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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.
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My D800 is here!
It certainly took long enough, but my D800 finally arrived today! I haven’t really gotten a chance to use it yet – but I don’t think my opinion matters much anyways. When I pondered whether the D90 or D7000 would be a better choice for other non-photographers that like me were primarily going to take pictures and capture memories as opposed to creating art, that might have been useful. On the other hand, the D800 seems awesome, but it is clearly overkill for the non-photographer, and if you’re going to spend a big chunk of money on a camera followed by a potentially bigger chunk on full frame lenses, then you probably should read through the 25-page professional reviews and make an informed decision.
That being said, highly preliminary use has been pretty encouraging – with some of the anticipated drawbacks:
- I’m comfortable raising my Auto-ISO limit to 6400. Per-pixel noise indeed beats the D7000 by perhaps a half-stop at the same ISO setting… and at any given viewing size, there’s a little over twice as many pixels in a shot from the D800 vs. D7000. In practice, that means in low light situations, I’ll have twice as much shutter speed (or more depth of field) than before, and since the kids seem to increase their top speed faster than Moore’s law, that really helps.
- A DX crop looks better than a DX camera. The D7000 was generally considered to have the best image quality in a DX form factor (though the new entry-level D3200 has a new 24MP sensor that hasn’t been fully evaluated yet). With any lens, DX or FX, the D800 indeed seems to produce a slightly better image when cropped to a DX level. This is actually pretty amazing; with the 24-70, I can get full-frame quality in the 24mm to 70mm range, but I can crop all the way to an equivalent of 105mm and still have slightly better results than the same lens on the D7000 with no cropping.
- Great viewfinder! I forgot how nice the big viewfinders on the D700 and D3 were – but this is instantly apparent the first time you raise the D800 to your eye. It’s not better than those cameras, but is nice if you’ve used something smaller for a while.
- Not too bulky. My earlier speculation based on weight stats (900g vs. 700g) holds up in reality; it is a little bulkier, but not by much, especially when you consider total weight with a lens attached. It’s a far cry from the D3, which was the last camera besides the D7000 that I used in any depth before this one.
- Files are huge! RAW files at default settings are 50MB a piece, and slow Lightroom (and other software) significantly. JPEGs at the Quality 100 setting I was using (since I backup the JPEGs; RAW files are only backed up within my home) were 24MB on something that was a little cropped. I’ve changed JPEG quality to 90 to compensate; I can’t tell the difference visually, and it cut at least the file size in my experiment by 50% to 16MB.
- No ML-L3.The Nikon ML-L3 was a cheap ($18) remote trigger for the D90, D7000, and many other models. I use it on tripod shots like the above to avoid effects of camera shake. For the D800 and up, Nikon expects you to buy a $125 non-wireless remote trigger instead.
It’s not really fair comparing the D800 vs. D7000, since one costs almost three times as much as the other; almost everyone would be better getting the cheaper D7000 since you can get a whole range of top-tier lenses or accessories with the $2000 price difference, and except in very specific conditions, that will have more positive impact on your results.
I really haven’t had time or opportunity to take real pictures with the camera yet, though here’s one shot of Leo in the worst possible conditions:
What do I mean by “worst possible conditions”? Our living room is the most dimly lit room in our house, and this is 8pm on a cloudy evening so there was very little natural light. The above shot is at 50mm, f/1.4, ISO 6400, 1/125th. The 50mm f/1.4D isn’t a great lens wide open, but it’s the only f/1.4 lens I have. The 24-70/2.8 would have dropped the shutter speed to a mere 1/30, too slow to handle either camera shake or kid shake. I used minimal noise reduction (10 in LR4), and while there’s plenty of pixel-level noise, the end result is still usable even with terrible light (quality and quantity).
For comparison, the same conditions with my Galaxy Nexus:
I’ve talked about the magnitude of the difference that exists between smartphones and cameras, but low light conditions are really where those differences become visible. The D800 is shooting at 10 times higher ISO yet it looks 10 times better, even on static things like the piano which aren’t affected by the vastly lower shutter speed that the Galaxy Nexus was using. That said, what you see in the Galaxy Nexus picture is far closer to what things looked like to the eye – very dim, with the last light of the day in the background. The D800 absolutely has better vision than a human being!
