The Online Photographer

This week's column by Ctein

I don't mean the package delivery service, although I always look forward to the appearance of the big brown boxy truck on my block. UPS stands for Uninterruptible Power Supply, and if you're at all dependent upon your computer(s) it's cheap insurance and peace of mind.

A UPS is a box about the size of a shoebox (more or less) that plugs into the wall socket and has a bunch of power outlet sockets on the back that your electronics plug into. Inside the UPS is a sealed lead acid battery, some AC/DC converters, and monitoring circuitry. If the line frequency or voltage fluctuates (or goes out entirely), the UPS switches to its internal battery within a cycle and continues to feed 120V AC to its outlet sockets.

Depending on how heavily you've loaded down the supply, the internal battery will be good for anywhere from about a half dozen minutes to half an hour or more. That's enough time for you to save any work you're in the middle of and shut down any electronics.

It'll not only save you from lost work product, but it can save you from lost equipment. Four or so years back we had a power brownout here that somehow managed to fry my Apple Cinema Display, despite there being a transformer between the display and the wall socket. Probably should've gotten a UPS back then, but I didn't. The local power's been reliable for the past 15 years, with outages a rare thing.

Two weeks ago was the exception. Four outages in three days, and I thought I was going to go nuts. It was a Murphy's-law situation. I was doing some orbital simulations for a book project (a story I may tell you at some future time but not now). It was straightforward but somewhat tedious, repetitive work. The software that does this well only runs under Windows, so I was running my Windows virtual environment on the iMac.

There's no difference between running virtual Windows and real Windows...except...if you yank the plug on virtual Windows, it leaves the virtual hard drive file in a confused state. Confused, as in unbootable and unusable. The only recovery is to go to the backup and restore the virtual drive file.

That's fine, except 1.) it takes a fair chunk of time to port over that large a file from the backup drive and 2. any work done after the last backup is gone. Doesn't matter whether it was saved or not; it got saved to a virtual drive that no longer exists.

After the first outage, it took me most of the day to figure all this out and get it straightened out and back to where I'd been.

The second time it happened, I only lost about half a day's productivity.

After that, I got completely paranoid and started archiving what I was doing every half-hour. Which was another source of wasted time and still didn't eliminate the time it took to restore from the backup.

Let me repeat: this was somewhat tedious, repetitive work I was doing. Oh yeah, how much more fun it was having to do it repeatedly!

Enough was enough. I logged into TOP's Amazon affiliate link and bought a CyberPower CP1350PFCLCD PFC Sinewave UPS 1350VA 810W PFC Comaptible Mini-Tower for $159.99. It was possibly more capacity than I needed, but more is better and it wasn't much more expensive than a lower capacity unit.

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Left: rear panel of the
CyberPower tower

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It's a nice design: made to be energy-efficient (it "sleeps" itself except when it needs to top off the battery or detects a line fluctuation) and it puts out sine wave power instead of square wave (supercheap UPS's do the latter, and that may not matter with modern transformers/switching supplies, but then again...). The front panel display is great and tells me just what I need to know about the state of my power.

With a couple of power strips plugged into the UPS, I had it supporting both the 27" iMac and the 15" MacBook Pro, the Apple Cinema Display, all eight external hard drives, the phone service/Internet router/modem, my AudioEngine computer speakers that Mike recommended, even the 60W desk lamp that happened to be plugged into one of the power strips. With everything turned on, the UPS reported that I was drawing less than half its capacity and that I had 10 minutes to shut things down in the event of a power failure.

Naturally, the next thing I did was to yank the power cord from the wall socket. The office electronics didn't blink. After I turned off the desk lamp and the two computers, the UPS's display informed me that I had well over an hour of runtime remaining before the battery would be drained.

There are two reasons why that might matter. The first is that my MacBook Pro runs fine off its batteries, so the UPS could give me more than an hour's access to its external drives. Nice, if I don't want my work interrupted quite so abruptly. The second is just a maybe—I won't know what will actually happen until I have a real power failure. Our access to the world is through a fiber-optic phone/data line; we no longer have a copper wire phone line. That means that in the case of loss of house power, the phones go down along with the inter-webs. If all it takes to keep those up and running is to keep the router/modem live, then the UPS will do the job (for a while). Dunno if that's the case, but I'm hopeful.

I'm almost looking forward to the next power outage to test all of this out for real.

Well, no, not really.

Ctein

Columnist Ctein looks out for your supply of power every week on Wednesdays.

©2013 by Ctein, all rights reserved

Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Dave (a.k.a. Sparky) in NM: "Our power comes from a rural electric co-op, and outages are regular occurrence. For that reason, we've got four UPS devices feeding all our computer equipment. They've been invaluable. Not only have they provided us with consistent power and surge protection, but on three occasions they sacrificed themselves, saving our equipment from lightning strikes. Unfortunately, many of the other electronics in the house and office that were only connected to surge protectors were fried. I've yet yet to find a practical method of protecting network cabling from transferring lightning strikes to connected equipment. None of our strikes were direct hits, but they were close enough to find their way through in-wall CAT-5e cabling and blow out routers and gigabit switches. If you've got any suggestions aside from abandoning the wired portions of my network and switching to completely to wireless, I'd love to hear them...."

M. Stanton: "I wonder how long that UPS would run my Gralab timer and the 211 bulb in my D5XL?"

Ctein replies: Hmmm, well, I can't imagine the whole assemblage is drawing over 200 watts, and this particular model is rated at 800 watts with a 100 watt-hour battery...so even allowing for a 50% safety margin, you'd have a good 15 minutes run time. Which ought to be enough to complete a print exposure or several.

I've been working in the darkroom when the power went off. It's kinda annoying, ain't it? And, somehow, the dark gets even darker.

Will Frostmill replies to Dave (a.k.a. Sparky) in NM: "I can offer some suggestions regarding Cat-5 protection.

"In general, you want the ground each device sees at a given point to be the same. You could use a power strip that has a dumb ethernet passthrough, which grounds the Cat-5 at precisely the same point as the equipment it is connected to. This lets any surge "see" the same ground value at any given group of equipment. Lightning can do math: if the AC power line drifts high by 1500 millivolts, but the Cat-5 only rises 800, then 700 millivolts are going to subtract themselves through your computer in an effort to reach that ethernet port. (Make sure your three-prong grounded wall outlets are actually grounded. There's a cheap tester for that.) You would need to do this at every single point you connect something to a Cat-5 jack, and you would need to do this for all the other cabling as well: telephone lines and cable TV lines as well.

"Prudence dictates the same kind of common ground setup back at the router and modem. I'll make a wild guess that this would make the biggest difference.

"Take a peek at the standard grounding diagrams that now are printed at the front of nearly every home electronics user manual. You should see something similar at your home, with TV antennas, cable TV, and electrical power all having ground lines that are bonded at the same point at the Demarc, the point at which they enter your home.

"If this doesn't look right, please hire an electrician to correct it for you. DO NOT TOUCH IT. The ground stake or post MAY HAVE LIVE POWER FLOWING THROUGH IT. It's supposed to do this as a safety measure when things go wrong. Most of those things trip breakers, so no problem, but in the rare exceptional case YOU COULD DIE if you don't know how to properly check it.

