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Product shown may not be actual size
Back in the spring, Valerie got the urge to add a number of fruit trees to our home – in spite of the substantial sum the prior owners of our home had spent on professional landscaping. On top of that, she was convinced that the last remaining Asian pear tree for sale was over on the far side of Seattle, and that we had to leave right now just in case someone else bought it first. But, she promised, the tree would rapidly bear lots of delicious fruit that would make it all worthwhile. I was somewhat suspicious, especially since Costco carries fairly nice Asian pears year round at a not-exorbitant price, but the non-mutual excitement level was already so high that there was only one way the story could go from here.
Well, sure enough, the tree wound up bearing fruit! And unlike the other trees and plants we have in our garden, the location of the Asian pear tree prevented the entire harvest from being lost to a mysterious combination of slugs, bugs, raccoons, rabbits, moles, birds, Leo, and who knows what else. Here’s a picture of one of the delightful fruits it produced:
Indeed, everything seems perfect until you put things in perspective a little:
Considering that the Asian pear tree is among the most successful plants in our garden, it’s safe to say that our weekly produce bill hasn’t been shrinking. But I am assured that trees need time, and that next year, things will be different :).
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Internet Weight Loss Scams
It’s been an incredibly long time since my last post – not for lack of interesting things to share, but for a number of reasons. One of those was returning from Toronto with 700 photos – after aggressively deleting while in Toronto – to process. Another was being a little busier with work. But perhaps the most significant contributor was having realized, shortly after Valerie and the kids left for Toronto a week before I did, that I weighed way too much, and really needed to do something about it. So I decided, to start, that I should try and lose 8 pounds of actual weight (not just retained water) in the 8 days before heading to Toronto, attending family dinners and a wedding, and eating myself silly again.
Now, you occasionally hear that the maximum safe rate for losing weight is 1 or 2 pounds a week, but clearly that wasn’t going to cut it here. So, what to do other than turning to the Internet for a magic low-effort solution, right? OK, not so much; I’m not too prone to believing things that seem to be against the laws of physics or chemistry, so I did some planning with simple math; 8 pounds = 28,000 excess calories, so I’d have to burn on average 3,500 a day more than I was eating. Eating less than 1,500 calories a day would likely have triggered starvation responses from my body given the higher level of physical activity; at that level of intake and my current weight, I could count on losing 1,000 a day via food, which meant losing 2,500 more a day via exercise. Anything high intensity was out, as there’s no way I could sustain than for 8 days without my muscles quitting on me, so it’d just take 4-5 hours a day of medium intensity exercise. Realistically, even with moderate breaks, it’d probably take 6 hours a day. Ouch!
Fortunately, this realization happened just after the 4th of July, so I was able to use some of the generous time off work that Google provided to get a head start, knowing that once the work week resumed, it’d be nearly impossible to find the requisite time. While I did get a good portion of the necessary exercise from walking, the sun does set, and that meant needing to use exercise machines. Fortunately, we have a really nice setup in our basement that leaves no excuse for not exercising:
Unfortunately, I hate exercise machines. Spending an extended period on them feels like torture, that’s bearable in this setup only because of the entertainment system directly in front of the exercise equipment. I managed to go through almost the entire Fullmetal Alchemist anime series, not to mention some movies and a bunch of Starcraft 2 games on this 8-day quest. And this is where the “internet scam” part of the post comes in.
About a year and a half prior, the lamp on my projector had started getting dim after roughly 2,000 hours of service – so I replaced it. I just needed a model number LMP-H200 bulb, so I did what I always do – searched for one online, and ordered a replacement. This turned out to be much more complex than usual; places like Amazon didn’t carry them directly, but there were lots of 3rd-party sellers. I chose one with a decent online rating, got my lamp, installed it, and was good to go. Or so I thought.
