2014 Year End Photography Equipment Purchases - Canon EF40mm f2.8 STM / Sirui Ballhead / Kirk L Bracket

 

 

I guess this would be my first photography related post on my blog. I got into photography about 3 years ago by getting a Canon 60D, then quickly moved to a Canon 5D Mark III 2 years from now. At this stage, I would say I’m pretty comfortable about getting correct exposures with natural lighting using manual mode. Composition wise, I still need much more practices. But for flashes, I’m still struggling understanding the mechanisms. I mean I have some understandings about the flash triangle for exposure and inverse square law, etc, but I just can’t seem to make good use of them. I need more time studying in this area, that’s my 2015 photography resolution. Anyways, here are some of the stuff I bought at year end:

1. Canon EF40mm f2.8 STM
2. Sirui Ballhead K-30X
3. Kirk L Bracket for 5D Mark III

 

 

It’s my first time buying a refurbished Canon lens. I only had three lenses before getting this one anyway… It’s a pancake lens with STM - stepping motor. I’ve always wanted to get this one instead of the nifty fifty. This looks like the perfect combo for the SL1 - my backup camera. I was able to get it for $100 after missing it a few times.

 

 

It’s a very compact lens, plastic construction made it weightless. This is my first prime lens BTW.

 

 

The macro focusing distance is 0.3m, slightly shorter distance to the 24-105mm that I’m using originally. I can get pretty close to the subject if I have the need.

 

 

The 2.8 aperture, being 1 stop faster than the 24-105mm f/4, is good for the low light situation, more bekoh as well. Although might not as faster than the nifty fifty, still good enough for me. I might get a sigma ART prime lens some time down the road, since that’s receiving all raging reviews these days. I’ll play on this one first to practice composition skills.

 

 

The size and the weight on the SL1+40mm could compete with SONY a7+28-70mm kit. I generally like the Canon for simple operation and familiar interface. The SONY a7 was just an impulse buy for a good deal at the time. Although SONY a7 has way more functions and has a full frame censor. I’m still not feeling comfortable to spend more money for the SONY ecosystem, FE 55mm f/1.8 seems the only (prime) lens that I’m interested in, but I could get a sigma ART 50mm f/1.4 for less than that, why bother… Also SONY is way too fast in refreshing their cameras every year, a7II is already out with in camera stabilization… The most disappointing thing about a7 is the battery though, it eats battery like no others, three batteries could barely keep it alive for a full day of shooting…

 

 

Now moving on to the ball head. I’ve got a Vanguard 263AT tripod, which came with this SBH-100 ball head. The tripod pretty much was ruined during the 14 day trip I had in 2014. The first thing I’m doing here is to replace the head. After reading around, I’m vouching for Chinese manufacturers again here, got the Sirui K-30X, which is the middle size of the line. I’m still looking for the carbon fiber legs. But haven’t decided which one to get yet. I can’t even decide if I want a more portable one (5 sections) or a more sturdy one (4 sections). There are just way too many choices out there… And I don’t want to spend $600 for just the legs…

 

 

Now the Sirui ball head seems like pretty good quality compared to the SBH-100.

 

 

The ball head seems a lot more fluid. I hope it could last me long enough.

 

 

The ball head is Arca-Swiss compatible, which is the essential function when I chose it. Intentionally or unintentionally, almost all the mounting plates I got so far are Arca-Swiss compatible. I can finally use these plates. All three of my cameras, and a 70-200 f2.8L get an Arca-Swiss compatible plate attached now.

 

 

I also like the screw has a D ring for easier attach and removal. You get the options to further tighten down with a coin or a allen key.

 

 

Now to complete this whole Arca-Swiss setup, I finally shell out some money on the L bracket. After comparing with RRS, Kirk, and ProMediaGear, I settled on the Kirk.

 

 

It’s a very niche item that cost $150 for just one piece of metal. I could probably make one if I still had the access to the machine workshop, provided if I can get the measurements right.

 

 

My old setup was attaching a Nikon hand strap to 5D Mark III, which the included plate has a 1/4in screw hole that I can attach yet another mounting plate. The setup was very prone to get twisted in the opposite direction and became loose. Worst of all, they all have the slot where you need a coin or the included tool to get attach again. So the L bracket fits the 5D Mark III only should solve this problem. Also by moving everything to Arca-Swiss, I can get rid of the second plate.

 

 

So this is what it looks like after moving the Nikon hand strap to the L bracket. Everything worked out great. The strap is not in the way of the battery door. I really liked the hand strap BTW as I absolutely hates neck straps. The genuine one sells for $90 and is hard to find. But ebay sells a Korean made on for around $22, which I wholeheartedly recommends. The mounting plate included is also a Arca-Swiss compatible one, which I moved to the a7.

