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Skyla Memoir FS80

Leslie Ayers — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:09:54 -0500

It’s mystifying to us when gadget makers assume that devices that do one thing well should be re-engineered to multitask. Testing the Memoir FS80, it took us back to when basketball god Michael Jordan tried his hand at Major League Baseball. It’s, like, why?

Skyla took a quality digital photo frame and added the ability to scan snapshots--a neat party trick, but not the most efficient way to digitize all your snapshots.

The FS80 is an 8-inch digital photo frame that incorporates a 300 dpi scanner. As digiframes go, it’s a winner, with 1GB of onboard memory (to hold about 500 high-quality images), a bright 800x600 screen, handy infrared (IR) remote, and built-in slots to read CF, SD, and xD memory cards. The onscreen menus are easy enough for any second-grader--or slightly tech-savvy grandparent--to navigate.

But the scanning process was far from foolproof. We experienced multiple misfeeds because the mechanism on the feeder simply couldn’t grab the photo in the right spot. Scanning 4x6 snapshots was also relatively slow--25 seconds on average for a 300 dpi scan, and up to 35 seconds from start to finish when we encountered misfeeds.

Canon Digital Rebel T1i vs. Nikon D5000

Zack Stern — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 12:40:26 -0500

Coke versus Pepsi. Mac versus PC. Canon versus Nikon. Among these great rivalries, we can only pick out one clear winner. (Here’s a hint: It’s not the colored sugar water.) In the latest Canon-versus-Nikon entry-level digital SLR (single-lens reflex) battle, both cameras score hits against the other.

It's the DSLR version of Mac vs. PC--except without as obvious a winner.

But in the end, they’re much more similar than different. If you already use a film camera from either camera maker--and own a few lenses--don’t bother switching sides. If you’re not already invested in hardware that only works with one of them, your decision is much more nuanced. After much debate, we give a tiny edge to the Nikon D5000 for its impressive high-ISO performance. But you could just as easily fall in love with the Canon Rebel T1i for its slightly brighter, clearer LCD.

Canon Digital Rebel T1i

The T1i is light in your palm, weighing about 1.5 pounds with the bundled lens. We felt comfortable slinging it around and shooting with just one hand in one of the auto modes. Like the D5000, the T1i uses a single LCD screen to show your exposure data. (Most midrange and high-end DSLRs include a top-mounted screen too.) But the clear markings give enough details for manual photos, and you can also see the most important information inside the viewfinder.

The T1i LCD edges out the D5000 in a direct comparison. Canon’s slightly larger screen sports a higher resolution and looks great when reviewing recent images. It also looks a little better outdoors, but just as the D5000’s, this screen washes out in bright sun. When you sight through the eyepiece, the screen automatically turns off, which is a major benefit at night.

Images look good overall, although the T1i has a few weaknesses. We shot clean colors in many different lighting conditions, but the auto settings look more muted than higher-priced cameras. While bright daylight can wash out the hues, and night images without a flash run too warm, they are common problems that can be combated with manual controls. Earmark a lot of storage space for best results: The T1i’s 15.1-megapixel RAW photos can run 20MB each.

Mid- and high-ISO night photos mark the T1i’s biggest weakness. Images show moderate noise--random, colored pixels in dark areas—at about 400 ISO. Significant noise enters past 800 ISO, a setting you’d try to use to compensate for minimal lighting.

Nikon D5000

The D5000 is roughly the same shape and weight as the T1i. Nikon’s camera felt just as comfortable to shoot with, and its versatile LCD helps you shoot in awkward positions.

Like the T1i, the D5000 includes a live-view shooting mode, so instead of looking through the eyepiece, the preview image gets diverted to the LCD just like a point-and-shoot camera. But since the D5000 LCD swivels and turns, you can hold the camera high above your head, around a corner, or at ground level and still get a clear view of the screen. The 2.7-inch screen unfortunately stays lit when you compose shots through the eyepiece. But you can rotate it against the body, giving up exposure details for just the viewfinder information.

We thought that colors in photos shot with the D5000 popped a little more than those shot with the T1i, although the 12.3-megapixel D5000 scored only a subtle edge. And like the T1i, fine details looked excellent, such as the furry texture on a flower’s leaf.

