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Ctein

Wednesday, 30 November 2011

How to Review (or Buy) a Lens (or Camera)

By Ctein

'Tis the "Season of Spending"—at least that's what the radio commercials tell me. They wouldn't lie to me, would they? I thought I might devote this column to some consumerist advice. What goes through my head when I think about reviewing a product isn't a lot different from when I think about buying one.

Once some shiny bauble has caught my eye, the very first thing I contemplate is what I might do with it. Just what kind of photographs do I envision making with said lens or camera? Understand that this is a rather different question from the one of what kind of photographs I make in general. The answers to both questions may be the same. Case in point being the Olympus 45 mm ƒ/1.8 lens, which matches so closely how I see the world photographically. I use it for indoor, outdoor, low-light candid, landscape, urban/architecture, and night photography. Where I goes, it goes.

More commonly, the answers are somewhat different, and it's that specificity that informs one's decision-making around a purchase. Particular tools for particular tasks. For example, I didn't envision using the Rokinon 85 mm ƒ/1.4 lens for anything else but available light "candid" photography. Given the range of my interests, that's a fairly small subset of my photographic activities.

Which gets to my next point; can I imagine I'll be getting appropriate value for my money? That involves comparing the goals for the product with what it costs. I didn't see the Rokinon lens being generally useful to me. Had it been a $1,000 or even $500 optic, I probably would have removed it from my list. I'm not that interested in supporting my candid proclivities. $250, though, fell within the range of my "whim" budget.

Now, I know plenty of people for whom $250 is a substantial sum to spend on a whim (truth be told, it pushes a bit beyond the top end of my "whim" range). I also know plenty who'll drop $500–$2000 on a lens and not blink. They can indulge a much more expensive level of whimsy than me.

Everyone has individual comfort levels for price vs. functionality. It's one of the major ways you can legitimately disagree with a reviewer without even testing a product yourself. For instance, I rarely agree with Michael Reichman or Lloyd Chambers on what is a worthwhile purchase. Their photography budgets far exceed mine. It doesn't mean that I think their reviews are in any way inaccurate, but they're willing to throw far larger sums of money at a photographic problem that I am. Conversely, their standards are sometimes higher than mine. It's easier to complain about the rattle in your Camry when you can afford (and have driven) a Bentley.

Blog215figure1I made this photograph with a small, relatively inexpensive camera. I could have made it with a large camera...but I didn't need to.

Of course the reviewer's priorities may be different than yours, which is why it is so important to understand yours. After nearly four decades of carting around a Pentax 67, these days I put some premium on portability. Using cameras that I don't mind hauling everywhere changes what I do artistically, and I enjoy the freshness (see above).

Blog215figure2I made this photograph with a large, very expensive camera. I could not have made it with a small one. But, is the high price and inconvenience of such a camera worth it to me to make more of these photographs?

At the beginning of the year I got to use a medium-format Contax with Zeiss optics and a Phase One back for several weeks. It was great fun, and I did some really good work with it, adding several extremely fine photographs to my portfolio.

Do I want to make it my standard go-to camera kit? Oh heavens, no! Can I afford such a rig? See previous answer. Still, it has had me thinking for the better part of a year on how I might review that medium format behemoth against my Olympus Pen. Yes, it sounds like the worst apples versus oranges comparison, but after some reflection you'll see it makes a lot of sense. There's a basic consumer question in there: "I am using X; what am I missing by not moving up to Y?" Specifically for me, given that I am a smallish-camera, smallish-budget photographer, what would I gain, photographically, if I could/would get one of those medium-format rigs?

Sometimes this just breeds dissatisfaction; other times it's genuinely revelatory. Harking back to the film days, I've known of more than one photographer who, upon using a 4x5 view camera for the first time, realized they had been making themselves crazy trying to exact almost-unreasonable levels of quality from their 35mm. Many others tried it and decided they had as little interest in routinely using such an ungainly contraption as I would have relying on the Contax boat anchor.

The question, "What should I buy?" has no answers. The questions, "What can I afford?" and "What do I want to photograph with it?" do. They are your friends. Remember, shop wisely, if not too well.

Ctein

(Entirely off-topic...Steven Halpern, if you're reading this, could you please email me? I have a question about a future column for you. Thanks)

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Featured Comment by Bob Rosinsky: "I use three cameras. Each camera is one magnitude cheaper than the next. Oly Pen EPL-1: cheapest; Sony a850: not cheap; Hasselblad H2f with 39 MP multi-shot back: expensive. As a pro and a hobbyist, each of these cameras serve a purpose. My favorite camera is the Oly Pen with the 14–42mm kit lens. It's a blast being able to have a camera with me in all situations. The Sony is great for photographing dogs and environmental portraits; the 'Blad is great for commercial product photography and fine art reproduction. Every time I pick up the Oly to take a snap, my blood pressure goes down. Picking it up and viewing the world through the nifty EVF is like taking a leisurely Sunday afternoon drive. It is fun."

Featured Comment by Jeff: "Another question I ask myself, which seems implicit in your post, is 'Will I see a difference in my prints?' For me, the benefits of a new tool may not relate to different types of photos, but rather to the quality of final product, which for me is the print. Generally speaking, I see greater gains from printing hardware and software than from any new camera and/or lens combination. (Perhaps use of Leica leaves little room for improvement, but I suspect the same would hold for most top end gear.) In my film days, the priorities seemed more on the 'front end' of the chain; now with digital there is increased emphasis on the 'back end' of the workflow. Testing new print solutions is unfortunately not as easy as renting cameras or lenses; one only knows through experimentation."

Featured Comment by Michael Bearman: "Your 'whim' budget is governed by Bearman's Laws. These may be stated as follows:

  1. The amount you will spend on goods without considering the price or undertaking a cost benefit analysis is known as the spending pain threshold or 'SPT.'
  2. The SPT applies to discretionary purchases.
  3. The SPT level is proportionate to the unnecessary purchase desire or 'UPD.'
  4. The greater the UPD the higher the SPT.
  5. Importantly, the SPT is inversely proportional to absolutely necessary purchases of 'ANP.' Hence, the higher or greater the ANP the lower the SPT.
  6. Finally, the SPT converges absolutely with the ability to pay for the purchase, or 'APP.' Hence, the less you can afford the purchase, the more likely its is you are to make it and vice versa. This is known as the likelihood of purchase or 'LOP.'

"Let us test these Laws by applying them to known two goods a) my wholly unnecessary new Zeiss lens or 'NZL' and b) my wife's badly needed new dress for a wedding or 'WND.' It is safe to assume that NZL has a high UPD and WND has a high ANP. Hence, NZL SPT is greater than WND SPT. It is known that in respect of discretionary goods in December my personal APP is A$1000. As SPT converges absolutely with APP, we can assume that the difference between NZL SPT and NZL APP (being infinitesimal) is zero. It follows that NZL LOP = 100%. And because UPD is inversely proportional to APP, it follows that WND SPT (being infinitesimally small) is also zero. Hence, WND LOP = 0%.

"Hence, assuming that the NZL price = $1000 and WND price = $500, I will necessarily purchase the lens because 100% LOP = ($1,000 SPT/$1000 price) and will necessarily not purchase the new dress because 0% LOP = (0$SPT/$500 price).

"And that, Darling, is why I didn't have any choice when I bought the lens I wanted instead of the clothes you needed. Really."

Mike replies: I assume she knew you were like this when she married you? [g]

Posted on Wednesday, 30 November 2011 at 08:43 AM in Cameras, new, Ctein | | Comments (32)

Wednesday, 23 November 2011

Olympus M. Zuiko Digital ED 12mm f/2 Lens: Review

By Ctein

"You get what you pay for."

This bit of anti-consumerism is frequently trotted out as an excuse for high prices, as if it were some law of nature. It's not. Sometimes you get a lot more than what you pay for. Sometimes you get a lot less.

Blog214figure1The Olympus 12mm Micro 4/3 lens, with the focus ring pulled down
to reveal the distance and depth of field scales.

At $800, the Olympus M. Zuiko Digital ED 12mm ƒ/2 lens is a case of getting less. A lens this pricey should be great; this 12mm (equivalent to 24mm in full frame format) has too many warts and weak spots to qualify as anything more than good. Its deficiencies are serious enough that I strongly considered returning it.

The main reason I didn't is that it occupies a unique spot in the lens selection for Micro 4/3. Fast wide angles are rare; the closest competitor I know of is the Panasonic 14mm ƒ/2.5. I have the Olympus 14–42 mm kit lens, and it's a better lens than most people give it credit for. I didn't need another 14mm lens just to gain a stop. I did hanker for something wider, but, because I'm not a major wide-angle fan, I didn't yearn for one of those small-aperture, large-size wide-angle zooms.

Truth is I was looking forward to this lens almost as much as the 45mm ƒ/1.8 I reviewed last week. It would fill a conspicuous hole at the end of my focal length range, and its fast aperture would let me use it for available light work as well as nature photography, my primary activity.

The first thing I did with the lens after I got it from B&H was take it out for some field tests. When I pulled the photographs up on my computer, I was sorely disappointed. On-axis sharpness was only adequate, even at ƒ/4.5–ƒ/8. Not good. Worse, edge quality stayed mediocre at all apertures (below). I don't expect great edge quality from a 24mm-equivalent at ƒ/2. I do when it's stopped down several stops, at least if it costs as much as this lens does.

Blog214figure2This photo was made at ƒ/4.5 with my first sample of the lens. Shown below are the central and corner portions at 100% scale.

Blog214figure3Click to open 100% sections of RAW files, converted using my ACR defaults. On the left is the central portion of a photograph made at ƒ/5.6 with the Olympus 45mm ƒ/1.8 lens for comparison. By comparison, the central portion of a photograph made at ƒ/4.5 with the 12mm lens looks very soft (middle). Corner performance (right) shows clear smearing. Stopping the 12mm lens down further did not significantly improve image quality.

Allowing for the possibility that my expectations were unrealistic, I ran this past TOP's panel of experts. There was a general agreement that this was not stellar performance and that there was a fair chance I had a defective lens. Jeff Goggin, who already owned a 12mm, sent me a JPEG of one of his photos that looked a lot better than any of mine.

I exchanged my lens for a new one. The new one was a lot better. Center sharpness was very good wide open, and became excellent stopped down. Edge quality? Well, it still wasn't particularly good wide open, but I would not expect that from a 12mm ƒ/2 lens at any price. It got a lot better stopped down than my first sample did, but it never got great. Most important for me, it was only marginally acceptable in 15x20" image area prints. That's my standard size for sale. It's pushing what this camera can do, but my other lenses perform well there. This lens makes the grade, but only barely, and you better not be looking too closely at those corners:

Blog214figure4A second sample of the 12mm lens performed much better. Please note this is not a straight RAW conversion; this is a print-ready file I worked magic on in Photoshop. It illustrates the best sharpness and fine detail I can extract from this lens.

Blog214figure5100% sections of the center and corner illustrate that central performance is excellent, but the corners still show some smear, even at ƒ/7.

$800 should get me better optical quality than that.

One much-touted feature of this lens is full manual focusing. Pull back on the knurled focusing ring and it reveals a distance and depth of field scale. The focusing ring no longer free-wheels as it does in normal manual focus mode; it locks into place so that you can manually focus this lens like an ordinary camera lens. A very nice idea when you need to focus quickly; scale focusing is a valuable technique with wide-angle lenses, which benefit from generous depth of field. Fixed-position focusing rings are also easier to use than the free-wheeling kind; you quickly develop tactile feedback that lets you focus very quickly in situations where autofocus won't cut it.

