Just six days after a Wall Street Journal article that basically boiled down to "What the Hell happened to Leica and how did they become so irrelevant in the digital age?"
Well today, Leica answered that question.
Leica came out blazing with the announcement of the 37.5 mp Leica S2 with a mid-size sensor (co-designed by Phase One) that falls between 35mm and medium format sensors. Anyone who has uses a medium format digital back can tell you it's not just the megapixels but the sensor size that counts and this is a GIANT step in the right direction.
You can read more from Leica, Professional Photographer, DP Review and British Journal of Photography.
Monday, September 22, 2008
Monday, April 28, 2008
LACIE QUADRA RAID ROCKS!
For those of you searching for a RAID solutions that's cheaper than Apple's X-Serve RAID and faster the the Sloooowbo, I mean Drobo, LaCie's Quadra RAID might just be the ticket.
Let's face it, Drobo is a bit light in the loafers when it comes to speed and built more as a "consumer" than professional enterprise storage solution.
On the other hand Apple's X-Serve RAID is big, loud and expensive. Plus it uses more power than a small emerging nation.
Well, Goldilocks, LaCie's Quadra RAID is just RIGHT...
My good friend photographer James Russell turned me on to these drives. James has been using them for a couple years now and James is ALWAYS right. If you shop Amazon you can find one loaded with 4.0 Tb of drives (which equals 2.73 Tb of RAID 5 storage after allowing for overhead and redundancy) for $1800 and change - or even less by the time you're reading this since the price of hard drives drops every 30 seconds or so...
Let's face it, Drobo is a bit light in the loafers when it comes to speed and built more as a "consumer" than professional enterprise storage solution.
On the other hand Apple's X-Serve RAID is big, loud and expensive. Plus it uses more power than a small emerging nation.
Well, Goldilocks, LaCie's Quadra RAID is just RIGHT...
My good friend photographer James Russell turned me on to these drives. James has been using them for a couple years now and James is ALWAYS right. If you shop Amazon you can find one loaded with 4.0 Tb of drives (which equals 2.73 Tb of RAID 5 storage after allowing for overhead and redundancy) for $1800 and change - or even less by the time you're reading this since the price of hard drives drops every 30 seconds or so...
SONY ALPHA 700 + CARL ZEISS LENSES
I recently had a chance to put the Sony Alpha 700 to the test on a few jobs. I can tell you that I like the lenses a LOT. The Zeiss glass reminds me of the medium format lenses that I've used for years. Sony definitely has the right idea. It's ALL about the glass. The Zeiss 24-70mm/2.8, 85mm/1.4 and 135mm/1.8 are all razor sharp, but what's hard to quantify is that not only are they sharp, but they have a great "look" that I've only seen from medium format glass.
I shot Hideki Matsui the with the Sony Alpha 700 a couple days after I got my hands on the camera. We were set up for a portrait shoot and waiting for Hideki when the Yankees PR came up to say he was doing the interview "now" and we might not get him later. Rather than tearing down one of the lights from our big set-up and dragging lighting across the stadium, I simply grabbed the Sony Alpha 700 and the Zeiss 85mm/1.4 and 135mm/1.8 lenses. These were shot in open shade under the stadium with the 135mm/1.8 wide open at 1/60 handheld at ASA 100. For the best quality, I always try to shoot at ASA 100 yet with the camera's image stabilization it was easy to keep every shot razor sharp.
I shot Hideki Matsui the with the Sony Alpha 700 a couple days after I got my hands on the camera. We were set up for a portrait shoot and waiting for Hideki when the Yankees PR came up to say he was doing the interview "now" and we might not get him later. Rather than tearing down one of the lights from our big set-up and dragging lighting across the stadium, I simply grabbed the Sony Alpha 700 and the Zeiss 85mm/1.4 and 135mm/1.8 lenses. These were shot in open shade under the stadium with the 135mm/1.8 wide open at 1/60 handheld at ASA 100. For the best quality, I always try to shoot at ASA 100 yet with the camera's image stabilization it was easy to keep every shot razor sharp.
Friday, March 21, 2008
DROBO NOT QUITE SO MUCH A SLOWBO ANYMORE
I have good news and bad news for all you Drobo users.
