Ramble On

Cameras for me, are like handbags are for many women. You need the right camera for the occasion. An iPhone for everywhere, a compact for gigs, a mirror less camera for times when I’ve got a small rucksack with me, and a SLR for quality. (I’ve recently upgraded my SLR to a Sony A77).

For the last 3 years my I’ve been using a Panasonic TZ-5 as my compact of choice. I bought it because it was a super zoom and I thought it would be great for capturing the stage from further back in the audience. But after three years it was showing it’s age. The image quality in low light was very poor. The max ISO is a very noisy and muddy ISO 1600. Although it’s good to have the extra zoom, the maximum aperture would drop to 4.9, not great for low light use. So often, I’d have to reduce the zoom length to get a barely usable picture. It also didn’t have a ‘PASM’ option so I had to dig into the menu system to find the option to limit the maximum shutter speed. So it was time for a change.

The specification was simple.

• Small
• Good lens
• Wide aperture at zoom end
• Good quality at high ISO
• RAW support
• Long zoom

Basically, something that doesn’t exist. After much research it was clear that finding a long zoom lens camera with a wide aperture at full zoom is not possible. As I’m often at the front at gigs, loosing the long zoom wouldn’t be too much of a problem if the quality of the picture was good enough to allow cropping – most of my photos are only uploaded to flickr and blogs.

With the spec solidified, the choice appeared to be between the Canon S100 and the Olympus XZ-1. The S100 has excellent ISO performance. But although it’s advertised with a fast F2 lens, after playing with one in a shop, it was clear this very quickly dropped off. So that at full zoom the aperture is a very slow F5.9. The Olympus on the other hand has fast lens that starts at F1.8 at wide angle and only drops to F2.5 at full zoom. However, it’s ISO performance was clearly not in the same league as the S100.

I spent many months debating which way to go and in the end, it was heavy discounting of the Olympus XZ1 that meant that I could say £150 over the S100, that sealed the decision. After three months of use and about a dozen gigs, I feel I’ve had enough time to judge the camera’s performance and I have to say I’m really pleased with the choice I made.

The XZ-1 is on the large-end of the compact range. Although it fits in a pocket, you know you are carrying it. It features a very big lens for a compact camera, but it doesn’t have a mechanical iris to protect the lens when it’s switched off. Instead it has a plastic cap which increases the overall size.

Although it comes in white and black, from a design perspective, it’s a functional camera, rather than a pretty camera. It clearly is designed to be what it is. A compact camera for people who also have a SLR but want a quality compact.

On the top of the camera is a PASM control dial. This allows quick access to Aperture, Shutter, Programme, and Manual modes. There’s also a few special modes. An intelligent auto mode (like all IA modes – it’s not that intelligent), a scene mode, art mode, lowlight mode and special custom mode that can be configured to work the way you like.

My mirror-less camera is a Sony NEX5. Sony designed it’s interface to be accessible to people moving up from a point and click camera. Many reviewers have critised the interface for being too clunky and dumbed down for SLR users. Advanced features are hidden away in sub menus requiring too clicks to access them. As a long-term NEX5 users, I think many of these reviews are wide of the mark. Sony provide numerous ways to customise buttons to your requirements and in daily use, I find it’s interface is great to work with.

I mention this because the Olympus hasn’t been critised for it’s menus. As I mentioned, the camera will be mostly used at gigs. So I have a very clear use-case. This usually means accessing ISO settings, shutter speeds, focus zones, EV adjustments and sequential shooting opions. Having customised my NEX to provide quick access to almost all these facilities, coming to the the Olympus, the menu system feels very clunky. Yes, you can switch quickly between PASM modes, but swapping other settings often requires several clicks and I think overall it’s more fiddly than on the NEX. However, like all interfaces you get used to it and it’s not a poor interface by any means, just different from my other cameras.

I purchased the camera purely because of the lens. Few compacts offer such a fast lens and it really is very good for this category of camera. I’ve found the lens to have very little chromatic aberration and it’s relatively sharp for a compact. However, there is noticeable barrel distortion at the wide end. But at gigs, the f2.5 (at full zoom) has meant that I’ve been able to capture photos in very low light which would have been out of the question with my old compact.

The camera’s ISO performance is good, but not brilliant. It’s not comparable with the APS-C NEX. But it’s a massive leap up from the TZ5. Noise is controlled well in RAW images up to ISO800, with little colour noise and controllable luminance noise. Above 1250, the noise is more difficult to control. You’re definitely not going to get good print photos, but for web use, the photos are usable. But the great thing is that with such a fast lens, it’s rare that I need to go above ISO1600.