There are some fantastic resources out there on the net if you start googling for terms like 'lighting protection,' 'spark arrestors,' 'RF ground,' or 'HAM radio ground.' Polyphaser has some nice technical bulletins.

"Here is a company that sells Cat-5 lightning protectors at 28–35$ a pop.

"I'm not endorsing either company, by the way."

This week's column by Ctein

Part 2: What I Don't Like

Last week I told you what I liked about the new iPad and why I thought it was a major improvement over the previous generation and seriously worthy of purchase.

This time, I gripe.

The new Smart Cover isn't well-designed. When it folds into a triangle stand, it now only makes edge contact instead of overlapping a full side. That makes it much less sturdy than before; it tends to collapse when I look at it wrong. Apple needs to restore the fourth flap section.

My second complaint is about iOS 7's look on the iPad. I can see how the new graphics and layout make it a lot more usable on small-screen devices like iPhones, but it loses big on the iPad. It looks flat and cartoonish (a minor point, I admit), and the icons and preview screens are spaced much too far apart for convenience (not minor). For example, each page in a folder only shows you nine icons. You could easily fit in 16–25 on the iPad. I spend a lot of time scrolling between minimally-filled pages. Similarly, the screenshots that are displayed in the suspended-apps interface are far, far larger than they need to be, so there's a lot of unnecessary side-scrolling to get to the app you want.

This is shoddy interface design, and it's so last-century. Any decent designer today would have the layout and ergonomics differently optimized for different-size displays. It's a lack of attention to proper UI ergonomics that I wouldn't expect of Apple. Much as I hate to invoke the cliché, Steve Jobs would not have allowed this to pass. Really.

Which plan?
A change which is a mixed bag, but nonetheless drove me crazy, is the myriad data plans available for the cellular models. Personally, I can't imagine not having a cellular model; once I got used to the idea that the iPad brings the world and data to my fingertips, it became intolerable that it wouldn't always do that.

The problem is the excess of choices (as I've written previously, I deeply hate comparison shopping). There are four different carriers for the iPad, and it's hard to sort through the details of the different plans. The available options have gotten much more complicated. Honestly, it inhibited me from buying for several weeks. Too many unnecessary choices are not good for sales.

Apple could make life a lot easier. Instead of making five different flavors of iPad—one without cellular and four for each of the four carriers—they could make two: cellular and non-cellular. Yes, yes, I know that means building multiple-carrier compatibility into the iPad and reworking the contracts with all the carriers. Well, that's the kind of stuff Apple is really good at, and with a 40% profit margin on the devices, they could afford to spend a little more on the cellular hardware. It would be far more in keeping with their keep-it-simple-stupid approach. I don't want to try to hassle out all the details of my carrier before I buy an iPad. Just let me buy one, for God's sake.

Heck, I'm not even sure it would cost Apple anything. It would cut the number of models they have to carry by 2.5X. That's got to be a big inventory savings, not to mention improving sales because they're far less likely to run out of a particular model in a store. It's a selling point for buying the cellular (more expensive) model: "Hey, you may not care now, but it doesn't cost you a lot to 'future-proof' your purchase, and you can use whichever carrier you like when the time comes."

As my editor would put it, just sayin'....

Some plan changes are improvements. If you hardly ever needs cellular data, there are some real bargains now. AT&T, for example, lets you buy (through the iOS settings) a single chunk of data that's good for 90 days. I think the minimum is 250 MB for just $5! If all you need to be able to do is occasionally check your e-mail (and read TOP, of course) when you're out of Wi-Fi range, you can hardly do better. Others are not. The option to use the iPad as a personal hotspot now seems to be restricted to more expensive plans. I wound up paying twice as much as previously to have that feature. Yes, it's giving me a lot more data per month, but I don't need the data.

Still, it's not the details I'm griping about, it's the huge amount of time to sort this all out. I had to make the rounds of the stores for all four carriers to figure out the plans—it proved somewhere between difficult and impossible to do it online or via phone. Especially since I couldn't have an iPad in hand to be able to check the iOS options!

Props to Eric
In that vein, I have to give a four-star recommendation to the AT&T store in Daly City on Gellert Blvd. The level of customer support and handholding I got from their salesperson, Eric Shou, and from one of the store managers when my questions exceeded even his knowledge, was extraordinary. They sold me on going with AT&T. They spent a huge amount of time with me, and all they ultimately got out of it was a lousy $40 month-to-month contract (they saved me $10/month over buying through the iOS).

I'm a big believer in rewarding stores and salespeople who go the extra mile. Unfortunately I didn't reward these folks with money, so I'm doing it with publicity. I know some of you are now going to rail at me about how awful the "Death Star" is. I'm not trying to negate your experiences. This is just mine.

Next week, I go old-school. Books!

Ctein

Regular columnist Ctein lets you know the plan on TOP on Wednesdays. Tomorrow: Carl's Panasonic GX7 Notes, Part III.

©2013 by Ctein, all rights reserved

Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

TOP's links!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Isaac Crawford: "I think you'll find that there's only one cellular model of iPad. The only difference between them is what sim card comes with it. According to Apple there is only one iPad sold throughout the world and it supports all carriers."

Paul De Zan: "IOS 7 adds nothing to the iPhone, trust me. I updated an iPad 3 to IOS 7...and immediately sold it. That's how much I hate IOS 7. What kills me is that Apple thinks they can call it a 'modern' looking interface. Those of us who've been around a while will tell you that the super-thin fonts and color scheme are right out of the late '60s concept of 'modern.' IOS 7 is the biggest design misstep since Jobs returned to Apple in 1997. We now know he's really, really gone and not part of some evil cryogenic marketing scheme."

This week's column by Ctein

Part 1: What I Like

My last iPad upgrade was a year and a half ago. At that time, I said I was pretty well hooked on keeping up with the most current model. Well, then what took me so long to upgrade?

It was a combination of Apple messing around with their introduction schedule combined with reliable rumors of what was to come.

There've been two interim releases since the Spring 2012 iPad, which souped up the processor and increased the maximum storage from 64 GB to 128 GB. The former didn't much matter to me. The latter did. It's a law of the universe that nature abhors an empty hard drive. I'd filled my 64 GB iPad to the brim. What held me back were the leaks about the next major upgrade. Namely, smaller, lighter, and lower power.

As I wrote in my review of the iPad3, those three things bugged me about that then-newest model. The Retina display was fine; the side effects of the power-hungry screen weren't. It hit my pain threshold on size, weight, battery life, and charging time, which is why I gave it only a qualified recommendation. Want all the details? Read what I wrote in my reviews back then:

iPad Part I
iPad Part II
iPad Followup

The obvious visible change in the iPad Air is that it's two centimeters narrower than the previous model. The screen's the same size; the bezel shrank. It doesn't seem like a lot, but it makes the device a lot more hand-holdable, and it will fit into pockets and pouches in bags that the older model wouldn't.

