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January 2006
David Em davidem@earthlink.net
www.davidem.com
Copyright 2006 David Em.
Photographic film is officially in its death throes. A couple weeks ago Nikon (http://www.nikon.com) announced that it's discontinuing all its film cameras except the top-of-the-line F6 and a low-end consumer model, the FM10. At the same time, they're plowing full steam ahead on developing digital cameras, such as their impressive new $1,600 DSLR, the D200.
There are several reasons photographers have moved in droves from film to digital over the last couple years. Perhaps the biggest is the experience of shooting digital on the road. This week I'll take a look at how a new generation of products has revolutionized mobile photography, including Fuji's (http://www.fujifilm.com) Z1 pocket camera, Seagate's (http://www.seagate.com) 8GB CF-format drive, and Kingston's (http://www.kingston.com) 15-in-1 flash card reader.
For every great photograph shot on film, there are probably a million corresponding missed ones. There's nothing more aggravating than not having your camera with you when an unexpected photo op presents itself.
There are several ultrathin digital slimcams on the market you can literally always have with you. I've reviewed some over the last couple years from companies such as Casio, Nikon, and Sony. Over the last couple weeks I've been testing Fuji's $300 FinePix Z1 that employs Fuji's 5.1 Megapixel SuperCCD sensor. The Z1 has greater light sensitivity than competing models.
The Z1's a sleek little unit that measures 3.5 x 2.2 x 0.7 inches. Its metal body comes in black or silver, and it has a bright 115,000-pixel 2.5-inch LCD. There are higher pixel-count LCDs out there, but I had no trouble seeing the image clearly in most lighting situations, including out of doors. The camera uses the now-familiar internal lens scheme that doesn't protrude from the camera's body while providing a 3X (36 - 108 mm equivalent) optical zoom.
The Z1 turns on via a sliding lens cover, an arrangement I'm not thrilled with. I found the cover occasionally opened and turned on the camera while it was in my pocket. This isn't good for the lens, and is sure to collect bits of dirt or lint in the mechanism that will eventually need to be cleaned.
I found the controls straightforward and well laid out. I never had to resort to the manual to figure out the settings. I was disappointed at the lack of a tripod mount on the bottom or an integrated USB port. Both these features are available on the included desktop base unit that also charges the battery, but that's not much help in the field.
The Z1 has clearly evolved beyond early iterations of this kind of camera design. It starts up in about a second and has very little shutter lag. Cycle time's about a second between shots, not bad for this class of camera. The zoom's a little jumpy. There's a bit of barrel distortion in the lens, but you'll rarely notice it. There is noticeable purple color blooming at the boundaries of overexposed areas.
You can control Autofocus and Flash modes as well as white balance and exposure compensation in +/- 2.0EV steps of 1/3EV. You can't control aperture or shutter speed (don't ask me why). The overall dynamic range of the images looks good, but some images didn't come out quite as sharp as I'd like, and others had noticeable noise, even in well-lit scenes. The Z1 also captures full VGA resolution movies at 30 frames per second, with sound.
The Z1's performance in low light levels is impressive. Shooting at close range with a flash delivers a good result with most of the newer ultrathin cameras, but if you're like me and prefer natural light, the Z1 distinguishes itself over the competition at parties or events that feature fast-moving "targets of opportunity" in less than perfect lighting scenarios.
I took the Z1 to my son's championship indoor soccer game, played at night in a basketball stadium, and got some good shots with the ISO light sensitivity turned up to 800. I shot in the same venue under exactly the same conditions a year ago with Sony's very similar DSC-T3, which produced blurry shots that were unusable.
You get somewhere between 150 to 200 shots per battery charge. The Z1 uses the tiny xD Flash cards favored by Fuji and Olympus and almost no one else. I got a $100 1GB xD card from Sandisk (http://www.sandisk.com), one of the few providers of xD cards. A gigabyte's enough to store between three and four hundred compressed 5-megapixel images. If you download the images to your computer via the docking cradle's USB 2 connection, you'll rarely have to swap cards - a good thing since xD cards are so small, they're easy to lose.
Fuji's already released a successor to the Z1, the Z2, in Japan. The Z2 LCD has double the pixel resolution of the Z1, and more significant, double the ISO light sensitivity, from ISO 800 to ISO 1600. Dynamism (http://www.dynamism.com), a company that deals in cool electronics you can only buy in Japan, sells it for $399 in your choice of black, silver, white, or red. I haven't tested the Z2, but if shooting in natural light with a camera that fits in your shirt pocket appeals to you, it sounds like a great bet.
