GX85 – SD card in backwards and wonderful bounce flash …

A couple of observations …

SD Card

The SD card in pretty much all the Panasonics went in facing away from you with the camera in hand. That is, the label faces forward in the same direction as the lens. I have never seen this be different and I just confirmed it with the G6 and G7 just to be sure.

But the GX85 goes in facing in the same direction as the rear of the camera, which means you see it as you hold the camera upside down to insert the card. This seems like an unnecessary and gratuitous change, and confirms the silo / stovepipe development and design teams at Panasonic. Or maybe it was a brain fart that stuck. Minor, but silly.

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Bounce Flash

I always liked the GF3 and GX1 bounce flashes. These things were mounted on some sort of spider legs that allowed them to tilt quite dramatically backwards. If you went too far, the flash would not fire, but if you held it just right, the flash would fire to the ceiling and you could get a pretty nice result. I even made a video showing how it worked on the GX1:

The production values are pretty low with that video, but the content is spot on.

I have been pleasantly surprised by the tweaks on the GX85 to this feature. The folding flash mount works similarly, but seems somehow sturdier and seems to have fewer fold points, although that may be an illusion. But what is really great is that you can fold it back all the way and gently pin it to the upright location and it will fire up at a slightly forward angle.

This makes it pretty easy to shoot bounce flash and the results are excellent. A warning though … the flash is tiny, so you should raise ISO pretty quickly, especially if you are not right on top of your subject. The extra distance will really weaken the flash.

On the other hand, the GX85 sensor is superb and lifting the result a stop or two results in a perfectly usable image once processed in Lightroom or Photoshop.

Here are a couple of images to clarify the value of shooting bounce flash with the built in. They are pictures of our Degu resting on his platform and there are cage bars in the way. A worst case scenario.

Straight On

The issues are obvious … red eye is prominent (although not all that red on this animal’s retina), shadows are harsh, light is very flat looking. All in all, yuck.

Since the cage top is open with bars, the light from a bounce should be able to get through and light the animal fairly evenly.

Bounced

These were shot moments apart. Need I elaborate on how much better this looks? You can shoot legit animal portraits with bounce flash from a built in, assuming that you are not bothered too much by higher ISOs. I regularly shoot 3200 on these sensors and that does not bother me at all. You can, of course, limit ISO to 800 and use a fast lens. These two images self-selected to 1600 ISO, which would make sense for bounced flash in a dark room.

So if you have the GX85, consider adding this to your arsenal of tricks when out and about without an external flash.

GX85 – The Arrival

I had what I like to call a “great selloff” of camera gear in order to get the Panasonic GX85, a body with a wonderful set of features and with a form factor that I have enjoyed in the past with the GX1.

I sold the GF3 for 60 bucks (the one I dropped in Stockholm with aftermarket batteries and charger so it had little real value), the E-PM2 for a couple hundred, and the GM1 with the excellent 12-32 kit lens for about 490 or something like that. I also sold the Oberwerk Astronomical Binoculars for about 180, so that brought me enough to handle most of the cost of the GX85.

I order it yesterday around noon from The Camera Store in Alberta, famous for their excellent test video series. They shipped Purolator and it arrived today at noon, blowing my mind.

So I popped out for a few minutes at lunch and then again after work to try it out with the 100-300 lens on the monopod. I wanted to see whether they were a decent match, and I can say unequivocally that they are. The images are all excellent and there was no shutter shock style blurring present. This is an issue with the G7 if you are not careful, so I think the GX85 is my new long lens camera.

So … my first impressions.

• Excellent form factor. Feels nice in the hand and reminds me a lot of the GX1.
• Poor EVF. A real step down from the G5 through G7. I am getting used to it, but they should not have used this one when the one in the G7 seems so much better. Panasonic has a very bad habit of allowing too much independence between teams, and some of them make really dumb decisions on features.
• Good grip. It feels great in my hands. The grip has a sharp(ish) edge to it so despite not being all that deep, I can grip it very well.
• Dumb placement of on/off switch. Honestly could not imagine a worse choice. Another brain fart for team GX85. However, I will eventually get used to it.
• Lovely LCD. The tilt is nice and it fits flush to the body. You would never know it tilted.
• Love the monochrome EVF display option. Supposedly for manual focus clarity, but I like the clarity in all cases.
• Has some heft. Feels about the size of the GX1, which is not small. Very well built IMO.
• The flash is magnificent as it retains the classic GF / GX ability to be bounced. Why can the G series not do that? (More team brain farts one supposes.)
• The shutter is fantastic. The new solenoid based shutter is quick and quiet while stilling sounding real. Nicely done.
• Image quality is excellent. The lack of AA filter is not blindingly obvious, but the images are very sharp.
• Kit lens sucks. Had I known it was so cheaply made, I would have kept the GM1 kit and then sold the GM1 with the GX85 lens. I liked the real one that came with the GM1. All that said, this lens seems very sharp.
• No charger included – pathetic. On the other hand, I like the ability to charge in camera over night. But I would rather have had the charger.