Olympus's implementation of this has three big problems:

  1. The focusing ring focuses well past infinity. The end stop is at about +ƒ/4 (I'm using the depth of field marks as indicators). You can't blindly set the lens to infinity, or you'll actually be focused well beyond infinity. This kind of slop is often needed with telephoto lenses to allow for thermal expansion, but that shouldn't be an issue with a 12mm lens.
  2. If you align the infinity mark with the focus line, you're still not in focus at infinity. True infinity focus is when the infinity mark is at about –ƒ/2.8. Consequently, scale focusing isn't going to be very accurate.
  3. When you focus in this full manual mode you don't get continuous focusing, as you do in normal manual focusing where the ring free-wheels. The manual ring only provides coarse zone focusing. Focus snaps from zone to zone abruptly; the separation between zones is about the same as the separation between the focus line and the ƒ/5.6 mark. That huge jump makes it impossible to achieve either precise or accurate focus.

Blog214figure6
Full manual focus is poorly implemented. The top close-up shows the position of the distance scale when the focusing ring is turned to the full left; the lens is actually focused well beyond infinity. The middle illustration shows the ring's position at the point of best infinity focus; the infinity mark is well off the distance indicator. The lower illustration shows how much more the focusing ring needs to be rotated to change the focus by a single zone. That is a very large jump in focus.

I began to wonder if I might not have another defective lens. Jeff graciously loaned me his copy. The results are reminiscent of good news/bad news jokes:

Our two lenses perform essentially identically, so the good news is that I didn't get a second defective lens.

The bad news is that this isn't a defective lens. This seems to be as good as it gets.

Actual good news
Unexceptional image quality and an amazingly awful manual focus ring. Is there anything I can wholeheartedly praise in this lens? Yes: image stabilization.

Blog214figure7This lens shines at available light work. I made this photograph handheld at ISO 100 at ƒ/2 with an exposure time of 2/3 second. There was no light on in the dining room; the only sources of illumination were lights in other rooms. It is actually much darker in there than normal dim indoor lighting. Note how little blur there is in the 100% section on the right.

This lens is so stable that I would swear the image stabilization system in the Olympus EP-1 had been designed around it. I can handhold this lens at 1/4th second and get photos that are sharp down to the single pixel level three-quarters of the time. At 1/2 second I'm good half to a third of the time. On rare occasion, when the gods smile, I can push even further (above), although a full second seems beyond my capabilities.

If I crank the ISO up to 800 (the maximum ISO for high quality with this camera), the results become amazing, as you can see below. If I can see it, I can photograph it (assuming, of course, that "it" is standing stock still).

Blog214figure8ISO 800 at ƒ/2 and 1/2 second, handheld. It's the middle of the night; the only illumination is a street lamp up the road and the ubiquitous urban night sky illumination. The white spots in the sky aren't hot pixels, they are stars.

Blog214figure9100% sections from the frame above, showing how rock-steady the image it is. The faint white dots on the right? Those are the Pleiades! They're just barely visible in the full frame, near the top center of the frame.

For available light work, this lens is a true champion, due to its combination of acceptable wide-open image quality and unbelievable stability. Under more normal conditions, the lens is less impressive. This is not a bad lens. But it is no better than merely good, and its performance doesn't come anywhere close to justifying an $800 price tag.

For the present time, I'm keeping it. If a better fast wide-angle comes along, I won't hesitate to replace this lens. It is only its uniqueness that makes it a keeper for me.

Ctein

Olympus 12mm ƒ/2 from B&H Photo

Olympus 12mm ƒ/2 from Amazon.com

Olympus 12mm ƒ/2 from Amazon U.K.

Ctein's regular weekly column appears every Wednesday on TOP.

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Featured Comment by Jeffrey Goggin: "While I agree with most of what Ctein says about this lens factually, I disagree with him a bit as to a few of his subjective statements of opinion.

"For a start, $800 doesn’t strike me as ridiculously expensive for a lens, at least not these days. I have paid quite a bit more than that for several of them over the past three years, including the Olympus 4/3-format 7–14mm and 14–35mm zooms I happily use with my E-P1 and other Micro 4/3 bodies, and I personally consider the 12mm ƒ/2 lens to offer good—but not great—value for the money.

"Second, the maximum size print that I can make from the average Micro 4/3 file is 12x16", slightly less than two-thirds the size of Ctein’s preferred 15x20" prints. At that larger size, I am not surprised that he is less than delighted with E-P1/12mm combo’s image quality overall, but at 12x16, I find that I am generally satisfied with the quality of the results that I achieve with it.

"Third, the various focusing quirks he cites, while definitely annoying in theory, don’t seem to be nearly so annoying in practice. At least not to me; your mileage may vary, of course.

"However, I do agree that the E-P1/12mm combo handles handheld, low-light photography with considerable aplomb. Last summer, I used mine to photograph handheld inside the underground parking garage at the office building where I work and was amazed to find I could consistently capture sharp photos using shutter speeds in the 1/8 to 1/2 second range, especially when I would hold the shutter button down and capture batches of three images consecutively, as the middle one almost always proved to be slightly sharper than the other two.

"Bottom line: If you’re considering purchasing this lens, I suggest that you check it out personally and decide for yourself whether it meets your needs and/or fits your budget, rather than rely solely upon the opinions of others. And I suspect Ctein will agree with me on this point."

Featured Comment by Christina Brandon: "For those of you who haven't tried the 12mm ƒ/2, don't put your wallets away too hastily. I have had every wide-angle lens for the 4/3 and m4/3 formats—the $1800 7–14mm ƒ/4 lens (for 4/3); the $890 7–14mm ƒ/4 lens (for m4/3); the $600 9–18mm ƒ/4–5.6 lens (for 4/3) and the $700 9–18mm ƒ/4–5.6 lens (for m4/3)—and this is hands-down my favorite of the bunch.

"I have had the 12mm ƒ/2 lens since July and to say I am blown away by it is an understatement. As somewhat out-of-control collectors of cameras and lenses, my husband and I have plenty of other gear for comparison, including a Nikon D3 setup, a Canon 5DMII, and lots of truly stellar manual focus legacy glass we use on the Sony NEX 5n. We both agree that this little 12mm is a gem on all fronts.

"Here's what's great about it:

  1. Image quality—By far the most important aspect of a lens to me is its image quality. Over the four months or so I've been using this lens, it has delivered consistently sharp, contrasty images under a wide variety of shooting conditions and with an equally wide variety of subjects, from portraits to architectural interiors. It's one of those lenses I feel I can depend on to give me not just good images but truly special images.
  2. Wide aperture—I love this lens for interiors in available light, and guess what—an ƒ/4 or ƒ/4–5.6 lens is not much fun to use in low light. An ƒ/2 lens makes all the difference, and it's so sharp wide open that I find myself using it at ƒ/2 for the majority of my shots.
  3. Minimum focusing distance—It's closer-focusing than any of the other wide and ultra-wide angle lenses I listed above (20 cm vs. 25 cm). This is a big deal for me as I enjoy getting in close to many of my subjects. Not only that, but an added benefit of getting in so close is that at ƒ/2 the backgrounds can be thrown significantly out of focus.
  4. Aesthetics and ergonomics—Nothing to forgive here, either! This is truly a beautiful lens to hold, use, and just gaze at.

"Do I think the $800 price tag is appropriate? You bet I do. The lenses I listed above range from $600 to $1800. The only cheaper lens is the $600 9–18mm for 4/3, and I really struggled to get sharp images with that lens, so much so that I sold it. And of course all of those other lenses are ƒ/4 or slower! I consider it a minor miracle to have such a beautiful, tiny, jewel of a lens that is both super sharp and super fast for less than $1000.

"I am scratching my head a bit about Ctein's experience with edge sharpness. I get consistent sharpness across the frame at all apertures with this lens. I can't speak to the manual focus issues he discusses, as I've only shot it in autofocus mode.

"By the way, I have the 45mm ƒ/1.8 lens as well, and while that lens is also excellent and the 'right' focal length for my way of seeing most of the time, I have to say that the 12mm would be the harder of the two to part with if I had to make a choice. It's that special."

Posted on Wednesday, 23 November 2011 at 11:25 AM in Ctein, Lenses | | Comments (44)

Wednesday, 16 November 2011

Olympus M. Zuiko Digital ED 45mm f/1.8 Lens: Review

Oly45-2
By Ctein

The Olympus 45mm ƒ/1.8 lens for Micro 4/3 is a moderately priced ($400) moderate telephoto, equivalent to 90mm in 35mm terms. I fell into lust with this lens as soon as Mike first described it last summer. It was exactly what I wanted. I decided then that if my TOP print sale did especially well, I would treat myself to some optical presents.

By the time the sale rolled around, I had decided to hell with the conditionals, I was going to buy it, regardless.

One reason is that it's a fast lens. I'm an available light photographer by inclination. Other people do great with strobes and the like; I never cottoned to them. Most of the time I don't need anything like ƒ/1.8; I'd rather be down somewhere around ƒ/4 or ƒ/5.6. But when I want it, I want it.

The other reason is that it's a longish lens. For many photographers, their focal "sweet spot" is in the 30–40mm (equivalent) range. Me, I've always been a telephoto kind of guy. When I bought my first Pentax 67, I didn't think twice about choosing the 105mm lens over the 90mm. I didn't even get a wide-angle lens for that camera until I'd been using it for well over a dozen years.

The Panasonic 20mm ƒ/1.7 lens is superb, but it's wide for my tastes. I readily adapt, but when I put the 45mm Olympus on the camera, it's just like we were made for each other. It sees the way I do. I hardly ever have the experience of immediately feeling sympatico with a piece of equipment, but this is one of those times. It's compact and lightweight to boot. I can put my Olympus Pen with this lens in the same little padded stretchy pouch I use for carrying around the camera with the Panasonic 20mm.

Optical questions
So much for physical issues. How does the lens perform optically? The key questions for me are, how good do its images look wide open, when I am in one of those available-darkness situations? And, is it uniformly excellent across the field stopped down? My portfolio prints are large: 15x20" image area. I want a lens that can keep up. Issues that are not important to me are "color rendition" of the lens and bokeh. I'm not even convinced the former matters when one photographs in raw, as I always do, and I am sufficiently insensitive to bokeh that I only notice it when it is exceptionally awful. If you wish for an evaluation of that, wait for Mike's upcoming review.

This lens exceeded any expectations I had. It is so good that it's hard to tell what aperture I'm working at except by the amount of light falloff. Wide open, the lens exhibits a bit over half a stop of falloff from center to corner, but it's down to under one third of a stop at ƒ/2.2 and below a quarter stop by ƒ/2.8. There's no focus shift that I could detect going from ƒ/1.8 to ƒ/8.

At ƒ/1.8, central sharpness is close to the camera's limit, and corner resolution is only a little worse than that. The only hint that you're working wide open is a slight softness to the edges (acutance); they are just ever so slightly smeary. Other than that, the lens is already almost as good as it gets on this camera. There is no sudden jump in image quality as you stop down, like there was with the Rokinon 85mm. It just gradually creeps up from very, very good to excellent.

Blog213figure1

This lens is phenomenal wide open. Above is the full frame; below is a 100% section from this (after you click on the image). It's a little grainy 'cause it's ISO 800.

Blog213figure2
At ƒ/2.8, photographs are visibly crisper than wide open, especially at the corners; at ƒ/4 there is very little to complain about anywhere in the field. Continuing on down to ƒ/8, the corners to pick up a bit more contrast and sharpness along the way, but it takes some really serious pixel peeping to see any differences anywhere between ƒ/4 and ƒ/8. Acutance falls off a little from that optimum range at both ƒ/2.8 and ƒ/11 (diffraction has to dominate, eventually) but you can confidently use any aperture from ƒ/2.8 to ƒ/11 and be assured of excellent results. The differences are, frankly, subtle.

Blog213figure3

Above is the full frame of this test scene. Below, 100% sections from the centers and the corners of the frames. From top to bottom, ƒ/1.8, ƒ/2.8 and ƒ/5.6 (click on the image to see it 100%).

Blog213figure4

Correction for chromatic aberration is extremely good. There is maybe one pixel's worth of lateral chromatic aberration. I didn't notice any longitudinal chromatic aberration until I started pixel-peeping for this article; then I detected just a hint of magenta-foreground/green-background longitudinal color. It is small enough that I didn't notice it before this.