As it turns out, the majority of projector lamps available online are essentially 3rd-party replacements. Yet for some reason I don’t understand, they all get away with calling themselves a “Sony LMP-H200”, even though they’re not made by Sony. In many cases, even when on sites with very high reseller ratings (4.5+ stars out of 5), it’s difficult to tell whether you’re buying an original or not. The only reliable indicator seems to be the price – the original Sony products are basically $300; the knock-offs start as low as $80, but get up into the $200’s. And unfortunately, there are so many knock-offs and so many knock-off vendors, that it’s hard to tell which might be a viable solution, and which replacements are total garbage. Some claim to use exactly the same Phillips bulb in a refurbished enclosure, others try and define seemingly arbitrary terms like OEM, OEM Compatible, Genuine Compatible, etc. But fragmentation is so high, and meaningful trustworthy user feedback so low, that it’s hit and miss.
Just search Amazon for “LMP-H200”, and sort by popularity – of the 10 most popular items, 4 have no rating, 4 have a single star, one has 1.5 stars, and one has 4 stars (with a single rating). I’ve never seen a product category with such universal dissatisfaction from customers, and I’m surprised Amazon even tolerates this. These ratings aren’t reflective of people discovering “hey, this isn’t genuine” – read the comments, and it’s reflective of the products not working – or in most cases, surviving a very short period of time.
So, as I’m several days away from my 8-day goal, on target in terms of actual weight loss, the replacement bulb I bought in ignorance burns out – after just ~420 hours out of a rated 2,000-3,000 hours (my original Sony bulb was over the 2,000 hour mark when I felt like it was getting dim). It was already painful to force myself to spend all that time suffering on the machines – what would I do now? Give up? Chromebook to the rescue!
I have one of the newer Samsung Series 5 550 Chromebooks from work, and it seemed just made to fit atop the elliptical machine in my time of need. It has great Netflix performance that somehow seemed to provide all the battery life I needed without even being plugged in! My usual disclaimer, I work on the Chrome team and I’m biased, but it really was a lifesaver in not giving up on my rather arbitrary and excessive goal.
With that temporary solution in place, I was able to finish the 8 days as planned, and lose the 8 pounds the math said I would (plus a little more that I attribute to temporary reductions in water levels), allowing me to go from an outright obese weight to something merely at the high end of being overweight. Yay! Then I got to Toronto, and faced this:
It’s amazing how much easier it is to eat 28,000 calories than it is to burn them!
Most of the information on projector bulbs I shared above was from my purchase the 2nd time around. Ironically, despite the risks involved, I still wound up buying the best non-original bulb I could find, in addition to an original bulb, simply because the original bulb was on indefinite back-order (it took more than a month to arrive). If you’re interested, I bought the original replacement from Adorama; it cost almost $300 and looks like this:
Given the performance of the first original bulb I had (that came with the projector), I strongly recommend sticking with originals and avoiding the knock-offs. But I’ll post again when my temporary knock-off dies; who knows, maybe I’ll get lucky this time. But probably not!
On the health front, I’m unlikely to do something as crazy again soon – unless I manage to balloon back up in size again – but even trying to make much slower progress towards a healthy weight requires a surprising amount of time. Especially when the kids triumph in their perpetual quest to avail themselves of junk food. So I’m hoping to work through a backlog of things that I had wanted to share – we’ll see how I do!
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Ubiquitous Internet = better fireworks
I posted some 4th of July fireworks pictures on Google+, noting that I was pretty impressed that a relatively small town like Kirkland managed to put on a nice display out over the water. While you could see the bigger show going on in Seattle at a distance, what we got locally was pretty cool.
It’s been two and a half weeks since then, but I thought I’d follow up and share the rest of the pictures I took (via the slideshow/gallery link below), and mention how helpful ubiquitous Internet access was in learning the basics of how to even go about taking these shots. I don’t shoot much landscapes or scenery – our kids are my primary subject – and I don’t think I’ve ever left the house with a tripod before. But since the family, minus myself, went off to Toronto on the morning of July 4th, I had the opportunity to give it a try – plus Olivia had already started to say that she’d like to see the fireworks, even though she knew she was leaving that morning. Some of the basics – using longer exposures, keeping ISO relatively low – were sort of intuitively obvious. But at least one simple thing – using bulb mode to manually control the start and end of each exposure – helped greatly, but just isn’t something I would have thought of, since bulb mode just isn’t something I’ve really ever used. Another thing that clear in retrospect but that I didn’t figure out on my own is that like flash, the brightness of the fireworks themselves aren’t really affected by exposure time, so picking the right aperture (usually f/8 to f/11) is actually more important. One thing that’s kind of neat – shooting at base ISO and f/8 means a basic camera and kit lens would be perfectly sufficient!