In low light, the D5000’s clearer high-ISO modes perform better. We cranked the setting up to 2500 ISO before the noise seemed too distracting, but you could go even higher in a pinch. Images brightened up in this mode, helping us shoot in certain night conditions--indoors or with a streetlight--with no flash.

Tough Call

The similarities between these SD-card DSLRs outnumber most of the differences. Both shutter speeds range from 1/4,000th second to bulb mode (where you hold the shutter open as long as you choose). Both start up and continuously shoot images with almost no delay. Both have competent stabilizers built in to the bundled 18-55mm lenses, netting shake-free photos as slow as about 0.4 second. And both shoot weak high-definition video, blurring moving subjects or camera pans into useless footage. (If your subjects and framing stay mostly static, video can look great, however.) Other than that video complaint, they’re both winning cameras.

Pentax K2000

Arthur Bleich — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 09:56:20 -0500

Stepping up from a point-and-shoot to a DSLR can seem as daunting as trading in your minivan for an 18-wheeler. To ease the transition, Pentax has placed all the controls on its new 10.2MP K2000 to the right of the camera’s bright, 2.7-inch LCD screen—just like on your favorite point-and-shoot. The K2000 is also lighter and smaller than most DSLRs. It weighs less than 21 ounces fully loaded with batteries and an SD (or SDHC) memory card. And despite its svelte 4.8-x-3.6-x-2.7-inch body, the grip is comfortable for those with both large and small hands.

With a DSLR camera, you compose pictures free of outside distractions—every detail is seen through the lens exactly as it will be captured. Holding the camera to your eye provides great stability, there’s no annoying LCD washout in bright light, and shutter lag’s gone, so you’ll never miss great shots of active kids or pets. You can also swap out lenses, choosing wide angles for candid street photos or landscapes and powerful telephotos to capture wildlife or sports.

Transitioning to the K2000 is effortless. Just put it on Auto and it becomes, well, a point-and-shoot. Then experiment by using more advanced controls like aperture- or shutter-priority modes or manual settings. Next, crank the ISO up to 3200 for those dimly lit arena shots, or freeze action at up to 1/4000th of a second shutter speeds. You can also try RAW capture or get cozy with 23 custom functions. The LCD doubles as a status information center—a nice alternative to the hard-to-read, black-on-green panels found on most DSLRs.

In a welcome change from every other DSLR camera, the K2000 is available in either a black or white body. Both come with a DA-L 18-55mm f3.5-5.6 zoom lens (27-82.5 on a 35mm camera) and have the same powerful image processing engine as the K200, which earned a Mac|Life Editors’ Choice in our Aug/08 issue.

Movin' on up...to a starter DSLR.

The black K2000 can be ordered with either an external flash that gives a longer reach than the camera’s built-in or with an additional DA-L 50-200mm f4-5.6 lens (75-300mm on a 35mm camera). The white limited-edition version is only available with the two lenses. We fell in love with the white K2000; it’s the perfect accessory for our Star Wars Storm Trooper uniform.

Pentax promises more than 1,600 images on four AA lithium batteries. Figure about 1,000, if you shoot flash half the time. NiMH rechargeables will knock that down to 1,100 or 640 with flash, still impressive. Standard alkalines—readily available, but less than optimal for use in cameras—can also be used in a pinch, though your shot count will plummet to 360/260.

If you hate to read manuals (or forget to take one along), a special ? button displays info that tells you everything you need to know, from what each button does to details about scene settings, including Action, Portrait, and Landscape, among others. It also covers photo topics such as ISO, white balance, light metering, and much more. When you’re up to speed, simply reassign the button to another function, such as checking depth of field, customizing color settings, activating special effects filters, or shooting in RAW.

We output vibrant, color-perfect, 13-x-19-inch prints on an Epson Stylus Photo R2880 (5 out of 5 stars) using three test papers: Epson, Hahnemühle, and Red River. Images shot at ISOs of 100 to 400 were virtually noiseless, with beautiful tonal range. Even higher ISO images looked fine at normal viewing distances.

