Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Upgrade Mentality?



















Apple announced the new iPhone 3G S at their WWDC conference yesterday. I spent a little time last night reading the reactions to the new phone on the various tech websites and forums. As expected, many posters complained that there was little improvement in the new 3G S and they weren't going to upgrade from their current 3G.


I have to admit that I chuckled at the similarity to all the discussions on various photo forums about whether one should upgrade from the K10D, K20D etc, to the K-7. Since we're comparing totally different product categories, this is one time I can unabashedly state that compared to the 3G S, we've put a ton of significant new features and capabilities in the K-7, and therefore the thought process of whether to upgrade or not should be a brain-dead decision.


As I realize we all have limited funds to purchase new gear, my somewhat biased advice is to pass on upgrading your iPhone, and buy that K-7! Unfortunately, I've promised my wife I will hold out for more than 60 days before I buy the 3G S, so I still have a ways to go in my quest to ignore upgrade angst.


(Note: The comments above are intended to be tongue-in-cheek and do not reflect the opinions of anyone at Apple or HOYA...but yours truly.)

Monday, June 8, 2009

K-7 Custom Image Presets

The K-7 has six Custom Image presets including Bright, Natural, Portrait, Landscape, Vibrant, and Muted. These presets offer an additional -4 to +4 steps of additional tuning for saturation, hue, brightness, contrast, and sharpness. There is also a Monochrome mode with the same range of adjustment over brightness, contrast and sharpness.


Since it's hard to visualize how these presets will affect your image, I had a chance over the weekend to take a few photos of my 88 year old mother to show the likely results you can expect in using these different presets. Since I'm shooting with a pre-production camera, I'm restricted from posting images larger than 600x800. All images shot in JPEG with no processing, editing or cropping before uploading files to Blogger.


Photos below displayed from top to bottom: BRIGHT, NATURAL, PORTRAIT, VIBRANT, MUTED and MONOCHROME. As it wasn't appropriate, I did not take a photo in LANDSCAPE mode. Lens used: FA 50mm f/1.4 with aperture set to f/5.6 for these photos.