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Fujifilm X100 First Impression

Wednesday, May 18th, 2011

I’ve been looking forward to the X100 for months, and have been in and out of a couple X100 forums, so it’s been interesting to finally have one in my hands now. (Actually, due to the way preorders overlapped with shipping, I’ll have two, but obviously one is going back, unless someone in LA wants to pick one up).

It’s still early days – I’ve only gone out shooting once (I’ll be heading out shooting tonight as well) and I’m still getting used to how it handles. I know it’s capable of capturing fantastic images, but coming from shooting tens of thousands of frames on Canon DSLRs over the past decade, adapting to the X100 has been a bit of a challenge so far.

The lack of rangefinder patch, focus screen or some other equivalent is killing me right now (the EVF is not my idea of a good time), but maybe that’ll pass. That being said, I’m actually looking forward to shooting the heck out of this thing. I’m sure it’ll make me a better photographer in terms of thinking about what I’m shooting, estimating distances, and thinking about DOF. It’s certainly not a P&S, and I’ll no doubt miss a lot of shots, but I plan on trying to carry it everywhere, so we’ll see how it goes. (I’ve ordered a Luma LoopIt strap.)

For those considering the X100, I’d probably have to say that this isn’t the camera you want to take with you to evening social events, not unless you really want to work for your photos. While the bright lens (F2.0) and amazing High ISO performance (totally usable at 3200) and quiet leaf shutter would seem to make it great for low-light candids, the AF seems more finicky than average, and sadly, the fly-by-wire focus ring is pretty much useless right now.

That being said, I plan on working primarily in MF mode and zoning, so we’ll see how that works.

Happy Accident

Also, there are a lot of niggles in the firmware. On the bright side, these could all be fixed and there seems to be some noises from Fuji that they will work on the firmware. On the negative, that historically hasn’t been the case. I’ll be keeping a running list of things I’d liked fixed here:

General

  • Startup Times: I’ve managed to get it starting up fairly quickly (about 1s?) but out of the box it took so long that I kept thinking it was broken.
  • File writing: file writes seem to block operations? Is this 2011?
  • ISO settings don’t persist across modes
  • Even in full manual mode, the aperture doesn’t seem to be physically set, so there’s shutter lag. More of an annoyance than a dealbreaker
  • Yep, the battery goes from “low” to shutdown in < 5min; in general power usage/management seems to be rather poor. There must be a better compromise for responsiveness/power usage. Canon DSLR powerpacks are about the same capacity and last forever.

AF

  • My current #1 focusing issue, at the cause of most of my misfocused shots is the OVF AF parallax. The FW fix that would help this greatly would be to recompose the AF point with the focal plane (just move it along with the framelines). More discussion here.
  • Low light AF; is this the best it gets?
  • The focus-frame size can only be adjusted in AF-S; I’ve find it enormously useful if it could be adjusted in MF

Focusing

  • The biggest problem is the focus ring doesn’t work at all for covering distances; it’s not helped by it being incredibly laggy as well. This should be an easy fix with a better acceleration curve, and allowing that to be user adjustable/distance-dependent
  • In MF, since the command lever is used to enter EVF zoom mode, wouldn’t it make sense to allow the lever to be used for focusing as well? Actually would be a lot less finicky than the ring; you could also use one or the other for rough/fine focusing

Buttons

  • It’d be nice to reassign the RAW button (I’m always shooting JPG+RAW, I’d much rather be able to assign that to movie mode or the ND filter)
  • Macro should just be a toggle instead of popping up a menu – it’s either on or off! Same w/ ND – these are probably my biggest usability quibbles after the first week.
  • Auto ISO should be a toggle in ISO menu (so you can easily flip it on/off in the OVF fn mode); actually, for night shooting, being able to toggle Auto ISO off even easier (long-press?) is even more important; it really screws with you when the metering if off by more than the exposure compensation…

Video

  • Manual focusing while shooting. The AF is especially clueless when shooting video
  • It’d be nice to be able to set the fn button (or the RAW button) to go directly into recording

OVF

  • The histogram doesn’t seem to be right? It doesn’t reflect aperture or shutter speed changes?
  • The range scale is good, but would be nice to show the hyperfocal distance as a marking (or as others have suggested, a mode/way to jump to the hyperfocal distance like the GRD)
  • In the post-capture EVF review, it’d be nice to have an option to show brights/histogram; being able to have a 1s or even 0.5s preview would be nice as well

I’ll be trying to post more regularly to my flickr account.

After a couple weeks with the X100, I posted an updated list on Engadget.

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Posted in Personal, Tech, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

SXSW Music 2011 Playlist

Wednesday, March 9th, 2011

I haven’t been very diligent listening to the SXSW torrents this year, but my schedule is already plenty packed: my current SCHED. (My SXSWi is much less structured; primarily planning on catching up with old friends).

Anyway, before things get officially crazy this week (I head into Austin on Thursday), I made a little share a quick and dirty playlist of some of the bands I’m most excited about catching live:

Bonus Track: Not playing at SXSW, but I just stumbled on a great track that Quantic spun at his set last year:
Nicolas Jaar – Mi Mujer (Wolf + Lamb 2010) by Clown and Sunset

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Posted in Music, Personal, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Installing Windows 7 on a Mac Pro via USB Key

Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011

First of all, holy shit this was a miserable experience. The tl;dr version is that on a 2008 Mac Pro (2 x 3.2GHz Quad-core) running a freshly installed OS X 10.6.6 with rEFIt 0.14 I couldn’t successfully install a Windows 7 x64 ISO from USB.

