Category Archives: technical

Olympus Stylus not so Tough

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The “Olympus Stylus Tough 3000” is not so tough inside. The zoom buttons are held together with some really flimsy plastic springs (highlighted and currently covered in a drop of crazy glue). I sure hope the OM-D is constructed better than this, because I want one someday.

P1030054

The part that broke off is the round black thing that’s highlighted in the image.  For reference those are about 2mm across.  The plastic springs that both locate and return the round part are towards the middle.  The spring to the right is what broke, allowing the round part to flop around under the rubber button panel.  It could have destroyed other buttons too.

In fact, every button on the back of the camera is supported by a flimsy piece of plastic. Picture all the buttons being supported inside the way parts in a plastic model kit are attached to a big plastic ring. Yeah, like that, only 1/10th the size of that.  Kinda disappointing to see this type of design/construction.  I really think this is designed to wear out and break.  This could break flopping around in a jeans pocket.

The only thing pleasant about taking this apart was discovering that the built in memory was just a microSD card in a slot.P1030050

See it there?  It’s just right of center towards the bottom with a sharpie mark on it (from the factory, not me).  There’s a plastic tab attached to the board, so that even if you take the whole board out, you’re discouraged from replacing the card.  Well, an exacto fixed that!  The card didn’t appear to have any important software on it, but it did appear to have some auto-run software that will give you a manual in your language.  Copy that to a new bigger card and you can upgrade the internal memory!  My guess is that it’ll take at least micro SDHC, which is good up to 32gb.  I wouldn’t get too excited though, because the internal memory is accessed through an internal controller, which tends to be really slow.  So it’s a good emergency thing, but of limited daily use.

Still, neat to know you can upgrade, huh?  If you want to upgrade a camera that isn’t made to last.  C’est la vie.

Oh, and yes, I did put this back together and it works fine now.  I’m good like that.

D7100 practical bit-depth

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More test results from this past week.  I already know that 14-bit isn’t any better than 12-bit at base ISO on the D700.  Well, let’s just make sure things haven’t changed with new gear.

There is (quite wisely) no “uncompressed” raw on the D7100.  But if you’re foolish enough to want to waste space, there are “losslessly compressed” and “compressed” modes, in addition to being able to select between 12 and 14 bit files.  My preference is the smallest file, since that helps the buffer dump to the card faster.  Lets see if I lose anything choosing 12-bit compressed (allegedly lossy) vs 14-bit lossless, first just comparing the overall scene before manipulation:

sidebyside

There’s a pretty good hot spot in between those trees.  Let’s dial down the exposure and see if one setting is capturing more in the highlights:

12 bit lossy14-bit lossless

Can you tell the difference?  There’s no posterization.  Now you can complain that the highlights didn’t blow, however, the point is that even in the 12-bit lossy version, there’s more highlight than I need.  Unless you’re doing something wrong, you probably don’t need 14-bit for highlights with the D7100.

Now let’s look at the shadows (artificially pulled up in post):

14-bit_lossless_shadow12-bit_lossy_shadow

Not seeing anything different here.

Now the point is not that there’s no difference.  The point is that for actual real world shooting, there is no appreciable difference.  Don’t waste your time or card space on 14-bit files.  If the review sites were smarter or more honest, they’d tell you the same.

Of course, if you want to come up with a reproducible test with real world repercussions, please, by all means do so.  And share your results like I have!

Here’s my original raw files if you want to play with them yourself.

D7000 back focus issue

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A brief glance at google will tell you that there’s a lot of noise about the D7000 and back focus issues.  As an adept googler, I couldn’t seem to find any images illustrating the issue, so here we go…

baseline/no correction

baseline/AF fine tune turned off

This is not absolutely horrible, but it is troublesome.  This is wide open with an 85mm 1.8D Nikon lens, of a test chart available here: http://regex.info/blog/photo-tech/focus-chart

There is a slight amount of focus error visible here, but in real world shots I am Continue reading →

Bit Depth Part 2 of 3

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(or: Proving what I already knew)

In the last post we looked at what bit-depth means and how it is theoretically useful.  It could theoretically be useful for recovering detail and tonal nuances that don’t appear obvious from standard processing.  The example I gave was to illustrate how under extreme settings we could add contrast to enhance the appearance of an edge between two nearly similar colors (two nearly identical shades of green).

Theoretically, a file with more bit depth has more information and if manipulated, we might be able to use that information in useful ways.

So, let’s take a look at this from a capture standpoint.  Pedal, meet my dear friend, Metal

one of the images at default settings

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Bit Depth Part 1 of 3

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Ok, I lied, this one is gonna be big and spin your head…

I had planned on starting small and working up to more complex concepts, but then I decided to address bit depth for my first topic. So this first real post is going to give background to the topic and really, there’s a lot that needs to be said here that I will absolutely refer back to.

In conversations about photography, we refer to bit-depth or cameras supporting 12, 14, or even 16-bit raw files. Cameras generally all put out 8-bit JPEGs and TIFFs, so we’re talking about raw files when we talk about bit-depth.

What is bit depth? Well, let’s start with a description of what every one of us see on a daily basis: 8 bits.

Every computer/tv screen you see is optimized for 8 bits per channel, in the sRGB color space. 8 bits describes 256 colors, or black through the brightest of that color. Like so:

green ramp

This “ramp” of green has a total of 255 values of green and one value for true black. Each “pixel” on your computer screen has three sub pixels of red, green, and blue, and each gets assigned one of these values. Black gets a value so that each sub pixel can be completely off.

Why is this important? Because the human eye can barely distinguish between value 255 and 254 on this ramp. Really, here they are, try it:

green patch

Can you see a difference? Can you see which part of this patch is 254 and which is 255? Unless your monitor is severely broken or improperly calibrated, no, you will not see the division between the two colors very clearly. Why is this important? Well, to illustrate what bit depth means. If the above ramp were 16 bits of green, you wouldn’t get a brighter green or darker black, you’d just get the same range of values chopped up into finer “bits”. A total of 65536 values to be precise.

Why on earth would you want that precision? Read on…

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