So, thank you Galaxy Nexus + Chrome for Android + Google Search + experienced photographers who share freely + a lengthy wait for the fireworks to actually start – this first real attempt at this subject matter turned out much better than it would have otherwise (I say “real attempt” because I snapped some handheld shots on Canada Day a couple of years ago while holding a crying Olivia with the other hand).
(Slideshow which links to gallery below – won’t show up in RSS)
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The bag I’ve been looking for
I’ve been really bad with posting consistency recently; I finally got to a backlog of things I had meant to mention a month ago, and haven’t posted anything since. Though like last time, that’s meant there’s a queue of things I’ve been meaning to share, after which I should really try and be more consistent!
The first thing I wanted to mention is a new camera/laptop bag I picked up. I already had quite an assortment of bags:
- Think Tank Digital Holster 40 – great for walking around with the D90/D7000 or D700/D800 with a single lens attached. I use this the most, but when traveling with more than one lens it’s not ideal.
- Lowepro Rezo 180AW – small/medium shoulder back that was great with the D90/D7000 and most DX lenses, but too small for the full frame stuff I use now.
- Lowepro Classified 250AW – huge shoulder bag that also takes a laptop. Great for transporting a bunch of equipment (camera + laptop) from A to B, but is too big to lug around during the day.
- Lowepro Flipside 300 – medium backpack that holds lots of photo stuff, but doesn’t provide quick access to your camera.
I’d tried quite a few different approaches to travel, but nothing really worked well. The Classified 250AW held everything I needed, but it was just too big; most airlines limit you to one carry-on bag (up to 9″ deep) and one personal item – a laptop bag, purse, briefcase, camera bag, or other such item (up to 6″ deep). The 250AW was well over the personal item depth – in fact, it was pretty much 9″ deep if you brought much stuff! Other configurations, like just bringing the holster and sticking my laptop/lenses in a regular rollaboard worked but weren’t great. Before a combined work/personal trip to New York back in May, I went looking for a solution to this issue, and decided to try out the Tamrac Rally 7 bag (aka Tamrac 3447). It’s been great!
It’s form factor is about as minimal as you can get when carrying a laptop + camera + lenses, and while it’s technically a tad over the 6″ limit, it looks and feels like a personal item and stows easily under airplane seats. Despite this, it holds a good amount of actual equipment; I just got back from Toronto, and packed it with the following:
- 15″ Macbook Pro (which fits easily but snugly)
- Nikon D800 with a 24/1.4 lens attached (the 24-70 2.8 would also fit)
- Nikon 70-200/2.8 lens (though this wouldn’t fit if attached to the camera)
- Nikon 50/1.4 lens
- Nikon SB-800 flash
- Chargers for both the camera and laptop, mouse, keys, wallet, etc.
The shot above is with all of the above in the bag; it’s a great fit for a configuration like that. With the top flap open, it looks like this:
It’s easy to pull out the camera whenever you need it, and having done several outings with the bag now, I’m pretty happy with the purchase – especially since it was just $90 on amazon.com, which is well below what I spent on the 250AW. The bag isn’t perfect, though; the following are things I wish were done better:
- The strap is non-replaceable and the plastic ring you see on the left constantly causes the strap itself to bunch up; there’s no freely rotating rings that allow you to straighten the strap out while on your shoulder.
- There’s a thin pouch (e.g. for a magazine) on the rear, but you can’t put a rollaboard handle through that area to walk securely with this bag atop a rollaboard.
- The top handle you see in the first picture is really dinky and isn’t suitable for lifting the bag if there’s anything in it.
Despite this, the bag works really well and I’m happy with the purchase!
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Leadership vs. Management
Six years ago, when we our small company was being acquired, one of the acquiring execs asked what I guess is a fairly standard management question: what’s the difference between leadership and management? I don’t remember how I answered the question at the time, though I didn’t get sent to the basement to work on “special projects” by myself, so I probably came up with something within the boundaries of a normal answer. But now, I have a new answer.
