LensWork Technology Blog

Roku on my Android

We gave up on cable TV a couple of years ago. We found we were only watching the Food Channel and Myth Busters. Quite honestly, it simply wasn't worth the $80 a month. Oh, and the occasional baseball or football game, but its hard to be a die-hard fan when your home teams are the Mariners and the Seahawks. So, bye-bye cable.

This became a very easy decision when we discovered the Roku box and streaming movies from Netflix. We don't watch that much TV anyway, and we get all we want via Roku and renting a disc now and then.

Enter the Android market. Some clever folks have created a apps for Android smart phones and tablets that will replace the remote control on the Roku box. What a fascinating blend of two seemingly unrelated technologies!

   

They work well and are much handier than the Roku's separate remote control. I always have my phone on me; I spend far too much of my life searching for the Roku remote. So, bye-bye Roku remote.

It's always a joy to let go of some technology as it's replace by some better and more convenient.

Toshiba Thrive

Stopped by Best Buy yesterday to look at the Toshiba Thrive tablet. This one looks to me to be a real winner. If you are shopping for a tablet and are looking beyond the ubiquitous iPad, take a look at this one.

Android OS, 10" screen, two cameras, stereo speakers, full-sized USB and HDMI ports, replaceable battery.

It's heavier (by a bit, but not much — 1.4 lbs for my Transformer versus 1.7 lbs for the Thrive) that the others in its size range, but the full-sized ports, replaceable battery, and better, louder speakers make at a contender. If I didn't already own a Transformer, this is the one I'd buy today.

Speaking of weight, lots of folks are making a basic mistake about this in their reviews and comments. I so often see that this tablet weighs an ounce or two more or less than this other tablet, blah, blah, blah. Comparing tablets is not all that real-world in my way of thinking. If I want to save weight, I'll take my phone or my Kindle reader, both of which weigh a fraction of any tablet. If weight is not really an issue, then I'll often take my netbook and have full PC capabillities. That is, when it comes to a real-world decision about what I take with me at any given moment, it's a use capabilities/weight trade off. The spectrum of possibilities runs from smartphone to Kindle Keyboard to (eventually) the Kindle Fire to a tablet to my netbook to a laptop. Or sometimes, just nuttin'. It's against this type of thinking that the extra weight of the Thrive over other Android tablets seems insignificant to me.

 [For comparison, the Kindle Fire weighs 0.91 lbs., the Kindle Keyboard weights 0.52 lbs, and my Atrix phone weighs 0.3 lbs. The iPads 1/2 weigh 1.6 and 1.3 lbs respectively. And nuttin' weighs nuttin'.]

LensWork Extended on our new Sony LCD TV

We upgraded our TV to this century. Our new 40" Sony Bravia LCD is HD. We're happ'nin'.

I know, I'm slow to catch up with the rest of you. Perhaps all that follows is old news, but it was new to me. In setting up the new TV, I first needed to learn about HDMI connections. Hmmm . . . I also have an HDMI out on my tablet. Wonder what happens if I plug my tablet into the TV and look at, say, LensWork Extended.

[Cue the angels, high C in 4-part harmony, go . . . .] AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!

I am aghast, agog, ablownaway how great LensWork Extended looks. I mean it, truly amazing.

   

   

A few thoughts:

• In all my years in photography, I've never made a print this large.
• HDTV is 1920x1080 pixels. We encode LensWork Extended at the equivalent of 2666x1666 and have since the first issue of LensWork Extended way back in 2005. We were HD before HD was HD. In fact, HD has a ways to go to catch up with us. :-)
• So, LensWork Extended has more than enough pixel resolution to be seen on HD screens and still zoom in a bit without pixelating.
• Even the videos look great. We added the Sony sound bar for better audio with a sub-woofer and this makes the interviews sound fantastic.
• My TV has various "scenes" I can select (or customize) for Cinema, Sports, Photos, et al. They substantially change the tone, warmth, sharpness, etc. of the visual image. It's worth experimenting to find the best one. Cinema works best on my set for not oversharpening, but it a bit warmish. I made a custom "scene" that used no extra sharpening, only a slight warmth, and a touch of increased brightness in the shadows to preserve detail. The image on the TV now matches perfectly the image on the tablet which matches perfectly the image on my calibrated computer monitor. Sweet, and not much fussing to accomplish.
• I was really surprised how readable the text is on the TV, even from across the room on the couch. A two-fingered pinch zoom and the text was as large as I could possibly want — and never pixelates because it is not rasterized. One of the advantages of the PDF format.
• A 16' HDMI cable cost me $14. Couch potato, indeed.

I have no idea if this is the future of LensWork Extended or of the consumption of still images. I'm not sure people will want to see photographic artwork on their TV, but it is interesting that it works, looks great, and gets me away from my desk and the computer. I'd be very interested to hear if any of you have tried this and what you thought about the experience.

Kindle Fire

   

Amazon announces the new Kindle Fire.

Looks like a LensWork Digital Editions device to me!

Amazon's web page went live this morning at 8am my time and they had my pre-order at 8:01. Supposedly shipping on Nov 15th. We will definitely work to make sure LensWork Portable Edition and LensWork Android Edition work on this exciting new device.