What all this tells me is that this lens is a lot better than the camera. If the Micro 4/3 format survives long enough for us to see a 25–30 megapixel body, I have no doubt that this lens will still be a strong performer. This is not one of those optics where a significantly better camera body will make you long for a significantly better lens.

Blog213figure5When I'm looking for corner-to-corner uniform sharpness, this
is going to be my go-to lens.

Is there anything I can complain about in this lens? Well, I do wish it stabilized a little better. Sharpness is pretty reliable at 1/40th sec, but not so much at 1/20th. That's nice, but it's nothing to write home about. I've seen similar behavior with other lenses in this focal length range; I think maybe the image stabilization in the Olympus Pen EP-1 just doesn't optimize all that well for this focal length.

Verdict
All in all, I think this lens is worth every bit of the $400 price tag. Even if it weren't a fast lens, it would deserve accolades. It is that good.

Well, that's it for the 45mm lens (the Amazon link again—B&H is currently out of them). Next week I'll be reviewing the Olympus 12mm ƒ/2. If you've been thinking about buying one of those, you may want to hold off until you read my review (that's what English majors call foreshadowing). Until next time....

Ctein

ADDENDUM by Mike: Peter Vagt, in the Comments, asked to see a picture of the lens on a camera, so I made a quick snap of mine on a Panasonic G3. Subjectively speaking I'd say the 45mm is about the size of a 50mm Summicron, but quite a bit lighter.

Oly45oncamera

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Posted on Wednesday, 16 November 2011 at 01:18 PM in Ctein, Lenses | | Comments (42)

Wednesday, 09 November 2011

Time for a Poll

If you're a regular reader, you can help us with a process issue—

Assuming you read and enjoy Ctein's weekly column—and without going back and reviewing or performing analytics—what is your gut sense of how often he writes about topics directly relevant to photography?

Again, please don't answer if you don't usually read and enjoy his column. Thanks for your help!

And how often do you want him to write about photography-related topics?

Posted on Wednesday, 09 November 2011 at 05:29 PM in Blog Notes, Ctein | | Comments (29)

The Not-So-Slippery-Slope of Piracy

By Ctein

Okay, this time I'm going to make you guys do the heavy lifting. I have a serious essay question for you. Please, no flip answers. Don't worry, it won't determine your final grade...but it might re-determine your outlook.

When I wrote my columns about converting vinyl to digital couple of months back (Part I and Part II), I truly didn't expect so many of the comments to focus on the (minor!) intellectual property (IP) aspects of the matter. Clearly, interest in that subject is nearly insatiable.

So here's my question to you: what would you do?

Here's the scenario: Imagine that you have hundreds of vinyl records. You have digitized all the music on those records. Your next step is to dispose of the records. Half of the records in question are not available as new purchases in any medium, vinyl, CD, or download (in other words, out of print). What's your next step?

Before you start dashing off your remarks, please read the entire rest of this column.

Some things you may want to think about before writing your answer (you don't have to, if you don't want to):

• Does the difference between the physical record and the music on it matter to you? Many people value the record itself, not just the music. So, when you're thinking about how to dispose of these, would you take both form and content into account?

Taking it further, does the wastefulness of throwing away physically useful property come into conflict with the rights? Should you trash a perfectly good record if not throwing it away deprives someone else of a sale?

• Does money matter? Do you feel differently if you contemplate giving the records to friends, giving them to some charity, or selling them to a record store? Does the amount of money matter? Would you feel differently if you could get $5 an album instead of 50¢ an album?

There are no right or wrong answers to these musings.

Things you perhaps shouldn't be dwelling on before writing your answer:

• Absolutism. Previously, one reader commented that if I was selling my vinyl, I might as well just steal any and all intellectual property that I wanted. That's like arguing that if I admit that I drive three or four miles over the speed limit on occasion, then I might as well drive at any old speed, even 50 miles an hour faster, heedless of safety and road conditions.

Imagine using that logic on a Highway Patrol officer the next time you're pulled over for speeding. "But officer, everyone else was going three or four miles over the speed limit, and you didn't stop them, so why shouldn't I go 30 over? The principle's the same; we're all breaking the law!"

• The Law. Music IP law is not exactly the same as IP Law for photographs, books, or software; there are some critical and important differences. When I wrote last time that I wasn't sure if I was breaking the law, I wasn't dissembling; I really don't know. I suspect I was, on the level of going 3-4 miles over the speed limit, I'd guess. But I am not an expert on music IP law. Unless you are such an expert (if you are and would care to write a short exposition on the subject, it would be extremely welcome), don't try to evaluate the legality of the situation. This isn't about what you'd argue about with Judge Judy, it's about what you'd do.

In other words, if you experience the inclination to start writing "Well, I'm no expert in music IP law, but my belief is..." lie down until the feeling goes away.

• Analogies. Because the IP laws are different for different media, trying to argue this by analogy with how you'd handle a book or a photograph or a copy of Photoshop may lead you astray. I'm not saying don't go there; most of us develop our actions and reasons from analogies with cases we are familiar with. Just be appreciative of the difference between what informs your actions and what is objectively and factually correct.

• Don't tell me what you think I should do; it's already done and I'm really not interested. I'm cleverly disguised as a responsible adult, and I thought out these matters for myself. So, no prescriptions for me or others. Just talk about what you, personally, would do and why.

That's it; have at it. Please remember to be polite and don't be contentious. Nobody's attacking you personally; no need to attack them in return. Whatever you say, there will be nothing approaching unanimity on this, possibly not even a broad consensus. It's not a vote, it's a conversation, so be as nonjudgmental as you can. We will all learn a lot more that way.

Okay, open your composition books!

Ctein

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

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Featured Comment by Tom Kwas: "Theoretically, according to IP law, you never bought the records—you bought the ability to listen to the music contained on them in perpetuity. In the past, making tape copies to preserve your originals was still legal. Ditto for CD. What was not legal was to make copies and sell them to others, or prevent the additional sales of the music to others by giving it away to them.

"The record companies did not police this stuff because, pre-CD, the copies were never considered to be near the quality of the original, so the record companies figured that sooner or later, if you liked the source music, you'd get around to buying it. Guess they weren't figuring on guys like me making copies of my jazz stuff on reel-to-reel—but only for my own use, of course.

"But, in reality, not only were the record companies supposed to be coming after you if you sold or gave away copies—you should have been able to get new copies of the record if you wore it out, for a nominal fee: something that never happened either. I've bought more than a few records more than once because I wore them out!

"You can see where the record companies have little to stand on after years of allowing the horse out of the barn, and allowing it to run down the road, and go to everyone else's barn. Hard to call 'foul' now!

"That said, what would I do? Hey, I'm the king of the needle drop, so my records mostly had tics and pops I didn't want to spend hours on cleaning up. I thought about copying my most esoteric stuff over to CD, but never planned to copy all of it. Hey, I do have a life! As lousy as it is....

"When CD reissues really got cheap, I just re-bought the stuff I wanted and chucked the records (who'd want those scratched up things?). I'm sure like everyone, about 30% of the vinyl I owned was a mystery to me why I ever thought I liked it in the first place.

"I will admit to selling my most pristine copies of Mosaic jazz records on eBay, BUT, I didn't copy them over for myself. I'll just get around to re-buying the ones I really wanted. Everything else I had could be 're-had' from the big CD discounters for literally $2.99 or less! Even though I resold the Mosaic stuff without copying, I still think it was wrong. I enjoyed them; now someone else is doing the same without more money going to the artist—and if you know jazz, you know they all need money!"

Featured Comment by Bryce Lee: "Most of not all my music is in the form of something physical; wax cylinders, 78 rpm shellac and, yes, vinyl LPs. I also have the proper equipment to play same. The compact disc or portable storage device is strictly a convenience factor, for me. My entire cassette collection (2000+) is in the process of being converted (as time and my mood allows) to, first, CD, however, it's also being converted to a solid state storage device. The recording medium tends to age over time; yet my extensive collection of VHS and Beta tapes is in fine shape. And they are not being converted to some other medium.

"And as to long term for the original items? The wax cylinders and the pre-WWII records are all destined for an audio museum after my passing along with the proper equipment to listen to them. My collection is fairly basic, although it has a very definite basis towards string and wind instruments specifically pianos and pipe organs with some harp music for good measure.

"At my age (65) figure maybe another ten to fifteen years, if I am lucky. After that my estate shall distribute the items to the appropriate museums and people. After that, does it matter?

"Yes, in one instance; even at my age of listening to an tuning pipe organs am still able to distinguish between an LP playing and a compact disc doing the same selection. The compact disc reproduction is simply not the same.

"Copyrights and similar have long been paid on the recorded music you have now.

"Keep one thing in mind; if all your saved music disappeared suddenly what would be your feelings, if any! That's the final solution, no more no less."

Featured Comment by Dave Van de Mark: "I once owned 72 feet of tightly packed shelves of premium vinyl—now down to 5 feet and representing the best of what I had purchased over many years. This remainder is almost all classical and many represent the earliest and original releases of a given composer and conductor and soloist from Mercury, RCA, EMI, and Decca. They are all very old—30 to 45 years—and all aspects—the LP, sleeve and jacket are very, very clean. Many played once only.

"I intend to sell these and will be seeking the best price I can get. Buyers of these LPs will, like me, be prizing them for not only the musical content but also for the packaging. Virtualy all the composers, conductors, orchestral members, recording teams, and producers are dead! Except for some minor reissuing of some of these on CD (and probably all of that is over too), there will probably never be more copies of these particular works of art commercially produced (and I'm including here the fine and esoteric LP reissue industry).

"I am going to copy some of these recordings and lovingly photograph the artwork and liner notes on the jackets, then sell them with absolutely no feeling I have cheated anyone."

Featured Comment by Marc Rochkind: "I don't see this a slippery slope, or a gray area, or even one where there are no right or wrong answers. You own a copy of the music, you made a second copy for yourself (both legal and ethical) to have the music in a different form, but if you give away or sell the original, you have just made your digital copy both illegal and unethical. The difference is between one person owning two copies (OK) and two people each owning a copy (not OK unless both paid for). So, the correct answer is to 1) keep the originals, or 2) destroy them, or 3) give them away or sell them and destroy the copies you made. Why did you think this was so difficult?"

Featured Comment by Anon.: "(Posting anonymously because I actually am a licensed attorney but don't feel like getting into a debate later with anyone who thinks that I was writing this as their attorney. Mike can get my name from my email address to verify that I'm an attorney quite easily.)

"United States law only looks at whether making a copy was 'fair use' at the time the copy in question was made. If you own the CDs and you format-shift the material to your iPod, the question is: is that a fair use of the copyrighted work on the CD?

"Our normal notions of 'what's fair' are often different that what we find on the books when looking at copyright law.

There's no case directly on point, but an attorney for the RIAA asserted that he thought it would be when he was answering a question from one of the Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court in the Grokster case. Given the parallels with the time-shifting activity sanctioned by that court in the Sony case (the VCR case), an answer otherwise would have been surprising. I suspect that his employer was displeased because they'd be happy to sell you another copy of 'The White Album,' but that's another story."

Posted on Wednesday, 09 November 2011 at 12:07 PM in Ctein | | Comments (76)

Wednesday, 02 November 2011

What Artists Have a Right to Expect

By Ctein

A couple of weeks back, a reader asked me if I still held to an observation I had made a while ago in one of my columns:

...Artists who hope or expect the majority of the audience to like their work needs to have their heads examined! In any mass-popular media that I can think of (photographs, books, movies, and music come to mind) I can not think of a single work or even an artist who is liked by the majority of the audience (remember that includes all sub-genres). Tastes are simply too diverse.

I still agree with what I wrote back then. It seems almost self-evident to me. So, yeah, most people won't like an artist's work. That's a lesson we all learn pretty fast.

Blog210-2figure1
You don't have to like this photo. Odds are that most of you won't. Just
be polite when you say so. An artist can't ask for more than that. But
they can and should reasonably expect no less.