The more important invisible change is that it weighs one-third less! That's a huge difference when you're holding the iPad in one hand—one pound is so much easier to heft than 1.5 pounds!

Where did the weight go? Out of the battery. It has 25% less capacity than before, because the second-generation Retina display uses a lot less power than the first. Even with the smaller battery, worst-case runtime is improved. At maximum brightness (and power drain) with all I/O powered up, my old iPad would run down in five hours. The iPad Air runs an hour longer.

Even better, the slimmer battery combined with a 12-watt (instead of 10-watt) charger markedly reduces the charging time for the new iPad. My old iPad took six hours; the new one takes under four and a half. The iPad Air will charge, albeit slowly, while I'm using it when it's plugged in. My old model couldn't do that; it sucked more power while running than the charger could provide.

This may not seem earthshaking, but it makes a substantial difference in usability for me. I'm usually using my iPad under brightly-lit conditions, which means I'm running the screen near maximum brightness. An extra hour makes it far more likely I'll get through the day on a single charge. If I don't, an hour pick-me-up on the charger gets me 80 more minutes of runtime instead of 50. That's nowhere as great as the original iPad, but it's a big improvement.

The second generation screen looks about as good as the first. I see some sample-to-sample variation, so your mileage may differ a bit, but on average it will be as bright as the first generation and the color rendition will be as good. Maybe even better; the samples I've looked at all look a bit warmer, which means they're closer to the D65 standard. It's a quibble, really. All Retina screens look great. The viewing angle seems slightly less, but not a lot and not enough disturb me; I mention it for the sake of completeness.

Yeah, it runs faster, too. Plants vs. Zombies 2 launches in 11 seconds on the new iPad; it took 19 on my old one. But I never had reason to complain before. I'm told that the graphics processor is really improved, but I won't be able to check that out until I get some serious photo processing apps. That's on the schedule; it was one of the reasons for getting the maximum storage model. I can say it's still not powerful enough to run full-res movies under VLC without skips, although it'll handle about twice the resolution it would before.

The new smart cover attaches much more firmly than the previous generation. Combined with the lighter weight of the iPad, I have no worries that if I pick the iPad up by the cover, which I am prone to forgetfully do, the iPad will detach itself from the cover and head groundward.

And that's what I like about my spankin' new iPad Air. Next week, I'll tell you what I don't like.

Ctein

©2013 by Ctein, all rights reserved

Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)

By Ctein

Over the past several years, I've written four columns about upgrading my computer hardware to make Photoshop run faster without having to buy an entire new system. My last upgrade was an Other World Computing Seagate Momentus XT 500GB drive with 4GB of flash RAM cache, reviewed here.

You can trace the links back from there to the three columns that preceded that one if you want to read the whole saga. That's probably a good idea before hitting me with questions about what works best and what is most cost-effective.

Well, now I'm replacing that hard drive with an OWC Electra MAX 3G 960GB SSD [Ed. Note: See important addendum below]. This is the end of the line, because I honestly can't figure out any further enhancements to this machine.

There's a more general question I'm investigating, too: How much do you gain by trying to soup up an elderly machine with an SSD? We all know they make state-of-the-art machines astonishingly fast. Maybe, though, drive speed isn't the bottleneck in an older system. I've already souped up my 2007 2.2 GHz Core Duo MacBook Pro to the point where it's more than twice as fast as it was originally on Photoshoppy stuff. It performs comparably to a fast 2009 or a slow 2010 machine. That's a nice return on my investment, but maybe I've pushed it as far as it can go.

Understand that for most of you the Electra MAX 3G 960GB, priced at a whopping $1,045, is severe overkill. I had several reasons for testing this model, not the least of which is that my current 500 GB Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive is almost full, and configuring a 480 GB SSD in exactly the same way (so I could get meaningful comparison runs) would be a considerable headache. Most of you won't need this capacity, or the nifty fact that the 960 GB drive is actually two 480 GB drives, so you can configure it as a single drive (as I have) or as a 480 GB RAID1 array.

Furthermore, 6G SSDs are now insignificantly more expensive than 3G's. The extra performance won't do you any good in an older system with a 3G bus, but if you later recycle that drive into a 6G system, you'll pick up a substantial performance boost for free.

Finally, if you configure your machine for two internal hard drives, you can get by with an OWC 120 GB SSD ($129) that holds your operating system, applications, and scratch space, and you'll see almost as much performance improvement as having everything on the SSD.

But if you want a really honkin' big and fast drive, this baby is it.

So, why go this upgrade route in the first place? Why not just get a new machine? One reason is cost. Incrementally improving my machine has cost me much less than half what a new machine would run (up until this extravagance, and it would still be true if I had gone with a smaller drive), and it has extended the life of the system by several years.

Another reason may be compatibility. This laptop still runs Snow Leopard, which means it runs my business-critical software that will die on a newer Rosetta-less machine. A new machine may also have different I/O ports, demanding expensive or possibly even unavailable adapters for your peripherals.

Under those circumstances, maximizing the performance of an old system makes a lot of sense. But, maybe I've already taken it as far as it'll go? We're about to find out.

Since I was testing an older machine, it made sense to also test older software, so I looked at performance with both Photoshop CS4 Mac (which was severely limited in how much memory it could use) as well as CS6. I also compared it to our high-end 2009 27-inch iMac, whose quad-core processor, faster and more efficient processors, faster data buses and 16 GB of RAM can trounce my laptop (which only supports 6 GB RAM).

For general purpose tasks, the Electra MAX made things a bit peppier, but not by a lot. The SSD'd MacBook Pro booted in 25% less time and launched Photoshop in 30% less time, but my mail client, word processor, and voice dictation programs were not noticeably faster. Somehow, I expected more.

Running Lloyd Chambers' DiskTester revealed that the SATA bus in this old machine simply isn't up to supporting full 3G performance. It's not uncommon in older machines for the manufacturer to save money on I/O by using slower components. The Electra MAX clocked in at 120–128 MB per second, only half of what this SSD is capable of in a more modern system. Keep that in mind if you're souping up an old machine; you may not need the very best-performing SSD.

Moving on to Photoshop, I ran Lloyd's Photoshop benchmarks. As expected, there was very little difference with the Small benchmark, which mostly exercises the processor; it ran at most 10% faster under CS4 and CS6 with the SSD. The iMac ran that benchmark in 2/3rds the time under CS4 and 1/6th the time under CS6, which took full advantage of the iMac's 16 GB of RAM.

The Medium benchmark was another matter. The Electra MAX speeded my laptop up by 50–100%. The iMac was now only three times faster than my venerable laptop.

The Huge benchmark is representative of what happens when you see Photoshop's progress bar creeping along at a snail's pace, because you've started swapping a lot to the scratch disk. Under CS4 the iMac and the Momentus-configured laptop turned in nearly identical times, because their internal drives had similar throughput. Under CS6 the iMac turned in a time that was 40% less than the MacBook Pro, because the extra RAM did help. But it didn't blow away the MacBook.

