Red Epic camera (Updated)

Update again: Mike has a couple of good links.

I find it interesting that there's no "design" at all about the Red products. They are stark and hard and utilitarian, but just from being so well made, they become beautiful after all.

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Update: I thought this was the "DSLR-killer" they'd promised. It's not. (They have a lot of clout, sure, but I will still wait to get excited until we actually see this thing.)
Update: Reichman has a nice overview. And so has wikipedia. (It seems from wiki that the Epic/Scarlet is the "DSLR-killer" after all. Very confusing.)
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When Leica announced the S2 system, I said "I must admit I didn't see this coming!" Well, you can take this to the second degree with the Red Epic still/video camera announcement. They have a lot of work to do yet before it'll be for sale, but one thing shocks me: it'll have sensors up to 6x18 centimeters! An 18 centimeter long sensor! The biggest (and very expensive) one we have right now is less than 5cms, and I really didn't think that would ever be trumped significantly.

RED seem to want to be original in everything, for example the Epic brochure is not a PDF file, it's one hugely tall JPG. Odd. :-)



I like the look of their lenses. Yum.
They have plans of a radical 3D system:


I am amazed at how this upstart company can make these amazing developments when big Japanese companies with decades of experience are getting mowed down in the market.

What I want to know is, who needs to shoot video at 261 megapixels!? That's over 100 times HD resolution!

One thing I like is that these future RED cameras promise to deliver on something I've long said was the final frontier for digital cameras: high dynamic range. I hope to see the day soon when the constant attention you need to apply to avoid burned out highlights etc (when you can avoid it) is no longer necessary.

Home flicks

David Pogue is right, edited right, home movies can be fun.

First photos of other planets

[Thanks to Justin.]
They believe they have photographed, for the first time, planets around other stars.

Fake paper announces end of war

[Thanks to Ray.]
Fake paper announces end of war.
This has to be harsh medicine for all the poor souls who got the paper and believed it. But hopefully a reminder of how much we dislike being at war, unless we have stock in Haliburton.
Video here.

Update: this is hysterical: a British blog has the headline "New York Times spoof gives city a taste of a socialist America"!
"Socialist". Heh.



Here's a site for the fake edition. There are also other interesting headlines, like "Court Indicts Bush on High Treason Charge" and "USA Patriot Act Repealed".

USA Patriot Act Repealed
By SYBIL LUDINGTON
Published: July 4th, 2009
Eight years after being enacted, and three years after being reauthorized, the controversial USA Patriot Act was repealed by Congress by a vote of 99 to 1 in the Senate and 520 to 18 in the House.
No fanfare greeted the repeal in either house. Absent were the 40-minute speeches and foam-core charts predicting Armageddon. The act was repealed with a simple vote cast late in the day by a Congress ashamed of what it had done and what the Act had meant for Americans.

Only one senator voted against the "Patriot" act in 2001. Oh how it would be to live in a sane world.

... Damn, this paper and site does not pull any punches. Look at this ad:


And here's an interesting fake apology by the NYT.

Sadly, when you click on the Arts Section, you get a 404 page! LOL. Too bad, I'd have been curious as to what the Yes Men would consider modern renaissance art.

Ron Paul on liberty

Winter McCloud interviews

The Scott McCloud family is awesome. The youngest, Winter, is actually a journalist at eleven. (Maybe not a paid one, but that's the least of it.)

... I did not intend this to be my Neil Gaiman week, but the first "winterview" I found happened to be with him, and he's always interesting when interviewed.

Here's an article about her older sister Sky (13) and the benefits of alternative education. And here she talks at MIT! (Her bit starts about 56 minutes in.)

Adam Engst on e-books

I have interviewed Adam Engst about e-books and devices.

By the way, the first time I heard the word "blog" was in 2000, when somebody called MacCreator.com that. And he was right, it really was a blog, apart from me having to do it all by hand. It was mixed comments, links, and articles, regularly updated at the top of the same page. So I made a blog ten years ago, how ahead of the curve is that? :-)

Canon G10

The new Canon G10 camera is getting very good reviews, especially on features and image quality.
It is still weak though in the areas where compact cameras are usually weak: operating speed (autofocus speed and pics per second), and low-light capability. It does have a good stabilization which helps in low light, but noise increases rapidly if one goes above 200 ISO or so.

I wonder if they would be able, with current technology, to build a camera this size (it does need a jacket pocket after all, it's no super-compact), and yet make it faster and give it a significantly larger sensor? I hope so. I dont' see why not. But on the other hand, if it was easy, I'm sure they would have.