What artists can expect, though, is that people should not be insulting to their faces. I don't think that's unreasonable. In fact, if Mike didn't block jerky comments from being posted, I wouldn't write for him. I don't put up with that kind of crap. Nobody should have to.

It seems like half the people on the Internet have come down with the web equivalent of Asperger's Syndrome: they think that they may blindly speak the truth as they see it with no regard to other people's feelings and that people should not take offense simply because they are speaking their mind. Well, sorry, Charlie, that's not how people work. At least, not the emotionally whole ones.

Artists can't expect everyone to like their work. But their audience also has no reason to expect the artist to accept obnoxious and gratuitously rude behavior.

I've had people politely, even regretfully tell me they didn't care for my work. I am kind and respectful towards them, because I don't expect the majority of people to like my work. I tell them they're in a majority. And I'm cool with that. This makes them feel better. Sometimes it even makes them feel better about me. And on occasion, it has made them feel better about my art. A win-win all around.

I've also had people approach me abusively, expecting me to somehow be happy for their lack of manner and grace. For them I have a form letter I came up with a long time ago, back when letters to the editor were rare and one would only occasionally get one that ran in the vein of "If Ctein knew his elbow from... then he'd know..." It reads like this:

Dear Sir or Madam,

My deepest apologies. 

I seem to have created the impression that I am obliged to respond to any and all correspondence, no matter how insulting or rude it may be. I sincerely regret any inconvenience this may have caused you.

I am not.  

Ctein

Feel free to steal it. I can tell you that on those rare occasions I feel compelled to send this to someone (less than once a year), they never, ever dare to write back.

The pen is not mightier than the sword.... But it can easily be more poisonous.

Ctein

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

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Featured Comment by Kenneth Tanaka: "Ouch! I feel like we're catching the last half of a conversation? I agree with your plea for critical civility...or at the very least silence. But you're farting in a hurricane, Ctein. We live in an ungracious age abetted by mass Internet anonymity. It's a sad answer to the old question, 'What would happen if everyone could yell at their television and be heard by the players?'

"By the way, I actually like your outside/outside image. It strikes me as a humorous challenge to our immediate visual assumptions of a wall's role and the camera's point of view. So there! Take that you #*%#@ ! ;-)"

Featured Comment by Christian Dönges: "Thank you for sharing this wonderful retort to rude comments! I almost fell out of my chair laughing. 'I am not,' indeed!"

Posted on Wednesday, 02 November 2011 at 01:47 PM in Ctein, Reflections | | Comments (63)

Wednesday, 26 October 2011

Roller Derby!

Blog210figure7

Words and photos by Ctein

This column will be filled with much name-dropping and external linking. There's a reason.

About two weeks before my just-completed trip to Minneapolis, DDB (a.k.a. David Dyer-Bennet) mentioned in an email, "I've got a crazy photo project coming up, but shortly after you've left I think: 22-Oct. Shooting the Fabulous Lorraine's roller derby team in a match. Should be fun...."

Well, Lorraine is indeed Fabulous, and a friend of mine, too, and I wasn't leaving until the 24th, so I asked DDB to ask her if I could join the fun. I kinda knew what the answer would be, but it's always polite to ask.

Blog210figure1Our very own DDB (David Dyer-Bennet) at the ready, in the "suicide zone." Made with the Rokinon 85mm.

Mind you, I haven't done any sports photography for 40 years, and DDB's got even less experience than me, but that's never stopped either of us. He's good and he's a fast learner, and I figured I'd get my chops back pretty fast. Right on both counts.

So, last Saturday DDB, Lydy, and I drove out to Eau Claire for the match.

I haven't seen roller derby since it was on TV as a kid. I loved it. I didn't like watching any other sports, still don't. I think it was the combination of skill, chaos and mayhem combined with getting to see women actually do something real and physical. A novelty when I was young, but still a delight. And still too rare. This match, in fact, was a charity bout raising money for Girls on the Run.

Blog210figure2This is what the arena looks like. No banks, so no one is gonna go up and over the rail. The photographer in me says, "Dang." The blue tape marks the outer bounds of the skating zone. It's a permeable boundary. Note DDB, left of center, there. Made with the Olympus 12mm ƒ/2 lens.

Turns out flat tracks are now the norm, not the banked ones of my youth. OK, so maybe not quite as much mayhem as I remember. We got ourselves situated in the suicide zone, which is the area just outside the blue zone the skaters are supposed to stay in. Note the phrase "supposed to"; that's why they call it the suicide zone. Hah, the closest any skater came to colliding with me, she was a good two feet away.

Continue reading "Roller Derby! " »

Posted on Wednesday, 26 October 2011 at 02:06 PM in Ctein, Shooting techniques | | Comments (20)

Wednesday, 19 October 2011

'Expose to the Right' is a Bunch of Bull

By Ctein

Got your attention, didn't I?

Unless you don't know what I'm talking about. Lucky you.

For those who haven't been force-fed this bit of dubious dogma, "Expose to the right" is a rule that asserts that to get the best quality in your digital photographs, you should push your exposure as far to the high side (the right side of the histogram) as you can without clipping the highlights.

Once upon a time, this rule made a certain amount of sense, although not as much as its proponents ever claimed. Once upon a time, digital cameras were pretty noisy beasts, and suppressing that image noise was one of the more important ways to improve image quality. Increasing exposure increases the number of photons counted, which improves accounting statistics. Hence, reduced noise. If you can do this without clipping highlights, it's a win.

These days, noise is really not a big source of image quality loss, unless you're that particular kind of photo-fetishist (see "The Photo-Fetishistic League"). Cameras and sensors are so much better. Clipped highlights, as Mike and I discussed last week, haven't gone away. It's still a big issue when trying to get real quality in a digital photograph.

The thing is, digital behaves like slide film—slide film with a really, really sharp toe. The toe of the film curve is low in contrast, so there is not a hugely abrupt transition from no detail in the highlights to a little detail. Digital is abrupt. When you hit the wall, you know you've hit the wall.

The worst thing you could do with a slide film was to blow out the highlights. Many professionals routinely underexposed their slide film to avoid this. Pictorially, the results weren't as great, but you could fix that in printing and reproduction. You couldn't fix blown highlights.

In theory, you can still use the dubious right-hand rule. Just be careful to never blow out any pixels. In practice, much easier said than done. Histograms and camera-back displays are only an approximation of what's actually in the file. Even when they aren't, highlights are frequently small enough regions of the photograph that they don't contain a statistically significant number of pixels. You may not even notice them in a histogram, and on that little screen on the back of the camera that shows you maybe one pixel in ten, highlight warnings may not show.

Blog209figure11. The original photograph was underexposed by more than a stop to maximize the amount of highlight detail it held. A straight conversion in ACR, unsurprisingly, looks quite underexposed.

Blog209figure22. For the sake of clarity in illustration, I've converted illustration 1 to black-and-white in ACR so that color doesn't distract from the important discussion.

Unless you're sure you're dealing with a low contrast subject, pushing your exposure to the high side makes it likely you'll blow highlights. If you're trying to improve your odds of getting a good exposure, pulling away from the right is a much smarter thing to do. If you know your subject is really high in contrast, pull far, far away from the right. Keep those highlights under control and let the shadows go where they may.

Of course, if you don't take steps to correct the tonal placement when you process your file, it'll look lousy. It'll be very dark, with middle-tones that look more like charcoal. Not a pretty sight. Kind of like illustrations 1 and 2.

This photograph was substantially underexposed to ensure that the highlights didn't blow out. Illustration 2 is just a desaturated version of illustration 1, because it's easier to see what I'm talking about without the confounding effects of color. Don't think this is just about black-and-white, though; blown out highlights are at least as annoying in a color photograph. Nighttime scenes like the one shown are especially high in contrast, which is why I'm using this as an illustration for the article, but the rules apply equally to normal daytime photography. This is not a special technique to be used in unusual circumstances; it should be your normal way of working.

Blog209figure3
3. Even with underexposure, there are some blown highlights, shown in red.

Even with this underexposure, there are some blown-out highlights. Illustration 3 is a screenshot from ACR with the highlight warning (bright red) turned on. In a really contrasty scene or one with glaring or specular highlights, something is likely to blow out, no matter what the exposure range of your film or sensor it is. Underexposing minimizes but doesn't always eliminate that. We can deal.

Blog209figure44. The straight-line curve and the accompanying histogram on the left are from the default conversion in ACR. The curve and histogram on the right are my custom conversion designed to compensate for the underexposure in illustration 1 and 2.

The left side of figure 4 shows the characteristic curve in ACR that I used to get illustrations 1 and 2. It's my standard default ACR setting. Below it is a histogram for illustration 2. Notice how everything is piled up near the shadow end, far from the right side. Overall, way too dark. To fix that, I used a curve setting like that on the right side of figure 4. It produces the histogram below that curve, and illustration 5 shows what the picture looks like with that curve applied.

Blog209figure55. The same photograph as converted with a custom curve. Good tonality, good shadow separation, and no harsh highlight transitions.

That curve has three major benefits. Obviously, it restores the overall tonality of the photograph to something normal without adding more blown highlights. Next, it produces good contrast and separation in the shadows, where it is hard for the human eye to see tonal differences. We see shadow differentiation in prints poorly, so some extra contrast down there is a good thing.

The third benefit, and it's a huge one, is the rolloff in the shoulder of the curve, lowering highlight contrast. That means that what blown highlights are left don't jump out as harsh white blotches; the highlight detail just gradually fades out into white, the same way it does in a well-made darkroom print.

If you really can't stand the idea of any additional noise in your photographs, run a noise reduction plug-in on the image. You won't need a very strong setting; the noise difference between a normally exposed and an underexposed digital photograph is not all that great. Just a whisper of noise reduction will take the noise level down to where it would have been if you'd exposed normally or even to the right.

Just, whatever you do, don't expose to the right unless you're absolutely positive there are no highlights to get blown. It was a questionable rule to begin with; these days I call it downright dangerous.

Ctein

Ctein, who is a high-end custom printer among other things, writes a regular weekly column on TOP that appears on Wednesdays.

Editor's Note: Several readers have referenced an article I was not aware of on The Luminous-Landscape about ETTR. That article was published in 2003, when, as Ctein acknowledges, ETTR made more practical sense. From 2003 to 2011 has been a very long time in this particular stretch of the history of photographic technology.

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Featured Comment by Joe: "In my opinion, digital photographers have gotten way too used to using Photoshop to bring out detail in the shadows.

"A few years ago I visited a wonderful exhibition in Tucson, at the Center for Creative Photography, of some of the great New York City street photographers, mostly vintage prints from the mid 20th Century. And it turned out to be an eye-opening experience for me, because it reminded me that photo printers didn't used to fear the shadows. There was lots of detail in the highlights, but those blacks were black. Whole swaths of those prints were completely without detail. And they were just stunningly gorgeous.

"That was the end of my expose-to-the-right period."

Featured Comment by Niels Geuze: "I have learned to expose the subject right."

Featured Comment by Bill Pierce: ""I used to feel terribly guilty not exposing to the right, just exposing the same way I did shooting an ungodly amount of slide film over the years. Thanks to Ctein my sin has been washed away and I feel whole again (and I’m often using a handheld incident meter that favors exposure for the highlights)."

Pierce, as he's known to his friends, wrote the "Nuts and Bolts" column at The Digital Journalist from 2006 to 2010. —Ed.

Posted on Wednesday, 19 October 2011 at 11:04 AM in Ctein, Printers and Printing | | Comments (119)

Thursday, 06 October 2011

These Are the Voyages... (Very OT)

Blog207figure3 Stewart Brand and Dr. Mae Jemison chaired two of the paper tracks

By Ctein

Last weekend I attended the 100 Year Starship Study (100 YSS) public conference. Its three-day mission? To figure out what it will take for humanity to launch a starship 100 years from now.