Alongside the tradition PASM modes, the camera offers a number of art modes such as pop art, dramatic, diorama, pin hole, grainy film and soft focus. They’re useful additions but I don’t think they’re as good as those offered on my NEX.

Tufnell Park tube station. Grainy Film Art effect.

Not everything is rosy though. Olympus have decided to use a non standard USB cable and they do not provide an external charger. You have to leave the battery in the camera and charge it by connecting the USB cable to a computer or to the power block they provide. Although I’ve found that you can charge the camera through an iPhone power block USB connection, I still have to remember the extra cable when I go away. However, saying that, it can capture around 300 shots per charge. So it should be enough for a day’s shooting.

The camera also offers 720P video. But like most compacts, it doesn’t offer any option to reduce the sensitivity of the microphone. So if you intend to capture video at a gig, I’d look elsewhere. The microphone is unable to deal with the decibel levels at concerts and sounds are distorted and clipped.

Overall I’m extremely happy with the camera. It does exactly what I need it to do. It’s compact, so can be taken into gigs and is able to deal with low light and manages to capture some very usable pictures.

 

 Tourist-type photos

Kentish Town tube

Camden shop. F3.2. ISO 160

Full zoom – football stadium lighting. 1/80, f 2.5, ISO 200

Taken from a coach. (Shutter priority). 1/80. ISO100

Bog standard travel photo using ‘auto’

Gig Photos

Alabma Shakes at the Boston Arms. Almost no lighting of any kind. My previous compact camera would not have been able to return any results without flash – and when I’m a metre away from the artist, it’s something I try to avoid. 1/60. f2.0. ISO1600

Chapman Family, Bull and Gate. 1/80. f2.5. ISO1250

The Naturals, Bull and Gate. 1/80. f2.0, ISO800

Dave Gilmour. Cropped image. 1/80. f2.5. ISO800

British Sea Power. Low light. 1/60, f2.5, ISO640

Jock Scott supporting British Sea Power. 1/60. f 2.4, ISO800

Laura Marling, Cambridge Corn Exchange. 1/60. f2.5. ISO800

Ting Tings at Scala. 1/80. f2.1, ISO640

Dry the River. 1/80. f2.3. ISO800.

Dry the River, KOKO. 1/80. f2.3. ISO500

Hey Sholay, Koko. 1/80. f2.5. ISO800

Band of Skulls, XOYO, mainly lit from behind, with little front-fill lighting. 1/80. f1.8. ISO500

Howler. 1/80. f2.5. ISO320

Race Horses, Madame JoJo’s. 1/80. f2.5. ISO800

Posted in Gadgets, Photography, Review

I bought the original iPad on the UK day of release and have used it daily ever since. I was at SXSW last year when the iPad2 was released but decided against buying one in the ‘pop-up’ shop, Apple set up for the conference.

Clearly the iPad2 was much better than the original iPad. It was quicker, featured a front facing camera for video conferencing and was smaller and lighter than the original iPad. But despite all these advantages, it wasn’t enough to justify my buying one. The reason simply, after using my iPhone 4′s retina display, there was no way I was going to buy a new iPad until it offered a similar quality screen.

So with the release of the iPad 3, or the new iPad, as Apple prefers to call it, coming as it does with a near retina display, it was time to upgrade.

The new iPad is very similar in size and weight to the iPad 2. Apparently it is a millimetre thicker and slightly heavier, but in use few will notice.

The first thing you do notice when you switch on the new iPod is the quality of the new screen. Like the iPhone 4, the new retina display, displays crisp clean text and since you will be consuming lots of textual information through your iPad, this seemingly minor change significantly improves the overall experience.

Other changes, are an improved camera and the ability to use SIRI’s voice dictation within almost all iPad applications. Overall the dictation works remarkably well, it even seems to understand my mixed up accent.

If you’re an iPad1 user and are wondering whether the upgrade is worth it, yes definitely. If you’re an iPad 2 user, it is a more difficult decision. So I’ve put together a gallery of images to help you decide.

Small text on the BBC website

Readable without zooming in.

 

Side-by-side comparison

Posted in Apple, iPad

… no really it has. It’s come up with this fantastic product, the electronic book. It’s so much more than ‘book v1′, it’s interactive. ‘Books v2′ is so much better for the current generation of students. Apple thinks our current generation of students are too stupid to understand words and need pictures and too stupid to understand diagrams, so they need videos. Seriously Apple, is this meant to ‘change education’?

