F550EXR captures D7000 vs D700 – Size matters …

Lots of “size matters” jokes out there …

It’s not the size of the wand, it’s the magic in it …
It’s not the size of the dog, it’s how hard he bites …
… and so on …

Anyway, the whole point of the swap of my D300 backup camera for the D7000 was to provide me with a much smaller kit for travel. And I have to say that I am very pleased at the result. It’s magnificent and can shoot at 6400 ISO … what’s not to love?

Anyway, here is a comparison of sizes shot by the F550EXR at 1600 ISO in RAW … this image looks pretty darned good for that ISO if you ask me …

You can see that the D7000 is visibly smaller. Each camera has a prime on it here, the 85 for the D700 and the 50 for the D7000 … that’s as close as I can get to the same field of view with primes.

I can add one lens to the D7000 (18-200VR) for a 27-300 effective range, while I must add two lenses to the D700 (Tamron 28-75 and Nikon 70-300VR) to the D700 to match. The D700 would smoke the D7000 with that kit, but the D7000 is still very good and much, much lighter.

This is the same reasoning that people who buy bridge cameras like the HS10 and HG20 use to justify those purchases … and there is nothing wrong with that reasoning in general.

My problem with bridge cams as a solution to the travel problem is that the F550EXR gives me most of the reach and all of the IQ in a tiny package, and the D7000 with megazoom gives me vastly better IQ and most of the reach in the same sized package. I.e. I see no reason to own a bridge cam. The F550 is the travel cam of choice on a budget, and the D5100 / D7000 with a megazoom is the travel cam of choice if you have the cash.

That’s how I am wired. YMMV of course.

D7000 catches mice …

My kids’ favorite nursery rhyme when they were little … always a surefire way to elicit peels of laughter and giggles … and it still works in their 20s!

Hickory, dickory dock,
Three mice ran up the clock,
The clock struck one,
… and the other two escaped with minor injuries.

Anyway, I’ve always been a fan of ergonomic mice. I hate the typical soap bar mouse as it just feels wrong in the hand. Some are so esthetically pleasing that you cannot even pick them up and move them around.

So when I saw the Microsoft Natural Wireless Laser Mouse 6000 at Staples on sale one day, I had to try it. Only they didn’t have any in stock at the lower price (around 50 bucks.) So I waited and eventually saw one on eBay for 22 bucks in mint condition. With shipping, it came to 37 bucks and it’s magnificent.

My old mouse was also excellent, the Wireless IntelliMouse Explorer 2.0 … but it was getting old and crud on the wheel was making it difficult to use. Also, my wrist is not always happy. The new mouse forces me wrist onto the mouse pad rest at 40 degrees or so. The pressure is therefore on the wrist bone and not the carpal tunnel. That seems to make quite the difference.

Anyway, here are the two of them side by side … I highly recommend this mouse. And since it is looking like it has been replaced by an inferior product (the new one looks slick but is too slippery to move around the mouse pad easily … lots of complaints on Amazon), you should snap them up when you see them …

These images are shot at 6400 ISO hand held using the D7000 and Nikon 85mm 1.8D. This lens was one reason that I felt I could not go with the D5100 and now I am so glad that I went with the D7000.

And here is how it fits the hand. (Not my image or my fingernail … click through to an article on carpal tunnel syndrome.)

D7000 – Free bird …

I picked up my D7000 at Henrys on Friday evening, not long after shipping out the D300 and its L-Bracket to two different people. As I mentioned earlier, I was very pleased with the feel of the D7000 in hand, which came as some surprise since I lambasted the grip on this thing in an article some time ago.

One thing that I have noticed about the grip is that it cannot be used for one handed shooting if you set it up for AF-ON using the AE-L/AF-L button. Unfortunately, the distance from the grip makes it a stretch for the thumb. My D300 had an AF-ON button in addition and it fell right under your thumb. There was room on this body for that and they should have put one there … shame, shame.

Anyway … I popped into Rona to look at kitchens (they have the same stuff as Home Depot with better laminates for the counter) and when I came out I grabbed the D7000 to try to shoot a balloon in the distance. Well, I could not get things set up quickly enough but I did capture a bird a long way off. Since I was in jpeg mode and set at 1000 ISO, I was not expecting much. But it looks ok …

I turned and fired at a media tower a bit closer to me … perhaps 200 feet. This is a crop of that image.

So far I must say that I have no complaints about sharpness. Remember that these images are from a mega-zoom, itself a compromised lens.

The next evening, I shot Jonathan heading into the washroom … this was under terrible light at 6400 ISO, and yet it processed quite nicely. I must say that the D7000 is impressing the heck out of me …

Of course, he still hates his image taken. Always ready with a quick rendition of Freebird …

D7000 – Finicky little thing …

I’ve been struggling with an error message on my new D7000 – Cd Err, which of course means card error. I can often get one or two images on my Patriot Class 6 16GB memory card, but then it inevitably fails.

I have tried slow (full) formatting in card reader and formatting in camera and this just does not work. I am running a full sector scan with CardRecovery as we speak. It is almost done and so far no bad sectors found. Which tells me that the fact that the card works perfectly on the Panasonic ZS3 for movie recording is  not a fluke :-)

I was digging through the web for more information and found this disappointing table of approved memory cards:

That’s a really short list and only the most expensive cards are on it. Well, Future Shop has a Lexar Platinum II 32GB card coming on sale for 54 bucks this evening, so I think I’ll grab one.