Initiated* by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 100 YSS was created by David Neyland, director of the Tactical Technology Office of DARPA, along with Pete Worden, director of NASA Ames Research Center. Having created said baby, it's now being put out for adoption. That's the DARPA way.

Now NASA's interest we can understand, but why DARPA?

Space has always been important to DARPA. In fact Eisenhower started DARPA (back then just ARPA) in direct response to Sputnik.

Is a starship germane to present-day DARPA? Not likely, but the approaches and solutions to the problems of biosystems, energy, food, long-duration missions, building durable organizations that can stay focused for more than an election, and so on...those are all problems that interest DARPA.

DARPA's also interested in the fringe benefits. The year 1969 hosted the first human mission to the moon and the first message sent over a blue-sky, military-driven kludge of a computer called ARPAnet.

Yup, these are the folks who invented the Internet. (And, no, Al Gore never claimed he invented it—that is a politico-urban myth. But it has made for a lot of good jokes.)

OK, that's the background. 100 YSS had 1300 registrants, over half of whom showed up (there were two other major space science conferences happening in the same time frame. There need to be more weekends in a year.)

Blog207figure2 A small circle of SF friends included Gerry Nordley and Joe Haldeman

Interestingly, I knew almost none of them. OK, I knew a fair number of the speakers, especially the nuts and bolts guys (and they were almost all guys). And, of course, pretty much all the SF authors. But, among the attendees, I saw hardly any faces I recognized. Not that I know everyone in the SF community, but I know a fair cross-section, especially among the core groups.

That is to say, this was not your usual sci-fi crowd.

Continue reading "These Are the Voyages... (Very OT)" »

Posted on Thursday, 06 October 2011 at 04:14 PM in Ctein, Off-topic posts | | Comments (34)

Thursday, 29 September 2011

Introduction to Digital Printing Part II

By Ctein

This is the second of several aperiodic columns on getting started in digital printing. Mike asked me if I would do some articles geared toward those who haven't done any serious digital printing or are just getting into it, and I agreed that was a good idea, so here we go. It doesn't matter if you have wet darkroom experience or not. You're encouraged to reread the previous column and its comments before posting questions and comments to this one, as many related matters have already been addressed.

In the first column of this series I told you about all the things you shouldn't be taking into consideration when getting a printer. Now, we'll start talking about what you should be taking into consideration. To begin with, you need to figure out what you're going to be doing with it over the next year or so. That's hard to do when you haven't even started printing yet, but I'll try to walk you through it. A mistake is not fatal; it just means you might be buying another printer sooner than you expected.

I would not recommend getting anything that only prints smaller than 8.5x11 inches. Even if you're expecting that you'll only want wallet-size or 5x7 prints, get the bigger printer. The smaller, special-purpose printers are not cheaper to buy, and you'll be surprised to discover how much you like being able to do 8x10s on occasion. Furthermore, when it comes time to calibrate your printer (and you're likely to do that, if you follow my advice), you'll find that most calibration services and systems assume you can print out an 8.5x11 sheet.

Do you think you'll be happy for the time being making 8x10 prints? Then you don't need a printer that handles anything larger than letter-size paper. Do you have a serious hankering for 11x14? Then you're going to need a 13-inch wide printer. Sixteen by twenties? You'll have to move up to a 17-inch printer. Bigger still? Okay, you don't sound like a novice to me.

As a very broad rule, the smaller and cheaper the printer, the less durable it will be. Whether that really matters depends on how much printing you expect to be doing, week after week. If you average 10 8x10s a week, that's still only 500 prints a year. A printer that's good for a few thousand prints will very probably outlast your interest in that particular printer.

If you're really certain you're going to be giving the printer heavy use, look to one of those larger, more professional models. As I explained in my column on the Epson 3880 (a 17-inch professional printer), you can even save money by buying a much more expensive printer, if you're doing a large volume of printing. Run the numbers for yourself and see what makes sense. Ultimately, it's up to you: you can buy more printer than you need at the moment, in the expectation you'll take advantage of it later, or buy no more printer than you need right now and assume you'll buy a more expensive one when the time comes.

Don't forget about space! A bigger, larger-format printer requires a lot more room to run. The physical box will be larger and you'll need more space in front of and/or behind the printer as the larger sheets of paper travel through. The biggest reason why I got the 3880 printer instead of the 4880 was that I couldn't figure out how to make the 4880 printer fit in my office.

I've mentioned printing costs a couple of times. Here's the thing—some printers are a lot cheaper to run, print for print, than others; there can be more than a factor of two difference in the cost of an 8x10 print. There's no easy way to find this out! By and large the printer manufacturers won't tell you. If it's important for you to know this, you'll have to scour the various testing websites that review lots of different printers. Generally, they will have some kind of standard test suite they run that comes up with a per print cost or, equivalently, the number of prints you can expect from a set of ink cartridges.

The problem is that most printer test suites won't be testing for what you're interested in: a full-coverage, highest-quality photographic print. So you can't take their numbers as absolutes, only as relative data. It's a pretty safe bet that if some testing site says Printer X costs half as much to run as Printer Y, that will hold true for you. Think of it like automobile mileage tests: you don't expect to get the same mileage the tester did in the review, but so long as the testing is consistent from automobile to automobile you can tell which cars will be likely to deliver you better mileage. Don't try to compare results between sites unless you know they're running the same test suite.

Don't ask me what a good site is for this information or which printers are the most economical to run. I don't know. I'll bet you one of our readers does, though. Check the comments.

Fine, you bought your printer, set it up, installed the drivers, and it's playing nicely with your computer. What do you do next? That'll be the subject of Part III, coming soon (for some value of "soon") to a website near you.

Meanwhile, next week I'll go waaaaay off topic, when I report on DARPA's 100 Year Starship conference. Today, it's off to Orlando for me.

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column, posted a day late this week (not Ctein's fault), usually appears on Wednesdays.

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Posted on Thursday, 29 September 2011 at 10:04 AM in Ctein, Printers and Printing | | Comments (21)

Wednesday, 21 September 2011

Size Doesn't / Does Matter

By Ctein

The recent spate of camera announcements has brought forth many half-informed comments about sensor sizes and pixel counts. Let's clear some stuff up.

You can make great, as in fully professional quality, photographs with small sensors. I'm not talking about artistic subjectivity, I'm talking about objective technical quality. Now, just as with small-format film cameras (read: 35mm) they're not going to be the best choice under every single circumstance. Some subjects or working styles simply demand a camera with humongous real estate. No argument. My disagreement is with those who say it's not possible to do professional work with small sensors, stating it like some law of nature rather than their personal preference. Plainly and simply wrong.

Continue reading "Size Doesn't / Does Matter" »

Posted on Wednesday, 21 September 2011 at 01:08 PM in Ctein, Photo-tech | | Comments (54)

Wednesday, 14 September 2011

When Good Profiles Turn Bad

By Ctein

Last week I wrote about a problem I was having getting good prints of my Apollo/Soyuz in Floodlights photograph. You can read that column here; the condensed version is that I couldn't get the flood light beams to print out with smooth and even gradients unless I turned off color management and handed over the rendering to the Epson 3880 printer driver.

Several readers suggested that this was a problem with out-of-gamut colors, an idea I rejected because the gamut preview in Photoshop told me that everything in that photograph was well within my printer's color range.

Well, I'm un-rejecting it. And therein lies a curious and important tale.

Blog204figure1

Mike Chaney, of QImage fame, kindly agreed to look at the file and see if he could figure out what was going wrong. He observed that when he previewed the gamut for a different printer that he happened to have, he did see out-of-gamut colors, something like the preview above. Their locations aligned pretty well with the harsh breaks that I was seeing in my print's rendering. I brought Dave Polaschek (the printing engineer on Photoshop) in on the discussion, and the three of us batted it around for a bit, for, you see, I still wasn't seeing any evidence of out-of-gamut colors in my previews.

I still don't know for certain that there are out-of-gamut colors in that photograph for my printer. There's no test that I or Dave or Mike can run to determine that for certain. But it looks like a duck. And it quacks like a duck. And there are webbed footprints in just the right (or wrong) places. So we think it's a duck.

This is important because it means I can't entirely count on gamut previews to tell me if all my colors are properly printable. Neither can you. Most of the time it works pretty well. For this photograph, it failed very badly.

Does it squish?
Why doesn't gamut preview work like it's supposed to? It lies in the problem of rendering out-of-gamut colors in a pleasing way on a printer. Color films and decent digital cameras can record colors that no printer can print. Furthermore, an RGB color space like your display uses isn't a one-for-one match with the CMYK color space a printer works in. There are colors your monitor can display that can't be printed. What do you do about those colors? Well, it's that problem of squeezing a pint into a 12-ounce can, again. The only way everything is going to fit is if something squishes. Colors in your photograph that fall outside the ones the printer can print get mapped into colors that it can print.

Without getting technical about it, the software that creates the profile that color management uses has to make some assumptions about how that mapping occurs. For the sake of computation, it also has to treat some out-of-gamut colors as if they were in gamut so that it can deal with them at all. Consequently, there is not really a clear and accurate boundary in the profile or in the gamut preview between colors that are in gamut and colors that aren't. The boundary is fuzzy.

The printer, though, doesn't think so. If it gets thrown a color to print that's outside its comfort range, it will print something, but it may not do it very well. ICC profiles don't understand a particular printer's idiosyncrasies very well. The printer driver is more likely to be written to take into account said printer's foibles.

Most of the time this kind of situation won't jump up and bite you. It bit me good in this photograph. I can think of a few others I have that I've yet to print successfully where I think the same thing may be going on. I'm going to try printing them with color management off, letting the printer control color, and see if it works better.

If profiles can cause problems like this and give misleading results, why not just avoid them all the time? Because 99+% of the time, profiles won't cause problems like this, and they will render in-gamut colors much more faithfully than printer-managed color will. Printer-managed color will not produce superior color most of the time.

As I wrote previously, if you consistently get better results from printer-controlled color then full color management, something's wrong with your system. Either with your profiles, your software, or how you're using them. I can't help you fix that, I'm afraid. All I can do is give you the heads up. On occasion, though, printer-controlled color can save you from a nasty boundary condition failure.

Ctein

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

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

Posted on Wednesday, 14 September 2011 at 08:00 AM in Ctein, Printers and Printing | | Comments (26)

Wednesday, 07 September 2011

Nobody Cares How Hard I Worked—But This Is Kinda Interesting

By Ctein

Once again I'm writing about that Apollo-Soyuz photograph that's part of last week's TOP print offering and was the subject of my column, "Nobody Cares How Hard You Worked." Indeed, I had to work quite hard to get this photo to look exactly the way I wanted, but who cares? That's my business and my problem. But why I wound up working that hard turns out to be most curious, and has raised a puzzle for which our best minds (well, me, Oren Grad, and Dave Polaschek) have no answer.

Intrigued? I hope so. Me, I'm gobsmacked.

Although I've been offering this photograph as a small digital print for a half dozen years, taking it up to 17x22" meant reworking it substantially. Of import was the rendering of the floodlight beams. In a small print, they are only something of an accent. They're what make the photograph unusual, but the eye doesn't spend a lot of time lingering on them; they're a framing device for the rocket.

In a large print, the aesthetic balance shifts considerably; one really notices the beams. And, well, truth is they were never rendered that well in the small prints. The tonality was harsh; the color and luminance changes abrupt. They didn't have the delicacy you'd expect of floodlight beams. but it worked fine in a small print. In the large print, I needed to get that delicacy or it just wasn't going to work.

No problem; moving shadow detail is routine. A little tweaking of a curves adjustment layer, a little playing around with a hue/saturation layer, some masking to limit the effects to the areas I wanted. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Except this time it didn't work. I spent two days and generated over two dozen test prints on my Epson 3880, using myriad adjustment layers of all sorts, trying to wrestle those dim blue beams into being well-behaved. No matter what I did, I never got results very far from figure 1, which is a scan of one of my test prints. What was truly bizarre is that on the monitor everything looked fine. Nice smooth gradients where I wanted them. In the prints, it was harsh and ugly. Now, I know better than most that WYSIWYG ["what you see is what you get" —Ed.] is a lie. The monitor doesn't look like the print. But it's usually some reasonable approximation.

