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My D800 Preorder
(Image is Nikon’s, and links to their D800 page). In an earlier post on the announcement of the D4, I decided that the D4 was too big and too expensive to reasonably consider – and that the D800 was looking like it wasn’t the camera for me. Almost three weeks ago, on February 7th, Nikon announced the D800 (and D800E) full frame cameras. And in spite of what I had said earlier, I pre-ordered a D800 the day of the announcement. Did something change my mind – why did I preorder?
Well, pre-ordering alone doesn’t take much guts – you get to pore over all the samples, analysis, and early user feedback in the month or so that follows until the camera actually starts shipping, and if you don’t like what you see, you can cancel at no cost. And if Nikon’s past launches have been indicative, there won’t be enough D800s anyways, so it’d probably be trivial to sell it perhaps even at a profit if it didn’t meet expectations. I intensely dislike secondary markets that offer new goods at inflated prices (because it results in lots of non-customers buying solely to make a profit, making it more difficult and expensive for legitimate fans to actually get the products in question, without providing any value back to the product creator – see the first year of the Nintendo Wii for examples), but it does take any risk out of pre-ordering.
However, as I’ll explain below, I went a step further and actually committed to this for real. Given that the D800 isn’t intended to address my primary need – good enough high ISO performance to shoot the kids in ambient indoor light at shutter speeds that accommodate their constant state of motion – why did I commit anyways?
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Final Fantasy XIII-2
To say that I’m a long time fan of the Final Fantasy series would be putting it mildly; I’ve played every non-MMO iteration in the main series except for Final Fantasy 2 and 3 (though I did not play 1 or 5 through to completion when I did finally play them a decade after their initial releases). I’ve bought many of the original soundtracks, piano sheet music I can’t really play, and various figures, stuffed toys, and other collectibles. When the first North American performance of music from the series was scheduled – for a single performance – Valerie and I went to Los Angeles to see it. Nobuo Uematsu and Hironobu Sakaguchi were there in person! The music of the series has always been the high point for me by far, but still, it’s safe to say that I’m a fan.
Final Fantasy 13 wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea. It was incredibly linear, even for an FF game, and it wasn’t till you were about 3/4 through the game that you actually had the opportunity to experience the full extent of the gameplay that it offered. Others were put off by some fairly questionable character design elements (leading some to hope that that ‘-2’ meant ‘minus two’ of the characters they found annoying). While these concerns were legitimate, I still enjoyed it overall. Though character development options were somewhat fixed/limited, many fights that seemed impossible were actually surmountable not with grinding but with a highly tailored strategy in which you’d set up exactly the paradigms and equipment that you needed to survive that particular battle. You didn’t have to do these things, or you could just power up and come back, but it was very rewarding to get beaten 10 times, and then finally – with exactly the same party and equipment – find the strategy that allows you to prevail.
This is my first post in a month in part because I’ve been working through the sequel, FF13-2. I’ll get the good out of the way first, because what follows is mostly my astonishment and disappointment at the things I felt they did wrong. I still think it’s a decent game, and don’t regret having played it – but it had far too many moments where I just couldn’t believe what seemed like ineptitude in game design.
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Broom vs. Snow
I’m not sure how many people here in Washington would figure out that I was a Canadian if I didn’t tell them. No boots, no jacket, no gloves or hat, a car that’s useless in snow and has no chains – I probably seem more like someone from the tropics than a veteran of colder weather. Fortunately, the very mild and pleasant winter we’d been having returned today, with a daytime temperature of somewhere around 7 Celsius (45F). Since it had already become mild by yesterday, much of the accumulation of snow had already melted off naturally.
Still, our steep driveway doesn’t get as much direct sunlight as other areas, so there was still quite a bit of snow/ice/slush. It was clear that my car wasn’t going to make it (it’s rear wheel drive with low profile tires), but I wasn’t sure about the minivan – it looked like it might be close! Unfortunately, by a large margin, it didn’t have enough traction – in part because there was a layer of ice beneath some areas of snow. So shoveling the driveway was going to be necessary. Unfortunately, there was one more thing most Canadians have that I don’t – a snow shovel.