 

 

The L bracket fits like a glove to the camera body so no more came loose. Again by buying such an expensive L bracket that only fits specific model, it is definitely a big commitment to the camera. I don’t expect to upgrade the 5D Mark III in the near future.

 

 

The only drawback I can immediately see is that the side (when camera is in vertical position), is completely hollow to allow access to the ports. There doesn’t seem to be anything to latch against the stop pin on the ball head. It could be an issue when mounting in vertical, you gotta be extra careful, otherwise you are risk dropping the camera…

 

  

Well, I said I hate neck strap, I do use it from time to time. I got in on the kickstarter project for Peak Design’s slide. That was my first and last kickstarter backing though. The product turns out had a design flaw. Although the company was being transparent enough about the flaw and provide ways to verify and solve the problem, it was still too much trouble to save 10% for being a beta tester. Mine turned out to be safe after I did their testing so I don’t have to do anything, but still I would rather buy products which just works out the door at a higher price.

 

         

 

Canon PIXMA PRO-100 - How to Disable ICM in printer driver

 

 

The Canon PIXMA PRO-100 is probably the cheapest wide format inkjet you can get if you own Canon system. Or I’ve seen a few times that you can get it for $50 after rebate by buying the printer with Canon 13x19 luster paper.

 

So following the same concept in the Epson guide:

In order to print anything from Photoshop or lightroom with reasonable color accuracy without any calibration, you would need to turn off ICM in the printer driver. The Canon driver has the ICM off option buried pretty deep unlike Epson, took me a while to figure it out…

 

 

So pick the right printer profile in PS.

 

 

 

Disable ICM in printer driver.   

LG G Flex as Music Player / Neutron App / GOgroove BlueGate RMT Bluetooth Remote Review

 

 

So I got a LG G Flex from one of the super Bestbuy deals for $200. Since the price is decent for a relatively new device with good spec, I gave LG another chance. My last LG phone - LG L9 only lasted 7 months, which forced to buy a replacement phone - SONY Xperia ION. The L9, while being only a low end device at the time, performed pretty well if not dead…

 

 

The SONY Xperia ION while performed OK, spec looked good on paper, felt really old. It was first released with Android 2.3x Gingerbread, therefore the app partition is only 1.97GB, it started filled up quickly after installing only a few apps. It was a constantly battle to move apps to SD cards and deleting apps to release space, so I was never happy with this aspect. Another thing is no matter which ROM I tried, the dialer is always so slow to launch for some reason. Lastly the battery life is NOT that great, it can last for a day outside (8-10 hours) if I remember to charge it fully. I certainly would not be comfortable leaving home if the battery is 70% or below. I always carry a 2600mah portable battery though…

 

The G Flex is a speed monster compare to all the devices I’ve used so far. Coupled with a 6in screen, it really feels like a computer in the palm of hand now. The curved screen is really awesome, the landscape mode works best for the curve. It made me actually want a bigger TV with curved screen. It came with 4.2.2, I upgraded the ROM to 4.4.2 v20b by using LG firmware tool. (This is an AT&T brand G Flex D950, I don’t have AT&T, therefore I don’t get any OTA updates, the latest is v20f pushed over in September I believe). Then rooted the device using Stump Root with Brute force. Everything worked fine. After upgrading to 4.4.2, the device appears to be smoother. I also installed the G2 Exposed to get rid of the cell vendor on the left of the status bar. One feature I liked the best is the wireless storage, it makes the phone as a network place after activating. It worked sort of like the feature in PlayBook. Another great feature is quickmemo, which is essentially a screen capture with doodling capability. This feature was available on the L9. The battery life is pretty good. I get about 1.5 day of usage on average. The screen on time is not that great though, I get about 3.5 to 4 hours of usage on average. So it’s great for standby, about 1% drop in battery per hour. But if you start using the phone, the battery drops quite fast. But still, I wouldn’t feel uncomfortable leaving home even if the battery drops below 50%. The only bad thing is that it’s picky about the USB charging cable when using with a portable charger, the same cable used with Xperia ION with fast charging would receive a slow charging warning on this smartphone. But I only have to use a portable charger twice so far.

 

 

I don’t have issue with G Flex being a 6in Phablet, it fits my cargo pocket fine. But I preferred putting it in my shirt’s pocket. It fits there OK while you definitely feel the weight. But it’s a tradeoff I’m willing to bear. This time I decided to not get a screen protector, but get a case instead. I chose the official quick window cover. It provides protection to the screen and add a way to power on/off the screen. The double tap works great already without the case, but the case is even easier for locking/unlocking screen. The other thing I’m battling with is the lack of MicroSD card slot. You only get about 24GB available user space from the built-in 32GB storage. Being natively 4.2 Android, it gives unified storage so all 24GB is treated as a big partition. I’m happy with this aspect. 24GB is more than enough to put all the apps, books, and photos. But it’s not enough for any music or video storage.