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Now I know why people fear the taxman here
I posted a short while ago about what worked for me and what I wish I knew in advance when it came to taxes/finances and moving to the U.S. I mentioned noticing from my own searches that the penalties for not knowing that you have to file an FBAR are nothing short of draconian. I’d heard that penalties were as high as 50% of the account value. While I can understand these incredibly punitive measures for active tax evaders that moved money out of the U.S. to cheat on their taxes, taking half of an account because someone didn’t know they had to file a form seems downright ridiculous. The only reason I discovered this requirement is because co-workers were complaining about it on the internal list for Canadians. If I worked at a different company, or hadn’t subscribed to the Canadians mailing list, I might not have discovered this at all until the tax man came knocking.
I still believed that the stories I read online must have been worst case scenarios that represented the exception, rather than the rule. Then I read about the 2011 OVDI – Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Initiative, a program to allow people to voluntarily disclose foreign assets that they hadn’t previously declared. I’ll scale the numbers for effect, but let’s say you left Canada in 2003, and left $10,000 in a bank account there that earned $500 in interest each year through the end of 2010. In 2011, you learn about your mistake and voluntarily disclose the account to the IRS. How much do you think you’d pay? How much do you think you’d pay if the IRS discovered this and you didn’t voluntarily disclose the information?
If you voluntarily disclosed the error, you’d pay $5,180 – over half the original balance in the account. If you did *not* voluntarily disclose the error, you’d pay $45,430 in penalties. On a $10,000 account! That’s because the FBAR penalty of 50% of the account value applies for every year that you failed to file an FBAR! So if you lapse by two years, they take everything; if you lapse by four years, they take twice what you had overseas. The IRS uses large numbers in it’s examples – $1,000,000 in a foreign account, resulting in a $4,543,000 penalty – which makes it pretty clear that they’re thinking about rich people evading taxes – but the law itself applies to every immigrant that left $10,000 or more in their country of origin.
Next year, when mailing my FBAR forms (I do still have an RRSP in Canada), I think I’ll send duplicates and ask for signature confirmations :).
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Cool Google Stuff
A great benefit of working for Google is being exposed to all the cool stuff that Google actually does. Even better is that the vast majority of those things are either already publicly available, or become publicly available not long after Google employees get a chance to play with those things. I thought I’d mention a few things I’ve started using recently. A few things that I’ve mentioned before but will repeat: (1) of course I’m biased, I liked Google enough to work there, so take that into account; (2) everything here is 100% public and unrelated to what I work on because I would like my badge to work tomorrow morning, and (3) like all my posts here, this is 100% my own opinion, not that of Google.
So, what cool Google stuff have I started using recently – or started using differently?
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The last speaker change… for a while
First I changed my surround speakers, getting Mirage OMD-Rs to mount on the wall to better match our room and to make some space. Then I quickly caved and got matching OMD-28s to replace my left/right speakers, and an OMD-C2 for a center channel. I feel like there was a noticeable improvement – and at roughly 4 times what I originally paid for the Infinity Delta system that it was replacing, one would hope that this would be the case. But while I’m OK at hearing A/B differences when two things are side-by-side, above a certain level of quality, I’m much less capable of comparing two things if I hear them even a day apart. Still, the new speakers have done a pretty good job of bringing the few movies we’ve watched on them to life.
These changes did leave one weaker link in the system: the subwoofer, an Advent AV-550s that was great for the price, and highly capable of rattling things with its massive 15″ driver and 500W Sunfire amp. While I’ve never felt there was an issue with the AV-550s, I did feel that it was boomy (which was also the main criticism even at it’s low price point by other reviewers, though overall ratings were pretty strong). Unlike with speakers, I haven’t had much of a chance to listen to different subwoofers, so I also didn’t have a strong basis for comparison. In any event, I spent lots of time researching moderately priced options, and wound up picking the SVS PB-12NSD.