This is Mommy, being managed by Olivia to produce a birthday cake for Leo:
Okay, it’s not the greatest looking, but that’s what going dairy-free does to a mousse cake! This is Daddy, being managed by Olivia to produce a birthday cake for Mommy:
I shared these pictures before in the Mommy Cake, Daddy Cake post. But a collaboration under Olivia’s management produced something even nicer for her birthday:
Each of these three cakes involved decreasing levels of micromanagement and direct involvement; quality seemed to increase as a result.
When it came time to make a cake for a belated birthday for Uncle Peter, Mommy decided that Olivia was finally ready to take a leadership role; she would not just supervise and direct an aging workforce bound into servitude – instead, she would lead, setting the artistic vision and inspiring others with her direct involvement in the project. The results speak for themselves:
Most answers to leadership vs. management seem to imply that leadership is what organizations need more of. I humbly submit that this isn’t always the case! Yes, those are M&Ms you see scattered in the cake. And there’s a hole through the whole middle of the cake, filled with the same custard you see in the abstract arrangement on top. It’s kind of like an exploded Boston Creme donut, in some ways.
Fortunately, Mommy had a secret backup plan that was a little yummier:
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So Many Pixels!
I continue to be amazed by the resolution that the D800 offers, perhaps because this is enhanced by something I didn’t adequately appreciate in advance – autofocus capabilities that are a step above what the D7000 offered. The combination of these things allowed just walking up to a flower in my garden and taking this snapshot, with the 105mm f/2.8 VR:
There’s nothing great about the above as a macro shot, and if you’re into macro you can get far closer and more detailed. Having the leaf in the foreground obscuring things is distracting too, and perhaps I should have cropped that out. But to able to see this much detail in the world with no preparation, no tripod, and no lighting is new, at least for me. I had taken the random macro potshot in the past when the kids were being less interesting than insects, but a big camera at close range tends to convince most other lifeforms to fly away, and being off even a little with focus totally blows a macro shot. So I was kind of surprised by how easy it was to get something like the above.
Also, we went to Twanoh state park a bit over a week ago, since once a year they open up for anyone to come clam digging. We didn’t actually bring any clams home or eat them, but it was a fun activity for the kids. I was kind of amazed to see a seagull flying by carrying what appeared to be a whole clam in its mouth. It was kind of far away, and I only had the old 85mm f/1.8 AF on the camera, but I took a picture of it anyways. Unfortunately, 85mm really doesn’t provide very much reach:
But fortunately, 36MP provides the flexibility to crop… a lot:
I’m still glad I’m not into taking pictures of birds, as that’s one thing that seems even harder (and more expensive) than taking pictures of uncooperative offspring. I was just pretty impressed that the seagull was able to get such a large object into its mouth, and then to fly around with it!
While my PC is definitely feeling the strain of dealing with RAW files from my camera that weigh in at over 40MB each, I have to think that with the way that things are going in the display world, that all this resolution is going to help some day. My 5-year old 30″ monitor displays roughly 4 million pixels – 12 million camera dots – and feeding it with a 36 million dot image is overkill (camera pixels are not monitor pixels; there’s just one color value per “pixel”, not three). But with Apple creating attention around “retina” displays that pack a similar resolution into a 15″ display, and Viewsonic offering this 31.5″ 4K display (albeit at “about the price of a car”), it seems pretty clear that the detail that you may have to zoom in to see today will be baseline requirements for looking good on displays of the future.
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Free Cloud Storage from Hitachi!
This is an addendum to the prior post on rebuilding my home server. But don’t worry it’s much shorter. I was just amused by the offer that came with the Hitachi 2TB hard I picked up. The text in the photo is a bit small (unless you click for the large version), but it reads “Get 3GB free at hitachibackup.com”. The fine print at the bottom says you can get 250GB of storage for just $49/year. And free apps!
