Interesting times at DPReview

Two things today …

First, I’ve noticed lately that the DPReview site has had some serious performance issues. Very slow response, getting stuck waiting for its ads, that kind of thing. It goes through such periods now and again, but every time it is a major annoyance. It’s a very busy web page and when things starts to take a while it can seem like walking through hip-deep snow …

A moment ago, it paused on me and I got this error:

Sheesh. I’ve often thought that their software team was a bit weak, but this really sucks.

Second thing … there is a new strategy for dealing with miscreants like, apparently, me. Things have been rocky on the site the last few days with acrimony in many threads. The return of several individuals who are known to be drive-by shooters -- floating through the forum dropping insults -- coincided to a two day period in which amplification of the polarization the forum has suffered since 2008 has skyrocketed again.

I admit that I responded to more of the personal garbage than I should have … it’s a little hard to watch someone lie and behave like a creep and just let it go. Despite being from Mennonite stock, I don’t turn the other cheek easily. I watched The Expendables this evening and I tended to agree with their rather direct approach to their problems :-)

DPReview responded today in an entirely unique way. A lot of posts were trimmed from the tree, a thread was wiped out where two long-term members inexplicably used the forum as a private messaging tool and then defended it stridently, and all in all most of the weekend’s worst acrimony disappeared.

After trimming the crap away, they sent out warnings to me and user lloydy and possibly a few others. I’ve never seen this before … they went through several years where they were simply ban-happy … responding to back-channel deals where multiple people got together and hammered complaints in against one or two people by wiping out the unpopular people. Now they have seemingly chosen to avoid unnecessary banning. A very nice change in atmosphere there.

Here’s the message that came to me …

Their comments serve as a reminder to take people on the forum a little less seriously. I have always felt that people who like to trash talk constantly are really just weak thinkers. I’ve seen this time and again on forums and in the work place. People who get way out of their depth tend to get snippy. They lash out, getting personal instead of staying on the topic that upset them in the first place.

Others have a natural tendency to preach and diagnose mental issues when the very act demonstrates that they suffer what they accuse. Some argue the same points ad nauseum, confusing repeated assertions with proof. Several people dodge all technical points, preferring to pretend that they know the answer or worse, just making irrelevant remarks that imply that you are avoiding their clever arguments :-)

The lack of critical thinking can get really tiresome, which is how these acrimonious debates really get rolling. After all, the intelligent side of the arguments is playing too …

So I say bravo to DPReview’s new approach to jar people a bit without the patronizing instant ban. This is how moderation should be done.

Heavy Snow overnight on Saturday -- F300EXR

Kris Kristofferson said it best:

Well I woke up Sunday morning,
With no way to hold my head that didn't hurt.
And the beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad,
So I had one more for dessert.
Then I fumbled through my closet for my clothes,
And found my cleanest dirty shirt.
An' I shaved my face and combed my hair,
An' stumbled down the stairs to meet the day.

Well, my Sunday morning wasn’t that bad, but we got pounded overnight with snow. At some point on Sunday, I drove to a local minimall to pick Jon up as he was freezing while walking home from a friend’s house. It had been +6 Celsius the previous day when he left and his shirt-jack was not up to the task. Plus he had no gloves … in the day of the Internet how is it possible to be uninformed about the weather :-)

As I left the house, I saw the extent of the snow for the first time. Drifts almost two feet high, a huge pile of snow at the end of the driveway from the plow. The usual mess.

Our friendly neighborhood rabbit had paid the usual visit to the front step of my porch … I tend to leave the ferns sticking out of the snow until spring and I suspect that he finds the odd useful morsel there. Else he would not be frequenting the area.

Since there has been a sidewalk there the previous day, its absence was a harbinger of things to come.

I walked through that mess and found that the driveway has also disappeared :-)

That big pile of snow at the end of the driveway looks formidable, but of course the AWD of the CR-V does not really have any problems with such things.

The street view shows you how high this bank was. Not that bad … about up to the spare tire. But it was not made of ice, and that was why I felt I could blow through it as I did last time.

I appear to have forgotten to capture the bank after I blew through it … oops. But here is my driveway fully exposed. There was a bit of ice along the edges as this was the very first time I started my snow blower this year. I tried to make the whole year without clearing snow, but mother nature conspired against me. By the way, my snow blower started on the second pull after adding gasoline to a dry tank. I was rather impressed.

And with the CR-V in place … looking kind of small in the space provided. Wish I could afford a hummer :-)

But then … at a buck twenty per liter, things would get out of hand pretty quickly …

I finish with a quick snap of the night time view of the new snow. I shot this from the front door as I was grabbing my cam from my jacket pocket, where it lives most of the time.

Hysterical British Animal Voice Overs

I may never live down the shame …

I like to read light fiction. Sometimes really light. As such, I end up reading a whole lot of novels about cops, courts, lawyers and what not. I also really like science fiction and fantasy and have devoured those in great volume. But here comes the shame … I am also apparently able to read and enjoy romance novels … <bag over head as I write the rest of this> …

I was trolling Kindle’s book store for freebees, as I have found some excellent fiction of all types there. Authors often offer the first in a series for free and then let you decide if you will buy the rest of the series. I am very much down with that and they have made plenty of money from me because of that policy. I have to say that I have probably read two dozen full-length novels in the last few months. It relaxes my mind because my job and the usual stresses of life threaten to rip it apart …

When I found Amanda Hocking’s Trylle trilogy, I was completely unaware of her as a writer and minor Internet celebrity. So I stumbled into the first book completely oblivious to what I was reading. She opens strong and stays at a pretty even keel …

When I was on the third book, my youngest and I were discussing literature and he was torturing me once more over my choice of reading material. My eldest graduated with English literature with distinction and my youngest is taking English literature honors with a minor in philosophy, so they both have very low opinions of what I choose to read. And since he was ridiculing the book with such fervor, I read him a passage in my defense. He said two things about it: the writing was actually pretty decent, and the series is a romance.