So, what did the Electra MAX drive do to that benchmark? It aced it. It cut the time for running the Huge benchmark on my MacBook Pro nearly in half! Under CS4, the 2007 MacBook Pro left the 2009 iMac in the dust. Under CS6, it still beat it by about 10%.

Wow.

Now, that's the most extreme case. In my typical Photoshop use, the Electra MAX gave me a boost somewhere between the Small and Medium benchmarks. That's nice; I won't complain about trimming 25–35% off of times. It's not like buying a whole new system, but it pleases.

(Oh, and in case you're wondering how this compares to the state-of-the-art, the latest MacBook Pro Retina runs the Medium benchmark six times faster than my SSD'd laptop.)

The conclusion? Even in a fairly ancient machine with its very limited I/O, an OWC SSD is a very worthwhile upgrade to your system.

Ctein

IMPORTANT ADDENDUM Fri. Oct. 26: Murphy's Law always wins. After turning in this review, I took off on a one-week trip. Almost immediately, I started having corruption problems with the Electra MAX, with half my applications unrunnable and Disk Utility reporting unrepairable node damage. As soon as I got home, I copied off the new files I'd created on the trip and successfully reformatted and repartitioned the Electra MAX.

I attempted to restore my system and data two different ways:

—booting from the OS install disks and using Time Machine.

—booting externally using my Momentus HD in an external case and using Carbon Copy Cloner to port the HD over to the Electra MAX.

Both methods failed repeatedly, with no consistent stopping point over many, many attempts. The SSD would spontaneously dismount itself from the system in the middle of the process and remain invisible to the OS even after a reboot. It would reappear if I shut the laptop down entirely and restarted it.

I'm going to run some further tests to tell me if the drive is being inherently unreliable or just unreliable as an internal drive in my system.

This is the second sample of this drive that has misbehaved for me. The first failed almost out of the box, so I ignored it and got a replacement. It happens to reviewers on occasion and it's properly ignored unless it points to a deeper problem.

At this point, I think there's a deeper problem. I don't know if it's an incompatibility with my system or a more inherent flaw, but I can no longer recommend the Electra MAX 3G 960GB SSD at this time [the links have been removed from the article —Ed.].

This doesn't change any of my performance measurements nor conclusions about the value of an SSD; they still hold. Just not this SSD, for me, anyway.

This also doesn't change my very high opinion of Other World Computing or the general quality and reliability of their products. I've been buying their stuff for as long as I've owned Macs, and they will continue to be my preferred vendor. Their service and support have been consistently exceptional, too; their people are just wonderful. (And that's not me getting favorable treatment—I was buying from them long before they had any idea who I was or what I do for a living.)

Computer geek Ctein enhances your drive, vim, and vigor on TOP on Wednesdays.

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Joe Kashi: "Some SSD drives are faster and more reliable because they use better internal controller circuitry. I've been using Crucial M4 series SSDs for some time now and they have proven very reliable with Windows 7 Pro. The same drives were less reliable under prior OS versions and required reformatting to the new OS after a failure like Ctein describes.

"Hence, part of the problem may be generally OS related, part may be due to controller incompatibility with the OS or related problems, and part may have to do with the increased internal waste heat and/or noise arising from the higher chip densities of very high capacity drives.

"There's one final reliability-degrading factor with very high densities: Each bit has a finite chance of failure and it's an additive effect. Twice as much capacity means twice as many individual bits, which in turn means that the chance of failure doubles (or perhaps even more due to increased internal heat). Ideally, the controller should be able to map, relocate, and block any bits that show signs of incipient failure, but a particular internal controller may not do this efficiently or reliably and the SSD then becomes unreliable."

Last week I got an e-mail from a reader that pointed at a serious problem he had. It seems to me more important to take this up in a column and push back the RAW column another week. This could save some people from serious grief.

Reader: Hi. I wonder if you have knowledge about corrupted photo files, why they occur, how to avoid and how to cure them. I am dealing with seemingly random corruption. Sometimes the files are a mess; sometimes a thumbnail appears but the file will not open. The programs that are advertised to deal with this problem get mixed—usually rotten—reviews.

Me: Dear Reader, If you're seeing lots of corrupted photo files (like more than one or two in your entire collection), that's evidence that there's something wrong with your computer system. If you have multiple hard drives, especially if they're on different data buses, and the corrupted files seem to be predominantly on one drive/data bus or another, that's a sign of trouble on that storage path.

It could be as simple as an inappropriate or slightly defective cable. Back in the old IDE/ATA days, I decided to replace the rats' nest of ribbon cables in my PC with more modern and orderly bundled types, and I ran into all sorts of corruption problems. The bundled cables had higher impedances and the driver circuitry on the motherboard simply wasn't up to pushing the data through the higher-impedance cables. "Better" in that case proved to be worse.

File corruption could also be evidence of an unreliable hard drive.

Another place to look for evidence of data path problems is in your backups. If you have a way of running verification or checksum passes on backups, enable that and see what you get. If the backup software reports back with occasional problems validating a backup, that says you have a problem. A corrupted backup is a much bigger problem that a corrupted photo file. You'd be surprised how many people get bit by this one because they just assume the backups are good, and then, when they need them....

There are also test utilities out there, either cheap or free, which will heavily exercise data paths and hard drives to try to find errors. Something you set up and let run overnight or even for a couple of days, while it shuffles terabytes back and forth, and then you look at the report. Can't recommend a specific product, but Google will be your friend in this area.

No, I don't know of any good repair programs. The best scheme is to just have a whole bunch of image processing programs, both high-end and low-end, that can read a whole bunch of file types and will tolerate screwed up files. The freeware ones are frequently better at this than the expensive ones; Photoshop is particularly fussy about file quality. It will often tell you that it cannot open a file at all that another program will open and find only a few bad pixels or one bad row in.

Reader: Ctein, thanks for this extensive comment. I am experiencing backup issues. Will check as you suggest. I begin to think that cloud storage is superior to multiple externals. Again, thanks. Much appreciated help.

Me: Dear Reader, Then you need to get on this sooner rather than later. The corruption isn't necessarily happening in a data path that can affect files that your system writes to and uses. But, if it is, eventually your OS will start misbehaving and possibly become entirely unbootable, and you will not have a trustworthy backup that you can restore it from.

I don't know what kind of system you have or your level of computer expertise, so I'll make these very general remarks. First, get one of those drive-exercising utilities so you can test as you go along. Next, decide if you're interested in figuring out exactly what is wrong or just fixing the problem.

If the former, you need to make a systematic changes to your hardware and run tests after each one, until you isolate the bad actor. Try replacing the drive cable, try using the drive on a different I/O port, try using a different drive, etc.

If you just want to fix the problem, the best way is to buy an external hard drive as different in every way from your current one as is possible. Buy it from a different manufacturer and use it with a different interface, assuming that your computer has more than one external interface. For example, if your current drive is a Seagate USB (Seagate drives, in my experience, are not reliable) get a different manufacturer's FireWire or eSATA drive (assuming you can support either of those). That should make your problems go away entirely. If you don't have a choice of interfaces, don't make yourself crazy; the most likely point of failure for external drives is the drive or cable, not the interface. Remember to buy a new cable to go with whatever drive you get.

