel a few apologias concerning Apple:

1.) "It's the price of progress." No; the price of greed, perhaps. The progress from 10.6 to 10.7 didn't fundamentally break the concept or functionality of Rosetta or even require a major rewrite. This was not necessary, technically nor economically. It's a very minor development project in the total scheme of the OS.

2.) "You got your mileage out of those old programs, you might as well upgrade or find an alternative." Assuming those exist—they don't always. It also ignores the money you'll have to spend to do that and the considerable time (= money) you will have to spend installing and bringing yourself up to speed with the new software. Conservatively, an upgrade to Lion would cost me $1,000.

3.) "Why should all users have to pay for something only a minority need?" With any big-tent operating system or application, most users don't use most of the features. A major OS, or an application like Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop, has to include all the functionality that all their users might need, even though no user will take advantage of any but a small fraction of that. If I listed the 10 major features of OS X, hardly any TOP readers would be making use of all of them. Conversely, the majority of TOP's readers make use of some obscure OS component that a very, very small fraction of users need. That's just the way it is. Anyway, the cost of keeping Rosetta is not huge.

4.) "No one is making you upgrade to Lion." Oh, they will. If I buy a new Mac I'm going to be stuck with Lion. Worse, it's SOP for software manufacturers to not support OS's more than a generation back (the early release of Mountain Lion may throw that off for one cycle). Photoshop CS6 will run under Snow Leopard, but will CS7? CS8 surely won't. Within a few years, one way or another, this is gonna bite me.

Okay, so what should be done, given that big companies like Apple almost never backtrack on technical decisions, no matter how brain-dead they may be? Well, there is a simple and only mildly inconvenient solution. Allow users to virtualize their copies of the older OSs. VMware, Parallels, and VirtualBox can all run virtual Mac OS X; folks have hacked their way through the technical thicket to show that's the case.

Just one little problem. Apple's end-user license forbids virtualizing older Mac OS X clients, even on Apple equipment. Consequently, virtualization software does type-checking to prevent installing a Mac OS client. Usually. An interim release of VMware had a different installation interface that would allow client Snow Leopard to be installed. I quickly grabbed it and created virtual Snow Leopard machines to experiment with (figure 1). I believe the current version won't do that. I have this suspicion it was a trial balloon that Apple pricked.

It's illegal and it shouldn't be. My virtualized Snow Leopard client OS, running here under VMWare, is prohibited by Apple's EULA. Think I'm going to delete it? Think again!

Apple could enable this with the stroke of the pen by issuing an EULA addendum for the older client OS Xs stating that they may be virtualized on Apple hardware, and that Apple does not support this. That means they're not responsible if the older virtualized OS doesn't work, so no cost to them.

That's all it would take. Let me run Snow Leopard, or even Leopard, or maybe even Tiger in a virtual machine on my Mac. I get to keep all my old functionality with modest inconvenience and expense. A couple of paragraphs from Apple would solve so many headaches and it wouldn't cost them a penny. (It's not like there's a big market out there in pirating old OSs, and besides, pirates don't pay much attention to EULAs.) So far, though, they haven't budged.

That's the stupid and mean part.

Ctein

TOP runs its verbal Ctein emulator on Wednesdays.

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Featured Comment by Thomas: "Rosetta isn't Apple's code to do with as it wishes. (Source here.)

"I'm a former software engineer who is now a patent and copyright attorney. Part of my work involves reviewing software license agreements. I'm posting semi-anonymously to make clear that I'm not soliciting clients with this post.

"It is the typical practice for software to be licensed in commercial environments for a certain term. That term might be denominated in years, in relation to other software releases, or anything else.

"Your invective at Apple would be sorely misplaced if their hands were tied.

"Say, for example, that Transitive, the owner of Rosetta, had licensed it to Apple for five years or three major releases of OS X, whichever came first. (I'm making the exact terms up, but you get the idea.) Apple would have had to go hat-in-hand to Rosetta to get a license if Apple wished to included it with Lion. Today, however, Transitive is owned by IBM. IBM might will simply not be interested in helping Apple maintain backwards compatibility or, perhaps, the necessary technical expertise to maintain this old code isn't there anymore and so IBM can't or won't license the code to Apple.