As many of you know I've been critical of Drobo for two glaring problems:
1. It was slow and by that I mean glacier sloooowww...
2. There was no way to create a single volume larger than 2.0Tb. Meaning if you filled it up with four 1Tb drives, it would theoretically create a 2.7Tb array after overhead and redundancy, but only 2.0 Tb of that could be in a single volume meaning that the remaining drive space was not contiguously accessible. Or in simple terms, you were screwed.
THE GOOD NEWS:
Both issues have been addressed by installing Drobo Dashboard upgrade 1.1.1 and Drobo Firmware upgrade 1.1.1. Both are available here.
THE BAD NEWS:
If you've filled your Drobo with 750Gb or 1Tb drives, you'll have to reformat your Drobo in order to take advantage of the ability to create a single volume of all the available space.
WHAT THE UPGRADES MEAN:
Drobo write speed increases nearly 50% from 680 Mb/second to 990 Mb/sec. Which is still slow compared to 3.1 Gb/sec of my eSATA drives, but 50% is still a huge speed boost. Volumes are no longer capped at 2.0 TB, they can now be created of up to 16 Tb. Since the largest drives currently available are 1 Tb drives and four 1 Tb drives create a 2.7 Tb volume, so this actually gives Drobo lots space to spare in the future.
WHAT SHOULD YOU DO?
As long as you're using Drobo for redundant storage and all of the files are backed up elsewhere, then this is a no-brainer. Bite the bullet. Install the updates and reformat your Drobo. If you aren't backed up elsewhere, shame on you. Buy another enclosure back up your data first then upgrade and transfer it back.
As many of you know I've been critical of Drobo for two glaring problems:
1. It was slow and by that I mean glacier sloooowww...
2. There was no way to create a single volume larger than 2.0Tb. Meaning if you filled it up with four 1Tb drives, it would theoretically create a 2.7Tb array after overhead and redundancy, but only 2.0 Tb of that could be in a single volume meaning that the remaining drive space was not contiguously accessible. Or in simple terms, you were screwed.
THE GOOD NEWS:
Both issues have been addressed by installing Drobo Dashboard upgrade 1.1.1 and Drobo Firmware upgrade 1.1.1. Both are available here.
THE BAD NEWS:
If you've filled your Drobo with 750Gb or 1Tb drives, you'll have to reformat your Drobo in order to take advantage of the ability to create a single volume of all the available space.
WHAT THE UPGRADES MEAN:
Drobo write speed increases nearly 50% from 680 Mb/second to 990 Mb/sec. Which is still slow compared to 3.1 Gb/sec of my eSATA drives, but 50% is still a huge speed boost. Volumes are no longer capped at 2.0 TB, they can now be created of up to 16 Tb. Since the largest drives currently available are 1 Tb drives and four 1 Tb drives create a 2.7 Tb volume, so this actually gives Drobo lots space to spare in the future.
WHAT SHOULD YOU DO?
As long as you're using Drobo for redundant storage and all of the files are backed up elsewhere, then this is a no-brainer. Bite the bullet. Install the updates and reformat your Drobo. If you aren't backed up elsewhere, shame on you. Buy another enclosure back up your data first then upgrade and transfer it back.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
HARD DRIVES 101
I'm really only about a '6' on the Geek Scale, so I'll try to make this as simple as possible.
SCALABILITY: This is Geekspeak for E-X-P-A-N-D-A-B-I-L-I-Y. You want to set-up archives that grow. Most photographers started out using single external drives, but as your archives grow, so does your collection of individual drives. A friend of mine went down this route until he had a "Great Wall of Drives" with 40 LaCies Daisy-chained with 40 individual power sources as a case study for "Fire-Code Violation."
You DON'T want to go down that road.
You also do not want to be plugging drives in and out of enclosures because you are too cheap to buy enough enclosures. 2-Bay enclosures are meant for backing up files while you are on the road. PERIOD. There is no other long-term use for them. They give you no ability to expand. You will have to add more drives in the future. Just accept it.