You need to deal with this now. Cloud storage backup isn't going to fix anything that's wrong with your system.

•     •     •

That's it for this time. Next week should be the long-awaited RAW column, unless another fire turns up that needs putting out.

Ctein

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

robert e: "You and your reader probably looked into this already, but sometimes an unseated cable connector can cause intermittent file corruption and other disk problems. I've seen it happen (though that was in the old days of wide ribbon cables). A connector that was marginally seated (perhaps at the factory, or during an upgrade) could work fine for weeks or years before it worked loose to the point where problems happen. Connectors have improved, but you never know.

"So if you start having weird file problems, check all the cable connections you can get at comfortably. Really.

"If you're uncomfortable opening electronics in boxes, then it's good enough to narrow down the problem to a particular box or cable.

"But if your computer is a box that sits on the floor or a desk, it probably needs periodic cleaning inside anyway, whether it's done by you or a tech (whoever it is should know what they're doing). The last step to cleaning it out should be to check the cables and connections. Pay attention to fans, too. Dust buildup can make them vibrate, among other bad effects, which only helps connectors work loose.

"External drives, too, can have cabling inside, and sometimes fans, and dust. Even laptop drives often depend on cable connections—these are usually accessible through a hatch."

David Dyer-Bennet: "I've been scanning 1960s photos since mid August, and let me tell you, the bit rot is terrible. Neither I nor the other photographer whose work I was scanning appear to have had water filters in our darkroom, and commercial processing wasn't any better. And, now, there are layers of scratches on top of all that. I've spent over an hour spotting out crap on a few of the shots (ones I have some plans for and think are worth the effort; it's essentially a restoration job even though I have the original negatives for my own work). As a general rule, I advise against inventing organization and storage schemes for negatives if you haven't had any experience in darkroom work. (But, you'll notice, I still have the negatives from snapshots I took in second grade, which puts me ahead of most people.)"

By Ctein

Since my review of the new iPad, I've revised some opinions and found a very useful free app to recommend.

Let's be clear; in no way am I going to tell you why you should have an iPad. If you think you need one, fine. If you can't see any use for the device, fine. I'm not out to persuade you differently. You can read my previous articles to find out why I value the iPad, but as for whether or not you should get one you're on your own. Now, on to the updates.

After thoroughly trashing the usability of the camera in the new iPad, I found myself using it on rare occasion. Consequently, I will raise its ergonomics rating from –273 to a more modest –100.

One of the least exotic of the dishes at Travail (halibut, sunchoke, roasted tomato and pearl onion). No tweaks, no adjustments, just cropped. Even with a splash of direct sunlight, awfully good exposure and color.

In April, my friend Beth Friedman and I were having our second dinner at the fabulous and surprisingly inexpensive molecular gastronomy restaurant, Travail, near Minneapolis. (If you don't know what molecular gastronomy is, Google it. I will not even try to explain.) We take notes when we order the tasters' dinner, because there's no way we will remember the wonderful and imaginative dishes we've been eating. I typed into Notability on the iPad and, in a flash of inspiration, decided to see if I could use the built-in camera to photograph some of the tapas-sized courses. It worked astoundingly well, even with highly uneven and very mixed lighting and white china. Two of the photographs are reproduced here, with nothing done to them save some cropping.

Absent direct sunlight, the results were even better. Despite the mixed light sources, the color balance and exposure were excellent. Again, no tweaks.

The built-in dictation feature has worked even better than I expected. I wrote and edited my entire column about printing for Ronny sitting in the car one evening while on a trip, using the iPad's dictation. If this ever becomes user customizable, it will be my favoritest program, ever.

On the minus side, the runtime/recharge time issues have been more of an aggravation than I thought they'd be. In the bright light circumstances where I'm likely to use my iPad, I rarely get to turn down the brightness much. Since that's the main determiner of run time, I rarely get anywhere near 10 hours usage; it's more like seven or eight, at best. When I'm using Google maps in an automobile, 20% of the battery life can get sucked away in an hour. I bought one of those little $10 cigarette lighter USB chargers so I could keep the iPad plugged in while driving.

Because the new battery pack has such long charge times and the iPad has such high power consumption, plugging it in for short periods of time doesn't get you much. The calculus is pretty straightforward: with the old iPad, one hour of plug-in time would buy you about three hours of run time. With the new iPad, it may only buy you a little more than one hour of runtime.

The bottom line is that you're going to run out of power more frequently and more inconveniently, and it's going to be harder to do anything about it.

I'm still pleased that I got the new iPad, but if longer runtimes and more convenient recharging is important to what you do, and you don't really need the new and improved features, you'd be better served by a new or secondhand iPad2.

An app that helps
Lastly, I found a nifty new app for printing. It started when Walgreens advertised the Canon iP2702 printer for $19.95. It seemed like as good an opportunity as any to replace our ancient DeskJet 970. Paula asked me, "If we get this, will I be able to use it to print from my iPad?"

After some research, the answer came up no. After some further research, though, I stumbled across Airprint Activator, a program for the Mac that lets you access any printer that's hooked up to your Mac as an Airprint printer. Currently it is free and fully enabled, although a donation would be much appreciated.

It works like a charm. I can print to not just the Canon but the Epson 3880 as well; heck, I could print to the 9800 if I had a reason to do so.

I sent the author $10. It was worth it.

Sadly, I don't own any iPad apps that are particularly smart about printing; they lack controls for paper size, type or print quality. That's not an Airprint problem; Airprint is just a way of getting data to the printer. The application still has to tell the printer what to do. Consequently, I have no control over formatting at this time and all I can get out is plain paper quality. But I can print with no hassle and no fuss.

Maybe I should be shopping around for a few smarter apps.

Ctein

Ctein's weekly column appears on TOP on Wednesdays.

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by -et-: "With your background, I suspect that I am about to mention something that you have already considered. However, we all have moments when we overlook the obvious, so I'll go ahead anyway.

"All of the 'standard' cigarette lighter adapter (CLA) chargers have a built-in limit of 0.5 amps current flow to a USB connection. The iPad needs (and can accept) a current flow of 2.1 amps to keep up with the power drain while operating. If the iPad is not operating, it will just charge more quickly with a 2.1 amp CLA than with a 0.5 amp CLA.

"There are CLAs that can provide this amperage, but you have to look for them carefully. (There are some CLAs with two USB outlets that deceptively claim to provide the amperage, but when you read closely you find that they provide this as a total amperage—but split between the two outlets. So read the fine print.)

"Additional misleading factors are that most of the USB outlets on computers are also limited to 0.5 amps charging current, and that all USB cables are not equal. The 'standard' cables will not tell the charger that it should provide more than 0.5 amps—even if it is capable of doing so.

"I do not have an iPad, but I do have a Nexus 7 that needs and can accept more than 0.5 amps. I looked at CLA options for some time. and ended up purchasing a TomTom Hi Speed Multi-Charger from Amazon for $20. It has been very satisfactory for me, but YMMV."