   

Watch, I Miss Thee

I remember with fondness the world of watches. I stopped wearing a watch about a year ago. I love watches, but I detest watch bands. Mine was bugging me and interfering with the use of my computer keyboard. I took off my watch one day and I never put it back on. Whenever I need to know the time, I have my phone, my computer, my iPad, my Android tablet, the clock radio next to our bed, the microwave, the kitchen clock, the clock in the car, the clocks in my portable recorders, the clock in my MP3 player — knowing the time is simply not a problem!

That said, there is a nostalgic component to the reason I miss my watch. A watch, for me, was an incredibly important piece of technology because of the darkroom. I needed my watch to have multiple countdown timers, multiple alarms, and to function easily for all those things I needed to time in the darkroom. A watch was a more convenient timer than a Gra-Lab timer; a watch was always with me even if I left the darkroom for bite to eat or to rest. Having the right watch was such an important component of my work that I spent untold hours shopping for, selecting, learning to operate, and then shopping for better watches. I did this for 35 years. I now have a drawer full of them — sad little expressions of technology for which I now have no use, but yet cannot discard cold-heartedly. There were good friends for too many years to toss them into the garbage. I feel slightly guilty every time I closed the drawer and consigned them to the dark. Good night, old friends. Rest comfortably in your declining — um, winding down years.

Plug configurations

Just as the lens is more important than the camera, so the microphone is in audio recording. I just found a nice, inexpensive headset mic to use with my Motorola Atrix 4G and ASUS Transformer tablet. Wired, single ear listening, comfortable. Great. The mic sounded very good and I dictated my article for LensWork #96 onto my phone using this headset. So, thought I, why not use it with my Olympus digital recorder, too? Nice try, but the plug configuration is incompatible.

Off to my large toolbox (literally) full of cables and plug adapter. I have 3 dozen plug adapters I've collected over the years, all stored away in a gallon zip lock bag. Not one of them "converted" the three band plug on my new headset properly so I could use it with the simply 3.5mm mic jack on the Olympus.

This is why it is so unbelievable on Star Trek when the crew interfaces their devices with some alien space ship's computer system. I cant' even get my Japanese made headset to interface with my Japanese made digital recorder. What are the chances I would succeed if my recorder were Klingon?

More tablets than Moses

I've said for some time now that the most interesting component of photography's so-called "digital revolution" is not our ability to create images digitally (i.e., Photoshop), but rather the means of distribution of images that are now possible via digital transfer.

We are in the midst of seeing this capability explode even further with the introduction — and now the initial phases of distribution — of a new class of tablet computing devices. First was the iPad, and now we are starting to see a number of Android-based tablets being shipped and gathering user feedback.

Of these, one of the more interesting ones appears to be the ASUS Transformer. The Transformer, like the iPad, is a touchscreen-based portable device ideally suited for the presentation of photographs. Unlike the iPad, however, the Transformer adds the ability to play Flash which opens it up to the world multimedia publishing — and in particular, Adobe PDF documents that include media components. In an earlier post I mentioned how the iPad could easily have been designed specifically to present LensWork. The ASUS Transformer, with its widescreen design and Flash capabilities, could have been easily designed specifically to present LensWork Extended.

It would probably be an exaggeration to say that the iPad is a ubiquitous photographer's tool. We certainly see lots of them around and lot of photographers using them. By itself, it was (and is) an important and popular groundbreaking technology — but a bit expensive and a bit restrictive to satisfy everybody's needs and interests. However, with all these new tablets adding to the excitement of the category, we're starting to see prices come down, features go up, flexibility increase, and most importantly, user experiences influence design and usability. The Transformer is lower priced, with additional features, and an impressive first batch of user reports and thereby seems already to be making waves (unlike the Motorola Xoom) in the emerging tablet market. I'm excited to get my hands on one and see it perform for myself. As both a photographer and as a publisher, I'm very excited and enthusiastic about this emerging technology.

As a publisher in particular, I've been amused by those who predict universal dominance of this technology. It would be far too easy to see this trend and all these new devices as the death of print. It is not; print is not going away. True, print may be struggling a bit to find its new role in the world in which digital distribution will play an increasingly important part. Print distribution of photography will change. It will have no choice. The $100 fine art photography book will find the $10 fine art PDF eBook on a tablet device a formidable competitor. This may not be the death of hardbound books for us photographers, but it is the beginning phases of a publishing and distribution opportunity of unparalleled accessibility for many of us. Ignore this trend at your peril.

Bluetooth

You would not believe how desperately I would like Bluetooth to work. The seduction of a wireless world is powerful. I've played with Bluetooth ear pieces for my phone, Bluetooth headphones for music, Bluetooth file transfers to move things from one device to another, Bluetooth mice, Bluetooth keyboards — I'm blue in the teeth for having tried so many of them.

The seduction is worse because they almost work. The Bluetooth headset for my phone is the closest thing to functional, but only when the battery is charged — which is rarely. I have three different Bluetooth headphones that I use for music, occasionally, until the dropouts and skipped passages become so maddening that I'm tempted to throw the headphones against the nearest wall. Like I say, it's such a seductive technology that I really want it to work.

