Note: not Photoshopped! Well, a little,but I left the moon in place and didn't copy/paste anything. Living in the same spot for four years means you eventually see every cool combination of sun/moon plus scenery. Anyway, here's the original.
October 2009
Mini-review: Canon S90 compact
A couple of weeks ago I finally received a new compact camera after my last Ixy (that's Japan's version of the Ixus series) broke almost a year ago. I'd been content with lugging the 50D around for a long time, but on some occasions when I didn't want to carry a lot with me the alternative, my trusty G7, proved too big to fit comfortably in my pocket. It's getting old too, so I finally bought a new one: a Canon S90.
That's it. Nothing special. Just your average black camera. But it's so good. :D
It's like Canon finally listened to all of the criticism it's been getting over all the years, and decided to fix every possible problem they ever had. Well, except one, but I'll get to that later. The controls are great: besides the zoom lever there's the usual ring around the four-way pad at the back, and as an added bonus there's a digital control ring around the lens that I just can't stop twisting. It makes such a satisfying clicking noise whenever you turn it. The ring is digital, so every click changes a setting in the camera, and you can adjust per mode (PASM) what feature it should change (ISO, EV compensation, aperture, zoom). The ring's really easy to adjust, even with one hand, although using the camera with both hands feels slightly more comfortable. The one thing I had to get used to in the beginning is that the direction of operation is the opposite of what I'd intuitively expect: I twist the ring thinking the aperture should become smaller, but instead it becomes larger. This should please Nikon users who want to switch to Canon, I guess. It doesn't take long to get used to, though. The controls are great in every other way too; every button is where you'd expect it to be. The control ring around the d-pad at the back is very loose and easy to use. Now that I think about it, the mode dial was very difficult to adjust in the beginning, but it's getting more smooth during use.
For years now users have been telling camera companies to stop increasing the resolution of their sensors and to focus on image quality (and low-light performance) instead. Well, Canon listened. No huge megapixel sensor inside this camera: it's a 10 megapixel sensor, just like the Canon G7 that came out 3 years ago. That doesn't mean that Canon's been sitting around doing nothing, though. They claim that the sensor they used in this camera is excellent in low-light conditions. And it's not just the sensor: the lens is a beauty: an f/2.0 aperture and a 28-105mm range make for an excellent lens. In theory, at least. Canon feels confident enough to allow ISO values of up to ISO3200, and there's a special low-light mode available that operates at half the resolution.
For some reason Canon cut down on the movie mode. While competitors are starting to offer HD quality movie recording modes the S90 can record at a maximum resolution of 640x480. They've finally changed the compression format so you can record way longer movies on your memory card compared to older Canon compacts. That's great, but since the format is now .mov video I have to find a new video editing software.. Also worth noting is that there is no time-lapse video mode on the S90. Why!?!?! That was such a cool feature on the Ixus series, yet Canon decided to remove it here. Since Canon is not exactly known for adding features in firmware updates our only option is to hope that the CHDK people will be kind enough to hack the firmware so that we can write our own time-lapse scripts. That could take a fair while though, if ever.
So what about the picture quality? It's difficult for me to say, but I guess I'm slightly underwhelmed. Photos taken in low-light are indeed great compared to the G7 I used to use as a compact camera, but they're still far from perfect. I'm quite satisfied in this area though. What I'm less happy about is what the camera software is doing to photos taken on a perfectly clear day. Take a look at this.
Blurry-ish? Grainy-ish? Unfit for cropping, IMHO. Then again, that's not what I plan to do with it anyway. Without cropping the pictures are great, as you can see from the photo three posts below this one. This might be the one area where Canon hasn't improved much since the G7. Still, if that bothers you, you can always take RAW photos instead and process them afterwards by yourself.
All in all I'm very happy with this camera. All previous Ixus/Ixy series camera's I've owned were always lacking in some way, always missing an importing button, control or feature. The S90 has it all, and besides the image quality I really can't think of what could possibly be improved on this camera. My suggestion: if you haven't bought a compact camera in the last 1-2 years, get an S90 now. It's very worth it.
I'll end with these two night shots, taken with the low-light mode and auto ISO, choosing ISO3200 and ISO5000, respectively. Think of this as the worst case scenario.
Edit: I made a little addendum to this post after using the camera a bit more. Read it here.
Apple fan?
I came across this article today which speaks quite highly of Apple, and I thought I'd drop some thoughts on this topic as well. I'm programming for the iPhone myself, and learning to use MacOS, Xcode and even the iPhone have been interesting experiences. I'm an Apple newbie, but perhaps it's that what gives me a unique viewpoint of the whole situation.
It's so convenient. Everything related to Apple is convenient and easy. The article I linked to above mentions the huge success of iTunes over Walmart when it comes to selling music. The success of the iPod and the iPhone are no-brainers. Having used the iPhone myself I have to say it's incredibly polished. It's smooth, nice and a pleasure to work with. It feels good to use it. Unlike the Android developer phone, which just feels like a phone. Apple does that little bit of extra work to make its products special and unique. That's a large part of their success. Not playing to be the fastest, the biggest or the smartest. Instead, they have the coolest, the most popular and the most easy to use products.