Canon EOS 5D Mark II

Russ Juskalian — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 03:31:00 -0500

When Canon announced the 5D back in 2005, it was a game-changer. The camera was the first full-frame DSLR--meaning that its CMOS sensor is the same size as a frame of 35mm film, about 60 percent larger than the sensors in most DSLRs--in a standard sized SLR body, all for just a bit more than $3,000. Three years later, its successor, the 5D Mark II, pushes the image-quality bar higher and the cost of entry lower. But 2009 offers a more crowded field of competitors, and this camera comes with a few things--like full 1080p HD video--that puts it in a category all its own.

The second generation of Canon's 5D offers awesome stills and full 1080p video.

The price has come down, but at $2,699, the new 5D is certainly no entry-level camera. The price does buy quality, however. It’s chunky and well built, has monster resolution, and can produce images that rival anything you’re likely to achieve with a high-end consumer or pro camera.

It’s astounding that the Mark II, at 21.1 megapixels, offers nearly twice the number of pixels as its progenitor without incurring any negative consequences with respect to image quality. In fact, low-light images are actually cleaner--and the ISO range of the camera is as good as it gets--from 100 to 6400 standard, and it can be pushed all the way to 50 on the low end and up to 25600 on the high end.

Throw in automatic dust reduction, live view with contrast detect autofocus, a killer 3-inch LCD, advanced battery management that tracks shooting history and battery stats for up to six batteries, a micro adjust feature to perfectly calibrate the autofocus for each lens in your collection--and there’s enough here to get excited about, if you’re in the market for a high-end piece of photographic equipment.

But let’s be honest. What makes the new Mark II not just an awesome upgrade, but killer device, is what it can do with video: beautiful, crisp, 1080p HD video that easily rivals pro-level cameras.

Forget the stuff you get out of high-end HD digital video camcorders with three chips--this is something altogether different. Because of the huge size of the CMOS sensor in the Mark II, the camera is able to shoot video that looks like what you see in blockbuster films at the theater: totally isolated subjects with razor-thin depth of field (the so called “film look,” where one part of the frame is in focus and the rest is a buttery smooth blur), incredible low-light sequences, and the sharpest, cleanest colors this side of a Hollywood studio. Even the mighty Red One video camera doesn’t have a sensor as large as the one in the Canon.

But as with all good things, there are limitations, and the Mark II has enough video limitations that the world’s filmmakers probably won’t ditch their current rigs. For instance, the longest you can record at full HD is 12 minutes (around 4GB worth of video). It’s not the end of the world--how many films have any single shot that runs longer than a couple minutes? So although it’s not a deal-breaker, it is an inconvenience.

Worse, in video mode, one is left with little in the way of manual controls for things like exposure, aperture, and ISO. A workaround for these issues is to use the video mode with older manual focus, manual aperture lenses that are adapted to work with the camera. But this is a whole separate project.

Epson Stylus Photo R2880

Arthur Bleich — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 04:30:00 -0500

The R2880 churns out stunning prints at a good price.

There’s good and bad news about Epson’s wide-carriage Stylus Photo R2880, successor to the four-year-old Stylus Photo R2400. First, the good: It’s more robust than the R2400 and puts out the most gorgeous color and black-and-white prints up to 13x19 inches (13x44 inches for panoramas) we’ve ever seen. The bad: Photo Black and Matte Black cartridges still require swapping when using different paper surfaces.

The R2880 also weighs almost 27 pounds and takes up quite a bit of space: Its physical footprint is 24.3 inches wide by 12.7 inches deep (20 inches with its top-loading sheet feeder extended). You’ll need even more room behind it, though, if you use roll paper (holders included) or load single or heavier (up to 1.3mm thick) art-type papers through front or rear single-sheet feed slots. A tray for printing on specially surfaced CDs and DVDs comes with the printer and a pair of USB 2.0 ports allows a two-computer connection, though only one can print at a time.

Following Epson’s quick-start guide, we shook each cartridge a few times and then snapped in Light-Light Black, Vivid Light Magenta, Light Cyan, Light Black, Photo Black, Cyan, Vivid Magenta, and Yellow in that order (we kept Matte Black close by for later use). A press of the Ink button fired up the printer, after which we installed the software without a hitch before connecting the R2880 to our Mac.