First things first; while some speakers offer nice aesthetics – the Mirage set I mentioned looks quite nice, in my opinion – subwoofers are generally these boring and ugly boxes. The PB-12NSD takes this to the max; without anything in the picture to gauge its scale, this could be pretty much any boring subwoofer ever made:
(with the grille on)
(with the grille off – super boring!)
Since I wasn’t buying this to fit a particularly constrained space, I didn’t really look at the dimensions. I assumed that since this was a 12″ driver, 400W unit, that it would be smaller but hopefully more precise than my existing AV-550s. Wrong! It was at least as big, and even heavier than its predecessor.
Fortunately, on the acoustic end of things, it didn’t disappoint; indeed, it was really easy to tell the difference with the PB-12NSD because you just feel it a lot more. Whereas my old sub was pretty good down to about 30Hz, the PB-12NSD supposedly gets down to 20Hz – which really is the range where you’re feeling the vibration as opposed to hearing audible sound. Some of the scenes in X-Men: First Class – even the opening where a young Magneto bends the gates open – had substantially more impact with the new sub.
As a company, SVS is also interesting; it’s one of an increasing handful of companies that don’t sell through dealers; they only sell direct, over the Internet (or presumably the phone). While you’d think this model wouldn’t work well for something that you need to hear in person to evaluate, and that’s really expensive to ship around, they seem to be quite successful with the approach; and indeed, considering quality & price, this feels like the approach to beat. Why even go through Amazon, give up some margin, and be forced to charge taxes in a larger number of states? Perhaps the future isn’t that we buy everything from Amazon, but rather that we buy everything direct from the individuals and companies that make those things, with only UPS & FedEx between us? That remains to be seen, but for this particular purchase, buying directly from the folks who made the product worked out pretty well!
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Mr. Leo: Like a Boss
Leo usually sports a look that’s at least a little on the dopey side, but this weekend, he was carrying a water bottle around and just looking like a boss. Don’t even think about taking his water:
Planning his next move:
Taking a cool sip from a bottle that’s taller than his head, and as long as his forearm:
Questions, anyone?
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Playground Before & After
Last weekend, we spent a little time at the playground and park/path of the elementary school near our home (which Olivia and Leo will presumably some day attend). It was around 6 in the evening, so the sun was getting a little lower in the sky, a giving off a nice warm light – but it was still direct enough to make many shots very challenging for one reason or another. As always, neither the kids nor the playground could be adjusted, and unlike one dad I saw today holding a reflector/diffuser in one hand and a camera in the other, I still don’t ever head out of the house with equipment to bend the sun to my will. Valerie reminded me, as I pointed out the reflector dad, that she will pretend not to know me if I ever head out that conspicuously. Reflector dad did joke to me that it was easier to hold both camera and reflector himself than to give instructions (his wife was standing next to him); in my case, I’m pretty sure handing over a reflector disc to Valerie would result in it being repuropsed as a frisbee!
This post is essentially yet another appeal to other non-photographers shooting their kids to shoot RAW and use Lightroom 4. The new local adjustment features really help a lot, and compared to something like Photoshop, Lightroom is pretty simple and fast to learn and use. But rather than write an 8,000 word post about this, I’ll just share 8 pictures (4 before & afters) that say it better. These are 4 shots I’d probably have discarded, but even my amateur level of skill with Lightroom was enough to make them worth keeping (to me).
Example #1: I may have overdone this a little – it almost looks HDR-ish – but the new shadow slider (both the global one, and the one on local adjustments) really make it easy to make simple adjustments like this. The nice thing about something that’s too dark against a light background is that when you do local shadow adjustments on it, even if you aren’t precise with the area you select, it doesn’t spill over and create a halo. Likewise with highlight adjustments.
Example #2: I’m always astonished at how much the D7000 captures that can’t be seen by default. With the sun directly behind her, salvaging a shot like this seems hopeless, but ultimately winds up being possible. No adjustments to a JPG could possibly have worked here.