So to be clear, Hitach is selling you a 2 terabyte drive. That’s 2,000,000,000,000 bytes (since it favors the storage industry not to say 1K =1024). This is a hard drive in retail packaging that is almost always going to be used in addition to the main drive that your system will typically come with. They are generously offering to store 3,000,000,000 of those bytes for free – a whopping 0.15% of the drive. That’s like selling a Porsche and including a coupon for a 355ml can of gas. Now, 250GB for $49/year is actually not at all unreasonable – but I think I’d rather go with a cloud storage provider like Google Drive, Windows Live Mesh, or Dropbox that’s actually focused on this!
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Windows Home Server 2011
I’ve previously described the approach I use to backups; in a nutshell, I use Windows Home Server (2007) to back up our home PCs and store media content on an old PC with redundant storage, and I back up important things to the cloud (with SmugMug hosting the content that’s most important to me, my photos).
Unfortunately, the 8-year-old Dell desktop that I’d been running the home server on finally died. Perhaps it was old age. Or perhaps it was the copious amounts of sawdust that came from a construction project conducted right next to the home server (no, I wasn’t around, but I did notice a beloved old mechanical keyboard I kept around was completely covered in sawdust, so…). I considered trying to find a power supply and/or motherboard replacement, but I would have needed to find a setup that supported the old Parallel ATA drives I had in that machine. It would have been a temporary solution, but it might have kept things going until a new Windows release triggered a familiar cycle: my old PC becomes Valerie’s new PC, and Valerie’s old PC (my old old PC) becomes the home server. But a total lack of interest in Windows 8, and acceptable performance from my current PC even 2.5 years in, and an upgrade didn’t seem imminent.
Hardware
So, I decided to take the plunge, and build a completely new home server that’s now up and running. Here’s what I went with, from newegg.com:
- AMD FX-6100 6-core processor, Biostar A880GZ motherboard, 8GB DDR3 RAM, Seagate 500GB HDD, and a generic 500W case; on special for $320.
- 2 x Hitachi 2TB disk drives for primary media storage, $130 each for a total of $260.
- Windows Home Server 2011 OEM for $50.
So it was $630 total for a new system with 4.5TB of storage, enough processor/memory to hopefully act as a good media server even if some transcoding is involved. The core system seemed like a pretty good deal, though I didn’t wait for deals – I just bought what was available the day the old machine died. Newegg did a good job of getting things to me immediately, even though my failure to type in a coupon code on their product page probably cost me $20 :).
I stopped building PCs from scratch 13 years ago, when pre-packed systems from Dell started to simply be more cost effective than anything you could build yourself. So it was a bit of a shock to have to figure out which holes the mounting screws needed to go into to fasten the motherboard in place, or to try and make sure I got the right polarity when plugging LEDs into headers on the motherboard so they’d actually light up. This was not one of those screwless, everything-slides-into-place cases that I’d become accustomed to. But ultimately, everything worked.
WHS 2011 vs. WHS 2007
Windows Home Server 2011 seems like a fairly solid experience so far, and it addresses some of the performance issues that WHS 2007 systems seemed to eventually run into. At the same time, it’s a sad reflection at Microsoft’s total failure to produce a server product for the home, because everything that was cool for a non-techie about WHS 2007 is gone. I once thought about getting a WHS 2007 system for my Dad; I’d never even think about it with a WHS 2011 system. What changed?
- Perhaps the most visible change is that Microsoft dropped Drive Extender, awesome technology that finally took things beyond the confines of hard drives and drive letters. If you needed more space, you just plugged in more drives. You didn’t ever have to worry about what file was on what drive. If you marked a particular folder important, WHS 2007 would make sure it was spread across multiple drives so there’d be no data loss. This was the coolest feature of WHS 2007 – something one hoped Microsoft would bring to the rest of the Windows line – but it died. And the Internet literally hated Microsoft for this decision.
- Of equal importance is that there aren’t any more pre-packaged WHS machines. With WHS 2007, you could buy an HP from amazon that would do everything out of the box and that had the form factor of a server. With WHS 2011, the options are few and far between. You pretty much have to buy the OEM version and do things yourself.
- Doing things yourself doesn’t turn out to be as easy as just installing Windows. Besides having to borrow a SATA DVD-ROM from another machine to install things (who needs them anymore?), WHS 2011 lacked drivers for my NIC, and it wasn’t obvious how to remedy the problem. Post-install, a common bug prevented installation on both of our client keys until you go make some changes using Regedit. That’s right, even though this was reported many months ago, the shipping version of WHS requires some registry editing just to install.