We began by printing our 8x10 inch test image on Epson’s Premium Photo Paper Glossy at the three resolutions suitable for photos: SuperFine 1440, Photo 1440, and SuperPhoto 5670. Each has a High Speed option that allows the printhead to lay down ink in both directions of travel, instead of just one; we ran each resolution in both modes.
Unidirectional output speeds were: SuperFine 1440, 3minutes, 12 seconds; Photo 1440, 4 minutes, 39 seconds; SuperPhoto 5760, 8 minutes, 7 seconds. Bidirectional times for the same resolutions were 1 minute, 36 seconds; 2 minutes, 29 seconds; and 4 minutes, 14 seconds, respectively. Eyeballing our six prints carefully, all appeared equal in quality. But looking at them through a powerful loupe revealed some minuscule variations. Nevertheless, Photo 1440 at High Speed gave us excellent results on most papers, along with reasonable printing times.

The R2880 is one of the quietest printers we’ve used--we could hardly hear it at 6 feet away. Prints show no color shifting (metamerism), color layering or bronzing, and Epson’s Ultrachrome K3 pigment inks have a predicted print lightfastness of up to 205 years under glass, but humidity, heat, and air contaminants could shorten that.

Most impressive was the quality of prints we output on different Epson, Red River, and Hahnemühle papers using the R2880’s Advanced Black-and-White mode. They easily equaled or surpassed the finest silver halide prints we’ve seen, offering rich, deep blacks with an extraordinary tonal range that could only be described as stunning. It was also easy to simulate sepia, platinum, selenium, and other traditional toners.

Ink consumption when printing uni- or bidirectionally at SuperFine 1440 or Photo 1440 was about the same. At $13.29 per cartridge, we calculated the average cost of ink for an 8x10 inch print at those four options to be 80 cents ($2.50 for a 13x19 inch photo) though it could be higher or lower depending on the percentage of dark or light areas in an image. SuperPhoto 5760 used about twice as much ink when producing museum-quality, exhibition images on fine art papers.

Epson Perfection V30

Leslie Ayers — Fri, 08 May 2009 14:09:29 -0500

Beneath the Perfection V30’s low physical profile lurks powerful scanning chops.

Recession or no, time is one of our most valuable resources--second only, perhaps, to money. With the Perfection V30 scanner, Epson offers up a way to digitize hard-copy photos and documents that doesn’t suck you dry of time or money. That is to say, this sucker is fast and cheap--in a good way. The V30, a lightweight flatbed scanner with a conveniently flat lid so you can set a stack of papers on top of it without them sliding off, measures 17 inches long by 11 inches wide by 1.6 inches tall, so it fits nicely on a desk or side table--though the included power and USB 2.0 cables are only 6 feet long, so be sure your Mac and power outlet are close enough to reach.

Setting up the V30 and getting started scanning is a 10-minute deal, especially if you eschew a lot of the “extra” bits of included software, such as ArcSoft MediaImpression (a photo-creativity app) and Abbyy FineReader Sprint Plus (for optical character recognition). We skipped those at first and just installed Epson Scan, which is a bit fiddly--and not very pretty to look at--but lets you control what image format your scans are saved in, where they’re saved, and what kind of filters (dust control, descreening, and so on) are applied, saving you time in an image-editing app later on. The FineReader OCR software could come in handy for anyone scanning text documents that need to be converted to editable files--and in our testing on a dozen or so text docs, the OCR worked well.

The V30’s speed is impressive--and it’s whisper-quiet. A 300 dpi scan to PDF of a full-color magazine cover took 47 seconds. The same page scanned as a 25MB TIFF file took 1 minute, 33 seconds. Scanned as a 1MB JPG, it took 56 seconds.

The V30 has just four buttons: Power/Scan, Scan To PDF, Copy, and Scan And Email, a handy feature that scans a document according to the specs you’ve set up in Epson Scan, then launches your default email app and lets you choose a small, medium, or large version of the scanned image to send as an attachment.

Although it’s not advertised as a photo scanner exclusively, the V30 does an excellent job scanning color photos. The scanner works natively with Photoshop, so you can import a scan directly by choosing File > Import > Epson Perfection V30/V300. The scanning area is only 8.5 by 11.7 inches, though, so your scanned images are limited to those dimensions.