In your case, you have room for 3 more internal drives and that's where I'd start. You do NOT want to keep you data on you start-up drive with you applications. Get all that stuff onto a PAIR of matched internal drives - you have the space. New Egg has Western Digital 750 drives on sale for $149.
HARD DIVES TO TRUST: Seagates are great. Western Digital have shorter warranties but also hold up very well. Hitachi's are great IN a Mac, but have issues in external drives because they are very slow on start-up and can time-out in an external enclosure.
On the other hand, I've never heard good things about Maxtors so I avoid them.
LaCie doesn't make drives they buy from all of the above depending on which of the above gives them the best price on a given day, so you never know what guts your are getting. So in the words of Clint Eastwood, "You gotta ask yourself, Do you feel lucky punk?"
If you buy drives from NewEgg like I do, you'll notice they have like five identical listings with differences like "OEM" and "retail." This refers to the packaging and as one of the drive manufacturers told me, packaging has nothing to do with performance so buy the cheapest you can find since you're not going to keep the box anyway...
CONNECTION SPEED:
WICKED FAST: Fiber Optic, such as Apple X-Serve RAID. Also wicked expensive.
VERY, VERY FAST: SCSI - makes you wonder why it's all but obsolete.
VERY FAST: SATA used on most Internal Drives or SATA enclosures
KINDA FAST: Firewire 800 and USB2 - USB2 is slower than FW800 on a Mac, but faster on a PC.
NOT-SO-FAST: Firewire 400
SLOW: USB
SLOOOOOW: DROBO. Ok, I know Drobo is a drive enclosure not a connection type but for some reason it's slower that USB2 should EVER be...
EFFEN SLOW: NAS Ethernet based NAS is NASty slow. Like watching paint dry...underwater...
If you're on a Mac, no matter what kind of drives you're using, step one is formatting the drive in Disk Utility so that it's compatible with your current OS. Disk Utility can be found under Applications>Utilities>Disk Utility. I run Disk Utility to "Repair Permissions" on my boot drive every time I install or upgrade software, so I keep it in my Dock.
SCALABILITY: This is Geekspeak for E-X-P-A-N-D-A-B-I-L-I-Y. You want to set-up archives that grow. Most photographers started out using single external drives, but as your archives grow, so does your collection of individual drives. A friend of mine went down this route until he had a "Great Wall of Drives" with 40 LaCies Daisy-chained with 40 individual power sources as a case study for "Fire-Code Violation."
You DON'T want to go down that road.
You also do not want to be plugging drives in and out of enclosures because you are too cheap to buy enough enclosures. 2-Bay enclosures are meant for backing up files while you are on the road. PERIOD. There is no other long-term use for them. They give you no ability to expand. You will have to add more drives in the future. Just accept it.
In your case, you have room for 3 more internal drives and that's where I'd start. You do NOT want to keep you data on you start-up drive with you applications. Get all that stuff onto a PAIR of matched internal drives - you have the space. New Egg has Western Digital 750 drives on sale for $149.
HARD DIVES TO TRUST: Seagates are great. Western Digital have shorter warranties but also hold up very well. Hitachi's are great IN a Mac, but have issues in external drives because they are very slow on start-up and can time-out in an external enclosure.
On the other hand, I've never heard good things about Maxtors so I avoid them.
LaCie doesn't make drives they buy from all of the above depending on which of the above gives them the best price on a given day, so you never know what guts your are getting. So in the words of Clint Eastwood, "You gotta ask yourself, Do you feel lucky punk?"
If you buy drives from NewEgg like I do, you'll notice they have like five identical listings with differences like "OEM" and "retail." This refers to the packaging and as one of the drive manufacturers told me, packaging has nothing to do with performance so buy the cheapest you can find since you're not going to keep the box anyway...
CONNECTION SPEED:
WICKED FAST: Fiber Optic, such as Apple X-Serve RAID. Also wicked expensive.
VERY, VERY FAST: SCSI - makes you wonder why it's all but obsolete.
VERY FAST: SATA used on most Internal Drives or SATA enclosures
KINDA FAST: Firewire 800 and USB2 - USB2 is slower than FW800 on a Mac, but faster on a PC.