Blog201figure1 1. This is a scan of a test print made with a custom profile. Observe how abruptly the floodlight beams fade out and change hue.

This wasn't even close. I was getting harsh print transitions such as if the colors were going out of gamut, but the gamut warnings were all saying it was fine. Be that as it may, the prints just wouldn't look anything like what was on the screen, and I couldn't figure out how to fake the values and colors to make the print look good.

After two days I gave up, set that photograph aside, and went to work on one of the others. Came back to it in two days and thought to myself, "Well, maybe there is a 'hole' in my profile." The thing about custom profiles is that they can't fix everything perfectly, and they emphasize fixing some colors better than others. Furthermore, printers will often have a sour spot in their color rendition somewhere down deep in the shadows where you won't usually notice. The Epson 2200, for example, was really bad about deep forest greens. After I got a well-made custom profile for it, it behaved beautifully.

Maybe the 3880 had a weak spot in the deep blues that I hadn't noticed before. I have the tools to deal with that; not only can I generate custom profiles, but I can hand the profiler specific photographs and tell it to make sure that the dominant colors in those photographs get extra special attention. And that's what I did.

The test print I ran out with my new, customized profile looked a bit different—but it didn't look any better! Okay, maybe my profiling system is broken. Let's try printing out the photograph using some of the Epson canned profiles that came with the printer.

They, too, looked a little different. And they were still all very wrong in fundamentally the same way.

At this point I'm starting to wonder if I might not have some kind of weird printer problem. When all the profiles print out bad in roughly the same way, no matter the source, that says it ain't the profiles. Let's get as much extraneous stuff out of the loop as possible and see what's going on. I turned off color management in Photoshop printing, telling it to let the printer manage the color. Then I turned off ColorSync in the Epson printer control panel and told it to use "Epson Color Controls" instead. That kept Mac OS from assigning a profile. I told the printer to use AdobeRGB color and let it loose. Now I'd get to see exactly what was wrong, unmassaged by custom profiles or Photoshop.

Blog201figure2 2. This is a scan of a test print made with printer-managed color.
Now the floodlight beams look great!

The print looked fabulous (figure 2). I got gorgeous, smooth, delicate gradients in the floodlight beams that looked just like what I was seeing on my monitor.

What the %$#@!!!

Blog201figure3 3. If you're having trouble seeing the differences between figures 1 and 2,
I've marked up this JPEG to show where there are harsh breaks
in the rendering in figure 1.

I have never, ever before in my life seen a situation where the standard, unmanaged printer driver did a better job of rendering tone and color than a good profiled workflow. Not even a little better, to boot. It was spectacularly better.

That's when I e-mailed Dave and Oren. I made a test file available to Oren, who also owns an Epson 3880 printer. He ran a couple of quick prints out, using one of his profiles and printer-managed color. He got essentially the same result I did. The printer made a good print, the profile made a lousy one. That was doubly important. First, it proved I wasn't making some stupid "is it plugged in" mistake (I still do that on occasion). Second, I'm running Mac OS and Oren is running Windows, so our printing chains have absolutely nothing in common; all the code is different. If this is a bug in how profiles get handled, or in Photoshop, the OS or the rendering engines, it's exactly the same bug in both platforms. That's beyond unlikely.

We're stumped. The colors aren't close to being out of gamut. Eight-bit versus 16-bit printing makes no difference. The OS doesn't make any difference. The actual profile doesn't make any difference. What does make a difference is letting the printer and printer driver have their own head and go whichever way they want to.

We have no idea why this works.

Put on your thinking caps. It's a fine mystery.

Ctein

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

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

Posted on Wednesday, 07 September 2011 at 10:14 AM in Ctein, Printers and Printing | | Comments (74)

Wednesday, 31 August 2011

To Talk of Many Things: Of Digital and Dye Transfer Prints

By Ctein

No cabbages and Kings, I'm afraid. That would be Off Topic. And besides, I am not The Walrus. Still, the question remains...what's the better printing medium for photographs, dye transfer or digital inkjet?

Many would think that putting digital prints and dye transfers into the same conversation (not to mention the same sentence) would be worse than comparing apples and oranges. More like comparing apples and sea anemones. I would disagree.

I wouldn't be alone in that. Talk to folks like Joe Holmes and Charlie Cramer, who gave up the most exalted of darkroom skills to take up digital printing. I'm on the same path; I just haven't quite gotten away from the darkroom entirely yet. If I wasn't still making money off of my dye transfer chops, I would've folded up that tent long ago.

Here's the thing: while dye transfer prints have an undeniable cachet, and so command exalted prices, they are not, artistically and aesthetically, obviously superior to digital inkjet prints (marketability and artistic superiority have at best a tenuous connection). There are distinct differences, and that's the subject of this column, but it doesn't denote clear superiority, any more than oil paintings are superior to watercolors.

Pullquote I noodled around casually with digital printing for a long time (um, 30 years?) before I took it up seriously in the middle of the last decade. The first real challenge I gave myself was to duplicate my Scotland dye transfer portfolio (one of the photographs from which is being offered in the current sale) as digital prints. I was surprised—in about half the cases, I liked the digital prints as much as I liked the dye transfers. They didn't necessarily look exactly the same, but they made me equally happy. In about a third of the cases, the dye transfer prints were clearly superior. In the remaining one sixth, the digital prints were clearly superior. Understand, that's an entirely subjective judgment, made by yours truly. You might not feel the same way. But it's my art were talking about, so it is unlikely that anyone else is better qualified to decide.

The broad equivalency in quality surprised me, given my decades of serious experience with dye transfer printing, versus a handful of years with digital printing. The explanation, though, is pretty straightforward. When it comes to inherent qualities of the medium, such as density range and color gamut, there's little out there that can beat dye transfer. It can render up to a 3.0 density unit range in a print, with a correspondingly huge color space. It's got richness. What gives digital its edge is technique. It can't render as long a tonal range or as large a color space as dye transfer, but, within the range that it can portray, the skilled printer has much, much more control over the precise and exact rendering of tones and colors than is possible in the darkroom. Dye transfer gives the printer immensely more control over the appearance of the print that any other darkroom process, but it's positively crude next to Photoshop.

Medium matters
On average, it's a wash. What about when it's not? That's where the medium matters. That one third of my photographs that I thought looked distinctly better as dye transfer prints were ones that depended upon rich shadow detail with an exquisite rendering of dark tone and color. As an example, my Jewels of Kilauea series (starting here) has so far mostly resisted successful interpretation as digital prints. Too many of the photographs depend on shadow detail that goes on forever to give them a feeling of depth and three-dimensionality. I simply haven't yet figured out a way to work around that, artistically, in any other medium than dye transfer. I may eventually get there, but it's a tough nut to crack.

Conversely, photographs that depend on precise control of characteristic curve shapes, especially in the highlights, work better as digital prints. The reason is that it is extremely hard to control the shape of the toe and the shoulder in the characteristic curves of darkroom materials, although it's pretty easy to mess with the midrange. In particular, getting a clean, linear rendition of tone and color in highlights is nearly impossible. Consequently a photograph like this one looks much better as a digital print than a dye transfer and comes much closer to the look I hoped for in the photograph.

It's not just about obvious highlights, either. In color printing, any hue close to a primary has a "highlight" in one or more of the color channels. This photograph may lack an obvious white, but those delicate verdant greens have almost no magenta in them; we're up on the highlight portion of that channel's curve. It's the very slight differences in magenta tones that make a difference in the shades of green. The delicacy and accuracy of color separation I saw in the original scene is far better portrayed in a digital print than a dye transfer, as lovely as the dye transfer may be.

Painting this question in broad strokes, if I have a photograph where really rich separation in the deepest shadows is important, dye transfer is going to produce a better print. If I have a photograph where precise control and high accuracy in the highlights or very near the primary colors is most important, digital is going to produce a better print. Sometimes I can get them surprisingly close. Otherwise, they will be equally good, artistically, although not necessarily the same.

Ctein

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

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

Posted on Wednesday, 31 August 2011 at 01:33 PM in Ctein, Printers and Printing | | Comments (18)

Sunday, 28 August 2011

Summer Print Offer: Ctein's Big Digital Print Sale

CteinApolloSoyuz-800 Ctein, Apollo-Soyuz in Floodlights, Cape Canaveral, 1975

UPDATE, Sept. 2, 2011: Sale has ended.

Conclusion first: Our sales run for five days only, in this case starting now and ending on Friday at noon. Here's the direct link to the sale page [Link removed—sale ended 12 noon CST Friday, September 2, 2011]. Also as usual, the prices for these 17x22" Ultrachrome prints are low, barely more than you'd pay for a fine poster. The first print is only $140. (That's 1/2 the normal price Ctein charges.) The second print is $125, the third $110, and the fourth only $95. That goes for multiples of the same print, different prints, or any combination of the two.

More about our mad method later.

By popular demand: Like many of our sales, this one was essentially suggested by readers. Ctein, whose regular weekly column appears here on TOP on Wednesdays, wrote about one of the most difficult photographs he had ever made,"Apollo-Soyuz in Floodlights, Cape Canaveral, 1975" (above), in a column called No One Cares How Hard You Worked. Many readers asked for the opportunity to buy a print of this image. Good call, too: the print is stunning, with an impact only suggested by the on-screen JPEG.

CteinSwamp-800 Swamp with Lilypads Near Loch Sionascag, Scotland, 1995

More pictures: Ctein's previous sales have been among our most popular, but this one is the first one in which he hasn't offered prints made with the esoteric dye transfer method in which he is expert. Accordingly, I asked him if he could provide some additional pictures from his dye transfer portfolio crafted as inkjets. Of the three we chose, he picked one and I picked two.

Turns out the "translation" from dyes to inkjets led to some very interesting technical and aesthetic issues, which Ctein and I will be discussing a bit more here on TOP in the days before the sale ends.

CteinLassenCone-800 Cinder Cone North Trail, Lassen Volcanic Park, California, 1985

Big 17 x 22" prints: The other opportunity that seemed obvious was to make these prints bigger (the dyes we had offered previously were on the small side, as large dye transfers are expensive to make). These prints are all on 17x22-inch paper with a minimum one-inch white border. They are Epson 3880 Ultrachrome prints on Ilford Galerie Gold Fibre Silk paper. Ctein, of course, is making all the prints, and they're signed and titled on the front in ink and signed and dated on the back in graphite.

To order: If you'd like to order one or more of these prints, first, go to the sale page [Link removed—sale ended 12 noon CST Friday, September 2, 2011], and send Ctein an email following his instructions. Prices including any taxes or shipping charges are given on the PayPal buttons; you'll use those buttons to determine your price even if you're not paying by PayPal (we'd actually prefer payment by check, but either way is fine). Please note that a payment without an email will not work to reserve you a print; as he explains on the sale page, the email is the essential record he needs in order to reserve a print for you.

Shipping: Shipping charges and applicable taxes are included in the prices. All print will be shipped within 31 days, and are guaranteed/insured by us; if you don't like a print or if your prints are damaged in transit (or never arrive), don't worry: you're covered. We'll refund your purchase price if you don't want to keep the print, or send you a replacement print if yours was damaged or lost.

There's no number limit on this sale. All orders made before Friday at noon will be honored. The first orders will start shipping a week from tomorrow at the latest.

The anti-art-gallery: TOP print sales are democratic, meant to provide high-quality original work for prices that are far less than you could get them for otherwise. The way we do this is simply to collect the orders and the money in advance and then fulfill the orders afterward. This allows the photographer to "mass produce" the production of the prints knowing that each one is already sold. So even though the price is much less to you than you'd pay for a single print purchased individually through a conventional gallery, the photographer still makes a nice profit on the proceedings (TOP takes 20% for hosting the sale; the rest, the other 80%, goes to the photographer. Compare this to the 50-50 or, worse, 40-60 split commonplace with bricks-and-mortar galleries).