"I can speculate (and so can you) as to what really happened here, but we simply don't know. Getting nine women pregnant won't result in a baby in one month; no amount of cash is sufficient to conjure software out of thin air. Given the software patent environment of late, it is even possible that IBM wanted to license it to Apple, but another patent holder who'd given a license to Transitive/IBM refused to grant a necessary license. I doubt we'll ever know.

"If 30 years of hanging around the computer industry has taught me one thing it is this: you can't upgrade part of a system and expect that nothing could break and, eventually, you have to upgrade part of a system because old hardware will fail. In other words, find a working system and enjoy it while you can because, eventually, you'll have to find a new and different working system to replace it. Change is the only constant.

"Happy computing!"

Ctein replies: I much appreciate you posting an authoritative reference on the Transitive/Rosetta business. It's nice getting that confirmed instead of dealing in third-hand information.

That said, this is something of a red herring. As you carefully note, this is all speculation. It might have been beyond Apple's control. It might have been entirely within their control. We don't know. The real point is that they, like most of the companies in this industry, don't even care that they screw people by systematically breaking existing hardware and software. This is merely just one more example of it.

The industry has collectively decided that it's okay to constantly break our tools in the name of next year's profits. They've decided it's okay to screw us over, repeatedly. I've decided that policy sucks. I don't have to lie back and grin and take it. This isn't even close to the first article I've written about planned obsolescence in the computer industry; I've been in it for 45 years. I promise it won't be the last.

If, and I emphasize if, Apple had no choice in this matter, then Apple could ameliorate this with the stroke of the pen, by changing their EULA. That's just policy, not engineering. Policy can sometimes be changed by force of opinion. This is mine. I don't plan to stop writing about specific complaints against the computer industry's planned obsolescence policies.

Lenses are to Cameras as Applications are to Computers

By Ctein

I got a bit of amusement from Mike's #1 choice for "Most Desirable Camera on the Planet" a few weeks ago because only two days previously I had been thinking about that very same camera and...well....

I was out taking an afternoon walk on a lovely sunny Daly City day (we don't get many of those) with my Olympus Pen and my beloved 45mm ƒ/1.8 lens, our Lens of the Year for 2011. No agenda in mind, just walking and photographing for the idle joy of it. My mind, being free to wheel, was thinking about the review I'd just read in Pop Photo of the Sony NEX-7 and the test results I had just read at DxOMark. Not to put too fine a point on it, I found myself desirous.

That 45mm ƒ/1.7 lens sure is a sweetie. Fits me like a suede glove. But...

And why not? Forty percent more resolution than my Olympus (very nice), three stops more exposure range (very, very nice), a good stop more low light sensitivity (very...you get the idea), and a substantially better rear screen and a good eye level viewfinder. All at no special penalty in size and weight.

...I could sure use a couple of more stops of exposure range.

What's not to like! Oh, okay, I lose in-body stabilization. The world is not a perfect place. But, damn, in every other way that NEX-7 sounds like a lovely upgrade from my Olympus.

Six months ago, I'd have jumped. The only especially noteworthy lens in my kit was the Panasonic 20mm ƒ/1.7 that Mike likes so much. The Sony ZA 24mm ƒ/1.8 Carl Zeiss Sonnar-E lens would be an entirely satisfactory replacement for that. The other two lenses I owned then were nothing so special that I couldn't find comparably good ones for any camera system.

In between, though, I went on a modest buying spree and partnered up with the aforementioned 45mm. That is the lens I have a hard time imagining living without, more than the 20mm. I was torn: stick with the system I have and the lens I really like, or move to a system that is in almost every other respect substantially superior?

By the time this camera and lens become readily available, perhaps there will be other optical offerings that will resolve my dilemma. But what if there aren't?

As I've asserted in "The Lens is Not More Important Than the Camera," cameras matter as much as lenses. (No, we don't need to rehash that argument: please read the previous column and the comments there to see if you have something truly new to say on the subject. Otherwise, please consider it all said and read.) Now I was having to apply that thinking to myself, and I came to a realization: the title to this column.