NOT-SO-FAST: Firewire 400
SLOW: USB
SLOOOOOW: DROBO. Ok, I know Drobo is a drive enclosure not a connection type but for some reason it's slower that USB2 should EVER be...
EFFEN SLOW: NAS Ethernet based NAS is NASty slow. Like watching paint dry...underwater...
If you're on a Mac, no matter what kind of drives you're using, step one is formatting the drive in Disk Utility so that it's compatible with your current OS. Disk Utility can be found under Applications>Utilities>Disk Utility. I run Disk Utility to "Repair Permissions" on my boot drive every time I install or upgrade software, so I keep it in my Dock.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Dr. Brown's Process 1-2-3
Adobe evangelist Russell Brown has brought out a lot of cool scripts - but none as sweet as his new Dr. Brown's Process 1-2-3. Available as a free download as part of Dr. Brown's Services 1.9.2 that can be found here.
Consider it an update of his very useful Image Processor on STEROIDS!
Dr. Brown's Process 1-2-3 allows you to save up to three sets of images out of Bridge as PSDs, TIFFs or JPEGs selecting color spaces for each and in any compression settings independently for each set of images. You can also run a batch action at the end of the process if for instance you wish to change from 16bit to 8bit after the converting to the final color space.
Here's where it comes in handy. My working layered files are full-Rez 16bit ProPhoto PSDs generally from a Leaf Aptus 75S. So I need to downrez and convert the color profile before delivering the files to my clients and my photo agency. But the file specs are different for each.
When submitting to magazines, I submit 8bit Tiffs in Colormatch RGB - 18 inches (5400 pixels) in the longest dimension - and I use Lossless LZW compression to make upload quicker.
My agency requests Uncompressed 8bit Tiffs in Adobe 98 - no larger than 80mb (which translates to roughly 6000 pixels in the longest dimension when shooting 4x3 format.)
Before now it was a pain to downrez two sets of files at different resolutions, different color spaces and different resolutions. Dr Brown's Process 1-2-3 makes it easy. I save both as presets that save the files in subfolders marked "Corbis" and "Magazine" in the same folder as the layered full-rez 16bit files.
Consider it an update of his very useful Image Processor on STEROIDS!
Dr. Brown's Process 1-2-3 allows you to save up to three sets of images out of Bridge as PSDs, TIFFs or JPEGs selecting color spaces for each and in any compression settings independently for each set of images. You can also run a batch action at the end of the process if for instance you wish to change from 16bit to 8bit after the converting to the final color space.
Here's where it comes in handy. My working layered files are full-Rez 16bit ProPhoto PSDs generally from a Leaf Aptus 75S. So I need to downrez and convert the color profile before delivering the files to my clients and my photo agency. But the file specs are different for each.
When submitting to magazines, I submit 8bit Tiffs in Colormatch RGB - 18 inches (5400 pixels) in the longest dimension - and I use Lossless LZW compression to make upload quicker.
My agency requests Uncompressed 8bit Tiffs in Adobe 98 - no larger than 80mb (which translates to roughly 6000 pixels in the longest dimension when shooting 4x3 format.)
Before now it was a pain to downrez two sets of files at different resolutions, different color spaces and different resolutions. Dr Brown's Process 1-2-3 makes it easy. I save both as presets that save the files in subfolders marked "Corbis" and "Magazine" in the same folder as the layered full-rez 16bit files.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Drobo Slowbo
Ok, so I caved under peer pressure and decided to test out a Drobo from Data Robotics which calls the Drobo the "World's First Storage Robot" for fully automated data storage. I ran into these guys hawking the Drobo at PDN's PhotoPlus Expo in New York and had to ask, "Is Drobo just RAID for dummies?"
Well, yes and no.
Drobo's lead engineer explained that the Drobo is designed to be extremely user friendly and take the confusion out of drive arrays. There are slots for up to four Sata hard drives. If you load 2 drives Drobo backs up data between the two drives using RAID 1, add a 3rd or 4th drive and the Drobo automatically switches to RAID 5.
So yea, basically "RAID for dummies..."