 

For this problem, there are three options that I know of:

 

 

 

1. USB OTG. You could choose a traditional USB OTG cable, or modern USB drive with built-in OTG port, or maybe a Meenova card reader. This is certainly the most stable and versatile solution. All files are accessible locally. You can use any app of your choice. The biggest disadvantage is the draining of battery though. The USB drives would constantly draw power. Also it would be pretty inconvenient if you attach the USB drive all the time.

 

 

So I grabbed a 64GB Patriot USB OTG drive, it has a micro USB on one side for Android, and another full USB side for PC. The capacity is on par with my mciroSD card used in the Xperia ION. So I was able to keep all data in it.

 

 

2. Apps that have SMB or UPNP/DLNA capability built-in. I recommend Neutron Music Player. This is like Poweramp on steroids. As long as you can get past the UI, especially the settings, it is a very powerful app that can stream all types of music on your PC or NAS. It supports all the format (lossless formats obscure as TAK, TTA) that I can dream of and cue sheets. 

 

 

 

The SMB works very well, now I can stream hundreds Hi-Res, lossless music on my NAS. There is no buffering, no lag, everything works just the way it meant to be. It’s well worth the price tag IMO.

 

ES file explorer is another viable solution if you don’t want to spend that much on one app. It lacks systematic music management like Neutron though. The best that you can do is to use playlist to manage music from folders. The streaming performance is almost as good as Neutron. But you don’t get additional function such EQ, pre-amp, gain, crossfade, normalization, sleep timer etc.

 

3. Wifi Route. The main difficulty for the Wifi is that you need apps that can manage the files. Unlike USB OTG, your files are not accessed as if you are locally. To get them appear locally, the only option would be to use something such as CIFS mounting to mount the folder as a local folder. But you need a CIFS kernel or CIFS.ko module which there is none for G Flex at the moment.

 

I have options 1 and 2. I prefer option 2 for the easy of setup. When I got the phone, I didn’t intend it to be a music player. But I think the audio playback through the audio port is decent enough. The biggest advantage for Android is that I don’t need to process most of the audio file. This compliments my SONY NW-M505 walkman which plays MP3 and WAV only. My setup also includes the FiiO E17 portable amp. It definitely helps with filtering out some background noise. And apparently this guy agrees with my opinion, G Flex (starting at 2:15 mark) is ranked the no.5 on top of the 5 smartphone (no iphone) category.

 

 

Note in my setup that the FiiO E17 is hooked up to the G Flex via standard 3.5mm. FiiO is set as AUX input. So the processing is still done on the smartphone’s internal component, The FiiO is merely amplifies the signal. I could only hope that G Flex would someday get the Android L update so that I can use the USB connection. Android 5.0 is reported to support USB DAC natively with some limitations:

 

 

 

And lastly, the setup wouldn’t be complete without some kind of remote control capability. Smartphones are NOT built like walkman which features hardware controls for music. So I got the GOgroove BlueGATE RMT bluetooth controller.

 

 

At $24.99, this is a pretty steep priced bluetooth device with very limited usage. But it’s still cheaper than the $34.99 Satechi brand I tried last year. That one was only available to iOS or Android, while this GOgroove has a switch that can handle BOTH systems.

 

 

The overall build quality on the remote is pretty decent, the front side has some uncleaned finish for some reason, but a fine file should clean up the finish. The buttons are a bit stiff, but they do respond well. The non symmetrical placement of the play/pause button feels odd, makes the volume up/down keys smaller. I guess they do it to make it a bit easier for blind operation, but the plastic feel of buttons make it not that easy to distinguish which button is which without looking. But after a while, you’ll get used to it.

 

 

The bluetooth remote is a Bluetooth 3.0 HID device powered by an AAA battery. GOgroove claims that it can last upto 12 hours. There is a big catch not mentioned on Amazon or other vendor though: the device will enter sleep mode and disconnect Bluetooth connection after 3 minutes! To re-establish the connection, just press any key. My experiment is that the audio control buttons automatically registers after re-connection. So if the connection is lost, after pressing the play button once, it will re-connect AND issue the play/pause command. But for the bottom camera and voice key, pressing once after entering sleep mode only re-connects, you have to press these two keys again to issue proper command. This could be a deal breaker for some. And every time the Bluetooth connects, the Android system will display a notification, the notification will cause a flicker in some app, while completely quit in some apps. In Moon reader, the notification will quit the book you are reading, and send you back to the bookshelf for some reason… This shouldn’t be a huge deal though since if you’re using the smartphone, you get easy control, almost have no need for remote control anyways.