If I may elaborate:

When someone asks me if they should buy a new computer, one question I ask them is what software will they have to replace on their new system. Rarely have they considered that switching operating systems definitely means acquiring a bunch of new software. Even a major system upgrade can break older programs.

Most applications have close cousins on every imaginable platform. Maybe not the same make and brand, but something else that will serve equally well. Maybe even better. There's a good chance they can get the same functionality on their new machine they did on their old—they just have to remember to budget for it.

But, what about that unique program, the one that won't run on the new machine and doesn't have a close equivalent? I've got more than a few of those that I don't want to give up. There's not always a satisfactory answer. Compelling reasons for moving to a new platform vs. loss of unique functionality.

Doesn't that sound awful lot like the kind of decisions and cost/benefit analyses one has to make around changing cameras? At least the money situation with cameras is somewhat easier. I don't have to worry about licenses, activation codes, and other nonsense with lenses. They'll fetch a decent price on the market; should I decide to sell my Micro 4/3 kit, I'll easily get enough money to pay for an NEX-7 with the 24mm lens.

Does this answer my question for me? Absolutely not. It does give me a more sophisticated and nuanced way of thinking about the problem than simply "which do I care more about, my lens or my camera?"

Given my schedule and the lack of availability of gear, I'm not likely to settle my Micro 4/3 vs. NEX-7 question for some months. Maybe by then there will be a really sweet 50–60mm NEX lens in the ƒ/2 range that will resolve my dilemma.

That would be so much better than having to make a hard decision. He whined.

Ctein

Ctein, whose weekly column appears on Wednesdays, has been choosing, buying and using cameras for 48 years.

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Featured Comment by Benjamin Marks: "I am not really sure that there is a decision to be made. Yet.

"The choice you posit is a version of the generic problem faced by all of us who are susceptible to the latest-and-greatest photo-thing. You haven't really identified any shortcoming of the tool you have; you just like the published specs of a tool that may become available. Don't get me wrong, I use the NEX cameras and the Olympus Pens (E-P2 and NEX-5 for me). But, until I started using it, I didn't realize how much I hate the NEX-5's arm's length focusing and the software driven menus/adjustments. I went out and bought a contraption called a Hoodman that I strapped to the back of the NEX-5 with a big red rubber band. Focusing problem solved, but the Oly is such a much better thought-out device, from a photographer's point of view. My point is not that the NEX-7 won't be the bee's knees in some way, but that you are caught in a 'choice' between a well-thought-out camera that you own and...a published feature set. Until you get your hands on one (and your eye to the VF), you won't really know—can't really know—whether it works for you. By the way, the NEX-5 is a living, humming example of the fact that cameras matter. Sheesh, exposure compensation can't be accomplished on the fly with the camera at your eye. The 'feel in the hand' of this tool practically killed the concept for me."

Featured Comment by David Jacobs: "Sorry to say, but...

"(The upcoming 50mm ƒ/1.4 short tele lens for the Sony NEX cameras. Note that it has 'built-in Optical SteadyShot image stabilization.')"

Featured Comment by Peter: "I am also lusting after a nice 60mm lens for that system. I'm mildly annoyed that they have a 50/1.8 planned, but nothing on the horizon for an 85/90 equivalent. Seventy-five millimeter equivalent is most definitely not the same as 90mm-e, although I could live with 85mm-e. Basically, I just want a digital CLE kit. The search goes on."

Your Computer Needs Cleaning!

By Ctein

Something that really bugs me about the design of personal computers that circulate air internally for cooling is that none of them seem to include any kind of filtering on the airflow entering the machine. It's a basic design flaw that contributes to a significant amount of computer malfunction.

About a year back I wrote "Your Scanner Needs Cleaning!" Here I am, back with a related refrain: clean your computer!

Here's the problem. That circulating air carries dust. The dust settles out on the electrical components inside your computer. Some of those components are insulators, some conductors. Doesn't really matter. They're all designed to operate in open air, not under a layer of dust.