Example #3: The whole original was too bright, and with no cloud cover, the original shadows were very harsh. But it was really easy to selectively bring down the highlights on the ground while pushing up the shadows a bit, preserving more or less what Olivia looked like. I like the picture mostly because the sun makes the fern Olivia is carrying look like some kind of magic wand. The original framing was terrible, but I was far away and that was the longest my lens could go (70mm). This is one of those cases where more megapixels helps.
Example #4: Shooting towards very strong light from the sun totally destroyed contrast in the original, but with some adjustment, things worked out in the end.
It’s still true that the best shots seem to come when little to no adjustments are needed; in the last shot of the evening, there started to be some cloud cover softening the light, and I had to do almost nothing to the following shot. Too bad I can’t control the clouds at will!
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Selective white balance is cool! Or warm!
One of the seemingly small things that Adobe Lightroom 4 added was the ability to do localized white balance adjustments. Localized adjustments have long saved many “bad” photos of mine from deletion; even when faces and such are underexposed by a stop or two (see the second example here), you can wind up saving a photo that otherwise just isn’t worth keeping. For example, this one was borderline for a number of reasons:
The framing is pretty bad and there’s hard ugly shadows, and nothing is really particularly good about the photo. But Valerie will usually scowl at the camera, and since I usually have to take pictures like this walking backwards while hoping the kids aren’t falling into the water, I can only hope for so much. The same approaches as were always possible address most things, but still leaves an issue:
Things aren’t as blown out as before, but the reflected light on the shadow areas is really cool (blue) compared to the warm light directly from the setting sun. Before, there was nothing you could really do about this. Now that you can tweak white balance on selective regions (which I already had to lighten the shadows areas), it’s one slider to warm things up a little:
An actual photographer, especially if working with the subject, would use a reflector, position the subject differently, shoot at a different angle, or any number of other things that are far superior solutions. But if I had a reflector (I don’t own one), I can pretty much guarantee that my kids would see how well it floats. Besides, I almost never set up or pose pictures, I just take them as they are (not that Valerie would have listened anyways). The final picture isn’t fabulous, but it met the threshold to not get deleted:
This also came in handy of a shot Valerie took of me. It’s a miracle when (a) Valerie uses the camera, (b) the resulting shot isn’t completely out of focus (in no small part to non-default focus behavior), and (c) it’s aimed at me. There were lots of problems with the original shot, but after some corrections it was OK but had a blue cast to it (though not as pronounced as the example above):
One slider adjustment, and things balanced a little better:
While I doubt I’ll often have to use this adjustment, it’s certainly nice that’s available!
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Tax tips when moving to the U.S.
It’s been almost a month since the last time I posted anything, and while the reasons are varied, one definite contributing factor is that it was tax time. Twice, actually, since I had to file a return in both the U.S. and Canada. This isn’t the first time I’ve moved across the border (though I was considerably more ignorant the last time), and now seems as good a time as any to note what I learned – some parts via reading and planning in advance, and the rest via sometimes unfortunate after-the-fact discoveries.
Disclaimer – I’m not an accountant, lawyer, tax professional, or even astute in these matters. I might be arrested and thrown in jail by both Revenue Canada and the IRS once they process my returns this year, for all I know. Treat everything here as a pointer to go do your own reading!
1. Make sure you’re a [deemed] non-resident! If Canada deems you to be a resident, it will tax you on your world income as opposed to just the income you earn in Canada. Since Canadian tax rates are substantially higher than the U.S., it’s strongly in your interest to ensure that Canada doesn’t deem you a resident. You can read more here and also on this page, but what’s important is ensuring you don’t have residential ties. Having a home, spouse/dependents, or car in Canada can all trigger deemed residency. So be careful!