Meanwhile, I’ve just rattled off a bunch of images on the newly scanned 16GB Patriot and all is well. The D7000 seems happy. This has happened to me before with the other brand cards … a 4GB Transcend once became unreadable with all my London Aquarium shots on it. That freaked me out and that was when I went to http://cardrecovery.com to get a solution.

This software recovered all my data in files named file0001.jpg and so on. What was cool though was that the card became readable after that and has been used by me ever since. It works fine. What I eventually found on the topic was that these flash cards can get “stuck” in the wrong state and the scan used by Card Recovery will reset each sector. This has been known to repair cards, and for me it has now worked twice.

So this software continues to be highly recommended by me. It works well and it saves cards form the garbage heap. I just wish I had remembered to run it on my 32GB card from China … I dumped it after getting errors in all my cams. Duh …

Now, I have an A-Data card that got great reviews on Amazon, unlike the Transcend of the same size. It’s an 8GB Class 10 card and it works great in the D7000 so far. So not all off brands are evil. The problem is that it is hard to tell real one from fakes, and even harder with off brands bought in places like eBay.

Update (before I even finished this article): After more than a dozen successful images, the card is again throwing an error in the D7000. This really sucks. They are obviously pretty serious about the approved list … *sigh* …

Update 2: I ordered a Platinum II card at Future Shop for 55 bucks (half price) … 32GB! But Wymjym from the Fuji forum sent me a message that the Sandisk Professional cards are vastly faster, so I poked around and finally pulled the trigger on one of these cards at 16GB size for 69 bucks. That’s a lot more expensive … but the speed of the card is astounding. Triple the speed for shooting and offloading. Should be here in a week or so. I may pick up the one from Future Shop anyway … I have three days to decide and then they cancel it on me, which is fine.

Update 3: I never picked up the Platinum II, as I already have a pair of 8GB Platinum IIs and they have quite slow write times. The AData 8GB at Class 10 is a better value. Faster for less money. And regarding the D7000 … it turns out that the fault lies with Patriot. This is a known compatibility issue with the D7000. Of course, the D7000 could have been more forgiving, but it is not Nikon’s job to relax the specification to accommodate lazy firmware coders. So bye bye Patiot … won’t be buying any more of that brand any time soon …

You Go Girl!

That is a young woman with bigger cojones than the average male in Canada! She is Brigette DePape, a recent University of Ottawa graduate. She was a page and her job was about to end anyway, so she took advantage of her position to protest the Harper Government’s agenda during the Speech from the Throne. Right in front of the Governor General. That took balls of steel and one absolutely must be impressed.

Of course, Mike Duffy, the newly minted senator apparently from the CTV, hot off his rather nasty attack on Danny Williams, premiere of Newfoundland, had to be a sourpuss about the whole thing and characterize it as a stunt that hurt democracy rather than helped it. I mean really … get a sense of humor. It took serious guts to stand up for her ideals in such a public manner and in such a formal circumstance, and it’s not anything that has not been said by about 60% of Canadians and most of the premieres …

First time house of commons member Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party, stepped in with her own sour comment … a real surprise to me considering her protest-oriented background. She said that the protest was inappropriate and in the wrong place. And then she followed with a quick sound bite containing her entire party platform :-) "I sympathize enormously with youth in this country who feel they've been abandoned when the single greatest threat to their future isn't mentioned in the speech from the throne, and that, of course, is the climate crisis."

I quite agree that we need to keep control of high risks like deforestation and those nasty hydrocarbons etc, but at the same time the youth of today individually are threatened far more by employment issues and education costs than they are by something that is so slow and is not (I think) on the immediate horizon …

Anyway … good for Ms. DePape … it is refreshing to see such pluck in someone so young.

Unbelievable Phucking priceS

I sold my D300 and L-Bracket to two different people … the former in Alberta and the latter in British Columbia.

Unfortunately, Canada Post is having their annual shenanigans with the union regarding future hiring and all that fantasy stuff (people don’t mail letters any more, hence the jobs are dying out … it is sad, but it is also entirely inevitable) …

So everyone wants to avoid the mail and both buyers asked for a courier. Well, since I was asking them to pay I figured ok. But things moved slowly so I dropped the price a bit and included shipping. Both sold within the hour, although to the same people. So in the end I might have been ok without the drop. It wasn’t that much anyway, so I didn’t sweat it.

Until today, when UPS quoted me the breathtaking cost of shipping a tiny box that weighs one pound total across the country in a truck that takes a week to get there. 28 bucks! Insured for $100. Geeez ….

The D300 was even more disgusting … 37 bucks plus 24 for 800 bucks insurance. I was very upset and took the packages to Purolator, where they quoted me even more money.

So back I went to UPS and just ate the costs … $102 in the end, about 50 more than I expected. Uniformly Phucking Sucks if you ask me.

And the kicker … the insurance covers loss only, damage is not included.

I cannot see how Canada Post, with their much more reasonable rates, can be losing business to these guys. One presumes that their deficit comes from extreme reduction in letter mail caused by the rise of social networking. Too bad they can never get a handle on it … and I lost 50 bucks today as a result. More to come if they lose the packages.