Kodak EasyShare W1020

Zack Stern — Fri, 01 May 2009 04:13:00 -0500

The outer bezel is removable, if you want it to match your Ikea furniture.

We shoot tons of photos but only print those we’re certain have staying power. So what about all the pictures that don’t make the cut? The EasyShare W1020 acts as an LCD and slide show, looping these images on its 10-inch, 800x480-pixel screen. Best of all, the picture frame can pull down images from an online RSS feed, automatically updating when new pictures are added. While the on-frame interface and mildly limited Mac features are underdeveloped, online connectivity fills in the big picture.

The installation process worked all right, even without a Mac utility. We were able to use touch-strip controls to select items on the screen, but some functions were counterintuitive. Thankfully, after connecting online, we rarely needed to touch the frame again.

Kodak’s free FrameChannel website passes images through your Wi-Fi connection; you can even email images to the device. The service can pull in weather reports, news, and other online content, but that’s mostly filler to the crucial RSS photo feeds. We added specific Flickr and MobileMe/iPhoto RSS pages, and the frame stayed current with that content. Sure, it can also display JPEGs from USB drives, CompactFlash, SD, Memory Stick, and more, but automatic Wi-Fi updates trump those connections. We could even configure the device to wake up and sleep on a defined schedule.

The bright screen shows details in high-quality photos, although colors tend to wash out. And if your images are compressed a great deal, those artifacts will be amplified in the frame. The 16:9 aspect ratio matches any stills from your HD home movies, but still cameras shoot much more square images. You’re left with a tough choice for traditional camera shots: zoom and crop or leave black borders on the left and right edges.

Eye-Fi Explore

Leslie Ayers — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:13:34 -0500

If you lose track of the photos you’ve uploaded, the Upload History in the Eye-Fi Manager can remind you at a glance.

Digital cameras have eliminated the need to get prints made from film negatives at your local Fotomat. But there’s still the matter of getting your digital snaps from your camera to your computer--then sharing them using one of any number of online photo sites out there.

To solve this problem and eliminate the need for a physical connection between camera and computer, Eye-Fi cards use Wi-Fi to transfer photos from an SD storage card directly to the photo-sharing site of your choice: Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, Shutterfly, Snapfish, Kodak Gallery, Costco.com, Walmart.com, MobileMe Gallery, and many others. Eye-Fi released its first Wi-Fi-enabled SD card a few years ago, and in January it launched the 2GB Eye-Fi Explore card, which automatically adds geotags to all of your photos, even if your digital camera doesn’t have geotagging features built in. It was a nice coinky-dink that at the same time, iPhoto ’09 also added the Places feature, which takes advantage of geotags and organizes photos based on where they were taken.

The Eye-Fi Explore card is a no-brainer to set up and use. Using the included USB card reader, you insert it into a free USB port on your Mac and follow the onscreen prompts to determine what happens to photos that are stored on the card from that point on. Once you take a sample photo and it uploads, the setup screen also tells you if you need to change certain power-saving settings on your digital camera, necessary to make sure the camera stays on long enough for the Eye-Fi Explore to detect a Wi-Fi network and upload your pictures.

We set up our Explore card to automatically post photos to our MobileMe Gallery, which were then synced with iPhoto ’09. The end result: fast, easy photo-sharing, and nary a moment wasted getting our photos organized and in sync.

While more and more cameras are adding geotagging as a built-in feature, there’s no need to own a cutting-edge digicam to take advantage of geotags, which are just another layer of photo metadata--in this case, latitude and longitude--you can use to sort the snaps in your photo library. Flickr also lets you use geotags to “map” your photos--perfect for photographers who are lucky enough to travel a lot.

Compared to a standard SD card, Eye-Fi cards cost a pretty penny (2GB SD card street prices run low as $5, compared to the $129.99 retail price for the Eye-Fi Explore). But in the case of Explore in particular, you get quite a bit for the price: Unlimited geotagging, Wayport hotspot access for a year, and free use of the WebShare service to upload your images to online photo-sharing sites--all services that existing Eye-Fi card owners can add to their cards for a yearly cost of $9.99 to $14.99.