2. Sell Everything (and bring the proceeds to the U.S.). While you don’t want a home or car due to #1, what I’m talking about here is any non-RRSP accounts & investments you might have. What I didn’t know the first time I moved back in 1999 is that Revenue Canada treats leaving the country as a deemed disposition of all your assets (like stocks, mutual funds, etc) even if you don’t actually sell them. The IRS will similarly treat the purchase price for any investments you bring as the fair market value on the day you become a resident. So tax-wise, it’s as if you sold everything – and it’s a lot easier if you actually do. It was probably time to re-balance anyways, and you’ll probably also need more cash than you anticipate.
3. File an FBAR for your foreign accounts. The IRS requires that you disclose foreign accounts if you have $10,000 or more in total abroad, using form TD F 90-22.1 (also called the FBAR). You need to do this every year – and must report the peak value of the account for the year. You have to file this separately from your tax return, and the penalties for not doing so are very severe – $10,000 minimum, possible jail time, and some sites indicate the penalty is actually 35-50% of the value of the foreign account. Even if you’re just late! This story indicates that penalties hit 50% even for a voluntary late filing; in this case, an 80-year old woman who inherited accounts she wasn’t fully aware of was hit with a $120,000 penalty. So if you leave an RRSP or anything else in Canada, make sure you file or you risk losing a ton!
4. Make a Article XVIII(7) election on your RRSP. Assuming you have enough in your RRSP that you’d like to maintain it, you need to file form 8891, or else the IRS will treat your RRSP account as taxable. If you’re going to withdraw from your RRSP soon and will be in the U.S. when you do so, then it may be more complicated, so if you’re nearing retirement, consult an accountant. If you’re still 20+ years out, make the election (it’s permanent), and you’ll only pay taxes on an actual distribution. It’s hard to correctly file your US taxes if you don’t do this, because Canadian financial institutions don’t issue T3/T5 equivalents for RRSP accounts!
5. Disclose your foreign accounts again thanks to FATCA. Wait, what? First an FBAR, then an 8891 for RRSP accounts, and now yet another form to the same organization about your accounts? The thresholds are different for FATCA, the time period it covers is different (in your year of arrival only), and what accounts are covered is also different. Seeing why #2 said “sell everything” so you could avoid this mess? Form 8938 is the one you need for this, though the threshold is much higher ($50,000 aggregate value). Note that RRSP accounts don’t need to be included, but due to IRS form bugs, you need to report form 8891 as if you had filed form 3520, at least in this years forms.
6. Get an ITIN for your dependents. We messed up on this one, and it had a $1,500 impact (which I’m hoping it’s possible to correct with an amended return later). As a newcomer to the U.S., you might naturally assume you should try and get your dependents a social security number. But if you’re on a visa, which is usually the case, you’ll discover that you can’t. What you might not realize to later is that there’s an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) that you can get (form here). From the name, you’d think this unnecessary – unless your 2 year old is fabulously more talented than our Leo, and is out there earning an income somehow. But you can’t claim tax credits for your dependents without an ITIN for them! So file for one as soon as you arrive and are getting your own SSN.
7. Beware Paperless Statements. Save the planet! Think of the children! Switch to paperless statements! Really, how can you not go paperless with arguments like that? Paperless is probably still better than cutting down trees – but when you close your account, with many institutions, you can also lose access to the entire history of paperless statements you had for that account. So as you sell & close everything, make sure you’re capturing your transactions, cost basis, etc. – or you’ll be expending a lot more effort once you realize you need it at tax time. Like me.
8. Leave enough to pay Revenue Canada. While moving all your funds to the U.S. is a good idea for tax reasons, if you’ve held investments for a long time, make sure you have enough Canadian funds to pay Revenue Canada for capital gains taxes that you might have incurred as a result of selling all your investments (including deemed dispositions; see #2). You don’t want to be scrambling at the end of April to find a way to write a Canadian dollar check that Revenue Canada will be able to cash!
Again, use your own judgment and certainly don’t treat this list of things as comprehensive, but I thought it might help others avoid items they didn’t already know about! At least the upshot of this is that taxes in Washington are much lower than in Ontario!