For real: But what that means (which you also might know from our previous sales) is that when we say we're closing the sale, we really have to. On Friday at noon, we'll have a final number, and Ctein will order materials and begin work on fulfilment. As you know if you've ever made and shipped large number of prints yourself, that work is arduous and immersive, and needs to be planned. So if you're coming here for the first time from an astronomy, space enthusiast, or science fiction site or forum, please don't assume that we'll make an exception for you if you miss the Friday deadline—we can't, and don't.

At least there's no number limit for this sale, as I mentioned earlier. All orders received by Friday will be fulfilled.

CteinCrepuscular-800 Crepuscular Rays, Clear Lake, California, 1992

Art collectors without limousines: One of the most rewarding things about our sales is how many people say that our prints are the first original artwork they've ever bought. Art collectors aren't just people who keep their limousines idling in the street outside a Christie's evening auction, where the bid increments are more than most blue-collar workers will earn over the course of a lifetime. No, our sales ain't haughty, snooty, or exclusive/exclusionary. But we like that about 'em.

"Crepuscular Rays" is one of my four or five personal favorites from Ctein's dye transfer portfolio. I first used it to illustrate a column way back in my Luminous-Landscape days, and it almost became a cover of Photo Techniques magazine once upon a time. We'll have more to say about its odyssey to digital inkjet form on, I think, Thursday.

Questions? If you have any questions about any of this, please ask in the comments, and one of us will answer.

One last time, here's the link to the Print Offer page [Link removed—sale ended 12 noon CST Friday, September 2, 2011]. Please do us a favor and tell your friends about the sale! And, as ever, thanks to one and all.

Mike

ADDENDUM: A few people have reported problems sending email directly to Ctein at [email protected], via the mail link on the order page. If your order email bounces or is reported as nondeliverable, please resend it using this email address: [email protected]

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

Posted on Sunday, 28 August 2011 at 01:02 PM in Ctein, Print Offers | | Comments (8)

Wednesday, 17 August 2011

Ctein's 200th Column: Reality is Overrated (OT)

Ctein Ctein (it's pronounced "kuh-TINE") with some of his photographs

By Ctein

Welcome to the Bicentennial Celebration: This Is Ctein Column Number 200*! I felt like I needed to do something really special with this column. So, I'm going to mess with your heads. Lots.

Really.

If you thought my columns last Christmas were messing with your heads...

The Unseen World

The Unseen Universe Gets Much Weirder (Very OT!) 

...this time it's going to be a lot, lot worse.

Let me begin by explaining to you the idea of "local reality," a term used by physicists.

The first word is "local": in physics, this is actually a very strong word. For example, I can say the moon is globally a sphere, and you can confirm that for yourself just by looking at it. "Global" means that it's true taking the broad viewpoint. If I were to say the moon was "locally" a sphere, it would mean that it looks spherical at every size; no matter how close I got it would remain a perfectly shiny, perfectly spherical marble. "Local" means that we consider something to hold true everywhere, all the time, on all scales.

"Reality" means something very specific, but it's fairly commonsensical. Local reality has three characteristics:

• Causality: things happen for a reason. We may not know what the reason is, but still.... If my teacup suddenly takes off and starts flying around the room, I assume it happens for a reason. Maybe it's alien influence, maybe it's because someone put drugs in my teacup (I'll get back to that), maybe it's because I have poltergeists, maybe it's a miracle delivered to me personally by God. Something made it happen. It's hard to object to that.

• Objectivity: the things that we measure that we think are real really do have an existence independent of our imaginings. That teacup flying around the room? Unless someone has drugged my tea or I've gone insane, I assume it is there. If I make a photograph of it, I assume the photograph is real and what was photographed is real. If the tree falls in the forest, it does make the air move in a way we would hear as sound if we were there, even when no one is there.

(Lots of aspects of the world are subjective. If I ask you if you like pepperoni pizza, your answer is an objectively observable utterance, but your like or dislike of it is not.)

Like causality, objectivity is hard to disagree with. You can construct all kinds of philosophies where we are all living inside our own dreams or someone else's simulation, etc. But how many of us really believe that?

• Induction: this is a little more subtle, but we take it for granted. It's the belief that there is basically a logic to things. If we say that A always causes B and B always causes C, then A always causes C. Induction implies repeatability, which is at the heart of making any kind of an observation. I push the teacup off the table, and it falls to the floor. If I do it again (causality), and the teacup is really there and I really did push it (objectivity), then it should fall to the floor again...unless something has changed that causes it to fly around the room (back to causality).

That's what physicists mean when they talk about local reality, and it would be very hard for most of us to disagree that this is a quite sensible description of our basic experience with the world.

There's a slight problem. It's wrong. We can prove that the universe does not obey local reality and that at least one of our three assumptions has to be in error. We can do experiments in which things happen that are simply impossible according to local reality. I shall explain:

Simple logic can tell you how certain kinds of experiments will come out. Suppose I want to do a survey of cereal boxes in the supermarket. I'm going to count the total number of cereal boxes. Then I'm going to count the number of boxes that have sugar added. Finally I'm going to count the number of boxes that have no added sweeteners of any kind (those could be artificial sweeteners, sweet bits of candy or fruit, etc.; they might not be sugar). What can you tell me about the results?

It should be obvious that number of boxes that have added sugar plus the number of boxes that have no additional sweeteners of any kind must be no more than the total number of boxes of cereal on the shelf.

In general terms, Ctein's Inequality: [total items] is greater than or equal to [items with A] + [items without A thru Z]

This statement is not bulletproof. It does require some basic logic—those postulates of local reality. If the cereal boxes aren't really there or if counting them does not produce a predictable, reliable, and reproducible result, then my inequality can fail. But we would expect that in a normal, sane world, it will work.

Houston, we have a problem
Now, back to the world of physics labs rather than supermarkets.

Half a century ago, an amazing physicist named John Bell did this kind of logical analysis, figuring out what sorts of results we could expect from experiments. He came up with one called Bell's Inequality, a more sophisticated and useful version of my cereal box inequality. You can look up the details on the web. Its underlying logic demands nothing more than local reality; if that holds, Bell's Inequality applies.

In the late 1970s, a couple of physicists came up with a design for a quantum mechanics experiment that had an odd characteristic. They could calculate, using QM, what the results of the experiment should be. That prediction was in conflict with Bell's Inequality. So, of course, they ran the experiment! I do not know, but I strongly suspect that they were expecting to find a subtle flaw in quantum mechanics this way. No one thinks quantum mechanics is the be-all and end-all of physics, while local reality is awfully fundamental. So I imagine they believed the experiment would show some problem with their calculations which would lead to new, more interesting physics.

The universe threw them (and us) a curveball. Their experimental results matched their quantum mechanical calculations. The results were in violation of Bell's Inequality. In other words, the results were impossible if local reality were true.

Understand the import of that. This is not about whether or not quantum mechanics is right or wrong; quantum mechanics might very well be wrong in some way, although this experiment didn't find it. What this experiment said, though, was that local reality was unquestionably wrong.

Essentially, it was as if I had gone into the supermarket, did my cereal thing and counted that there were 38 boxes of cereal total, 23 of which had added sugar and 19 of which had no added sweeteners of any kind.

Houston, we have a problem.

First and most reasonable hypothesis: their experiment was flawed. Either their measurements were in error in some way, they were not measuring exactly what they thought they were measuring, or other factors they hadn't accounted for were intruding and messing up the experiment. That reasonable assumption hasn't panned out. In the intervening 30 years, the experiment has been refined dozens of times, and run by many different researchers.

With the advances in electronics and measuring devices, it's really at no more advanced a level today than college physics; it it might even be doable in a good high school physics lab. The results are pretty much bulletproof now—and they consistently violate local reality. Furthermore, people have come up with other experiments that measure different kinds of things that also violate Bell's Inequality.

So, it's not just one isolated case where local reality fails, although most of the time it works just fine. Regardless, reality is not supposed to be a sometimes thing. It means that we really don't understand what's going on, that our conceptual model is somehow fundamentally flawed.

So, which of our assumptions is wrong? Objectivity? Causality? Induction? Throwing out any of those makes reality a peculiar, disturbing, and very unfamiliar place. Yet we know that one of those (maybe more than one) isn't always true, it's just usually true.

Wild-ass guess
Physicists lean towards throwing out objectivity; there's already been some thought for doing that in both philosophy and quantum mechanics. But that's entirely an emotional preference born of familiarity; we really don't know. Besides which, throwing out objectivity raises those deep and nasty philosophical questions like Schrödinger's cat, and what effect does an observer have on the whole universe, and what does observer really mean when we are all part of one universe, and even more tie-your-head-in-knots conundrums.

Remarkably, physicists are starting to come up with experiments that can test which of those assumptions is wrong. That work is still in its early phases, and there is not entire agreement on the results, although it is looking like objectivity may be down for the count. Which, even if that's true, doesn't mean it's the only one of our assumptions that falls. If one of them is wrong, maybe all of them are wrong. Mildly scary thought.

What's truly astonishing, though, is that we are entering an era of experimental philosophy. Understanding the fundamental nature of experience and reality used to be limited to the great armchair theorists of our philosophy classes. Now people are actually figuring out physical experiments that may illuminate matters that we thought were entirely beyond the realm of experimentation.

Want to know my utterly wild-ass guess? I think, philosophically, we just plain have it wrong. I think we're in a stage akin to alchemy: we talk about things like "observers," "events," "measurements," and "objects" believing that these are fundamental components of reality. I think we're going to find out that they are philosophical Elementals, the equivalents of earth, air, fire, and water. They are undoubtedly real, but they'll turn out to not be fundamental building blocks of reality.

Like I said, wild-ass. And I wouldn't even try to guess what real philosophical "elements" might look like.

In 50 years, though, I think we will know something. Experimentation proceeds.

Ctein

*(There is a bit of ambiguity in the data; technically this could be construed as anywhere between Column 198 and Column 202. By my arbitrary numbering system, it is 200. It's my party, and I'll cry if I want to....)

Ctein, a physicist by training, is a photographer, parrot aficionado, sci-fi fan, and—as the author of well over 500 articles published in photography magazines over five different decades—perhaps the most experienced phototechnical writer in America. His regular weekly column on TOP, not always confined to matters photographic but usually conventionally reality-based, appears on Wednesdays.

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Featured Comment by Melv: "Eh?"

Ctein replies: I think "Whaaaaa???" might be more appropriate (g).

Featured Comment by Hugh Crawford: "I like the many-worlds interpretation with no wavefunction collapse , and not just because it was thought up by some other guy named Hugh (Everet). Flip a coin, create a universe unless it turns out that time is running backwards and you are consolidating two possible 'futures' into one 'now' I'm just glad to be in the universe where Ctein writes his off topic pieces about quantum mechanics and not golf. I just don't get golf at all."

Mike replies: It's harder than physics.

Posted on Wednesday, 17 August 2011 at 11:53 AM in Ctein, Off-topic posts | | Comments (56)

Wednesday, 10 August 2011

Introduction to Digital Printing

By Ctein

This is the first of several aperiodic [i.e., discontinuous —Ed.] columns on getting started in digital printing. Mike asked me if I would do some articles geared toward people who are just getting into it, and I agreed that was a good idea, so here we go. The intended audience is folks who haven't done any serious digital printing but would like to. It doesn't matter if you have wet darkroom experience or not. You're starting anew, regardless. Folks with considerable darkroom experience will have a leg up artistically and aesthetically, but, technique-wise, they're in the same boat as everyone else. It's a brand new learning curve.

In truth, one of the ways experienced darkroom printers get themselves in trouble is not realizing that. When they dive into digital printing expecting it to be the same, they frequently become frustrated or disillusioned with the mediocre quality of their prints. Don't let that happen to you. Accept that no matter how proficient you are in the darkroom, it will take you months to years to become really good at digital printing.