By Ctein

(Part I is here)

This is the second part of my review of new iPad. I strongly recommend the first part and my previous iPad reviews to understand where I'm coming from with this device. I'm reviewing only the features that I care about, as there are an unlimited number of other reviews out there.

Resuming right from where I left off, last column...

Ultra-high-resolution displays like the iPad's can't reasonably portray graphics at their "native" resolutions, if those graphics were designed to look good on normal displays. Ordinary displays have resolutions of 100–150 ppi; the Retina displays easily double that. Consequently, if I design a thumbnail for my website that's, oh, say, 170 by 135 pixels I'd expect it to take up 1 inch square or so or so on a normal display. On a new iPad it would come out something more like 1 cm square.

iPad's rendering software upsamples the graphic to display it a more plausible size in layouts suitable for normal human beings instead of Lilliputians. Unfortunately, the upsampling looks lousy. Even my 768x1024 pixel "fullscreen" images look mediocre. The thumbnails look like, well, total crap.

For those who want technical details on dealing with this, read this. I'll be taking the brute force approach; e.g., leave the image tag heighth and width attributes alone (e.g., 170x135 px) but upload double-resolution (340x270 px) JPEGs and just let the receiving device cope.

My test page now looks great on all screens. It's going to be a lot of work, since I don't have high resolution versions of most of the full-screen images; it's back to square one to re-create them. The thumbnails, at least, I can up-rez relatively efficiently (a few minutes work apiece) from existing resources.

The problem isn't pressing; currently this matters only for the new iPad. Still, the handwriting's on the wall; it's not going to be too many years before everybody is running high-resolution displays. Consider yourself warned.

Now, let's talk about the camera.

I need to bring up ergonomics, a very subjective matter. I ask you to imagine the very best-handling digital camera/phone/whatever you've used and rated as a 10 and the very worst as a 1. Ready? Where would the new iPad fall on that scale?

About –273.

There's just about no way it's good. The iPad is too heavy and awkwardly shaped to comfortably hold in camera-using position. You can select what point to focus on and set the exposure for by touching the screen, but then you're gripping one-handed, and that hand'll cramp up really quickly. In landscape mode, the lens is at the lower right corner, where it is very easily accidentally touched while holding the iPad in a way that places your hand near the shutter button. Voila, a smear of finger grease on the camera cover glass! Rotating the iPad 180° places the shutter button right next to the "exit this application" button. Guess which one you'll be hitting by accident? Portrait mode is better but still difficult.

How does the camera perform? As the photograph of the Macbeth chart (above) shows, color rendition is really excellent. It is slightly too saturated, but the hues are spot on. A good digital camera will do better, but this is more accurate color than any film can provide (says the guy who's tested most of them). Under non-daylight conditions, such as fluorescent or incandescent light, there is a slight color cast, orangish for incandescent lamps and yellowish for compact fluorescents. It is usually ignorable. It could easily be corrected; even Mac OS's Preview is sufficient for this task.

I measure the resolution at about 1200 lines by 1600 lines. That's roughly a 2-megapixel equivalent, a bit low for a 5-megapixel camera. In film terms, that's roughly like getting 25 lp/mm from a 35mm point-and-shoot camera. Not quite at the level of "acceptable sharpness" in an 8x10 print, but close. Indeed, such prints made from the iPad's photos are passably sharp; just don't scrutinize them too closely. Remarkably, sharpness is entirely uniform from center to corner; that new five-element lens really is remarkable. It does show a bit of pincushion distortion.

The camera will focus close enough to cover smaller than a 3x4" area; on the iPad's screen, it's more than a 2X enlargement from life-size. Even with relatively low resolution, you can photograph detail as fine as the naked eye can see.

Figure 2

The iPad's exposure range measures only seven stops. This is definitely an expose-for-the-highlights camera. Let the shadows go. Automatically-determined exposure usually works well, as figure 2 indicates, but there will be times when you'll need to dial it down by tapping the screen in a brighter area. Figure 2 show off both the accurate color and short exposure range. Elmo's almond eyes and the slight pinkish tinge to the skin around his eye are faithfully reproduced while the feathers are pleasantly close to the proper shade of gray.

Figure 3

Zooming in on figure 2 to 100% (figure 3) shows the ointment's big fly. Extremely aggressive noise reduction produces that undesirable "watercolor" look. The fine detail in the feathers on Elmo's throat pops in and out of existence depending on whether it has enough contrast to survive the noise-reduction algorithm's not-so-tender ministrations. At low light levels the noise really becomes unacceptable, viz. figure 4 (100% scale). It's tolerable on the iPad screen and might be acceptable in a "drugstore" sized print. It's ugly in anything larger.

Figure 4

Even in direct sunlight, the photographs aren't noise-free, as you can see in figure 5 (full frame) and figure 6 (100% scale). The noise is fine-grained; in a print, it looks about what you'd expect from a fine-grain 35mm film. Entirely acceptable to most viewers, even me, but well below what digital cameras can deliver today. Subject matter with bold edges and tones won't suffer much from the noise issues, as figure 7 (full frame) nicely demonstrates. Although it lacks tack-sharpness, it makes an attractive 8x 10print.

Figure 5

Figure 6

Figure 7

All in all, I'd say the iPad camera's quality is vaguely comparable to a middlin' 35mm point-and-shoot (better in some ways, worse in others). That puts it well below today's good digicams and the iPhone 4S. But the camera's usable, if you don't get your expectations too high; that certainly couldn't be said of the one in the iPad2.

Ctein

Note: None of the illustrations here were massaged or enhanced, save for a slight exposure adjustment to figure 1 so that it would properly match the Macbeth chart.

Ctein's regular weekly column on TOP appears on Wednesdays.

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

By Ctein

This is the latest in what will obviously be an indefinite series of reviews of new versions of the iPad as they come out. Apparently I'm hooked on upgrading. I'm okay with that.

I recommend readers look at my previous two reviews to understand where I'm coming from with this device: Why I Needed an iPad and Why I'm Getting an iPad 2. This is not a general purpose review. I'm reviewing the features that I care about and/or I think will matter to other photographers. There are an unlimited number of other reviews out there, so feel free to browse to your heart's content.

I didn't recommend the iPad 2 as an upgrade from the original iPad (even though I upgraded), nor did I see that it brought much to the table for people who weren't interested in the iPad originally. The 2012 iPad is a different beast. I think it's a worthwhile upgrade from an older iPad, with some distinctly interesting new features.

The first is one that is near and dear to my heart and obvious to me, yet invisible to you. I'm dictating this column on the iPad. The new iPad offers voice transcription so long as you are connected to the net (via either Wi-Fi or cellular) and it works extraordinarily well, considering that there is almost no way to customize vocabulary or user settings.

In fact, even though I make extensive use of specialized vocabulary, it may prove to be a more efficient way for me to write than using Dragon Dictate on my MacBook Pro. Dragon is prone to all sorts of idiosyncratic errors, including orthography (not following the normal conventions for when to spell out numbers or write them as numbers, issues with punctuation and capitalization, etc.) I spend an inordinate amount of time cleaning up Dragon's mistakes. Apple's Dictation feature seems to get all this stuff perfectly. Plus, the recognition accuracy is truly extraordinary, the best I've ever seen.