The dust creates problems for two reasons. The first is the dust doesn't have the electrical characteristics of air. It affects electrical signals that pass through it differently. Your computer is just one big radio frequency generator. It doesn't take a lot to distort all those high-frequency signals moving around on those circuit traces. There's a certain safety margin built into the design so that some signal distortion and degradation can be tolerated. There's not a lot. A layer of dust can distort the signals enough that occasionally they will be misread at the other end of the circuit. Programs will abort for no apparent reason, files will get saved with occasional small bits of corruption, and if things get extreme your computer will start crashing unexpectedly...well, more than it does usually.

Basically, the machines aren't designed to run under dust anymore than they are under water. If anyone doubts that and is brave enough to try it, fill up a tank with distilled water, stick your computer in it, and tell us how well it works. Distilled water is an excellent insulator, but you'll find it isn't all that great at supporting computer signals.

The narcoleptic CPU
What's the second reason? Well, that's why am writing this column. I have my MacBook Pro opened up pretty frequently, installing upgrades and new components such as the hybrid hard drive last winter. I always blow out the accumulation of dust when I do that. Apparently I did not do as good a job as I thought I did last winter. A month or so ago, my MacBook Pro started shutting itself off spontaneously. It would simply go into sleep mode with no warning. I wasn't losing any data, but computer narcolepsy is really annoying. It shuts down. I wake it up. It shuts down. I wake it up. Repeat until finally it stays awake...and I'm ready to throw it across the room. (Remember my motto: never use a computer too big to throw out a window.)

After a little experimentation I deduced that it had to be a heat buildup problem. The thermal protection built into the system was intentionally putting it to sleep. That's why I wasn't losing any data, being an entirely controlled shutdown so far as the computer was concerned. It just didn't accord with my wishes.

I took the machine apart and used the better part of an entire can of compressed gas to blast every nook and cranny I could get at, paying special attention to getting the little nozzle underneath circuit boards and in corners where I might normally not. (And being very careful not to spray liquid, just gas, into the computer!)

Violating nonexistent warranties
While I was at it I pulled the DVD burner. It's the third one I've had in this machine and it had moved far beyond being merely flaky. It not only usually failed to reliably burn new discs, it often failed to read previously-burnt ones. This happens regularly on my computers. DVD burners are not trustworthy beasts. That's why I always double-verify my disks.

The system was out of warranty, so I had nothing to lose. I took a half dozen screws out of the cover on the drive, sliced through the little stickers that told me how I was violating my nonexistent warranty, and popped off the cover. There was a thin layer of dust inside the drive, not a lot, probably not enough to matter. I was able to get rid of some of it with the remainder of my can of compressed air.

Then I took a PEC Pad, wet a corner of it with optical cleaner, and gently wiped it over the lens in the read/write head in the drive. The lens looked slightly more transparent after I did that. A good sign.

Popped the cover back on the drive, put everything back together. Total time consumed, just over an hour.

It's been two months now, and my laptop hasn't shut down spontaneously once. The internal cooling fans are also cycling off more frequently.

And, wonder of wonders, my DVD burner seems to work perfectly and be completely reliable again. I've burned a good dozen discs with it, they all read perfectly fine on it and other drives I own, and the drive didn't balk once the whole time. Wouldn't have done that two months ago.

Just regained some significant functionality at very little expense. I am happy.

Too bad my iMac isn't user serviceable; its DVD drive has been getting crankier than the one in the MacBook Pro. It'll be back to the Apple Store for a warranty exchange when I can find the spare time.

Friggin' ^%#@!@$*!! unfiltered circulating air.

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column on TOP appears on Wednesdays.

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Featured Comment by Paul Ewins: "I used to work for a bank doing IT support work and often had to deal with quite filthy PCs. The worst were a set of branch servers that had been kept under desks. There were dust-bunnies inside that would have shamed the worst bachelor housekeeper. I would take them down to the loading dock, pop the sides off and blow everything out with a household vacuum cleaner. We used to joke that PCs were designed to draw dirty air in through one side, filter it carefully over all of the components then expel clean air out the other side."