 

 

The second problem it has is that the remote is registered as a Bluetooth keyboard. By default, Android will disable on-screen software keyboard. It makes sense when you are using a fully functional keyboard. But this remote is NOT a functioning keyboard, so you’ll be forced to turn off hardware keyboard every time it reconnects! To turn off the keyboard, just use the dropdown menu, select “choose input method”, then select the input method you use.

 

 

And again, the 3 minute auto sleep feature really hinders the usage of this remote. So it’s pretty much impossible to use the smartphone while listening to music if you so wanted to use the remote control.

 

 

 

 

 

Finally some good news is that the keys do work fairly well. Some keys perform two functions depend long press or short press. Long press the camera button for 6 seconds launches the default camera button. But unfortunately it stops there, the camera button only works for the default camera app. I’ve tried it with other apps such as Playmemories, and the camera button never responded.

 

So in conclusion is that this Bluetooth remote is a good build quality one, but it has some flaws that you have to fight through. I finally decided to keep it after two weeks of trial.

 

 

 

And to end this post, I had to post some sad news that the included SONY MDR-NC31SP noise cancelling earbud from the NW-M505 Walkman was destroyed in the washer machine. I forgot to take the earbud out… And to replace it, it would cost $37 for the long version. Amazon.co.jp seems the only place that I could find to have the original short version. Of course, the newly released SONY NW-A16/A17 (sold in Japan only) would include one of these. But I don’t think I’m ready for another Walkman for such a short time. I’ll wait and see if the Hi-Res audio SONY’s been pushing will take off or not while slowly collecting those.

 

 

And SONY’s audio store MORA (Japan only) just announced that it would release files in DSD format, but the walkman I’m looking at - NW-A16/A17 doesn’t support these format yet. (Currently MORA sells Hi-Res audio in FLAC format, and these FLAC format are almost non-compressed WAVs, which means they only used FLAC container to include the art work, but didn’t take advantage of the compression so that the file size are huge). Not sure if they would ever support DSD via firmware updates either. One more reason to just hold off while being happy to use my current setup.

 

 

Lenovo Iomega ix2-DL Network Storage 2-Bay Quick Review

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So I got the Lenovo Iomega ix2-DL NAS in September. It was an impulse buy at $40. I’ve been waiting patiently for the HDD sales ever since while have this NAS collecting dust. The online reviews don’t seem to favor it, but I still gave it a shot due to the price… It is the first Lenovo product EVER.

 

 

 

 

I finally bought a pair of WD RED 4TB drives, cost me $300… It was definitely not cheap to have a dedicated NAS. But I can free my PC to do other things or shut down when I’m done with it now.

 

 

I’m using RAID 1 - Mirror for the moment. When I first put the drives in, it took over a day to finish the raid setup. Configuring it was pretty easy. I didn’t try the LenovoEMC management software. I just log into the IP address, and manage it from the web interface. This video gives a pretty good demonstration to have you started:

The NAS gives tons of features, but performance seems to be under par probably due to outdated hardware (This product has been on the market for over two years now). Good job for Lenovo still updating the firmware though. I’ve been receiving two updates since I powered it up. It’s only been running for about two weeks so far. File transferring speed ranks the bottom of all the NAS products out there. My speed is about the same as the tested speed, got about 28mbps writing and 50mbps reading. So it’s definitely not for video editing of anything like that. But it suffices for storage for media consumption.

 

 

The 4.0.x firmware brings a flat interface, which makes the interface a bit neat. But the web interface is still very slow to load, took about 5 seconds to load.

 

 

While it gives you loads of features, I only use a few of them, namely Media Server, Transmission Torrent, and UPS. This video gives a quick tour of what these features are about:

 

 

     

 

The ix2 comes with one USB2.0 port. That’s where you connect the UPS. Not every UPS works with ix2 though. You need to find one with the USBHID-UPS support. I happen to have an APC bought last year that support this protocol. Coupled with the Event Log features, I think I had a better chance to survive catastrophe failure. Hopefully that would never happen… Since it’s only got one USB2.0 port, if you need to hook up another drive, you can use a powered USB hub without any problem.

The transmission torrent server works better than I would have hoped. It pretty much support every feature that’s available to the full blown utorrent. And private trackers do NOT have problem with this version of transmission so that I can use it. Torrent files, magnetic links, speed limits all work well. The only thing that doesn’t work quite well is if you want to download only some files from a torrent or magnetic link, you can’t easily pick the files.

To summarize, this is a low end NAS, probably the cheapest one out there that you can buy. The performance at 28mbps writing 50mbps reading is about the fastest USB2.0 speed or maybe some slow USB3.0 drives. This NAS is good for media server where once you dump the files there, you would only access it with good enough speed. It’s not good for constant transfer of files, especially large files, or any video or picture editing. I’m quite happy with my purchase since media server is my intended use. And I already have a compatible UPS to back it up.