BlankPhotog sez:
I don't see why camera companies couldn't do what you suggest, and more. The question is why they would. Is there a legitimate, profitable market with this type of camera, or is it more speculation on their part still that there might be in the future if they keep developing? Or more cynically, are they holding back on innovation at this price point because they're going to make more of their R&D money back at a higher price point, and just let the tech benefits trickle down to this one after a few years? And would they want to undercut their big moneymakers by giving, say, Digic IV and an APS-C sensor, when they can still get by with less?

All good questions! :-)
I know that if it were me, I'd be worried about the future, since digicams every year are getting better, and even more, cheaper at a fantastic rate. Where does that leave their profits in a few years?

Sending art in the mail

[Still thinking about cases from the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund...]

I wonder if somebody can enlighten me:
Why do many countries have draconian laws about erotic art being sent in the post?

It seems to me that very often when there's a law suit or a seizure of materials being called "obscene" (or "indecent" in the UK), the whole thing hinges not so much on the fact of the materials existing, but on the fact that they were shipped in the post.

Why the heck would this matter? It's illegal to open other people's mail, so shouldn't it be a private matter what's in the mail? I don't get it.

One example amongst many is that in the UK, it is legal (since a few years) to sell pornography from a store... and it is legal to send pornography from abroad to a UK address... but it is illegal to send porn in the post from one UK address to another! See what I mean? If it's OK to sell it in a store, why would they be upset about it being sent in the mail?

Pascal commented:

Very soon, in Europe, the postal service will be opened to free competition. When this happens, I'm betting the private postage and distribution companies won't be too enthusiastic on opening the mail and violating their customers' privacy, since this would lose them a significant part of the market.
Ergo, I foretell that in the near future, such legislations will become moot. Anyway, it's already pretty much established that you can't make mail orders without a credit card or a checkbook, therefore you HAVE to be a free consenting adult.

All those laws, I find, have one thing in common: they deliberately target sexually-connoted matters, on the sneaky but safe bet that very few citizens will dare confront the judgement of the public eye by stepping forward and saying: "HEY! I demand my free constitutional right to view porn if I damn well please."

Poe folk don't 'spect much?

In an episode of “Frasier”, Frasier is worried about his upcoming recitation of “Annabel Lee” to a local Poe Society. His brother Niles says to him: “Don’t worry. Poe folk don’t ’spect much.” Hilarity ensues. Clearly both Niles and the audience thought he'd made a delicious pun.

I'm not used to being the dull knife in the drawer, but I don't get this one. I thought I had it when I imagined it punning on a phrase like "poor folk don't 'spect much", which sounds like a likely quote from an ancient play, but no luck, it does not seem it has ever been uttered until I thunk it. (It should have, it's a good phrase).

Help me out?

Leaf pattern

I keep coming back to patterns (and "chaos" pictures). It's not so easy as one might think.

Nikon 70-300mm VR lens.
It's new to me. A lovely lens, handles well, is very sharp. A bit big, but not dramatically heavy, and makes a nice package with a camera the size of the D90. And it's not expensive.

Acknowledging e-mails

Why do so many people suck at acknowledging/answering e-mails? It's a huge percentage of people and companies that you never get an answer from.

Just one small example is DPReview.com. And they know it, they just now wrote on their new blog:
"Firstly, and surprisingly for some of you I'm sure, we don't only welcome your feedback, we do read it and we often act on it. What's important to remember here is that our editorial team here consists of a handful of people with full-time jobs producing content (as well as forum moderation), and this means that we simply can't answer every email we get, nor can we acknowledge every bit of feedback. But that doesn't mean it hasn't been read (and if necessary, acted upon)."

What I want to know is, if something is important enough that you want to act upon it, isn't it important enough to send a reply to?

A few very busy people can do it, like David Pogue and others. Me too, I have a web site with 80.000 visitors daily, so I get a lot of mail, and yet I manage to reply to virtually everything people might reasonably expect an answer to, and I don't use a lot of time on it. If it's simply a nice comment they have sent, I have a macro which sends back a "thank you". That macro is one keystroke, it takes not even one full second to do that.

So why is it that something like half the people or companies I write to with nice comments or questions, I never hear from? They can't use a single second to tell me that I've been heard?

If somebody comes up to you in the street and asks for the time, you wouldn't dream of completely ignoring the person. Nobody does, I've never seen it. And if it did, the other person would probably be really offended. Is e-mail really that abstract for so many people that to them it's a completely different situation?