Coming soon...

My review of the new Pentax K7 DSLR.

Palm Pre - the laymen's review

OK, if you found this little blog you've probably done a lot of searching and reading on the palm pre. This tiny little review is basically for the laymen, like myself. If you're looking for a technical review with clock speeds and numbers you've probably already left.
First off - I have NO cell phone, technical background. I'm upgrading from a 2 year old LG flip phone (which was great, but featureless). I'm not a power user with corporate emails, and tethering to my laptop, or presenting slide shows. I got this phone to keep a bunch of information in the same place (contacts, calendar, etc) and stay connected with the Internet (email, searching, video, sharing, weather, stocks, movie trailers, whatever). So that's were I'm coming from.
It was a three way tie between the Pre, the iphone and a blackberry (most likely the storm). I liked the touch screen feature, so that got rid of most blackberries, and the storm just didn't do it for me (along with the extra money to Verizon). So then it's down to the Pre vs iphone, we've all see this before. For me, the iphone is just way to common place now, it seems like everyone has one. The pre is smaller and has a keyboard and the Sprint plan compared to the at&t plan saves WAY more money. The pre it is!
If you are in the market for a smartphone, there is one thing you should know - the battery life on these phones, SUCK. They have to do a lot, and are constantly updating, and usually have big, brite, screens. So just be aware of that, if you want battery life, DON'T by a smartphone. If you want great gas mileage, don't by a Ford F250 truck. It's a no brainer. If someone who drove an f250 was complaining about their gas mileage, you'd probably say "well, duh. What do you expect, it's a truck". So if you have a Pre or an iphone, don't complain about bad battery life, it's expected!
That said, they still should meet certain standards. A phone that drains its battery in one hour has a problem. There are many posts regarding bad battery life and it's relation to hotmail, this needs to be fixed. But on average, for me, my phone will last the day with calls, messages, pictures, web surfing, emails, etc.
"My battery gets hot" - that's called physics. When a battery is working, it gets hot, it has to. Should it burn you? No. When I'm using my phone, the battery heats up a little, so did my old phone. Maybe in the winter I can use it as a hand warmer.
EDIT - after using the phone now for a couple weeks, my phone; with 3 email accounts running and websurfing, along with calls, texts, pictures, etc lasts for about a day. My wifes phone; mostly calls, texts, some pictures (no email, no surfing... yet), lasts about 2 plus days.
Sprints reception - so far, so good. Here in Savage, MN I have more bars than I did with Verizon. My big test is if I get any reception in Target, since my old phone had NONE.
Quality control - There seems to be a problem here, and I've seen it first hand. My first phone had a dead pixel, and I'm the type of person who can't get past that. It stares me in the face, so I had to swap it out. Plus if you pay this much for a phone, you'd expect perfection. My wifes phone shut off every 4th time she closed it (with and without the "paper trick", which was highly annoying, so that one got swapped out. As a side note, the folks at the Sprint store (in Burnsville Mall) were fantastic, no issues, very nice. Now that we each have error free models (they way they should be in the first place), we're happy. I am a little curious how many phones had to (and will have to) go back to Palm, and I wonder if we will ever see those numbers.
The "oreo effect" - since this seems very subjective, the amount of wobble reported varies wildly. Both of our phones (and the 2 replaced models) have some wobble. Which in my opinion is very normal on a slider style phone with a touch screen. If there isn't a little play in the hinges something might crack. But I've seen some youtube video where it looks a little out of hand so this might be a real issue. The screen cracks - haven't seen it yet (and hope not to), but this is a little worrisome. - Bottom line here, Palm has some quality control issues to address.
Overall the build quality of the phone is superb. The screen is amazing, the touch responsiveness is great. My only issue is with the tiny little mini usb/charger cover. Seems like that little guy is going to bust off in no time.
Ease of use - In my opinion, very easy to use and learn.
Camera - a good cell phone camera. Not a great Camera, camera, but a good cell phone camera. There does seem to be a bit of a lag from taking a picture to looking at it afterwards.
I would have liked to see a video feature for the camera, but a hack might pop up for that sooner or later.
Sprint GPS - I've only done a quick test with this, but it works perfectly!
The ringer is nice and loud, call quality is good. Internet and data speed is very quick. WiFi works very well. The webOS interface is wonderful.
If I could add something to the phone (aside from video recording) it would be removable storage. I'm not saying I've filled up the 8 gigs of space yet (maybe 0.6 gigs worth). But it's nice being able to save pictures to a card and pop it out. Instead I just hook up the usb cable and it acts as a usb drive, easy enough.
So after one week, the bottom line is: This phone kicks @ss! Of course if it starts randomly shutting off or cracking, I'll have to change my opinion.

Sigma 530 Super Flash

I think this is a great, versatile, powerful flash. It has a ton of features, lcd display (both good and bad feature in my opinion), AF assist lamp, bounce and swivel head plus it's very powerful. I do wish it had a sync port and axillary battery power, but overall a decent feature set for $230. For those of you who want to use it with Skyports, you can't... at least not reliably.

Insignia High Def Flash Camcorder

I bought this little camcorder when my Canon Elura 100 had to go in for repairs. I've been in the market for a flash drive high def camcorder for a while, since I wasn't sure if I wanted to repair the canon or replace it. When I came across this little guy, I thought "who could go wrong for $99?"

Pros:

It has a nice sleek black design, very slim, with a huge 3" lcd monitor. It comes with a boat load of accessories including a HDMI cable (charger, pouch, usb cable, strap as well). The screen is huge, bright and clear. All of the buttons are pretty well laid out on the back. The hardest part is figuring out a way to hold the little guy.


