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April 19, 2012

For many reasons this isn’t a review, among them that until recently I was advancing film manually and as such don’t have a strong understanding of the DSLR/MILC/etc. market. Recent DSLRs offer a wealth of features, and alongside them a wealth of convoluted buttons and pictographs. A manual film camera has two options: aperture and shutter speed. This highly simplifies shooting for the user. Your ISO is locked in. Aperture is set through a physical dial on the lens with a giant arrow pointing at a number. Shutter speed is set through a little dial. Inside the viewfinder is a light meter. That’s all you need to understand the camera.

Playing around with an automatic film camera gets more confusing. Suddenly tiny and bizarre icons enter the picture, and you’re controlling your settings from a tiny LED readout. This is even the case for many DSLRs. You scroll a tiny wheel to set your primary setting. To change something secondary you hold an arbitrarily labeled button and scroll. To change something else you press the button once and then scroll, etc. It’s a convoluted mess that interrupts trying to take a photograph. Even though modern DSLRs have giant LCD screens to display this information, most still rely on combinations of button presses.

Sony’s NEX-7 is highly appealing for a number of reasons, among them, their “tri-navi” control scheme. It’s innovative, but it really shouldn’t be. Somehow Sony is the first manufacturer to discover how to add a third wheel to their camera’s controls. It’s a small touch, but it makes a massive difference. Between the three wheels, a user can set pretty much everything with ease. While taking a photo the three wheels set ISO, aperture, and shutter speed (or exposure compensation, depending on what mode it’s set to). There’s no mode dial, instead you hit the primary button to access a virtual one. It saves space on the camera (enough for that third wheel, I guess) and is a logical option to get out of the user’s way - you’re not likely to be changing modes with frequency. There’s a little button beside the shutter button that rotates through different control schemes. It allows for quick access to white balance settings and focus settings, thus allowing for quick adjustments rather than calling for the user to dig through menus. Overall, it’s a rather elegant scheme for a camera’s controls.

The EVF has been fairly well praised, and deservingly so. It’s certainly not on par with the clarity of an optical viewfinder, but the ability to receive a live preview of precisely how the photo will develop is perhaps a strong enough feature to argue in an EVF’s favor. It takes a bit of getting used to. Many reviews cite the NEX-7’s EVF as the best currently around, but even so, looking for the first time at a tiny screen is a little disconcerting. It’s easy to warm up to, however. There’s a manual focus assist that highlights high contrast edges, thus compensating for the lost clarity. It can sometimes be hard to view outdoors, highlights look a bit blown out, and shadows are a bit too dark, but the picture itself never retains these qualities. Aside from this, it’s a pleasure to use.

For the reasons touched upon earlier, I don’t want to go heavily into image quality, but the sensor produces some stunning results. ISOs up through 1600 are pretty usable. Beyond that, those shooting JPEG may be treated to an intensive noise reduction that makes the image look like it was printed on textured drywall. The kit lens collects a good amount of detail, but it otherwise seems to have a fairly bland character to it, be that good or bad. It’s unfortunate that Sony didn’t give the option of including their 50mm E-mount rather than the 18-55mm. The kit lens likely makes sense on more casually cameras like the NEX-C3, but it doesn’t excel enough at any focal length to have it make sense here. The 50mm has gotten far stronger reviews, though obviously the zoom lens provides more options, which is perhaps what a kit lens is provided to do. Regardless, the camera produces great looking images, and the short flange length allows for a lot of cheaper manual lenses to be adapted, which is a strong selling point given the price point of many lenses.

There are a few inconsistencies in the menu system, albeit very minor. When setting shutter speed and aperture, moving the dial left results in the on-screen virtual dial selecting the option to the left. Given that it’s a virtual representation of a dial, it would make more sense for it to represent the dial being turned, thus selecting the option to the right (more along the lines of the reversed scrolling in OS X Lion - you’re touching the trackpad, not the content, but it’s representative enough to make sense). The menu system follows the appropriate representations in other places too, which is odd. Setting the ISO is closer to a virtual representation of your physical manipulation. In other places it’s entirely different - exposure compensation has you controlling little arrow above various notches, though here controlling the arrow makes a bit more sense. Other reviews have maligned the menu system as complicated or more logical for a simpler camera, though it’s hard to see what the problem is. It’s broken up into six sections, four of which can be easily set without entering the menu. The other two are simple lists that you shouldn’t have to visit once the settings are how you want them.

There are a few quirks outside of the menu. The dedicated record button will accidentally get hit often enough to note. It’s immediately below the right wheel, which makes the button exactly where your thumb rests when you go to adjust it. It’s not a huge issue, but I’ve recorded a few seconds every other day of shooting. There’s also an automatic sensor to turn on the EVF. This works great in regular use, but it’s impossible to allow the camera to sleep while wearing it on a strap because the sensor picks up your body. Fortunately, the camera turns off and on quickly, but if you’re using autofocus it might cause issues. On a few occasions, it took the kit lens a notable amount of time to find focus after turning the camera on. It’s quick enough beyond this, but the initial focusing can take enough time to lose a shot.

Shooting with this camera is a pleasure. The body is super small and light, surprisingly so. Having to carry around a bulky DSLR is a major negative for traditional camera bodies. My last camera was heavier than my laptop - fortunately that’s not an issue here. The camera is a bit expensive beside it’s competitors, but it offers quite a lot. Beyond conventional (and more important) areas of judgement like image quality (in which the NEX-7 matches or beats those in its class, though that’s for DPReview to discuss), its control scheme, tiny and light body, allowance for old lenses, and full feature set such as mic-in and an EVF, make the NEX-7 a fantastic choice. It’s as powerful as most DSLRs and far easier to handle, and that makes this camera worth noticing.