Set-up is a snap. I decided to load up four Hitachi Terabyte drives resulting in available storage of 2.72 tb. The Drobo Dashboard shows how the drives are configured and how much total storage space is created and how much of that is used. When you start it up for the first time, Drobo then formats the drives. Any drives you add in the future will automatically be ERASED and formatted.
One of the Drobo selling points is that unlike conventional RAID, drives of different sizes can be mixed together, however the largest drive will always be used for storage, so one 750gb drive mixed with three 250gb drives gives you no more storage capacity than four 250gb drives, so while it's possible to mix-and-match, it's probably best to stick to equal sized drives.
Easy set-up is the plus. What are the minuses?
Well, the Drobo is maddeningly slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwbo...
I decided test how long it would take to transfer 2.5 Tb of images from 2006-2007 from three separate drives into a single Drobo Archive. I stared with a single internal 1tb drive containing 930gb of data and using Retrospect to duplicate the files to the drobo took nearly TWO DAYS. To be precise it took 23 hours to duplicate the files and then another 23 hours more to compare the volumes as it moved at a snail's pace of 681 mb/sec
For comparison, the eSata connection of my Sonnett Fusion 500P Sata drive boxes move data more than FOUR TIMES FASTER .
So what makes the Drobo such a slowbo? The most obvious culprit for the slow speed is the whimpy USB2 connection, which was chosen for the Drobo to keep the cost down. I asked the engineer if a faster connection like eSata might be in Drobo's future and they are definitely looking into that possibility. I hope so. I'd pay for the added cost to add a eSata connection. Time is money, so eSata would make this much more valuable....On the other hand if the way that Drobo writes RAID is the reason for the slowdown, a faster connection may not do the trick.
So would I use a Drobo as a main working drive? No.
Would I consider it for back-up? Probably since the price is good and once you've copied your data onto it, incremental updates go pretty quickly.
Would I pay extra for eSata connection? Absolutely!
Well, yes and no.
Drobo's lead engineer explained that the Drobo is designed to be extremely user friendly and take the confusion out of drive arrays. There are slots for up to four Sata hard drives. If you load 2 drives Drobo backs up data between the two drives using RAID 1, add a 3rd or 4th drive and the Drobo automatically switches to RAID 5.
So yea, basically "RAID for dummies..."
Set-up is a snap. I decided to load up four Hitachi Terabyte drives resulting in available storage of 2.72 tb. The Drobo Dashboard shows how the drives are configured and how much total storage space is created and how much of that is used. When you start it up for the first time, Drobo then formats the drives. Any drives you add in the future will automatically be ERASED and formatted.
One of the Drobo selling points is that unlike conventional RAID, drives of different sizes can be mixed together, however the largest drive will always be used for storage, so one 750gb drive mixed with three 250gb drives gives you no more storage capacity than four 250gb drives, so while it's possible to mix-and-match, it's probably best to stick to equal sized drives.
Easy set-up is the plus. What are the minuses?
Well, the Drobo is maddeningly slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwbo...
I decided test how long it would take to transfer 2.5 Tb of images from 2006-2007 from three separate drives into a single Drobo Archive. I stared with a single internal 1tb drive containing 930gb of data and using Retrospect to duplicate the files to the drobo took nearly TWO DAYS. To be precise it took 23 hours to duplicate the files and then another 23 hours more to compare the volumes as it moved at a snail's pace of 681 mb/sec
For comparison, the eSata connection of my Sonnett Fusion 500P Sata drive boxes move data more than FOUR TIMES FASTER .
So what makes the Drobo such a slowbo? The most obvious culprit for the slow speed is the whimpy USB2 connection, which was chosen for the Drobo to keep the cost down. I asked the engineer if a faster connection like eSata might be in Drobo's future and they are definitely looking into that possibility. I hope so. I'd pay for the added cost to add a eSata connection. Time is money, so eSata would make this much more valuable....On the other hand if the way that Drobo writes RAID is the reason for the slowdown, a faster connection may not do the trick.
So would I use a Drobo as a main working drive? No.
Would I consider it for back-up? Probably since the price is good and once you've copied your data onto it, incremental updates go pretty quickly.
Would I pay extra for eSata connection? Absolutely!
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