I can imagine the future now: Margaret Atwood signs, say 10,000 personalized messages in her books as a nice sample. Since the signatures are digitized, they can be captured. And since she has to be connected by audio to hear what the fan wants as a message (or at least the person’s name), that audio can be captured as well (the speech is converted to text automatically, and captured).

Somehow this data can be analyzed, and an “author profile” for the LongPen can be derived, which will generate her personalized “signature font”. In the future, if she is deceased or is unable to write with her hands anymore, the computer can take over and sign for her. She would be able to sign her books in perpetuity, with she herself being replaced by a digital actor that looks and talks like her. In a high definition world, no one will ever know.

Technorati Tags: book signing, LongPen

• Hauppage WinTV PVR-250
• Hauppage WinTV PVR-150
• Windows XP MCE 2005
• Nvidia GeForce 6600GT
• Cicero Firewire Card
• Microsoft Digital Media Pro keyboard (USB)
• Acer AL1715 LCD monitor (connected through DVI)
• 768 MB RAM (it’s RDRAM, and expensive, thus I only added 512 extra to the stock 256)

Well, I didn’t really “upgrade” but basically did a clean install of Vista Ultimate. I have MCE 2005, but I also purchased Snapstream BeyondTV because I really don’t like being constrained to the .dvr-ms format — especially if I want to edit some TV shows. The kicker also was their “ShowSqueeze” function to recompress the mpeg to divx format, a real space saver. Also, their commercial skip function is incredible also, a big time saver. The trouble was, I was occassionally getting audio hiss from my second TV tuner, and I did not know how to get rid of it. This problem has frequently spoiled some of my recordings. I figured by re-installing, Vista MCE would have default drivers that will solve my problem.

I was surprised that the Vista Ultimate install went smoothly — I only had to enter the product key and add some login info, and that was it. There was one hiccup though — my keyboard was not being recognized. Strange, since it’s a Microsoft keyboard! Luckily, there were accessibility options later where I could use the on-screen keyboard to login. I played around with Vista a bit to check whether everything was working — and activated it, which went pretty smoothly. I still had problems with my Digital Media Pro keyboard (fairly new) not being recognized, even when I installed the latest Intellitype software for Vista (downloaded from microsoft.com/hardware). I tried all USB ports, but Vista kept showing the error popup “USB Device Not Recognized”. Frustrating — but luckily I had an older Microsoft Internet Keyboard Pro (7 years old).

Vista MCE works great, and drivers for my Hauppauge cards were automatically applied to the devices. The only device trouble I had was trying to find drivers for my Plustek 1212U Scanner (over 7 years old). I thought I could use the Agfa Snapscan 1212U drivers (perhaps it is a re-branded Plustek), but no dice. I even installed the Vuescan software and used their generic scanners.inf file and tried to install their generic Plustek scanner device. The driver installed fine, but of course my scanner wouldn’t work at all. Oh well, I think after 7 years maybe I can afford to upgrade my scanner — either that or I can pair it up with an older XP machine. SnapStream BeyondTV works well, with their 4.6 version. Although video from the tuners is definitely slower than when on XP, since my Nvidia PureVideo drivers do not work on Vista — thus I am using the default rendering from the tuner cards.

I didn’t play much with the apps, although its interesting that Windows Movie Maker can edit dvr-ms files now. Played with some Texas Hold’em (downloaded from Microsoft Update), tried out Windows Mail, Calendar and Photo Gallery , Contacts — nothing interesting there. Vista SideBar was ho-hum: even if I used it, it probably will end up the same as my usage of OS X Dashboard: very infrequent. I didn’t like that I couldn’t resize their RSS gadget vertically. The “Network” is pretty cool — my D-Link DIR-655 router was detected and also the Snapstream BeyondTV web service. If I had other Vista machines this would help tremendously, instead of having to memorize IP addresses to go to their configuration pages. Even my APC UPS was “detected” properly when I plugged in its USB cable, and battery level can be viewed in the Power Options. ReadyBoost is intriguing — I don’t have a fast enough USB key, so I ordered a ReadyBoost ready 2GB USB key to test this out. I’m not going to spend a premium on getting more RDRAM for my system. UAC as expected is annoying — I have to endure this just to delete some file I created? Nanny-soft!

So there you have it, I only had two device problems: one did not have a Vista driver, and the other is inexplicable, since its a Microsoft product. For the keyboard: it’s not a problem with my USB ports, since other devices can be plugged into any of the ports and they are recognized immediately. Aero works great, but even with the latest Nvidia (beta) drivers I get an annoying flicker when Vista goes through the Secure Desktop for UAC. I’m sure that will be fixed with the final drivers. The DreamScene content (for Vista Ultimate) is nice: although I can’t imagine turning it on for my single-core system — I don’t even have hyper-threading on this CPU. For those of you that don’t know, the DreamScene content is basically high-definition videos that can act as your (animated) desktop background. I really like the (water) stream one. If I had a multi-core/multi-processor system I would definitely turn on DreamScene content.