Featured Comment by Dave Stewart: "I regularly fix desk/portable PCs for folk. Even if they're not having any hardware issues, I make a point of cleaning their machines out, as most are wary of looking inside. It can also be a useful exercise to educate the owners. Shoving the box on the floor wasn't a good idea—dust tends to collect down there, and for one owner, so did lots of pet hairs. Looked like half a cat was inside before it blew up!

"A vacuum cleaner and an anti-static brush are useful, though go easy—make sure the computer power is switched off at the wall, and best to avoid super powerful Dyson and similar vacuums!

"Laptops/notebooks—remove the power sources, i.e. power supply and the battery, prior to working on them. Dust sometimes forms a felt-like barrier across some of the cooling fins at extracts, and getting to such areas can be 'challenging' —not for the faint-hearted. It may be possible to suck or blow some of this out from outside, but again, go easy.

"There can be numerous fans inside that will clog up, and/or seize. Be wary of poking carelessly at them as you can affect their balance. Check they're working okay after any cleaning. Do not put on any lubricant, as it will just gum up with dust.

"Kids laptops are entertaining...gloves may be required. Sticky (as in yuck!) keys, along with all manner of crumbs and other foreign objects are the norm.

"Optical drives—as a first line of defence, there have been cleaning disks available for years. These have with tiny brushes that may resolve some dust problems. Careful how you store them—don't flatten the brushes. Failing that, the old cotton bud with some optical cleaner, as outlined by Ctein above. And note the 'gently' bit; otherwise the alignment may be affected. Optical cleaner doesn't remove jam; water's best for that!"

To USB or Not to USB

Okay, this is cute. At least as an idea, although I won't be buying one.

Somehow I see a relentlessly digitized future in which the rumored historical existence of "film" only fits as a meme. Oh, wait a minute—that's now. Never mind.

(Just kidding. I do have to admit it would be good for client deliverables, as Photojojo suggests.)

Mike
(Thanks to Vlatko)

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Featured Comment by Matt Alofs: "Finally, the digital film that we hear so much about five or six years ago. This will rescue my film-based cameras from near certain oblivion. Now where's that USB port on my M6 TTL?"

Featured Comment by Marc Rochkind: "Wow! I'm going to dial the phone and tell somebody about this."

Featured Comment by Rob Atkins: "Not available in 120? How am I to back-up my medium-format photos?"

The Perfect Computer Costs $5,000 (or More)

By Ctein

Back in the early days of personal computing there was a rule of thumb that said that your perfect computer cost $5,000. Not that you had to spend anywhere near that amount of money (the Apple debuted at $666) but if you sat down and imagined your dream machine, it wound up costing about $5,000. This was by no means the most expensive computer you could buy; you could always trick out your system with ever more storage, peripherals, and insanely-expensive monitors. Truth is, you could spend twice as much before you'd run out of toys to tack on. But, $5,000 would buy you the system that most all would envy, even you.

That proved to be a remarkably durable number, although it declined a bit as computer prices continued their severe decline. In recent years, it's been hard to break the $4,000 barrier. After all, today the overwhelming majority of computers sold are under $1,000. Apple, in fact, owns almost the entire market for over-$1,000 machines, and their total market share is still measured in single digit percentages.

But thanks (if that's the word I want to be using) to the technical machinations of our friends at Other World Computing, the ante has once again been upped. By my reckoning, the perfect machine runs closer to $6,000; with the perfect monitor, $7,000. Here's how you get there:

Start off with a MacBook Pro 15" 2.2 GHz with the Hi-Res antiglare screen option. That sets you back $2,350. Don't get the 2 GHz model; there's a very substantial performance difference between the two on Photoshoppy tasks. Apple's really pumped up the innards on the faster model in other ways than just the CPU. If you don't mind bigger (I do mind) go for the 17-inch "laptop" for another $200. You better have a really big lap, though.

Those two machines scream, out of the box. They'll outun the quad-core iMac that Mike just bought. This is just the beginning, though.

Throw away Apple's pokey hard drive and replace it with OWC's 480GB SSD. That'll set you back another $1,800.

Now to the newest sweet stuff. A big advantage of desktops over laptops has been their RAM capacity. Note the past tense. OWC has figured out how to cram 16 GB of RAM into the latest MacBook Pros, equaling the RAM capacity of the iMac.