I wish I were more of an under-the-hood kind of technical geek so that I could understand why this technology consistently fails. You would think there would be away for it to perform as we would all expect, but I've seen such inconsistent results that I suspect there is some sort of underlying structural flaw. It's really too bad. Pairing devices is arcane enough, but with patience I can always get past that first hurdle. It's the slow speed, spotty connections, background hiss, and required proximity that drive me nuts.

I wish there were some alternative technology on the horizon that would replace Bluetooth and work, but I've not seen or heard a peep. In the meantime, there's hoping, trying, fiddling around, and frustration. Oh, and wires everywhere when it doesn't work.

Smart Phones

Road Show Technology, Installment 4

How is it possible that they've made smart phones so smart?

Exit my iPad. I was, to be serious, impressed with the iPad's ability to do what it does. I resisted at first (as you blog readers know), but it found a place in my life. For about 4 months. Now it sits in the corner and gathers dust. It's been replaced by my new Android phone which does everything the iPad did and lots more. Smaller, of course, and the LensWork Portable Editions don't look as good on the smaller screen of the Android phone, but they do work. The one thing the iPad did that the Android phone does not is Netflix streaming movies. But I never watch TV when I'm out and about, so no great loss there. When I'm at home, I just use the Roku box and watch on my TV.

The problem with the iPad that has led to its falling out of favor in my everyday life is that it was simply never with me. It's too large to carry around in my pocket and I rarely carry a brief case. If I headed out for lunch somewhere, I never thought to bring it. Hauling it around just never became a habit with me. When I did have it, I used it and was glad to have it. It's just that as an impromptu device, it was too easily out of reach. What's the use of having such great portable capabilities if you can't actually use them because the device is at home where you forgot it?

On the other hand, my phone is always with me because it's, well, my phone. Like the iPad, however, the Android phone uses apps that significantly expand it use beyond a mere phone. I use it as:

• An audio note taking device
• A text note taking device
• An Internet browser
• An audio book listening device
• An eReader (the Kindle sits in the corner next to the iPad)
• A full-featured music player (replacing my MP3 player)
• A podcast receiver
• A diary
• An email application
• A document reading device
• A mileage tracker
• A business expense log
• My GPS (replacing my Garmin dedicated GPS unit)
• A full-featured memory calculator
• Fun apps with practical uses like a flashlight, a compass, a bubble level, a stopwatch and timer, a tide predictor, sunrise/sunset tracking

All well and good, but most, if not all, of this was also available on the iPad — when I had it with me, on those rare occasions. Those of you who have been using an iPhone are scoffing at me now, I know, because the iPhone does all this, too. I apologize to you. I just didn't "get it" until I owned a smart phone and watched it instantly become one of the core technologies of my life. On the other hand, oh iPhone users of the world, you can have iTunes and keep it all to yourself. Like the old Henny Youngman joke, "As an example, take my iTunes. Please." If I never see iTunes again for the rest of my life, I will not miss it. In fact, I'll probably smile a lot more.

Beyond In addition to the iPad and the iPhone, the Android smart phone has one extra app (not available on either Apple product) that I'm finding simply fantastic. More than fantastic — downright indispensible. Using an app called TouchDown, I am live synced to my Exchange server for live integration with Outlook emails, contacts, calendars, and notes. Amazing. From wherever I am in the world! When I'm at my desktop computer, I simply do my Outlook email and stuff — zing! — it's synced to my phone. Away from my desk and on my netbook — zing! — synced to my phone. Best of all, if I answer an email or delete them on my phone — zing! — seamless integrated back to my desktop and my netbook. I'm instantly up to date whichever device I am using at the time, at my desk, on my netbook, or away from it all and only connected via my Android phone. Amazing and truly indispensible. In fact, it's making the Road Show possible. I'm hooked.

Update: See Peter's comment below about syncing the iPad and Exchange. He's right and I now have my iPad synced to my Exchange server. Yay for the geeks! And thanks, Peter, for setting me straight on this.

By the way, my Android phone is a Motorola Atrix 4G. Love it, but it's not the only game in town. And for bigger screens, Android tablets are making their way into the marketplace, too.

Smart phones. I remember when the Princess Touchtone was introduced and we all gasped at the amazing technology that didn't use a rotary dial.

Panorama gear

I'm — literally — "gearing up" for a serious panorama project. This is all new to me, my only previous experience with panorama photography having been a few experiments with Photoshop's auto stitching capabilities. Terms like nodal points and other math stuff now float around in my brain without landing on any comprehending neurons.

I do understand, however, that my life will be a lot easier if I buy a new tripod head that is designed for panorama use. I've looked at a dozen alternatives. The leader of the pack appears to be Really Right Stuff. Top notch stuff for top notch photographers. I am not at that level yet, so my pocketbook has whispered to me that I ought try out some alternatives.

The one that is catching my eye is from Jasper Engineering and is called their Pano Head 3. Less than $250.

   

   

Anyone have any comments or advice before I jump in?