Tiny cameras are fine for a lot of purposes, but serious shooters need to haul around correspondingly serious cameras with lenses that mean business. Digital technology translates to mobility for these high end users as well, but the pacing item's not physical size, it's storage capacity.
A few days ago I ran into a photojournalist friend of mine who photographs remote locations for movie studios. He was just back from a trip to the Brazilian outback where he'd been shooting with Nikon's high-end DX2. It was the first time he'd completely eliminated film from his workflow, and he was astonished at how it had streamlined his process.
Armed with five 2GB Compact Flash (CF) cards, he was able to store over a thousand pictures, roughly the equivalent of thirty rolls of film. There was no need to carry the film, refrigerate it in a tropical environment, or constantly be changing rolls. No need to process it. No need to shepherd it through customs. No need to wonder if he got the shot. Even though he's been shooting film all his life, he's sold on digital and doesn't plan to shoot on film again.
The key is dense storage capacity, an area Seagate's taken the lead in by developing storage devices oriented specifically toward mobile media applications. With their recent acquisition of Maxtor (http://www.maxtor.com), Seagate's the player to beat in the mobile storage arena.
Seagate recently released their $220 8GB Photo Drive (a 4GB version's available for $149). The 1-inch Compact Flash format is standard to all professional and most "prosumer" cameras, but unlike standard CF technology, Seagate's Photo Drive is not silicon-based, it's an actual hard drive, the indirect descendant of IBM's Microdrive.
There are theoretical advantages to storage technologies that don't have moving parts, such as less to break, but I never had any problems with the Microdrives I used in several cameras a couple years back, and the Photo Drive's already down to a quarter the cost of a silicon 8GB Compact Flash card.
Seagate says the Photo Drive stores over 1800 11-megapixel or 2300 8-megapixel images. This will keep even the most prolific photographer going for days. Another key element of the photography trade involves moving pictures from place to place to show clients, deliver to printers, and so forth. Seagate supports this need with their $169 5400 RPM 100 GB portable drive (a 120 GB version is almost out the door).
This USB 2 drive is smaller and lighter than a paperback, and has no power brick. It pulls juice from your computer via a Y-cable with two USB connectors, one for power, the other for data. Its aluminum alloy surface is rugged, it's rated to 5000 Gs of shock resistance (nonoperating), and it's very quiet.
Seagate's also produced the aptly named $99 5GB Pocket Drive. The Pocket Drive is round, with a streamlined design that integrates a USB cable cleverly slotted into a channel. Like the 100GB model, it doesn't need a power cable. For the photographer on the go, these are all simply must-have storage tools. All three are Highly Recommended.
Even pros who haul around big cameras typically also have a smaller unit along for more casual situations. Smaller cameras usually use different media. Then there's all the different media for phones, PDAs, and other devices that periodically need to be downloaded.
The best solution I've found is Kingston's new $19 USB 2.0 15-in-1 flash media reader. Like the portable Seagate disks, there's no power cable required. The 3.46" x 2.19" x .63" device has four media ports that read fifteen Flash formats, including CompactFlash (CF) I and II, Secure Digital, miniSD, microSD (an SD adapter's included), MultiMediaCard (MMC) Version 3.1, MMCmicro (MMC adapter required), MMCmobile (DV RS-MMC), MMCplus (Version 4.0), RS-MMC (Version 3.1), Microdrive (CF Types II), Memory Stick, Memory Stick PRO, Memory Stick PRO Duo, and SmartMedia.
The 15-in-1 Reader has an 18 MB/s (megabytes per second) read rate and up to 15 MB/s write rate, making its 480 Mbps data transmission fast enough to keep up with the latest card speeds, including Kingston's SD Ultimate memory cards with 133x write speed. It comes with a 5-year warranty.
We've tested many Kingston system memory chips and media cards over the years and have always found them to be extremely reliable as well as competitive in price.
With companies like Nikon and Kodak throwing in the towel, it will soon be very hard to buy a film camera, or for that matter film, except for highly specialized scientific applications.
There's a downside to all this progress on the digital front as evidenced by the existence of the Kingston 15-in-1 Reader, namely that digital storage formats are becoming obsolete almost as quickly as they're created.
There are 35mm Nikon and Leica cameras produced decades ago that work as well today with any roll of film as they did the day they were made. It's hard to imagine we'll be able to say that about any digital camera on the market today. It's incumbent on all the big players in the field to create digital camera systems that in addition to being capable in the here and now can also withstand the test of time.