To successfully install Windows 7, I ended up driving out to buy some DVD-Rs and burning the ISO in a Win7 VM (VMWare Fusion 3.1.12) installed from the ISO via Boot Camp. If you are trying to install on a machine without a DVD drive, I suggest either simply using a VM or if you must Boot Camp, acquiring an external drive.

Additional caveats: once I was able to boot was that the Windows 7 installed did not recognize the BOOTCAMP NTFS partition, and the after formatting, threw an apparently common Error 0×80300024 on install (the solution for this was to shut down and pull out my 3 other drives out so the Windows installer didn’t get confused).

At the end of the ordeal, I ended up with a working Windows 7 install that used 28.4GB of space. o_O

Disabling components actually only increased usage. There is a tool called DISM (must be run as admin) that can manage packages, but appears to treat almost the entire Windows 7 install as one big package. The only way to strip Windows 7 down seems to be using a tool like RT Seven Lite to create an ISO that removes the packages entirely beforehand.

Note: if you need to zap the BOOTCAMP volume during the Windows 7 install, you’ll need to grab the Boot Camp drivers from the Snow Leopard CD or from BitTorrent (Apple doesn’t offer 3.0 drivers standalone, and 3.1 and 3.2 require 3.0 to be installed) and run those manually. (You may need to do this anyway as apparently Boot Camp 3.0 may fail by trying to installing the x86 instead of the x64 drivers).

In case you didn’t get it by now, this experience has been a pretty convincing argument for continuing to stay away from Windows as much as possible, certainly on Macs where the unholiness combination of EFI, Boot Camp, and Windows just makes a complete mess.

For your edification/amusement/horror, additional things that did not work on my Mac when trying to install from USB:

dd
The recommendations to use dd if=$iso of=/dev/$usbkey -bs=1m is a total fail as it’ll create a UDF image on the USB key, which apparently the Mac’s EFI won’t detect
Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool
I had an older Windows XP partition, so I was able to try Microsoft’s ISO tool. This created an image that was bootable in the sense that rEFIt could see and select it, but subsequently did not show up as a boot device (DOS prompt for inserting a bootable disk)
UNetbootin
Another try once I started down the WinXP path, I tried using UNetbootin to make the USB stick bootable, but to no more success. Same result as the Microsoft ISO tool.
WinToFlash
Next into my increasingly desperate descent into madness was to use an app that could write Vista/7 boot procedures using EFI. Unfortunately, these resulted in an “Error: Unsupported while loading bootmgr.efi” message when booting in rEFIt
Windows 7 in VMWare Fusion + DISKPART
Finally, I decided to install the ISO in VMWare Fusion on OS X, and then follow this method with DISKPART (you can’t do it in XP because it’s version of DISKPART doesn’t recognize removeable drives as disks). This also failed spectacularly (also, trying bootsect), at which point I threw in the towel on USB booting.

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

Gawker Passwords, etc.

Monday, December 13th, 2010

I have work deadlines, so I haven’t been able to been able to write a well constructed post about this, however, a few things:

  • To check if you had a Gawker account (there are 1.25M of them, so you might have one even if you didn’t realize it) I recommend: http://gawkercheck.com/. Note: even if your password wasn’t unhashed, consider it compromised. These passwords are encrypted with DES crypt, which is not adequate to stop attackers. The keyspace is too small. For more info on DES (and probably the best post-mortem so far), see this Forbes blog post.
  • This is as good a time as any to manage your passwords properly. A lot of people (including me) are using 1Password. It’s currently available as part of the MacUpdate December 2010 Software Bundle. LastPass also looks like a good solution and is free ($12/yr for mobile support). PwdHash and KeePass are also options.
  • According to the FAQ, Gawker claims to be sending emails eventually (and some people are doing so as well now). What I did last night, and maybe a good thing to do for your friends if you are an uber-geek is to go through your friends list and grep through the torrent database and them personally know if their account has been compromised, especially if the password has been unhashed.
  • Oh, lastly, if you’re a geek w/ your hash and want to check on whether it’s a reused password or not, you can pretty easily fire up a python shell and see if it matches: 
    password = 'your_password'
hash = 'your_hash'
salt = hash[0:2]
import crypt
crypt.crypt(password, salt)

    If you’re not sure though, audit your passwords anyway when you have a spare hour or two. You’ll feel better, trust me.

Posted in Personal, Tech, Uncategorized, Web | 4 Comments »

Tax Day

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

Yeah, yeah, I wish it were simpler too – the mechanics of it are a pain in the ass, but that stuff we use has to come from somewhere. So, to celebrate, here’s a classic:

I AM AN AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE SHITHEEL

this morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the US department of energy. I then took a shower in the clean water provided by the municipal water utility. After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC regulated channels to see what the national weather service of the national oceanographic and atmospheric administration determined the weather was going to be like using satellites designed, built, and launched by the national aeronautics and space administration. I watched this while eating my breakfast of US department of agriculture inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the food and drug administration.

At the appropriate time as regulated by the US congress and kept accurate by the national institute of standards and technology and the US naval observatory, I get into my national highway traffic safety administration approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal departments of transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the environmental protection agency, using legal tender issued by the federal reserve bank. On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the US postal service and drop the kids off at the public school.

After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the department of labor and the occupational safety and health administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the USDA, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to my house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and fire marshal’s inspection, and which has not been plundered of all it’s valuables thanks to the local police department.

I then log on to the internet which was developed by the defense advanced research projects administration and post on freerepublic.com and fox news forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can’t do anything right.

Originally posted on the Laissez Faire forums at Something Awful.

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »