Month: August 2008

Earlier in the year I finally succumbed and bought my first non-phone digital camera. Yes, you read that right. It’s a Nikon D40, the cheapest digital SLR I could find that takes a goodly range of lenses.

Some of the more recent stuff on my Flickr account was taken with it (notably the pencils, Duxford, and Ironbridge), and I’m adoring having a usable stills camera again.

I don’t care that it’s ‘only’ six megapixels, nor that it’s a ‘beginner-level’ camera; I wanted to see if I still enjoyed taking pictures, whether I took better pictures with a reasonable camera, and get some idea of what sort of lenses I might want.

So at the time, I couldn’t justify spending a chunk more change on a D80, because I had a sneaking suspicion that what I really wanted was a D200/D300. And that was more money then I was going to cough up.

…and now there’s a D90. It’s like a D80, only it has a better sensor. It has a ‘live view’ mode. And… and… and… it shoots 720p video.

Now, the handling of an SLR for video would be… er… awful, mostly. It’s built to be held to your face, not moved smoothly at waist or chest level. There’s no microphone jack. It saves motion-JPEG – what is this, the 90s? – and tops out at five minutes’ recording, presumably for buffer reasons but there may also be sensor heat dissipation concerns.

But you do get interchangeable lenses, honest-to-goodness depth of field to play with, and low-light sensitivity. It’s an appealing tool. For limited circumstances, perhaps, but still appealing. Very appealing.

So here’s my thoughts: Suppose —

• The D90 sells big, in part because of the video feature.
• Next year’s ‘$3,000’ RED Scarlet turns out to be a humdinger of a camera that people actually want (as opposed to a terrific technical package that’s a pain to use in practice, because post-producing the material it produces is a way way way high-end problem, ahem).
• Next month’s Panasonic HMC150/151 really is high-end web video’s equivalent of the game-changing Sony PD150

…then you have to wonder what Canon’s plans are.

They’ve been very quiet this year, offering relatively minor updates to the XL-H1 but not touching the XG-A1. Sony have done exciting things with cheaper XDCAM units and the Z7, Panasonic are going doo-lally over their AVCIntra and P2, and even Nikon have pulled this D90 trick.

Canon, meanwhile, build class-leading high-end consumer cameras in the £600 bracket, and… HDV stuff. Old HDV stuff.

My speculation is that they’re integrating their next-generation still and video camera technologies. Which could, potentially, rock, to the extent of them cleaning up. Who else knows as much about both stills and video as Canon?

Sony’s Alpha dSLRs are, by repute, really quite good, but they’re not Canon or Nikon. Could Nikon make a professional video camera? Really? Could they partner with Panasonic somehow? JVC?

I wonder if Nikon, RED, and Panasonic might demonstrate that a market exists, only for Canon to swoop in at CES or NAB next year with something really quite spectacular.

Damn. And there was me planning to buy an HMC151 this year, too. Maybe, like the D40, I’ll ‘make do’ with something cheaper until it’s clearer which way the wind is blowing.

No, not the Mike Figgis film (though I do have one of the circular ‘Fig Rig‘ camera grips that came out of that; very useful with wobbly teenagers and utterly loved by wheelchair users).

There’s a new iPhone app in the Store that does timecode calculations. And, yes, you can pick between 24/25/30/29.97/59.94 non-drop-frame/blah blah blah.

One of those things that’s no use at all for most people… but if you need it, boy do you need it. Time:calc (App Store). £1.19.

Read this, and tell me: are you thinking ‘IgNobel‘ too?

The modest amount of philosophy I studied came right at the end of my degree. On a practical day-to-day level, it was probably the single most useful thing I did throughout my entire education, and I’ve often wondered why I wasn’t exposed to it earlier on in the process. Say, for example, as a core subject in school.

(This seems to be a common theme for me. Perhaps once practical science is sorted – via SciCast’s successor, obviously – I’ll get on to sorting out broader ‘teaching people how to think’ stuff. Ahem.)

Dopplr knows about many places, all over the world. So many, in fact, that it’s a little hazy about some of the details. And it’s very rough indeed when it comes to local customs, it seems:

Close enough. Ahem.

[update: I’ve been informed by Dopplr that there’s a town near Sheffield called Wales, which is what it found. So it knows more than I do. Oh, the shame.]

Mondrianum: a Mac OS colour picker pane that talks to Adobe Kuler. Joy.

Chris Hoy wearing three gold medals and a suit, riding a Brompton folding bike, accompanying the double-decker bus into the Bird’s Nest stadium.

Brilliant.

[update: Annie Mole has a screen grab at Flickr]

They’ve actually done it: shut the M1 and duffed in the twin cooling towers near Sheffield.

It’s maybe ten years since I found myself talking to the guy who had the contract to bring them down. They had a workable plan, but it involved closing the M1. Blowing them up without closing the motorway would have been nuts, since the towers were right next to the flyover near Meadowhall and Rotherham; closing the road wasn’t on the cards; stalemate.

Apparently, a decade on the towers were in poor enough condition that leaving them up was no longer an option, so the road was duly closed in the small hours of this morning, and down they came.

They were a fine landmark. Now we’ll only have the merrily-decorated cranes in the yard on the other side of the road to look at.

Genius. Utter genius. Via Team Gupta, who ponders re-enacting this at a real party… after the drink has been flowing. Evil man.

[edit: changed the embed to the earliest posting I could find on YouTube. The original source is the Marie Curie Actions ‘Teens’ site, which appears to follow standard EU practice of there being an inverse releationship between the funding level of a project and the quality of the web design.]

Here’s a lovely little text experiment. Via Big Contrarian.

Lousy way of making tea, though.