As I had a dinner appointment, waiting another day for the snow to melt wasn’t an option, so I looked around the garage for alternatives. Leaf blower? Maybe on the super light snow from last week, definitely not on what was there now. Pouring fuel on the snow and setting it ablaze did appeal to my lazier side, but probably wouldn’t earn many points with the neighbors. Nope, the closest thing to a snow removal tool was a large broom:
With the ice underneath, with a standard broom I’d just have been polishing the ice as if I were curling. Fortunately, this broom had a hard rubber scraper on the reverse side, which was actually quite effective in breaking up the icy bits underneath (this is not solid ice in -5C weather):
Unfortunately, with most of the snow cleared, a bigger challenge emerged – further up the driveway, at our neighbors, there was still a big pile of snow blocking half the driveway. Our neighbor – a student around 20 – came out to help. I had thought the snow pile was because the people who went sledding down our driveway made a small jump or something. He explained that he and his friends built a 6-foot high wall, which later fell down – this was just the remnants of that wall. He still seemed quite proud and impressed of their accomplishment, and a little disappointed I hadn’t seen it standing it all its glory! This also explained why he came out to help as soon as he realized I was clearing the driveway. Since they packed snow into blocks to make the wall, igloo-style, it was a bit tougher than regular snowfall. Since he had an actual shovel, it wasn’t too hard to clear, but unfortunately, the trusty broom was a casualty of this process:
I guess use as an ice pick just wasn’t something the manufacturers of the broom had in mind!
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Cleaning oil spots… off a D7000
As I was out taking some of the pictures I shared yesterday, I wound up with a few shots that highlighted the one part of D7000 ownership that’s been pretty negative – recurring dust/oil spots on the sensor. I’ve already sent my camera back to Nikon twice to have them removed under warranty (losing my use of the camera on both occasions, though I did have the D3 as a “backup” during one repair). I don’t even have that option now that I’ve moved to the U.S., since I’d have to send it for service in Canada which would be quite a pain with customs and shipping. I mostly just ignored the problem, until hitting conditions yesterday that greatly exacerbate it – narrow apertures. Here’s a few pictures that I kept just to highlight the issue. First, at f/4.5, this looks like a pretty normal picture:
When stopping down to f/8.0, though, something became a lot more visible:
See all the little dots along the right, especially towards the bottom? That’s caused by the oil spots on the sensor. They’re in the same place in every frame, regardless of what I’m shooting. Their appearance does change with aperture and even by lens, but they are really annoying. At f/11, they get even more “well formed”:
Those tiny little branches, just one drop of water wide, are the same ones in that shot from yesterday, in which more than an inch of snow somehow stacked nicely on these narrow branches!
Although the branch looks bigger in successive shots, that’s just because I’m getting closer to the branch; focusing is changing, but the lens isn’t (105mm f/2.8 micro). As I got closer, I needed more depth of field and that’s why I was stopping down, revealing the extent of the issue. Once I realized this, it was trivial to check for dust spots – indoors where it’s not super-bright, at ISO 100 (or 200), use a wide aperture (f/11 or higher), and take a shot of something like a wall while moving your camera around. The shutter speed will be low enough to make everything out of focus. Except the oil spots!
Since Nikon service was no longer a real option, I looked for information on whether I could clean this up myself. A few interesting discoveries along the way:
- This is a fairly widespread issue with the D7000, even though Nikon hasn’t acknowledged it. It seems to be oil, not dust, because air blowers rarely remove the spots (they didn’t for me), and the spots always appear on the right side of the frame whereas dust would be a little more random.
- There’s a menu option on the D7000 to lock up your mirror and shutter for cleaning. Sometimes, it seems like it doesn’t work because the option is grayed out. On a past attempt, I set the camera to manual, exposure to bulb, and held down the shutter button while blowing air inside! It turns out that you need to be at 75% battery or higher, or that function will get disabled. So charge up, it’s much better than trying to hold down the shutter release!
- Touching the surface of the sensor seems super-scary, but while you won’t want to be scratching at it with a knife, it’s surface isn’t made of an unstable jelly either, and there is a layer over the sensor. The risk of making the sensor dirtier seemed to be greater than the risk of scratching it from what I read.
There are various wet cleaning solutions that were recommended by various forum-goers as being effective – but to my great benefit, one of the recommended cleaning tools that worked for many turned out to be something I already had, by pure chance:
Pictured above is a Visible Dust Arctic Butterfly 724 that my friend Herman and I got when buying a big batch of camera equipment about 8 months ago. The front of the brush goes in a plastic cover, which then goes into a styrofoam + plastic case, which then goes into a leather-like case. There’s a button to make the front of the brush spin around. When it was explained to us (as an option we could buy), the seller said it used some kind of electrostatic mechanism to rid the fibers of the brush from any dust. Though the seller was a really honest guy, I was thinking of this as an enormously unnecessary tool for cleaning lenses when microfiber cloths and a $10 blower work just fine. I mean, the thing came in more cases than you’d expect for Dolce & Gabanna sunglasses. We said no to buying this particular item – but the seller just threw it in anyways at the end. It sat on a shelf (and in a box) since then, and wasn’t used once, till Googling for sensor cleaning revealed that this tool was not in fact an overpriced cloth, it was specifically design to clean sensors!
Sadly, it was only after successfully cleaning the sensor and putting things away that I found a piece of paper in the case that said “do not spin brush while cleaning the sensor”. I thought that was the point, but actually, you’re supposed to spin it outside the camera to get all the dust off, then use the brush to clean the sensor. Fortunately, my D7000 sensor is now clean, and I won’t fret too much if I see oil spots cropping up again.
Finally, the above is what worked for me, but it is not professional advice on how to clean your sensor and I’m not advising you to do what I did. In other words, I don’t want you to try and hold me responsible if you try this and it doesn’t work for you.
And no, that dot in the top right of this last picture is not an oil spot on my sensor, it’s a spot on my carpet which will require something other than an Visible Dust Arctic Butterfly 724 to remove!
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Do not mock Mother Nature
Other than gazing at faraway mountain tops, or driving up to the ski hills around Vancouver during Christmas, this past Saturday (January 14th) marked the first time I saw a single falling snowflake since our move out west. Considering how much snow can fall by mid-January in Toronto, this was a welcome relief. When it did snow on Saturday, it was almost laughably mild; it didn’t even feel cold enough to be snowing at all, and it was more or less a light dusting, leaving behind just a few melting and conglomerating globs of ice:
It’s hard to see unless you click for the larger version, but it was mild enough for a bug to be running around on one of those ice-covered pieces of grass. As I went for a walk around 4pm, most of what fell had already melted in the afternoon sun:
In fact, it had turned into a pretty nice day, and I was carrying my camera specifically to capture the mildness of the first “snowfall” I’d seen in Washington. By the time I’d made the brisk walk to the western edge of Kirkland, still just wearing a light fabric “jacket” that I sometimes wear inside the office, it felt more like fall than winter:
If I didn’t have a backlog of photos in my camera to process, I might have posted that day about how nice the winter was here. Fortunately, I did have a backlog, because that post would have looked pretty stupid by Sunday afternoon, seeing this when looking out the back door:
I have to say, though, that it was actually pretty beautiful, especially since there was no wind – so the snow was falling very softly. Even the narrowest branch could still have snow piled neatly on top of it, as if someone was carefully balancing each snowflake in a game of Jenga at the molecular level:
You could hear the neighborhood kids off playing in the distance; some decided to use our long, steep driveway to go sledding (though fortunately stopped faster than the car which made the run a few months ago), and later I saw that another group had tried to roll the snow on our driveway into the start of a snowman!
While the total accumulation wasn’t anything that wouldn’t have been cleaned up overnight back in Toronto, it was a much more significant event around here. Though a good part of the snow melted off over the next day or two, the steep slopes and relative lack of snow clearing infrastructure made for quite a mess and a rash of closures; our office shut down today, and will be closed all day tomorrow, as we’re expecting snowfall that apparently hasn’t been seen since 1996 through the day tomorrow!
The saddest thing is, despite being a Canadian, I don’t even have a winter jacket handy (there’s probably one in a box around here somewhere!), I don’t have a pair of boots or a snow shovel (thanks to living in a condo in Toronto), and my car is the one I bought in the U.S. more than a decade ago which wouldn’t have the slimmest of chances of making it up my driveway. With the family in Taiwan, I’ve had minimal face-to-face human contact for half a week – other than a poor delivery guy who had to park his truck and pull my 120lb package through the snow by hand yesterday!
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The best camera you have with you
A phrase you’ll hear mentioned from time to time is “the best camera is the one you have with you”. The point of the phrase is that it’ll do you no good to get the D4 I mentioned in the last post if you don’t carry it around with you all the time. Since there isn’t a smartphone without a camera built-in anymore, we’re now at a point where you almost always have at least one camera with you. But sometimes, it’s been fortunate that I’ve had more than one. Like back in October, when there was a nice sunset at about 6:40pm, as I was leaving the Google offices. I took a picture with my HTC Sensation:
While there are worse cameraphone images, I was pretty disappointed. The sunset looked much nicer than the above, and you didn’t have to look too closely to see lots of noise in the image. Fortunately, the best camera I had with me wasn’t the one that was built into the HTC Sensation; I was carrying the PowerShot S90 (about 1.5 years older than the HTC Sensation). I felt it captured the sunset a little better:
Zoomed in a little, something you still largely can’t do optically on smartphone cameras:
I mentioned in looking at the statistics of which cameras/lenses I actually use, that I barely use the S90, and this is true. But because I have it much of the time, it’s still handy when I don’t have a DSLR nearby (which I never do when walking to/from work).
I read recently that sales of compact cameras in 2011 were significantly lower than 2010, as a result of the growing ubiquity of smartphones. It’s a shame that many people might not fully realize what they’re giving up when going to the cameras built into their phones, even in comparison to a compact camera. As I mentioned in a post when I was still kicking myself for not having my DSLR when we ran into Kim Clijsters, the difference in output between classes of camera (phone, compact, 4/3rds or APS-C, and 35mm) is still huge. With even a consumer-grade D5100 or D7000 in the above situation, there’d even have been enough dynamic range in the picture to bring out some foreground detail (if you want it), like this shot in much less interesting conditions in Vancouver:
I’m not that fond of the above photo, but I’m nevertheless amazed that it’s possible to capture the sun and details in the trees (you’ll need to click for the larger version to actually see the detail, probably) in a single frame with no HDR tricks applied. Unfortunately it seems like it will still take at least 5-10 years (given that APS-C overall performance is just now approaching the first full-frame D3 from over 4 years ago, and that the sensor size drop going to a compact is much bigger) before compacts reach what APS-C sensors can today.
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Time to go full frame?
Nikon announced the D4 last last week, a $6,000 successor to the Nikon D3s:
The image is Nikon’s, and links to their blog post announcing the D4. It’s a 16.2MP camera, only a little more than the D3S, and essentially the same as the D7000 (which is what I use, and is the latest model in Nikon’s line of cameras that use smaller DX sensors). It’s marquee features are awesome low light performance, better video than any prior Nikon camera, and very fast shooting and auto-focus.
According to NikonRumors.net (which was spot on with the D4 prediction), the replacement for the less (but still) expensive full-frame D700 is also forthcoming. They say it’s named the D800, and will be a whopping 36MP – though significantly slower in terms of shooting speed than the D4 as a result of this. It will probably have a body that’s more like the D700, which is to say, much smaller than the monstrous D4 (which appears to be similar in size to the D3 that I used for a few months). Is one of these for me?