Ok, enough about Vista. After the initial excitement of installing something new wore off — I’m back to my 17″ Macbook Pro, running OS X 10.4.9. Occassionally I will RDC to the Vista machine, I think

Technorati Tags: Vista Ultimate, BeyondTV, Hauppauge, OS X 10.4.9

• I am between an amateur and semi-pro (or that’s where I want to be)
• I like to use existing light, I prefer not to use the flash at all
• I want to use manual instead of automatic settings, I like to tinker (I am a software developer after all!)
• I don’t have an existing lens collection
• I like in a SLR, in order of importance: image quality (esp. at low light conditions or high ISO), body features, body quality
• I am not too concerned with lens selection, since I am probably going to use only a few good lenses, not a wide range (unless LBA takes over me!)
• I think I will do lots of low-light photography (indoor, night shots, winter shots)
• I will be shooting in moisture rich conditions

The last two points are important, because I live in the Vancouver area, where it is wet almost all the time, and cloudy obviously. I narrowed down my choices to three cameras (all 10MP): the Canon Digital Rebel XTi, the Nikon D80, and Sony A100. The Pentax K10D wasn’t even in the picture yet, until I saw the review at Popular Photography , DPReview and AnandTech [via the OK1000 Pentax Blog].

All of the cameras I mentioned are good cameras — but only the K10D balanced what I wanted in a SLR based on my profile above. Here are some of the features, plus my comments:

• Shake Reduction — the A100 has it too, but Nikon and Canon have that feature only in their lenses, not their bodies.
• Dust Reduction — the A100 and XTi have this feature. Nikon does not have it in their D80
• Weather Seals — none of the other models have this feature, except in their higher end models (Canon 1-series, Nikon D200)
• Pentaprism viewfinder — the A100 and D80 have this large viewfinder mechanism, but the XTi uses a smaller viewfinder that is pentamirror
• Spot Metering — all the other cameras I mentioned have this capability except for the XTi. The Canon 30D has this capability, and I even considered it because of Canon’s “Double Rebate” offer, but then I saw the K10D
• Dedicated RAW button — This is quite useful for the primarily JPEG shooter. This toggles between your current format setting to RAW+JPEG. So if you shoot primarily in JPEG and need to get the next shot off that includes a RAW file for greater flexibility, you can do so easily. Conversely, if you primarily shoot in RAW and want a JPEG also, you can do so using the RAW button (but less useful, see the next point about in-camera RAW processing)
• In-camera RAW processing — Some will wonder, why would you want to do so, when your workflow probably includes a PC for RAW processing later? One reason I can think of is, to free up space on your memory card for shots that don’t need to be in RAW in the first place because you probably don’t need to tweak it further
• Image quality — across the board they look almost the same to me. But the A100 seems to be grainier at higher ISOs so that rules out the A100 for me. The D80 has ISO 3200 which none of the others have, and it has better noise reduction at higher ISOs.
• Body quality — All the bodies seem fine, except for the XTi which seems too small for my hands.
• DNG support — the K10D supports DNG as a RAW format. Not too important for me, but a nice feature to have in the body. Future-proofs your RAW images since DNG is an open spec. However, a 10MP DNG file takes 16MB of space, instead of Pentax’s proprietary PEF format which only takes up 10MB of space. However, the DNG can be further processed on your computer using Adobe DNG Converter, which can losslessly compress the 16MB DNG file to about 10MB. It’s probably uncompressed on the K10D because its faster to do so, obviously for continuous shots. A side effect however, is that Pentax Photo Laboratory will not open these compressed DNG files.
• Top LCD — all of the cameras I mentioned except the A100 and XTi have a top LCD. I find a top LCD invaluable when changing settings.
• Application support — current lack of support for Pentax K10D PEF files in Apple’s Aperture/iPhoto or Adobe Lightroom/Camera Raw, but that might change, who knows when. That’s probably why Pentax included the DNG support, because using the included software on my Mac is just not optimal. [Update] Aperture supports the K10D in the OS X 10.4.9 update, and Lightroom in its recently released version 1.0 (wasn’t in the beta)

So there you have it. I chose the Pentax K10D more for its pluses instead of the other cameras’ minuses. If it wasn’t for the K10D, I would have picked up a Nikon D80 instead. I picked up a K10D body, plus a DA 16-45mm F4 ED AL lens, at my local London Drugs (all the online stores out of province were out of stock). I’ve only had it a day or so, but I think I will need a faster, wider lens — the FA 50mm F1.4 for low-light photography. Also none of the current lenses for Pentax have weather sealing, I hear the ones that do come out in March 2007 (uh-oh, am I getting lens buying addiction or LBA???). Oh, I also took some test photos of my cats, using the K10D.

[Update] I ordered the FA 1.4 50MM prime Pentax lens from B&H, very nice piece of glass, I use this the most, very sharp and I get a few more stops more light compared to my F4 (about 8x more light!), perfect for low-light situations.

Technorati Tags: Pentax, K10D, XTi, D80, A100