I have to admit that I love the convenience that comes with all Apple products, but the more I use them (MacOS, Xcode, iPhone) the more I hate the fact that you can't configure things manually. There is an 'Apple-certified' way of doing things with your Apple products, and you'd better not deviate from that way or else you'll pay the price. You'll suffer for hours trying to find an obscure feature that wasn't really popular so Apple didn't bother to put in their product, or sometimes the feature simply doesn't exist at all. It's Apple's way of saying: "you do it our way, and you'll like it, but it's not like you'll have a choice in the matter". And this way works. As long as you're the typical user you'll love everything about Apple. And besides, there was never really any good alternative to Apple. If you wanted to do things your own way you're condemned to using Windows or Linux, neither of which is as 'smooth' as MacOS. Mp3 players are a similar matter. I've looked long and hard to find a simple mp3 player that fits my demands, but in the end I chose the iPod cause it fitted my needs best. Apple was the leader in quality for the longest time. Until Google came along.
To be fair, the user experience I got from Android was lacking compared to the iPhone, but in a more general sense I think Google has a much better vision than Apple. If Apple's vision can be summarized as "Do it our way, and you'll be cool", then Google's is "Do whatever you like, we'll support you". This is reflected really well in Google's tools. Buttons are where you expect them to be, the things that you want (or could ever possibly want) to do are easily accessible, and if there's a feature that you might one day need in the future, you can find it. Google accommodates it's users in every possible way, and not just in ways that lead them to use more of Google's products. For example, Google recently announced that they will create export functions to the most popular formats for their internet office suite. They're basically saying: "If you don't think we're good enough, you can try something else". Apple, on the other hand, is desperately trying to protect what it owns. An example of this is the new iPhone firmware, which once again prevents users from 'jailbreaking' their phone and using applications that are not Apple-approved.
It's control versus freedom. Apple impresses by creating products that are of excellent quality and a pleasure to use. That is, if you do it the 'Apple way'. Google, on the other hand, lets you choose how you want to use their products. You're free to do whatever you want with it. The keyword here is 'free'. Going back to the article mentioned above, it compared the successfulness of iTunes versus Walmart, but it didn't compare it to the amount of songs downloaded through illegal means on-line. It is of course quite impossible to track how many songs are downloaded every day by illegal means, but that only illustrates how iTunes would lose if such a comparison were ever made. People don't want to spend effort on buying songs online if they can get them for free more easily. The only reason iTunes is so successful is that it's very convenient (the Apple keyword, again) to download songs and pay for them at the same time.
It won't be like that for much longer. Everything that has been free since the beginning of the internet is gaining in quality. It may take some time, but things are getting better all the time. Powerful companies like Google that accomodate the user and give him/her freedom have arisen, the open-source world is growing larger and larger, and long-time open-source products have increased in quality tremendously since they were first created (Linux, anyone?).
I don't think Apple can fight this. Since I would love to appear in a list of famous mispredictions in the future, let me make a prediction here. Apple's market share will decrease in the coming decade. I don't think it'll decrease much, but unless they change their company philosophy they won't be able to keep up with 'newcomers' like Google. Microsoft too seems to have learned a few lessons from Apple, so let's see who comes out on top ten years from now.
Posted in
Tech
Pictures of the day
I've been following the Wall Street Journal's pictures of the day blog for only a couple of days, and I really wish I had known about it sooner. It's beyond excellent.
Click here for the Wall Street Journal's pictures of the day
Posted in
Photography
The iPhone
I've been developing for the iPhone for over a week now, and I'm starting to get used to it. In the process of getting used to it I made a lot of mistakes though, so I thought I'd share some of the stupid things I've done.
* C: Using the equals '=' character in DEFINE (did this twice too...)
* Xcode: Importing the .h file but not linking the library (took a lot of time to figure this out for the first time, and to find out where in Xcode to add it)
* Confusing and mixing C, C++ and Objective-C syntax
* Ignoring memory management just to 'get it to work'
* One word: NSAutoReleasePool.
* Mac: assuming that Mac cannot do something quickly just cause I don't know the right key combination
* Mac/Xcode: the Interface Builder is a lie!
* AudioQueue framework: the mere act of choosing to use this framework is a mistake. Too bad it couldn't be avoided.
* PCM formats: why in the name of Sean Connery are there so many variations on plain and simple uncompressed pcm data?
The last one seriously cost me a lot of time, because I couldn't get my pcm data to become little endian. It's supposed to be a simple flag that you can turn on and off when setting up the audio queue, but the queue simply fails to initialize if you don't specify big endian. I suspect this may have something to do with the nativeness of the audio chip (apparently Motorola defaults to big endian even though everything else in the iPhone is little-endian), but I have little resources or motivation to prove this. In the end I chose to flip the audio streams bytes myself, which made everybody happy in the least amount of time required.
Last note on the iPhone: I am by no means biased towards Apple. If anything I have a negative bias to them for making average hardware and selling it for top prices just because it's cool, when a rival product is usually available for less money and has more capabilities. I particularly despise the way Apple forced me to use synchronization in iTunes just to get nested playlists to work on my iPod, and I still have not forgiven them for that. Now that my mini-rant is over, I just would like to say that the iPhone is indeed damn bloody cool and if I had one I'm sure I would love it to death.
I'm not buying one though.
Posted in
Tech
Was it worth it?
The Windows 7 burger. 7 beef paddies. Only in Japan, only available for one week. Can't miss it. Just like an earthquake or some other natural disaster.
No. It wasn't worth it.
Sorry guys! No videos yet. I got a new camera last week (Canon S90) but I don't have video editing software for it yet. Chotto matte kudasai.
Really. It was disappointing. It started out fine, but after some bites it just became a huge, dense mass of gray matter, without any taste whatsoever. Except perhaps leather. That's all I can say. You won't see me at BK for quite some time from now..