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25 Megapixels
Do more megapixels really matter? Camera manufacturers seem to think so, with the Sony NEX-7 pushing things up to 24MP and Nikon’s forthcoming D800 rumored to have a whopping 36MP. Well, I now have a 25MP photo in my collection:
I always link images to SmugMug’s X3 size, which is pretty big, but well short of 25MP. If you want to see every last pixel, this link is the full sized JPEG. Now, I like this picture independently of any of the technology behind it, simply because in all our thousands of photos we have very few that are of all four of us, which isn’t surprising given that someone has to hold the camera (especially since my camera is configured in a weird way that makes it hard to hand over to someone). So, what was this picture shot with?
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Happy 2012!
It seems with each passing year, we pay less attention to the actual new year itself. 12 years ago, I rang in the new year with my cousins in Malaysia, where there was a huge event on the grounds of the old international airport (relegated to handling a few domestic flights after the opening of KLIA) – while wondering what Y2K chaos might ensure for computer systems. 11 years ago, I was with friends and family in New York City’s Times Square as we welcomed 2001; the size of that affair needs no further description. This year, I went to bed at around 9:30pm (because Olivia still refuses to go to bed on her own), and while I did wake up a couple of hours later, I didn’t even stop to really think that it was the new year until later. I think I was actually playing Starcraft 2 when the new year rolled in!
Still, 2011 was a busy year with lots of change for us – where we live, where I work and the type of work I’m doing, one of our cars (after 10 years with Dopey) , to name a few – and with the kids starting 2011 at 2 years 8 months and 10 months old, the pace of change within the year as they develop is nothing less than astonishing. I haven’t really thought about and don’t really know what to expect or strive for in 2012, which is too bad because I usually do set some goals at the start of the year. But with Valerie and the kids heading to Taiwan for a while shortly, I’ll have some time to think about this. For now, I’ll just share a couple of interesting stats…
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Travelocity << Singapore Airlines
I had intended to write three travel-related posts consecutively before getting sidetracked with the last post. I figured that by going from bad (United Airlines) to good (Singapore Airlines) to awful (this post), I might avoid sounding like a perennial complainer. And indeed, as I mentioned in a recent post on customer service, I really think it’s worth calling out and supporting great customer service (and the companies that provide it) so we get more of it – and less of companies like Travelocity.
You already know that this story doesn’t end well, so I’ll caveat things up front. First, I technically booked through travelocity.ca as opposed to travelocity.com; but were they to tell me that’s a separate corporate entity with a relation in brand only, I’d tell them that I don’t care and that they should be more careful with their brand. Second, this is just one experience; I am sure that some people have good experiences. Much probably depends on which agent your call is routed to, and whether they’re having a good day. Though having communicated with them many times via both phone and E-mail, I must have hit many bad days. Finally, there are definitely things I could have been more proactive about or attentive to. Still, I think customers deserve better.
The context is simple – I needed to go back to Malaysia from Seattle for my mom’s birthday. Since I was no longer living in Canada or flying out of Toronto, which I was pretty familiar with, I had to look for different options and decided to give Travelocity a try (due to a slightly negative experience with Expedia, in which a flight booked with Expedia got cancelled, but I got charged for the hotel I also booked with Expedia anyways; understandable in some respects, yet unpleasant nonetheless).
The first challenge was just finding flights. Like essentially all travel sites, you type in what you want and what feels like 5 minutes later, you get back a list of options (some of which have impossible connection times and other traps to watch out for). I look forward to the day when the awesomely fast Google Flight Search covers the whole world and not just the U.S. Now, I understand that finding optimal flight routes is something of an NP-complete problem, but taking 6 different airlines via different cities isn’t going to work anyways, so it’s unclear that the search space should be that large. Yes, arcane fare rules and airline partnerships probably make matters more complex, and I have no doubt that the people who work on this problem are very smart. But the results aren’t great, yet.
What do I mean by not great? Searching for flights from Seattle to Kuala Lumpur turned up a few options, all with 2+ stops, that were not appealing and also quite expensive. Searching for flights from Los Angeles to Kuala Lumpur and then matching flights from Seattle to Los Angeles offered a whole host of viable options not returned by the first search. You can try it right now! Plugging in this same set of routes (SEA -> KUL versus SEA -> LAX -> KUL), with a random date, the two-part search found flights $70 cheaper – with the same number of stops (2). In my case, the difference was more than $70, and more importantly, I was looking for a decent airline (Singapore Airlines) and also a Star Alliance carrier since that would have put me at the 100k threshold to qualify for Super Elite status for another year. The added inconvenience and time of flying via LAX was easily worth it to earn those miles.
But my gripe is not about the search process not being as good as it could (or should, or will) be. It’s about three things that happened next:
- As I check in at Los Angeles for the flight to Singapore, the check-in agent tells me that in addition to only having middle seats (which I can accept), that I’m on a special fare that doesn’t qualify for miles. I’ve rarely ever seen such fares, especially not for international travel – but in all cases where I had, it was fully disclosed. There was no mention of this in any interaction with Travelocity, and I did indeed read all the fare rules. I read them again after discovering this, complained to multiple people at Travelocity about this, and all they could say was that it’s an airline policy, not their policy, and that I have to talk to the airline about it. They were utterly uninformed, and this was a serious failure in disclosure. The net cost of this was approximately 40,000 miles (I earn 2-for-1 through this year due to being Super Elite), which is enough for 1.5 round trip tickets anywhere in North America. And it put me well out of reach of making Super Elite for next year (which historically meant 50,000 extra miles during the year – another 2 round trip tickets). Of all the issues, this was the most serious – it still makes me angry thinking about it, especially given their clueless and uncaring response to the issue.
- Several weeks after booking, I received several E-mails on both flights informing me about changes to the flight schedule – made by the airlines (Singapore and Alaska, in this case). Flights, in particular the LAX -> SEA flight, moved several times, sometimes backwards, sometimes forward. I knew I’d have to check this at some point, but assumed that it was just a change of schedule. In actual fact, my LAX -> SEA flight had been moved earlier enough that there was absolutely no way I was going to be able to clear immigration and customs, walk between terminals (it’s LA!), and go through security to catch my flight. Once I realized this, I called to correct the situation. Their response? I should have called sooner, now I’m stuck with unworkable flights, and have to pay $200 to get something later. I paid less than $200 for the entire round trip initially! To add insult to injury, they spent a bunch of time trying to convince me that I initiated the change – when I was looking at E-mail directly in front of me that made it clear that I didn’t. Thank goodness I was calling with Google Voice, or it would have cost a fortune to listen to them tell me that I decided to pick impossible flights for myself.
- A day later, they get in touch via E-mail to say that my rebooked flight didn’t go through, because my credit card – the same one they had yesterday when they were on the phone with me – has now expired. Note this isn’t a credit card I had given them; they asked if the same credit card was fine and I said yes, without actually thinking about exactly which card I had originally booked with. Oh, and in the whole 24 hour period that went by that it took for them to discover what normally happens in the 10 seconds after you click the “Book” button, the fares have changed – upward – and now I have to fly through Portland.
I’ve probably traveled between 800,000 and 900,000 miles by air during my lifetime, but this qualifies as the single worst experience in that entire history of air travel. The only two that come even remotely close are benig told by the now-defunct airline Jetsgo that we our flight out of Newark was cancelled because it was snowing in Toronto (it was over 10 degrees Celsius, and an Air Canada flight was departing at the same time – this was just an outright lie), and being locked in a room for over four hours with my brother while on transit as unaccompanied minors in Los Angeles.
I won’t be using Travelocity again, and I suggest that you don’t either.