The second big win for me is that the new iPad can function as a personal Wi-Fi hotspot for up to five other devices. Currently, Verizon supports that in their contract, while AT&T doesn't. I imagine AT&T will come on board, but I wasn't willing to wait, so I bought the Verizon model this time around. I don't use a lot of cellular data. Previously, I used the cheapest AT&T plan that provided 250 MB a month. A couple of times a year, when I would travel, I would kick up to the next highest (2GB) tier in AT&T. So I used to spend about $200 a year for connectivity. Verizon offers a $20 a month data plan that gets me a gigabyte per month, but it's going to save me money. A lot of the times when I travel I have to pay for Wi-Fi at a hotel for my MacBook Pro. I will not have to do that in the future, so I expect I'll save something on the order of $75 a year, along with getting about twice as much data on the iPad as I was getting the old way.

Now, about the display, which I know you've been wondering when I would get to. I did not order a new iPad in advance for the simple reason that while more pixels are nice (and the new iPad has plenty more), I'm a lot more concerned with pixel quality than with quantity. I bought my original iPad (see my first column) because I could use it as a near-studio-quality monitor in the field. If the new iPad compromised tone or color quality in any way it was likely to be a fail for me, no matter how attractive it seemed otherwise.

Well, quite the opposite! The new iPad display is better in every respect. Not only does it offer twice the resolution, which certainly is wonderful to behold, it renders exactly 100% of sRGB color space, in comparison with 70% on the old iPad. Apple has also tweaked the contrast, so the contrast curve is also now a perfect match for standard sRGB; previously it was too high. It's also slightly warmer than the old iPad's display, which was a little bit cooler than standard D65. Consequently, right out of the box, the new iPad display looks fabulous. After running it through a custom profiling in Air Display with ColorMunki, it looks even better. I am a very happy camper.

And, yes, all those extra pixels are really, really nice when reading the morning paper.

There are significant downsides to the display. The power consumption is way up on this model of the iPad, which means the standard 10W charger takes considerably longer to bring the unit to a full charge. Think something like six and half hours. With the old iPad, giving it a one-hour "quickie" over lunch would get you through the rest of the work day. No more of that (sigh). The additional power consumption also means that the unit charges extremely slowly or not at all if you are using it while it's plugged into the charger. Finally, run life is now most dependent upon screen brightness rather than CPU usage. At maximum brightness, the runtime is barely six hours. It still remains 10 hours or more at more normal brightness levels, but this is of concern if you're trying to work in extremely bright light or outdoors.

There are also some important, possibly unexpected, implications for photographers. I'll cover those next week, along with my review of the new iPad's camera.

Ctein

(Continued in Part II)

Ctein's iColumn—sorry, column—appears on TOP on Wednesdays.

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By Ctein

Something that really bugs me about the design of personal computers that circulate air internally for cooling is that none of them seem to include any kind of filtering on the airflow entering the machine. It's a basic design flaw that contributes to a significant amount of computer malfunction.

About a year back I wrote "Your Scanner Needs Cleaning!" Here I am, back with a related refrain: clean your computer!

Here's the problem. That circulating air carries dust. The dust settles out on the electrical components inside your computer. Some of those components are insulators, some conductors. Doesn't really matter. They're all designed to operate in open air, not under a layer of dust.

The dust creates problems for two reasons. The first is the dust doesn't have the electrical characteristics of air. It affects electrical signals that pass through it differently. Your computer is just one big radio frequency generator. It doesn't take a lot to distort all those high-frequency signals moving around on those circuit traces. There's a certain safety margin built into the design so that some signal distortion and degradation can be tolerated. There's not a lot. A layer of dust can distort the signals enough that occasionally they will be misread at the other end of the circuit. Programs will abort for no apparent reason, files will get saved with occasional small bits of corruption, and if things get extreme your computer will start crashing unexpectedly...well, more than it does usually.

Basically, the machines aren't designed to run under dust anymore than they are under water. If anyone doubts that and is brave enough to try it, fill up a tank with distilled water, stick your computer in it, and tell us how well it works. Distilled water is an excellent insulator, but you'll find it isn't all that great at supporting computer signals.

The narcoleptic CPU
What's the second reason? Well, that's why am writing this column. I have my MacBook Pro opened up pretty frequently, installing upgrades and new components such as the hybrid hard drive last winter. I always blow out the accumulation of dust when I do that. Apparently I did not do as good a job as I thought I did last winter. A month or so ago, my MacBook Pro started shutting itself off spontaneously. It would simply go into sleep mode with no warning. I wasn't losing any data, but computer narcolepsy is really annoying. It shuts down. I wake it up. It shuts down. I wake it up. Repeat until finally it stays awake...and I'm ready to throw it across the room. (Remember my motto: never use a computer too big to throw out a window.)

After a little experimentation I deduced that it had to be a heat buildup problem. The thermal protection built into the system was intentionally putting it to sleep. That's why I wasn't losing any data, being an entirely controlled shutdown so far as the computer was concerned. It just didn't accord with my wishes.

I took the machine apart and used the better part of an entire can of compressed gas to blast every nook and cranny I could get at, paying special attention to getting the little nozzle underneath circuit boards and in corners where I might normally not. (And being very careful not to spray liquid, just gas, into the computer!)

Violating nonexistent warranties
While I was at it I pulled the DVD burner. It's the third one I've had in this machine and it had moved far beyond being merely flaky. It not only usually failed to reliably burn new discs, it often failed to read previously-burnt ones. This happens regularly on my computers. DVD burners are not trustworthy beasts. That's why I always double-verify my disks.

The system was out of warranty, so I had nothing to lose. I took a half dozen screws out of the cover on the drive, sliced through the little stickers that told me how I was violating my nonexistent warranty, and popped off the cover. There was a thin layer of dust inside the drive, not a lot, probably not enough to matter. I was able to get rid of some of it with the remainder of my can of compressed air.

Then I took a PEC Pad, wet a corner of it with optical cleaner, and gently wiped it over the lens in the read/write head in the drive. The lens looked slightly more transparent after I did that. A good sign.

Popped the cover back on the drive, put everything back together. Total time consumed, just over an hour.

It's been two months now, and my laptop hasn't shut down spontaneously once. The internal cooling fans are also cycling off more frequently.

And, wonder of wonders, my DVD burner seems to work perfectly and be completely reliable again. I've burned a good dozen discs with it, they all read perfectly fine on it and other drives I own, and the drive didn't balk once the whole time. Wouldn't have done that two months ago.

Just regained some significant functionality at very little expense. I am happy.

Too bad my iMac isn't user serviceable; its DVD drive has been getting crankier than the one in the MacBook Pro. It'll be back to the Apple Store for a warranty exchange when I can find the spare time.

Friggin' ^%#@!@$*!! unfiltered circulating air.

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column on TOP appears on Wednesdays.

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Featured Comment by Paul Ewins: "I used to work for a bank doing IT support work and often had to deal with quite filthy PCs. The worst were a set of branch servers that had been kept under desks. There were dust-bunnies inside that would have shamed the worst bachelor housekeeper. I would take them down to the loading dock, pop the sides off and blow everything out with a household vacuum cleaner. We used to joke that PCs were designed to draw dirty air in through one side, filter it carefully over all of the components then expel clean air out the other side."

Featured Comment by Dave Stewart: "I regularly fix desk/portable PCs for folk. Even if they're not having any hardware issues, I make a point of cleaning their machines out, as most are wary of looking inside. It can also be a useful exercise to educate the owners. Shoving the box on the floor wasn't a good idea—dust tends to collect down there, and for one owner, so did lots of pet hairs. Looked like half a cat was inside before it blew up!

"A vacuum cleaner and an anti-static brush are useful, though go easy—make sure the computer power is switched off at the wall, and best to avoid super powerful Dyson and similar vacuums!

"Laptops/notebooks—remove the power sources, i.e. power supply and the battery, prior to working on them. Dust sometimes forms a felt-like barrier across some of the cooling fins at extracts, and getting to such areas can be 'challenging' —not for the faint-hearted. It may be possible to suck or blow some of this out from outside, but again, go easy.

"There can be numerous fans inside that will clog up, and/or seize. Be wary of poking carelessly at them as you can affect their balance. Check they're working okay after any cleaning. Do not put on any lubricant, as it will just gum up with dust.

"Kids laptops are entertaining...gloves may be required. Sticky (as in yuck!) keys, along with all manner of crumbs and other foreign objects are the norm.

"Optical drives—as a first line of defence, there have been cleaning disks available for years. These have with tiny brushes that may resolve some dust problems. Careful how you store them—don't flatten the brushes. Failing that, the old cotton bud with some optical cleaner, as outlined by Ctein above. And note the 'gently' bit; otherwise the alignment may be affected. Optical cleaner doesn't remove jam; water's best for that!"

By Ctein

Back in the early days of personal computing there was a rule of thumb that said that your perfect computer cost $5,000. Not that you had to spend anywhere near that amount of money (the Apple debuted at $666) but if you sat down and imagined your dream machine, it wound up costing about $5,000. This was by no means the most expensive computer you could buy; you could always trick out your system with ever more storage, peripherals, and insanely-expensive monitors. Truth is, you could spend twice as much before you'd run out of toys to tack on. But, $5,000 would buy you the system that most all would envy, even you.

That proved to be a remarkably durable number, although it declined a bit as computer prices continued their severe decline. In recent years, it's been hard to break the $4,000 barrier. After all, today the overwhelming majority of computers sold are under $1,000. Apple, in fact, owns almost the entire market for over-$1,000 machines, and their total market share is still measured in single digit percentages.

But thanks (if that's the word I want to be using) to the technical machinations of our friends at Other World Computing, the ante has once again been upped. By my reckoning, the perfect machine runs closer to $6,000; with the perfect monitor, $7,000. Here's how you get there:

Start off with a MacBook Pro 15" 2.2 GHz with the Hi-Res antiglare screen option. That sets you back $2,350. Don't get the 2 GHz model; there's a very substantial performance difference between the two on Photoshoppy tasks. Apple's really pumped up the innards on the faster model in other ways than just the CPU. If you don't mind bigger (I do mind) go for the 17-inch "laptop" for another $200. You better have a really big lap, though.

Those two machines scream, out of the box. They'll outun the quad-core iMac that Mike just bought. This is just the beginning, though.

Throw away Apple's pokey hard drive and replace it with OWC's 480GB SSD. That'll set you back another $1,800.

Now to the newest sweet stuff. A big advantage of desktops over laptops has been their RAM capacity. Note the past tense. OWC has figured out how to cram 16 GB of RAM into the latest MacBook Pros, equaling the RAM capacity of the iMac.

Oh man, you're going to pay for that: $1,600. Add it all up and it's quite a pretty penny. Said penny, though, gets you a system that will run rings around the aforementioned quad-core iMac. In fact it will run rings around most any stock computer out there. And it all fits in a laptop—use it at your desk or take it wherever you need to. No longer are you compromising performance to get portability.

It still loses in one way: that relatively crappy laptop display. Well, get a NEC MultiSync PA271W-BK 27" display for $1,100.

Before you complain that a good display makes it a non-portable, remember there's always my iPad trick—dual displays with studio quality, in the field.

Either way, you've got a machine that's damn near perfect. Too bad about that $7,000 part, though.

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column appears on TOP on Wednesdays.

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(But you don't need to)

By Ctein

Last summer I wrote "Why I Needed an iPad (and You Might Not)," which explains why the iPad is an invaluable tool for a traveling photographer like moi. Well, as soon as the pipeline refills, and who knows when that will be, I plan on moving to an iPad 2 (missed getting one on the opening day by 20 minutes, dagnabit). But, I think most if not all of you can safely ignore it.

There are three reasons I'm buying the new iPad 2:

1. I think this is the wave of the future and, as a writer and reviewer, it's a technology I want to stay on top of. There are also some iPhone camera apps I'm anxious to write about, like SynthCam, and the built-in camera will let me test those out, regardless of its lackluster specifications.
2. Space and weight are really at a premium in my shoulder bag. I'm right up at the absolute limit of what I can port about. The iPad 2 with its Smart Cover/stand is half the thickness and half a pound lighter than my current iPad plus its shell/stand.
3. Paula is really hot to buy my iPad, so I'll save a good part of the cost of the iPad 2.

I'd be very surprised if any of these reasons would matter enough to most of you. (Especially number three, seeing as Paula only needs one iPad.)

All the other improvements of the new iPad 2? Pretty much irrelevant.

More or less doubled processor power is nice, but honestly I haven't lacked for horsepower in my current iPad, with the exception of trying to watch HD movie files. I'm told the new iPad 2 will handle those better, but I do this maybe six times a year when I'm on an airplane. I bet it happens even less for you folks. In the meantime, anything oversize that I want to watch on my iPad, I run through Handbrake to reduce it to a manageable file. An inconvenience, to be sure, but such a minor one that I'd not be willing to throw away hundreds of dollars to avoid it.

Video-out is nice if you do presentations. I don't. How many people do? Remember that the iPad itself will almost always have a better quality screen than what you're projecting with. Unless you're showing to groups, you're better off just handing the client your iPad to look at.

If you've already got an iPad, there's little reason for you to buy into the second generation. If you haven't seen the need for an iPad, there is little in the iPad 2 which is likely to seduce you. For that matter, if you're ready to take the iPad plunge and you haven't yet, you're going to be able to buy used iPads at attractive prices—there are an awful lot of people on the same upgrade path I'm on who will have them to sell.

Will I get the iPad 3? Maybe, maybe not. I'm sure it will have its own set of cool new features, but whether any of them will matter to photographers is another matter entirely. We are not exactly the main audience.

That's my take on it: Save your money.

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column on TOP is published on Wednesdays.

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Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.