Oh man, you're going to pay for that: $1,600. Add it all up and it's quite a pretty penny. Said penny, though, gets you a system that will run rings around the aforementioned quad-core iMac. In fact it will run rings around most any stock computer out there. And it all fits in a laptop—use it at your desk or take it wherever you need to. No longer are you compromising performance to get portability.

It still loses in one way: that relatively crappy laptop display. Well, get a NEC MultiSync PA271W-BK 27" display for $1,100.

Before you complain that a good display makes it a non-portable, remember there's always my iPad trick—dual displays with studio quality, in the field.

Either way, you've got a machine that's damn near perfect. Too bad about that $7,000 part, though.

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column appears on TOP on Wednesdays.

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Why I'm Getting an iPad 2

(But you don't need to)

By Ctein

Last summer I wrote "Why I Needed an iPad (and You Might Not)," which explains why the iPad is an invaluable tool for a traveling photographer like moi. Well, as soon as the pipeline refills, and who knows when that will be, I plan on moving to an iPad 2 (missed getting one on the opening day by 20 minutes, dagnabit). But, I think most if not all of you can safely ignore it.

There are three reasons I'm buying the new iPad 2:

1. I think this is the wave of the future and, as a writer and reviewer, it's a technology I want to stay on top of. There are also some iPhone camera apps I'm anxious to write about, like SynthCam, and the built-in camera will let me test those out, regardless of its lackluster specifications.
2. Space and weight are really at a premium in my shoulder bag. I'm right up at the absolute limit of what I can port about. The iPad 2 with its Smart Cover/stand is half the thickness and half a pound lighter than my current iPad plus its shell/stand.
3. Paula is really hot to buy my iPad, so I'll save a good part of the cost of the iPad 2.

I'd be very surprised if any of these reasons would matter enough to most of you. (Especially number three, seeing as Paula only needs one iPad.)

All the other improvements of the new iPad 2? Pretty much irrelevant.

More or less doubled processor power is nice, but honestly I haven't lacked for horsepower in my current iPad, with the exception of trying to watch HD movie files. I'm told the new iPad 2 will handle those better, but I do this maybe six times a year when I'm on an airplane. I bet it happens even less for you folks. In the meantime, anything oversize that I want to watch on my iPad, I run through Handbrake to reduce it to a manageable file. An inconvenience, to be sure, but such a minor one that I'd not be willing to throw away hundreds of dollars to avoid it.

Video-out is nice if you do presentations. I don't. How many people do? Remember that the iPad itself will almost always have a better quality screen than what you're projecting with. Unless you're showing to groups, you're better off just handing the client your iPad to look at.

If you've already got an iPad, there's little reason for you to buy into the second generation. If you haven't seen the need for an iPad, there is little in the iPad 2 which is likely to seduce you. For that matter, if you're ready to take the iPad plunge and you haven't yet, you're going to be able to buy used iPads at attractive prices—there are an awful lot of people on the same upgrade path I'm on who will have them to sell.

Will I get the iPad 3? Maybe, maybe not. I'm sure it will have its own set of cool new features, but whether any of them will matter to photographers is another matter entirely. We are not exactly the main audience.

That's my take on it: Save your money.

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column on TOP is published on Wednesdays.

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OT: New TOP Mac

TOP's new heart.

I wrote about my computer shopping travails last September, here and here. I concluded at the time that there was an urgent need to continue dithering. Finally, Steve Pellechia, owner of Techwise Computers in Waukesha, let me bring the store's demo 27" iMac home so I could try out the glossy glass screen for myself in my own environs. A five-minute trial convinced me it was less an issue than I thought it would be, so I wimped out on getting the Mac Pro and NEC monitor that I really wanted and bought a new quad-core 27" iMac instead. (I bought from Steve, since he helped me out with the demo loan.)