The battery and card slot are enclosed on the other side of the unit. It can be a little tricky sometimes to pop the card out, so keep a longer finger nail. An 8gb card will hold about 9 hours of non-hd video and 4.5 or so hours of hd video. There is no delay in "writing" to the card, everything seems instant (sandisk 8gb ultra II).

The sound quality is great for a little camcorder, and the onboard speaker is very loud and clear for replays.

The menus are laid out nicely and it's very quick and easy to replay your videos.

The device includes some extra features - a sound recorder, motion detection (which works pretty well), still camera and flash/led light (which suck).

It starts up pretty quick, only about a couple of seconds from opening the lcd to recording, but certainly not instant.

Cons:

The digital zoom is pretty useless, and you can't zoom in and out while recording.

You have to select the focus depth (ie, macro, portrait and landscape). If your recording in macro mode, things in the distance are blurry. But if you keep it in portrait mode it seems fine.
It would be nice to have it start up silently, it will always play a loud welcome chime.
The light/flash is useless. Some people complain about having a finger over the light when holding it, but since you have to go into the menu to activate it, you'll probably hold it differently as well. But really, you won't need to bother activating it at all (carry a flash light if needed).
The camera is terrible, terrible. Don't buy this for still shots.
Not a low light performer! Most video done inside, if you don't have all the lights on and windows open would be considered low light. You get a lot of "noise" on the screen with low light and picture quality drastically reduces... but what do you expect for $99? In a well lit scene, the video performance is great!
Playing the video's back on a windows xp system took some research. The video's are in h264 avi format so you need ffdshow to play it (special thanks to doom9 forum).
No lens cap - why? This seems like an important piece.

Conclusion:
For $99... you can't go wrong. The con list might seem long, but come on, this camera is only $99, you can't expect it to be perfect. So far, I'm really happy with it. HD recording, with a HDMI cable, large and bright LCD, in a pocket sized package...awesome!

Update - Cybersyncs fire the camera!

Hooking the reciever to my K10D (or K200d for that matter) will fire the camera remotely! All I needed was a 2.5mm to 3.5mm adapter (ala Radio Shack) and I'm in business.
Another plus for the cybersyncs!

Pentax K10D DSLR

This was Pentax's flag ship professional camera (now replaced by the K20D) about 2 years ago. I won't be going into an in depth review here, you can find those all over the web. If you don't trust it's performance simply look at all the awards it's won. In hand, it just feels right for me. It's the perfect size, just meaty enough to hand onto but not to heavy. It runs on a rechargeable lithium battery pack and can be boosted with a battery grip. When using this at a 10 hour wedding I've yet to replace the battery... not bad in my opinion!

All of the features are at your finger tips, you don't have to dig through the menu very much at all. It has 2 e-dials that work very well together.

Picture quality is outstanding! I've got the settings just right now so my JPEG's come out almost perfect, fresh from the camera.

The SDM focus motor is outstanding, whisper quite and quick (if not to dark)

The down sides for me: No sync terminal on the camera, I have to use the hotshoe or an adapter for all flash work. Focus speed in low light isn't the best. High ISO image quality is poor, if this doesn't get worked on by the time the K30D rolls around that might be my push towards Nikon. But that's about it. Sure it's frames per second is around 3 but since I don't use it for sports much, that doesn't really bug me.

Keep on trucken' Pentax, I want to see a sweet K30D in the next few months!

Cyber Sync wireless controllers

My search for reliable and affordable wireless controllers led me to the CyberSyncs. It all started back with my ebay radio poppers (poverty wizards), which worked just fine in house, but when they failed me once on location...it was bye, bye. So then the search began. I was thinking about the pocket wizards, which are the industry standard, but I knew there had to be more options out there at better prices.
I was first attracted to the Skyports (http://www.elinchrom.com/), they where tiny, cool looking and you could group strobes into separate categories. But they just wouldn't work for me, apparently their triggering time is so quick they wouldn't reliably trigger my gear, so back they went.
I then came across the cybersyncs (while searching for solutions to my skyport troubles), and I'm very glad I did. First off, they were even cheaper than the skyports (score!), and they are smaller than the pocket wizards (not to mention way cheaper... double score!). To get them to work on my Sigma and Sunpak flashes (since they don't have any ports) I got the hotshoe adapter from http://www.flashzebra.com/. They fire all of my strobes, every time, and that is what I was looking for.
The receivers run on 2 AA batteries, which is nice since the are easily replaced when needed (skyports run on rechargeable lithium's). The transmitter works on a little watch sized battery. The transmitter slides onto the hotshoe and is very snug, there is no way to secure it in place, but it doesn't seem like it would go anywhere by accident (it's hard enough to remove when I want to).
It says that they will work up to 400ft, which is much shorter than the Pocket Wizards 1500ft but I can't image a time that I will ever need that. I haven't had a situation that they didn't work for me, through walls, etc.
They do have a couple millisecond "recharge" time between firing them, which might be a problem in some situations but I haven't ran into one yet. The Skyports could fire boom, boom, boom.
The down sides for me, so far are: no on/off button. Once you hit test, they go on and stay on for about 2 hours and then auto power down. In one sence it's nice since I will never forget to turn them off, but if they accidentally get bumped on in my bag, they will stay on for 2 hours. It would also be nice to be able to power them on and off and have to option to leave them on for as long as I want and not have to worry about them turning off. Next, and last down fall, no lanyard! This is such a simple add on I don't know why they didn't include one. I have had one fall and bust open from about 5 feet onto a hard wood floor, fortunately I put the batteries back in and it works fine (passed the drop test), but this shouldn't happen in the first place... with a lanyard.
Overall - I am very happy with these. Price is right and they haven't failed me yet.