- Achieving redundancy needs careful planning around WHS storage limits. WHS can’t by default handle drives more than 2TB in size, and it can’t span shares across volumes. So if your videos or photos collection is ever bigger than 2TB, well, you’ll have two of them. Worse, it’s backup functionality is limited to 2TB in total. Once you cross 2TB, you can’t make a backup of your server. While I have a comfortable amount of headroom before I reach this limit, it seems pretty ridiculous and I’m hoping Microsoft patches it before I hit that limit.
In short, WHS 2011 only seems to have appeal for techies who build their own system with the very reasonably priced OEM version of the software. This certainly isn’t the typical home, and that’s sad, because people all over the place really need to do a better job of backing up their content. Fortunately, there’s many more cloud options now and for most people, that’s a good option.
There are some high points for WHS 2011; the media serving software is much better, and performance is vastly higher than before. I’m noticing that higher performance now – our home in Kirkland relies on wireless, and WHS 2011 easily saturates the Wifi network while doing backups or copying content. Hopefully once things become incremental, this won’t be a big deal, but right now, our home network is fairly unusable. There’s also fewer random errors even right out of the box, and the fact that it’s not doing anything in fancy makes it easy to get directly to things if you know what you’re doing. So it remains a good solution for me – I just can’t recommend it broadly as I did with WHS 2007.
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Goodbye Nikon 10-24… and lens economics
I sold my Nikon 10-24 ultra-wide lens today. A little over a year ago, I wrote a post titled “How Wide is Wide Enough“, and concluded it was personal choice. I’ve definitely continued to make heavy use of the 10-24, which is why when I looked back on 2011, I found that it was my second most used lens, behind the 24-70. I also enjoyed my short time with the 14-24, which is huge and inconvenient, but takes incredible wide angle shots. So why did I sell it? As I noted in that post, while most full frame lenses are useful on a crop camera, the one place where this isn’t true is on the very wide end of things. The 10-24 was a DX lens, and now that I’ve moved to the full frame D800, it’s really not useful anymore. So alas, I took a few last photos of it, and put it on Craigslist:
It turns out that the D800 isn’t the only thing that Nikon has a tough time making enough of; the 10-24 is also back-ordered at all major U.S. retailers. I finished up my post just before 4:00am (it took longer than expected photograph the lens, find sample pictures I took with it, and write up a post). An interested gentleman contacted me at 9:45am, and by 3:00pm I was no longer the owner of the lens you see above. I’ve kept roughly 1,000 photos taken with this lens, which means I likely took about 4,000 shots with it – in spite of having and using the 14-24 for a decent stint during my ownership. If the slightly more expensive full frame 16-35 delivers results that are on par with the 10-24, I’d probably already be satisfied.
The point of this post isn’t just to comment on having sold the lens rather quickly, though. Even without the current stock issues, the asking prices on Craigslist for this lens on the rare occasions it actually shows up are usually in the $700-800 range. I sold my copy, which was in very good condition, for $725. I paid $798 for the lens shortly after its release, in July 2009. So for almost 3 years of use, 4,000 exposures, and 1,000 keepers, it cost me a grand total of $73. I’ve definitely rationalized (many times!) the purchase of nice but expensive lenses with the theory that good ones don’t depreciate much, but this was the first time I’d really put the principle to the test. And had I bought the lens used in 2010, it’d probably have cost about… $725, making my use of the lens over the years free.
Not every lens is going to hold it’s value quite this well (though some actually appreciate) – but this is certainly helping me feel OK about the cash that’s locked up in the rest of the lenses I own! Interestingly, the 10-24 is also the last lens I purchased new; the rest have been used purchases on Craigslist, at prices that effectively haven’t changed over the years. It’s absolutely stunning to think that I could box up my 24-70 tomorrow, sell it, and have gotten the use of that fabulous glass for several years for free. Where are you going to find a $1,500 stock that generates that kind of guaranteed return on investment?