Experienced and intelligent computer users must be grateful for Migration Assistant, which essentially turns your new computer into your old one with minimal hassle. For a guy like me, however, what it means is that every bit of clutter, error, and all the piecemeal and illogical (dis)organization of my old computers is faithfully recreated on my new one. I find that dispiriting. I've likened it in the past to moving house and being forced to move every single thing from the old house into the new one, down to and including the trash. And even the dust. You use a move as an opportunity to clean up, clear out, and reorganize. Not so when you get a new Apple.

In my "Applications" folder, for example, there are many applications—along with another folder called "Applications," in which are more applications. Why? I have no idea. Does it have to be like that? No idea. There are many applications I don't recognize. I have no idea what they do. Is it safe to throw them away? No clue.

Ctein is a computer expert. I am not. It's too bad he's out there gazing over the Pacific Ocean. I wish I could sit him down and let him help me organize my computer. At the very least, I'll bet his running commentary regarding my ineptitude would be very entertaining.

Does anyone know of a book or a site that tells how to most efficiently organize one's files on a Mac? I should have looked at the Apple default before I ran Migration Assistant, although it doesn't really want to give you the opportunity to do that, prompting you at turn-on to migrate your old data immediately.

The new computer is up and running quickly and efficiently, at least. The only thing I couldn't get working is the new AirPort Extreme; that looks like it will have to wait till Monday when I can get Apple Technical Support on the phone. My current Rube Goldberg rat's nest of modems, routers, and ethernet cables reminds me of the story of "Leaky" Lee, the 95-year-old town plumber in Woodstock, Illinois, who died a while back. It was rumored that when Leaky passed, the owner of one old building downtown had to rip out the entire building's plumbing system and replace it from scratch, because no one could figure out how the crazy old system worked. Only Leaky knew.

In my case, no one knows. It works. Don't touch it.

The new computer seems sleek and huge and fast compared to the old one—just like the old one seemed when I got it. Of all the Macs I've had since 1984, only two have not imparted this sense of gleaming speedy modernistic up-to-the-moment improvement—a Mac "Classic" I had for only two years, and a shoddy Mac desktop my then-boss provided for me during the nadir of the Sculley years. All the rest have imparted a wondrous new-toy new-tech aura, each in its turn.

The new screen seems quite nice, but very bright. I have the brightness slider turned down to about 1/3rd and the screen still makes me squint. Strangely, the one thing that looks horrible on the new computer is my own site—TOP. On my old displays, the main text background was a subtle beige, and the sidebar color was a muted brownish yellow. On the as-yet-uncalibrated iMac11,3 screen, the text appears on a sickly yellow background that has a greenish cast, and the sidebar color is a lurid, bright, grotesque yellow. It looks horrible. (And yet the photographs on the site look fine.) If there are people out there who have been seeing the site like this for years, all I can do is apologize!

One thing's for sure, I'm not going to keep looking at the site in these colors.

I found an old ColorVision Spyder in my drawer—it might be three or four years old—and when darkness falls I'll plug it in and see if its software is still lurking on the computer somewhere. It should be. It might even work, if the various updates over the years haven't "broken" it. We'll see.

If not, I'll have to buy or borrow up-to-date calibration equipment.

And if that doesn't help, well, TypePad has a design service—it might be time to spring for a top-to-bottom redesign of the look 'n' feel of TOP.

Seriously, is there a manual that covers housekeeping on a Mac? I need that, and I'm not just trying to be funny.

This is the exact computer I got, I'm pretty sure, except mine has a 2 TB hard drive, and I plan to boost the RAM to 16 GB with memory from Other World Computing (which, by coincidence, is based in Woodstock, where Leaky Lee plied his trade for 70+ years). (And did you know B&H sells more Apples than Apple does? True.)

Mike

P.S. I hear there is a football game being televised today, which partly explains why I feel so free to maunder on about my computer: no one is reading this. This is traditionally our next-to-worst traffic day of the year, second only to Christmas. Hmm, maybe the new color scheme of the site should be green and gold....

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Scrap of Cloth Tied to Tree-Trunk...

...Figuratively speaking.

I am now going to attempt to switch over to the new computer I finally bought. If you haven't heard anything from me in three days, please send IT with bloodhounds.

—Probably-more-nervous-than-he-needs-to-be Mike