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Secondary Markets
While I might not like the Groupon model all that much, there’s one common practice that I despise without reservation, and that’s no-value-add secondary markets on new consumer products where supply can’t meet demand. The particular manifestation of this that bugs me is as follows:
This happens with many product launches; the most pronounced recent example I can think of was the Nintendo Wii, which had significantly higher-than-new prices on eBay for an extended duration. The practice harms consumers in a number of ways:
- It reduces the availability of the item through legitimate channels, and increases the difficulty of buying the item through those channels. One random sampling of a lineup during the Wii craziness indicated that half of them were just there to resell the item. The survey probably wasn’t accurate and I don’t think the problem was quite that acute, but it did mean that if the resellers were willing to line up starting at 4am to get at a new shipment of the item, you had to be too – or your odds of getting the item were 0%.
- It’s incredibly inefficient. Instead of being able to check stock online and even purchase for in-store pickup, you get to deal with a bunch of sellers through a variety of channels (eBay, craigslist, kijiji, etc), each of whom has exactly one item, and who’d back out of a deal with you 10 minutes before meeting if they got a higher offer.
- It’s unsafe. Not only is the buyers desperation a great way to lure an otherwise cautious consumer into a scam, you’ve got to meet a stranger somewhere carrying (in this case) $4,000 of cash – or pay and trust that they’ll ship something. Perhaps that’s an acceptable risk to save money, but in this case, you’re paying more.
- It may void or at least complicate getting warranty service on an item, especially if it was bought on one end of the country at a local store and then shipped to you.
- It’s worse for the retailer, especially online because pre-ordering is effortless. Speculators can buy an item, and if the price on eBay goes above retail, they sell it there and make a profit. If it doesn’t, they return it at no cost.
- It’s even worse for the product manufacturer. Sure, they sold out their shipment, but this would have happened anyways. But now, instead of delighted customers who bought into the product at launch, they have frustrated customers who don’t understand why so few were available. And sometimes, especially in the case of gifts for a birthday or Christmas, the consumer will buy a competing product instead.
There’s nothing here to like – it’s bad for the consumer, the retailer, and the product manufacturer alike. The secondary reseller is the only beneficiary of the practice, and they only benefit by creating scarcity and inconvenience for others.
Sports & concert fans have had to deal with scalpers for quite some time, though there, measures have generally been taken to prevent the practice (including making the practice illegal in some places, or requiring ID in others). With products, it’s harder; you can’t forbid people from selling property that they legally own. Is there anything product companies can do? Sure:
- Price the product via auction until supply catches up with demand. The product is still more expensive to the consumer this way, but the benefits at least accrue to the product maker – and the issues of risk and inconvenience are address. By definition, no intentional reseller will participate, because they could only pay a price at or above what the remaining long-term buyers are willing to pay.
- Same as the above, but with a dutch auction on each batch. This reduces the price to consumers, and is probably the way to go, except you’ve got to do this in batches which might be tricky (with a straight up auction, each time an item rolls off the factory line, you could send it to the current highest bidder).
- Yet another auction variation, in which the gap between the normal selling price of an item and the price paid by a consumer is donated to charity. This ensures the manufacturer has no incentive to create scarcity, and early adopters can feel good knowing that the premium they were willing to pay is doing some good in the world.
- Fans first. Let past fans of the brand have access a day before (or have higher priority pre-orders) than the general public. This is easiest when it’s easy to prove your allegiance to the brand (e.g. bring in your D700 to pick up your D800, provide your Xbox gamertag when ordering the next Xbox, etc).
- Price higher, with published, gradual, frequent price reductions. Consumers can decide whether to pay $3,300 now, or $3,200 next month.
Many products seem to get priced and sold as if we still live in an old retail world, where you need to post one price for everyone and stick with it for 6 months. The reality in the Internet age is that things can be much more fluid – and secondary market resellers are essentially taking advantage of this. Instead, the product makers themselves should recognize what’s going on, and build a product launch model that’s designed for the time we live in.
Consumers can help too, of course. If nobody ever paid more than retail on principle, this practice would vanish. Sadly, I don’t think this is likely to happen.
And yes – I’m still waiting for my D800 pre-order to ship, as you can imagine from this post :).