(Below, a SmugMug gallery/slideshow of some of the shots I’ve liked with the 10-24 over the years – though it’s more places than people since I put it together as part of the Craigslist posting)
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More D800 early impressions
My very first impressions of the D800 were posted after just a small handful of shots, indoors under terrible lighting conditions. I was impressed! Now that I’ve had all of one weekend to use it outside too, I’m impressed even more.
As I said previously, the cost of the D800 ($3,000) still puts it at a point where it’s really hard to recommend for people like me who are shooting pictures of their kids and capturing other memories. Serious shooters will be far better of reading the in-depth (as always) review of the D800on dpreview.com (they like it a lot too, and go into a ton of depth). Still, within 5 years or so, it’s reasonable to expect that sub-$1,000 cameras will match or beat what the D800 can do today, and that’s great news if you’re the one in your family tasked with taking pictures. I apologize to any actual photographer who is still waiting for a D800, seeing this awesome piece of technology used for my dull family photos must be painful!
Part of why I’m bothering to write this – besides that when you think something is really cool you usually want to share it – is that most reviews seem to compare the D800 and it’s immediate predecessor, the D700. My perspective – the D800 vs. D7000 – is hardly a fair fight and is probably much less useful in general. But I suspect there’s at least a few other DX shooters that ponder – as I did for years – whether it was the right time to go full frame, so I’ll just provide an opinion on that.
So that said, what did I find noteworthy that wasn’t already captured in the many photographer-oriented reviews out there?
Resolution
Okay, so this one is covered to death in every mention of the D800; but yes, 36MP is pretty stunning. Here is a really poorly framed snapshot of our friend George:
Here’s a 100% crop from this snapshot:
If you look at what a tiny part of the original image this represents, it’s pretty amazing. If there were any more detail, aliens would be able to clone us from a photograph alone.
There’s been lots of commentary on how you need really good lenses to get the most out of the D800, and that’s true. But keep in mind that the D7000 made exactly the same demands on central sharpness of a lens; in fact, this photo would look identical on the D7000 (high ISO isn’t a factor), except the “zoomed out” version would a center crop of the image above. This really matters, though; you can crop the heck out of a D800 image and still have a ton of detail to work with. If you were satisfied with 12MP photos (I am), then considering resolution alone, you can get a full body shot and a head shot with the same exposure!
Highlight Protection
At base ISO, the D7000 had incredible shadow detail and really low noise. What this meant is that if you mess up like I do and underexposed things, you had a lot of room to fix the mistake later by brightening things up. However, if you overexposed on the D7000 and blew the highlights by more than a little, there was often no chance of recovery. The D3 and D700 seemed to be much better at highlight protection; even up to a full stop overexposed, you could probably fix things. As a result, I set my D7000 to -0.7 exposure compensation by default; this was safer for outdoors shots, but gave up a little quality indoors if I forgot to reset things.
By contrast, the D800 seems as clean (unscientifically) as the D7000 in shadow detail, while providing lots more headroom on highlights. Thanks to the metal slide reflecting the sun, this shot of George’s son Patrick would probably have been unusable on the D7000 due to blown highlights:
Kids don’t give you a second chance and don’t always have a natural expression when looking at the camera, so reviewing the shot, adjusting exposure, and asking Patrick to hold still in the process would simply not have worked. Fortunately, even with -1.7 exposure compensation in Lightroom – almost two full stops! – the shot turned out to be one of the nicer ones that day:
I feel almost guilty thinking about how much insight the film photographer would have needed back in the day to take the shot correctly – while I managed to get things quite wrong, yet easily correct things later. It was literally just basic exposure and levels, with a little cropping and vignetting, to go from the top image to the bottom one.
Mid ISO
Landscape and nature photographers mostly focus on image quality at base ISO, because shutter speed isn’t so important and they’ll carry a tripod around. For sports photographers, especially indoor sports, speed is paramount, and thus high ISO performance becomes important. Pretty much every review focuses on quality at those two extremes.
I find things are a little different shooting memories. You’ll have quite a few shots outdoors in good light where even a decent compact camera will produce perfectly good images. You’ll have plenty of indoor, poor light situations where either you need good high ISO capabilities or a decent flash (though shots are always a little less natural looking with flash) – and as I mentioned previously, the D800 does great here. But I find that there’s a good chunk of family shots that are in fading light on a cloudy day, where you’ll be between ISO 800 and ISO 3200 at the shutter speeds you need.