Your very first task is going to be choosing a printer. Pretty much anything made by the four major players—Epson, HP, Canon, or Kodak—will produce decent-looking color prints, as good or better as you could have made in the darkroom. Doesn't matter whether they're four-ink, six-ink, eight-ink, or ten ink; they can all produce very good results. It's all in how you use them. Most printers made by these four companies will also offer decent print permanence (to check for certain, go to the Wilhelm Research site) with some cautions that I will get to in the next column; it doesn't matter whether they use pigment-based or dye-based inks.

I'm not saying there aren't differences. I am saying that you have to be a sophisticated printer for the differences to matter. Otherwise it's like being a beginning photographer and fretting about whether you should be settling on Nikon, Canon, or Leica lenses.

If you're one of the small minority whose primary interest is black-and-white printing, you'll need to be pickier in your choices. You'll want a printer with at least two levels of black ink (normal and light) and three is even better. Your basic four-color printer or, really, any printer with only one black/gray color of ink in it is not likely to make you black and white prints you'll be happy with.

If you don't know how to research printers really carefully, stay away from the second tier companies such as Brother and Lexmark. Some of their printers are great. Some are garbage. Some produce really permanent prints. Some produce prints as ephemeral as tissue paper.

Something else to stay away from: the so-called "aftermarket" inks and papers: the stuff you see advertised that costs a fraction of what the printer manufacturers' inks and papers cost. Many of them will produce significantly poorer-looking prints. And just about every single one of them, in any combination, will produce prints that are 10 to 100 times less permanent than the manufacturers' goods.

Yes, the printer manufacturers are going to charge you an arm and a leg for print supplies. You're just going to have to learn to live with that.

There are good third-party inks and papers out there. They aren't cheap, either. Especially the papers.

My advice? Stick with the manufacturers inks, beyond question. Try the manufacturers' highest-grade photographic papers first. If you find one of them that you like pretty well, stick with it. Only look into third-party premium-quality papers if you can't find a manufacturer's paper you like.

Once you become a really good printer, then you can become a fine connoisseur of inks and papers. When you're beginning, it's like fretting about which fine wine goes best with a Happy Meal.

Does that mean I think you should just pin all the printer names on a corkboard and throw darts at them? No, but to decide what printer you should buy, you'll need to take other factors into account. That'll be the topic of my next column in this subject.

That column won't appear for several weeks, however. Next week is the occasion of my 200th TOP Column (canyabelieveit?) and I have something special planned for that one. And the week following, my next Grand TOP Print Sale begins! Stay tuned—Mike will give you the details.

Ctein

If it's Wednesday, it must be Ctein—back on schedule. Long known as an expert in fine printing, Ctein was one of the last masters of the esoteric and difficult dye transfer process, and now makes part of his living as a custom printer making inkjet prints. —MJ

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Posted on Wednesday, 10 August 2011 at 12:51 PM in Ctein, Printers and Printing | | Comments (41)

Monday, 08 August 2011

Audio O.T.: From Vinyl to Virtual—Part II

(Part I is here)

In Praise of Adobe Audition

By Ctein

As we resume...

I had digitized all 500 licorice pizzas and saved the resulting WAV files to duplicate external hard drives. Unfortunately, because of hardware/software glitches and ticks and pops in the records, I really had to listen to every transcription all the way through to make sure it was okay before I got rid of the record.

I like listening to music when I'm pixel-pushing on the computer. It turned out, pleasant surprise, that I still like 98% of what I bought decades ago. Newer tastes have expanded my musical enjoyment, but they haven't evicted the old ones. And, of course, much of the music had pleasant memory associations. Listening to 300+ hours of records took time, but it wasn't onerous.

What was onerous was doing the audio cleanup. Most of the albums were in pretty good shape, with only a handful of transients. When I would hear a tick or pop, I'd switch from Photoshop to Audacity, zoom in on the defective waveform and use the fabulous Repair tool to make it go away. Those little interruptions added about a third to the actual listening time; not a big deal.

Sadly, many albums had a lot more than a handful of problems. By way of example, here's an especially bad track (note: the wav files are about 60 MB each). Some were just inherently noisy, some had acquired too many scratches over the years. Whatever the reason, when there are dozens or hundreds of audio defects to repair, it becomes unreasonably time-consuming. Also not something I can do as a background task; the interruptions to work come too fast and furiously.

Consequently, after over two years I still had almost half the files to clean up and they were worse than what I'd completed. I was feeling frustrated. All the cheap/bundled-in click and pop filters I tried worked like they were running a lawnmower over the waveforms, chopping off peaks. They don't actually remove the noise they find, and at sensitivity settings high enough to be useful, they do major damage to the sound quality. They suck.

Continue reading "Audio O.T.: From Vinyl to Virtual—Part II" »

Posted on Monday, 08 August 2011 at 02:21 AM in Ctein, Music Notes, Software | | Comments (28)

Wednesday, 27 July 2011

Audio O.T.: From Vinyl to Virtual—Part I

By Ctein

Almost exactly three years ago, Mike wrote about finding (or not finding) stuff in his library, archiving, and so on. Free association combined with his columns about putting in new bookshelves and buying classic stereo gear made me decide to digitize all my AV stuff.

I owned about 500 record albums and 500 CDs. The CDs got listened to almost entirely on my computer or in the car. The vinyl, except for the albums that I'd put on cassette, pretty much never got listened to. I just wasn't playing music in the "living room" anymore, where the stereo, turntable, and speakers were. I doubt that I had listened to more than a dozen albums in five years; the vast majority of them hadn't been played in at least a decade. All that music, losslessly-compressed with full fidelity (flac, natch) would consume about half a terabyte. An iPod would even make the music portable. But what a lot of work.

What pushed me over the edge was the realization that once I digitized all that stuff, I could get rid of it! I don't care about vinyl albums as physical artifacts, as many people do. I only care about the music on them. Which, I must emphasize, wasn't being listened to.

You can figure out how many feet of shelf space all that music and video took up. Plus, I could sell the CDs and the vinyl. I'd clear about a buck apiece on the vinyl, twice that on the CDs. So I'd be getting back about $1500 and a lot of free space in my house! Most of said space (and some of said money) would go for additional bookshelves. Of course.

I figured less than an hour a day of my time would complete the job in a year. Well, that turned out to be totally wrong, as I'll explain. I couldn't just transcribe and convert all those record albums in the background while I was doing other things. It took more than three times as long as I thought it would.

Fortunately, my standards were modest. This is a project at which you can throw huge amounts of money, even into the low five figures, without getting into stupid-rich territory. Each incremental debit of your bank account buys you higher audio quality that is audible with sufficiently good equipment and a sufficiently good ear. Happily, I only wanted the transcriptions to sound at least as good, on equipment that I could afford, as the way the records had for me. No "golden ear" much less "golden equipment." I had an acceptable direct-drive turntable (Akai AP D210) and cartridge (Shure M91ED). I'd buy a new needle for the Shure cartridge and a couple of hard drives. A few hundred bucks.

I turned to Mike for mid-level audio advice and to my friend, Alexia, for the really tough stuff. You know how much I know about photography relative to someone who just bought their first camera last week? Well, that's Alexia's level of knowledge about computer music and audio compared to mine. Back in the mid-'80s when I was dreaming about having the power of a Cray to do image processing, she was dreaming about it for music analysis and synthesis.

Mike suggested I replace my whole cartridge. His recommendation, for less than $100, an Ortofon OMB 10. It was a winner; distinctly better sound than my Shure, which was not a bad cartridge.

I asked Alexia about data rates. Did I need to go to 96 kHz or even 192 kHz instead of 48? And what bit depth? At my middlin' level of quality, Alexia said I wouldn't be able to hear any difference between 48 kHz and 96. On the other hand, she strongly recommended 24 bits per sample. The logic is much the same as using 16 bits per color instead of eight for image processing. You can get by with eight bits of color if everything is just perfect and you're not massaging the data much. Make substantial changes, though, and there may be noticeable gaps in your histograms. The same logic applies to 16-bit audio. 24-bit ensures that you've got margin to work with when you process the audio files, and it means you don't have to be anywhere as fussy about getting the peak level set perfectly.

Alexia also told me not to trust the A-D converters built into any of my computers. They might be good...but probably not. The problem? Timing. As the old joke goes it's...

...

...Everything.

48 kHz is hardly a fast sampling rate for modern computers, but unless the interval between samples is extremely precise (fractions of a microsecond) and the sampling window kept narrow, phase and harmonic distortion creep in. No matter how fast you're sampling, poor timing will make it sound crappy.

Off to buy an A-D converter. FireWire, of course; for real-time data recording, don't want to trust a CPU-mastered bus like USB. At my level of quality, there was plausible gear under $200 from M-Audio and PreSonus. The latter's Inspire-1394 looked like just what I would need. It had audio line inputs on channels three and four, built-in RIAA compensation, and it was powered off the FireWire bus.

A mistake, at least on my Mac. First was that the built-in RIAA compensation did a really lousy job, introducing horrendous hum. Yeah, ground loop problems, but running some external gounding leads from cases-to-cases eliminating that...until I turned on the RIAA function. So it was off to buy an RIAA preamp. Fortunately they're not expensive.

Then I discovered a modest incompatibility with Audacity, the excellent freeware audio processing software. Audacity can handle input on channels three and four, but some important things like the peaking VU meters don't work. There was no way to map Inspire's line audio to channels one and two. So I switched to CuBase LE, which came bundled with the converter. Its VU meters sucked; it also had much poorer controls for cleaning up and editing the transcription than Audacity. Worst of all, I discovered it (or maybe the Inspire, could never sort that out) had an annoying tendency to lose timing synchronization if I was using the computer for much of anything else. Audio would stutter or drop out for anywhere from a fraction of a second to minutes, mid-recording. This was not a basic CPU or FireWire bus load problem; I had much extra capacity. It was a prioritization problem. Still, it meant I couldn't do the transcribing entirely in the background while doing my normal work, and it also meant I had to go back and re-record a lot of licorice after I discovered this.

Maybe all the low-to-midpriced converters have such problems. Maybe it was unique to my Mac. I bludgeoned the Inspire into doing the job and doing it well, but there were so many glitches along the way that if I had it to do over again, I'd buy something else.

Learning curve aside, the work went quickly; in spare time, I could copy 3–6 albums a day. I carefully washed each platter before transcribing it, cleaned and dusted each side when I put it on the turntable, and cleaned the stylus between sides. My records had never sounded cleaner. But they were still pretty noisy, compared to digital, anyway. I knew that was going to really bother me if I mixed together tracks from both media in my playlists.

That's when things started to go very sloooowwwwwwly.

Tune in next time to find out how I got to the right answer, Adobe Audition, by the long way around. Wish I'd known about that program when I started the project.

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column appears on TOP on Wednesdays. Note: Part II might be delayed for a few days if Mike is still on hiatus. We apologize for the interruption in service!

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Featured Comment by Nico Burns: "I wonder what the legal status of downloading a vinyl rip of a vinyl you own is...because there are high-quality rips of almost everything [i.e., on the internet —Ed.] if you know where to look."

Featured Comment by Robin P: "For the odd bits of my vinyl collection that it's hard to find on CD I had a Philips CD recorder connected to the 'tape out' of the amplifier. I recorded to CD-RW, converted to .wav on the PC and used a program called Groove Mechanic to clean up hiss, rumble and clicks. Reasonable results but no competition for many recent 'remastered' CD releases...and the whole process is so time-consuming that after initial enthusiasm the CD recorder lay unused for years and I recently sold it on eBay. Spending time rejuvenating old tape recordings of musical friends seems more justified, similar to breathing new life into old negs with a scanner and image manipulation software."

Posted on Wednesday, 27 July 2011 at 12:36 PM in Ctein, Off-topic posts | | Comments (47)

Wednesday, 20 July 2011

Your Computer Needs Cleaning!

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

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!"

Posted on Wednesday, 20 July 2011 at 02:58 PM in Computers, Ctein | | Comments (44)

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