9:01am | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZlHBNyJwMP2u

April 4, 2012

Instagram Launches on Android

In just over a year, Instagram has amassed an impressive user base of over 30 million - and only on the iPhone. Yesterday, Instagram finally launched for Android. The app is nearly identical, lacking only a few small features. But this is more important for the Instagram community as a whole than simply for owners of Android phones. Instagram has succeeded wildly in an over saturated marked - over saturated with photo editors, photo filters, photo albums, over saturated with micro social networks and mobile only social networks, not to mention the big players. It’s easy to see why this is and how Instagram already has the ball rolling. Now with their expansion to Android, they can ride the momentum.

Social networks have an inherent problem for adopters. There’s no reason to use it if no one you know is on it. Of course, many have come to surpass this hurdle, but many many more have failed. The App Store is littered with mobile only social networks that have received only the slightest of press coverage. Even hot apps like Path and Highlight are hard sells outside of San Francisco - the tech press seems to ignore that there are areas lacking ‘obvious’ things like heavy Twitter use, let alone smart phone saturation.

Instagram provides more than a social network. As much as they want us to treat it like a rigorous network, it isn’t, at least not first and foremost. Instagram allowed for heavy adoption, because even without other friends on the service, the app still generated a product for users: photographs that looked good. Allowing for easy sharing to Twitter and Facebook proliferated Instagram’s clear style. You can tell an Instagram photo apart from anything else. In this way Instagram has been able to gain its massive installation of users. People can see why they should get Instagram. A few acquaintances being on Path is hardly a compelling argument.

Instagram’s social aspect is good and well, but the company wants it to be the app’s main focus going forward. Now it can be. Instagram has been opened up to nearly every smartphone owner. It doesn’t need this social aspect to succeed, but a stream littered with photos is a joy to browse through. It’s a different medium than Facebook or Path. With the certain coming influx of Android users, the social aspect is bound to become a powerful player.

It’s understandable that it took Instagram’s small team so long to bring about an Android app. Now that they have, the lack of a web interface is even more noticeable. It’s a bit bizarre that we’re unable to browse others’ profiles on anything but the tiny phone app. There isn’t even a way to navigate through a user’s previous photos without a direct link. The team’s dedication to quality is evident, but when so many third parties have managed something using Instagram’s API, even a simple interface would be fine for now. Much has been made of these mobile-first social networks. It certainly makes a lot of sense to design around the device you have at all times. But your phone isn’t necessarily what you spend most of your time on. Something is sure to be in the pipeline. Impressively, the absence doesn’t hurt Instagram - it just doesn’t help.

It’ll be exciting to watch Instagram’s expansion during their second year. They’ve built up a strong reputation. They have a great core product, and the social element is about to grow significantly stronger. If they already aren’t, Instagram is about to become the first big success in the mobile-first social space - and that’s a lot harder than filtering a photograph.

9:59am | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZlHBNyJ3u2WC

Filed under: tech instagram photography apps android social

March 6, 2012

Lytro & Light Field Technology

Lytro reviews have been hitting the web, and so far they aren’t too hot on the device. It’s unfortunate that the camera’s first iteration is disappointing, but Light Field Photography is revolutionary. For those not following along, this technology captures an entire scene in focus, allowing the photographer to select focus afterward. It’s very exciting - it just needs to mature a bit.

The camera itself is a bit odd, though it’s stylish in its way. Perhaps the main problem here is the sensor. It’s too small to really show off the power of this advancement. The images all look like they were taken from a mediocre camera phone. Additionally, because of the small sensor size, depth of field is fairly limited. Not surprisingly, this makes the Lytro’s primary feature a lot less interesting to use. Sure, you can shift focus between the foreground and the background - I could take two separate photos on my phone and achieve the same effect. Right now that’s about all the fun you can have with the Light Field technology. It’s a bit more interesting than my simplification, but a lot less useful due to the poor image quality.

This technology is going to be big. It’s perfect for camera phones and point-and-shoots. No more lagging auto-focus. It literally becomes, Point, Shoot. Theoretically, these may one day be the type of sensor inside our DSLRs (or ILCs, or whatever). It would allow an unprecedented ability for photographers - focus will always be perfect, and they will have more data than ever before to work with. It will likely take some time to get the sensors up to size. Full-frame sensors are still out of most consumers’ price range, and their housing is hardly the level of portability afforded by some (less powerful) cameras today.

I have to wonder how focusing after the fact will play into a photographer’s process. It makes a lot of sense for phones and point-and-shoots - there is already a limited creativity beyond composition. Allowing for a selected focus would actually enhance the photographer’s options. On a DSLR, however, this drastically changes the process. The photographer only worries about composition, and in post must select precisely how they would like the image to look. Presumably the technology will come to a point where it can accurately simulate specific apertures. Though I’m uncertain of the details, it seems to currently be far less specific in its de/re/focusing. But even with powerful editing technology, this becomes almost a different creative form. First, it brings about a good deal more work in post. But more importantly, it eliminates the fleeting choices a photographer must make. Perhaps this is an antiquated way of thinking, but in a sense it seems to be changing the art form when a photographer must later adjust and decide what they want, rather than relying on trained instinct and a transient feeling to select how the image will be created. It will be interesting to watch the evolution of this technology, but I suspect it’s the biggest advancement to photography in a long time.

2:52pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZlHBNyHZ-de4

(Notes: 1)

Filed under: tech lytro light field photography