Oops … you see, I like to experience a book and not analyze it. I had no idea that this was just one step above the Harlequins that my mother used to read. <second bag on head>

I went on to Amanda’s blog today and found out that the Trylle Trilogy is her venture into Paranormal Romance … <bags still on head> …

But here’s the thing … despite being way out of the appropriate age range, and despite having testosterone in my blood … I enjoyed this series. It’s well written, I was surprised several times, and I enjoyed her take on people and magic. The girl can write.

Hall Pass … much funnier than I expected!

The theme is a bit mundane -- two guys running around trying to relive their youth with the permission of their wives – and the message is more than a little predictable. But the movie has multiple scenes that keep you laughing your head off for minutes at a time. It happens more often than you would expect.

Absolutely excellent comedy …

F550EXR High ISO, has Fuji hit a home run?

This just might be the advent of a new era of Fuji hegemony for high ISO shooting. A set of sample images was posted the other day on a Japanese site and they are breathtakingly good.

I’ve always liked the EXR cams in low light, but they have also required some manipulation because of smearing and blotching. It’s been a problem from the start, even with the F70EXR.

But this new long zoom appears to have noise characteristics similar to those which make the Nikon dSLRs so nice to shoot at high ISO – fine grain and low to zero chroma blotching.

Of course, this is a limited set of samples, but still ….

Here is an indoor image of a cat shot at 3200 ISO. This is the processed version (mild processing, nothing heroic), click through to see the original. Also note that this is a fairly strong crop, which makes this image quality all the more impressive.

Very impressive. Note the fairly minimal smearing in the fur and the very clear edges in the eyes. This is really something for a compact.

And here is one of the series of pencil crayon images shot at 1600 ISO. The trick here is that this image was shot in HR mode, which in previous EXR cameras was near-fatal.

You will note that the saturation is superior … I added nothing to that. The edges are magnificent, something that the HR mode always had trouble with, even at base ISO. Now it is decent at 1600 ISO … I find this performance hard to believe.

All is not perfect though … the tiny pixels will bring a significant issue with dynamic range. There is simply not much headroom if you want to expose for shadows. This image was shot at DR100, so one cannot complain about the fairly harsh bright areas. I will reserve judgment on the DR until I can test one myself.

Let’s take a closer look at the HR and SN modes at 1600 ISO … there was always a rather dramatic difference in the earlier EXR cameras with rampant edge destruction and smearing evident in HR mode at higher ISOs …

What I see in the following crops is that Fuji have managed to draw HR mode much closer to SN mode, which makes me salivate to see how P mode and DR400 perform. I always find that to be superior to SN mode.

Note: the following crops are untouched and the SN crop has been upsized to match the HR crop resolution, which means that the SN half has been taken from 8mp to 16mp. This is a huge jump and should put it at a major disadvantage, yet it does not.

The SN image has excellent per-pixel quality and stands up very well to enlargement. Remember that these crops are the moral equivalent of looking at a section of a 46” print from 20” … this stuff is invisible at normal print and web sizes. But we look at it to see what the tendencies are …

The first crop shows us that the edges and fine details are decent in both modes. The main difference is that the local contrast is higher in the SN mode, but that may be due to subtle differences in exposure between them.

Where I notice the biggest difference in the above crop is the details in shadow, which are slightly better preserved in the SN crop. This appears to me to be the result of slightly better edge integrity. But this is a very subtle effect and some will much prefer the finer lines in the HR version. All in all, a wonderful performance.

The second crop is in shadow and shows us just how well Fuji are doing with their jpeg engine. Could it be that they have finally understood the destruction that their heavy selective noise reduction was doing? It would seem so …

This crop shows quite clearly that SN mode will remain cleaner where edges and tone transitions are concerned in shadow at high ISO. This may not matter to some, but it is something to keep in mind. It tends to affect the reality of an image … I look for a real 3D feeling. With the F10 it was often called a “liquid” smoothness that was hard to define.

Both of the above are excellent, but I would select the SN version for enlarging, despite its 100% resolution disadvantage.

Crop three is about saturation, and the F550EXR is loaded with it.

You can see subtle edge integrity issues in the HR image with both the lettering and the hair as it approaches the top of the frame. But this is still a remarkable performance and at any normal size will be completely invisible.

And how about that saturation? The SN again holds the color a bit better in my opinion but both are pretty excellent for such a tiny sensor.

Finally, let’s look at the scarf texture and the other side of the face.

Again the SN shows better local contrast on the eye. The edges are a bit better too. What really amazes me about this crop is that the subtle texture in the shadow area right next to the face is intact on both HR and SN images. The only area where it breaks down slightly is the bottom right corner, where the really fine details are seen in the SN image but on in the HR image. This just shows that there are still limits in HR mode … but they are so far below the usual visibility threshold that it just might be possible to shoot this cam at full resolution in concerts with impunity.

Holy cow … Fuji just may have the best compact in the world again.

I would be willing to bet that this thing is going to finally put the F31fd into its place in history …