The announcement happened while I was at Lotusphere and I saw some tweets from some people I respect in the academic world about Apple ‘reinventing education’. With IBM failing to provide a working wireless network at Lotusphere I’ve only now had a chance to download the iBook Author and view the Apple announcement. Don’t get me wrong, Apple do a lot of good things with education and well designed ibooks will help provide a more engaging experience for many pupils, but there are so many things that are wrong with the way Apple made this announcement. Students who perform poorly in the Western world, do so because of factors such as:

• Poor discipline – lack of respect from both students are parents
• Poor teaching – poor wages and low requirements for teaching means that (sometimes) the best talent isn’t attracted to teaching
• Large class sizes so students are allowed to fall behind
• The over reliance on standardised testing often produces students who lack critical thinking abilities
• Poor resources and old school infrastructure.
• and simply a difficulty with engaging students with ‘difficult’ subjects such as maths and science in a society that makes them believe everything has a short cut (reality TV such as XFactor)

Many of the problems of Western education are due to society. The countries that perform best are often the countries with better discipline in society as a whole. Countries such as Finland who score highly, are countries were politeness and respect are still prevalent. There’s also a smaller degree of social depravation in Finland. In countries such as the UK and the US, we have generations of society who successively drop-out of school due to lack of encouragement from parents and the social pressures place on them.

The solution(s) to our educational problems are more complex than simply throwing electronic content at students. They require an education system that can engage with pupils who have little interest or encouragement from home. This is not a simple job and requires a completely radical overhaul of the education system, to one that is centred around a students interests and somehow engages not only with them but with them, but also their parents, who have ‘given up’ on the education system. (i.e. something ‘home schooling’ does very well)

So if we remove the ‘hype’ and look at the announcement. What have Apple announced?

1. Electronic books that can be viewed on an iPad.
2. A very simple tool to create electronic books.
3. A simple mechanism to publish electronic books.

As somebody who’s been working in Learning Technology for nearly two decades, here’s my view:

1. Electronic content for education has to be platform neutral. Content tied to an OS is not ‘opening up education’ but closing it off. I regularly count the ratio of student laptops when I leave work. The Macs to PC ratio has been as high as 25 PCs for every Mac. The lowest I’ve seen 2 PCs to every Mac (but there was a Art & Design hand-in that day). In general the ratio is about 10 PCs for every Mac. (Our log files show that 9% of accesses are from OSX, so I think this number is accurate). Increasingly we’re seeing accesses from Android tablets. Should I put our content into something that cannot be accessed by students who choose to use an Android tablet? I thought this was meant to be improving education not creating ‘haves and have nots’
2. The new tool looks incredibly simple to use. But simple authoring tools have been available for two decades. Apple’s own Hypercard was a very simple tool to produce ‘interactive books’. There were tools such as Authorware, and Director, (even VB) that could be used to produce more interactive systems such as simulations, that actually could teach students. But the problem has always been to produce quality content is extremely time-consuming. As soon as it goes ‘multimedia’ it’s requires even more time to produce that a text book. It’s not something that can be knocked together from a few Powerpoints. But if you do manage to produce an interactive iBook, it’s nothing new. The majority of multimedia content produced since the 90s has tended to be nothing more than an electronic book, and these CD-ROMs and websites haven’t radicalised teaching. Books complement learning, but they rarely teach. That’s why we have teachers.
3. Most worryingly for me. Who’s going to provide ‘quality assurance’ for the content? Apple? Do we want to see US religious freaks writing ‘science books’ that are based on a text written by 3000 years ago, yet presenting them as fact? For all their faults, good academic publishers have an editorial process that counteracts these religious zealots and try to ensure the content we present to our children is accurate, or at least follows the scientific method. (God help the US if it continues to allow these idiots to dictate it’s science teaching).
4. There’s also the expense. Yes, you can load a lot of electronic books onto an iPad, but an iPad is a £400 outlay. For this to be successful in the UK, you need an iPad per student pre-loaded with all the courseware for a year, that means maths, physics, chemistry, biology, history, English, modern foreign languages, geography, design, art, music, PE, ICT, and citizenship. That won’t be cheap. As school with 2000 students would have to outlay at least half a million pounds to provide just the iPad and it’s not like Pearson’s are using this as an opportunity to vastly reduce costs with a new ‘software-like’ licensing model where a school can subscribe to a book on a ‘concurrent use’ basis. Every student would have to own a copy. How much would it cost say to provide the core English core texts on the iPad? It seems the profit margin on e-books are even larger than with a print-run. This is of course, unless of course Apple are proposing to give every pupil an iPad for free?

So sorry Apple, if you want to change education, start talking to some people who really understand the problems in the education system and society. Throw some of your vast cash reserves at initiatives to support new ways of engaging disadvantaged students. Something I know the Bill Gates foundation has done. But do not present your new profitable income stream as an ‘education revolution’ as if you’re ‘doing education a favour’.

Posted in Apple, iOS, Learning Technology