All in all, I can say that I am very pleased. Handles well, even with big lenses. Feels nice in hand and shoots great.

I am very glad so far that I grabbed the GX85 to go with the G7 as my main travel kit. The G6 will back them up for a while in cases where I want to have a third angle in video.

One more thing … the GX85 looks really nice in black. Very modern.

Some samples of its images … just quick shots, nothing very exciting. They begin after the last Pug image with the shot of two yellow daisies:

http://letkeman.net/SnapShots/index.php?f=Nature/Neighbourhood&p=4

The bee close ups near the end (as of this writing) on the small purple (or so I am told) flowers are severe crops.

Published in the Ottawa Citizen Newspaper Tomorrow

Thanks again go to Robbi Hay, editor of the Ottawa Citizen Ourtown section, for using one of my images again as the heading. This comes out tomorrow, Thursday the 7th of July. Grab the paper to see everything cool that is happening in Ottawa for the next few weeks …

Evernote … time to say goodbye …

Evernote is an absolutely great note-taking service and application.

Or at least it was once …

You see, they have decided to push the freeloaders away and extort encourage us free users to “upgrade” to the premium service. Now, had they ever managed to do a premium feature that was worth the money, that might have worked.

But no, they did not. All the really useful features were already available for free.

So some genius at Evernote realized that the only way to get some of us to go over to premium was to start taking the really useful features away.

Some months ago they remove direct email forwarding to Evernote. That really stung, but I can always use Office integration and so it is manageable.

But today … wow … they just announced that in a few weeks they will restrict the free service to two devices, period. Evernote’s biggest strength is ubiquity across all devices and platforms. And they are now bring that into the paid service.

It makes sense. They obvious have a weak product management team and possibly weak development, so they are taking things that have worked forever and simply shutting us off.

Well, screw that.

I’ll be moving to OneNote rather than pay for what I already had for years. What a joke …

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/migrate-evernote-onenote/

Quicken Cash Manager 2016 – *updated* Painful Process, Finally Working

Remember that post a few weeks ago where Quicken extorted be to buy the next version of Cash Manager in order to continue downloading from my bank?

http://kimletkeman.blogspot.ca/2016/05/shameless-quicken.html

Well, I finally caved in because (and they know this) I really did not have a choice.

And the install went well enough.

But it turns out that the product will not run. I have to have a Quicken ID, which apparently started in 2014 and was hardened in 2015. I finally created one and successfully authenticated it in email.

But it still won’t run. When trying to log in from the application, I get a vague “something went wrong” error. Googling about leads me to realize that this is very common. Also that Quicken has no email support. You have to phone and only during business hours.

* update *

Technical support on the phone dropped my call after waiting 20m in the queue. The chat session they suggest you start would not do anything and no pop-up warning showed up. So effectively, Quicken technical support does not exist.

The community, on the other hand, does exist. I tried the standard manual and mondo patches they recommend ad nauseum and neither would install on my version. I tried to follow a link to a Canadian version of the patch and it just showed “file not found” …

So I finally posted the exact same question with a lot of bitter vitriol and within less than an hour I was up and running. There is a new Canadian patch that updates the product just fine.

https://assistant.quicken.com/patch/CAN3955ASD13/QWCA2016R2Patch.exe

Conclusion

Quicken continues to be the 800 pound gorilla … but the shine is coming off the star. The product has been sold to some management group and who knows what they will do with it. The technical support is weak, although the community did respond with the correct info once I bluntly complained, so kudos for that.

Cash Manager 2016 seems to be running, but I will update this if I have any trouble with the bank downloads. I have seen stories …

Published as the Father’s Day Edition header for Ourtown in the Ottawa Citizen

Thanks go to Robbi Hay, the editor of the Ourtown section of the Ottawa Citizen.

Pick one up this Thursday to get the scoop on all the goings on around these parts …