The D7000 was pretty decent for getting family shots at the lower end of that range, but often needed at least a little noise reduction (which takes some detail along with it), and you started to be able to see some reduction in dynamic range and/or color performance (I don’t know the right way to technically describe it). So far, it feels like the D800 is really solid and a definite improvement in this fairly important ISO range that gets little attention in most coverage.
This is an example from yesterday; it’s 7:30pm, we’re completely shaded by trees, and it’s completely overcast on top of that. Even opening up fully to f/2.8, and going with a shutter speed of 1/200th that really is on the low side for kids on bicycles, ISO was still up at 1250, but the resulting shot felt a good notch above what I would have previously expected:
Olivia is pretty impressed with her ability to ride without any hands. Just wait till I take off the training wheels!
On the D7000, I’d probably have applied a little vibrance to get the colors to look a little more like what they do at base ISO (and to match my perception of real life); indeed, +10 vibrance was my default setting in Lightroom for the D7000. On the D800 and the above shot in particular, I find this unnecessary – colors look great out of the camera even into middle ISOs. There’s also no noise reduction at all in the above, I just didn’t feel it was needed!
Other Things Worth Mentioning
While the above stood out most and seemed to call for examples, a few other observations:
- AF is awesome. The number of focus misses is noticeably lower than on the D7000 (which was already decent), and focusing speed is notable faster. Maybe this wasn’t a huge improvement over the D700/D3, but it’s definitely a step up from the D7000.
- The AF-ON button is great, use it! I configured my D7000 not to focus when half-pressing the shutter; instead, the AE-L/AF-L button was assigned to focus. The D800 has a dedicated AF-ON button positioned just perfectly for this. I strongly prefer this mode of doing things. Normally, you need to use a tiny switch + button to go between manual focus, AF-S (single focus), and AF-C (continuous). AF-ON is a much better solution; don’t press it = manual focus, press once = AF-S, hold down = AF-C.
- Video AF still sucks. This is really too bad, and it probably can’t be addressed without changes to lens design and overall mechanics, but full-time AF in video mode still sucks. It’s loud (so you need a microphone), it’s slow (dpreview is spot on about contrast-detect AF performance in Live View mode), and instead of smooth focus transitions, things are abrupt and focus bounces back and forth as things converge. Video quality seems a little higher than the D7000, but things sadly still don’t feel great for kids that move unpredictably in and out of focus.
- Shooting banks are still poor. I already found the D7000s U1/U2 modes sub-optimal; I was usually in U2 (using aperture priority) but if I ever switched to manual mode (e.g. to force higher shutter speed on a flash shot) and back, it would reset everything including exposure compensation, aperture, etc. The D800 seems inexplicably even worse. Shooting and Custom settings are in independent banks despite being related, certain things and covered and certain things are not, and while the D7000 had dials, you need to use menus to switch banks on the D800. Even for simple family shots, it’d be nice to easily switch between a “still” setting (AF-S, lower minimum shutter speed, etc) and “action” setting, or between settings optimized for flash vs. natural light. No such luck. This is inexplicably poor.
- The built-in Mic seems OK. An external mic will still do much better, but the built-in Mic seems significantly more competent than before. Any focus-related noises are still really audible, though.
- Video activation is confusing. There is a dedicated red button beside the shutter for video recording. Just press it, right? No. So far as I can tell, you have to put the camera in live view mode, make sure that video is selected on the live view switch, and then use the red button to start recording. I don’t understand why pressing the video record button, which has no other purpose, wouldn’t automatically do all the other steps.
All in all, I really feel like the D800 is a fantastic piece of equipment that I wish every non-photographer capturing their life could have. At $3,000, it’s still hard to recommend for that purpose. If you don’t have Lightroom or an equivalent, if you don’t have a good flash for indoor shots yet, if you don’t have lenses you really like, those things are all more important. Saving for your kids college education and your own retirement are also more important! But if you’re fortunate enough to be able to justify the price tag, it definitely won’t disappoint.
