Playing the xbox late at night, while my girlfriend is asleep, isn’t possible. So I asked Logitech if I could test out the Logitech F540 wireless headphones for game consoles.

A few days later I had the headphones. After unpacking the rather neatly put together box, it was very easy hooking it up to the Xbox. You basically plugg 2 wires into the basestation. The power and the audio cable. It couldn’t be easier

After turning on the headphones and pushing the sync button on both the station and the headphones, all was set. I played several hours while wearing the headset and was very pleased with the battery life, about 10 play hours. The sound quality for me was great too, although I’m not really a sound guy, but heck it was decent enough to hear the rain fall in Oblivion which for me is all I need.

I didn’t really use the microphone in game, but it’s pleasing to hear yourself through the headphones when the mic is on, so you don’t scream when talking. I did try it once and it seemed to work decent enough, but I can’t really tell because none of the other players in the game bothered to talk.

Most headphones are quite hard to wear after a while, because my ear gets pinched, but the F540 has cups that go all around your ear, not on your ear which is very nice.

The only big problem I had and what for me is kinda of a deal breaker, is that fact that I got loads of interference after a while. Especially when the Xbox was online over the wifi signal, I tried all solutions found on the web, but none really helped, except putting the transmitter at a 45 degrees angle, but that is not very handy when you need somebody to hold the transmitter while you are playing.

So overall, I like the headset a lot, but there are 2 things I didn’t like, one is that I couldn’t use digital audio on it, which is very annoying because our tv only has a headphones and digital out connection and the headphones is never surround and the second one was the interference I got from other devices.

Sony is really good at letting me test their new cameras. A little while ago I had the chance to test the Sony nex-5n, the successor of the nex-5. I had the pleasure of photographing with the nex-5, which I reviewed over here. As I said then, I didn’t like the menus, the startup time, …

The 5n is a whole different deal, in fact it’s a great camera. Sony really listened to their users, they did a real good job cleaning up the menu-interface. It feels snappy, intuitive and very logical.

The quality of the photos is great, it can match the quality of my 5d MK II, which is about 1500 euro more expensive. The photo above is a shot of a concert at 3200 iso, with the standard jpg b/w conversion on it. There is almost no noise and the image is pretty sharp.

My other concern about the nex-5 was the that the camera was pretty slow, well the 5n is definitely not slow. It has a fast autofocus, pretty short start up time, but when you can capture a race-car in full focus on a track, I can only say that it’s really fast.

But as with every camera, there are a couple of drawbacks, the first being that you don’t have a viewfinder, that’s pretty annoying when photographing in bright light. Sony kinda solved this problem by adding a swiveling screen, a very sturdy one I have to say.

Then there is the fact that the flash is external, an sich not a real problem, except sony doens’t like standard hotshoes. They didn’t even include the typical sony hotshoe, so the only way you can use a flash is by using the included small flash, a flash I don’t like. It’s small, there are almost no way to control it and it feels pretty filmsy.

The most annoying thing, but that’s something I have found in all Sony cameras is the way, you can review your photos and videos on it. I can imagine some people find it very good, but I don’t want to go through the menu to view everything I have on my card.

Despite the few things I didn’t like that much, the nex-5n is a very decent camera. Even so good that my girlfriend and I are actually considering buying one, how’s that for a reference. I test a lot of mirrorless cameras and this is the first I really think is up to par with all DSLR’s in the same or even a bit higher price range.

Thx to my girlfriend Saravdv for taking most of the pictures.

As a professional photographer, I get to test new cameras when they are released. That’s how I got my hands on a Samsung NX200 for a couple of months now. This review is going to from a professional viewpoint, if you want a less technical review check out my PitsLamp blog.

The nx200 is a mirror less camera system, with some pretty decent lenses. I’ll list the pro and cons of the camera and will explain some a bit lower.

Pro

• Pretty high fps in RAW (4) even higher in JPEG (7)
• Nice intuitive interface
• Hot shoe
• Very accessible buttons on the right locations
• Good quality AMOLED display
• 20 MP
• Good form factor

Con

• Lot’s of noise above ISO 800
• Slow startup time
• No viewfinder
• No swiveling display

That’s the very short version of my likes and dislikes of the Samsung NX200. So now let me get into that in more detail.

Screen

The quality of the screen is great, even in harsh sunlight. However, because of no viewfinder and no swiveling screen, it’s not always very easy to compose a shot. You are limited to how you can look at the screen. This means no shots low by the ground, or high above your head, because composing is not possible if you don’t see the screen.

Ease of use

Samsung always had a pretty good idea how to make a camera easy to use. The menu is clear, easy, logical. All the buttons are located very conveniently, at least for me they are. It’s a joy to use this camera.

However how hard Samsung keeps on trying to have me use the i-Function button on the lens, I don’t really care for it. It’s is one of their selling points since the nx100, it was made after the older rangefinder cameras where you could set almost everything on the lens. But where Samsung got it wrong for me, is that the button is never in the same place on the lenses. Also the first you use the button it doesn’t really react directly. Also the ring on the lens you can use to change the settings, is stepless, but the interface on the screen has steps, that’s confusing. So I prefer to use the buttons on top and on the back.

Quality and speed

A slow startup speed, makes that you better don’t use the battery saving feature, if you want to photograph your kids, make sure you keep it on all the time. However once started, the speed is very good, a very decent fps even in RAW. On the other hand, once you want to look at the photos, it can take quite some time before the RAW’s are processed. So speed overall is not good enough for me.

With 20MP on the camera, the photos are of good quality, large, nice to look at in 100%. The camera is excellent for studio work in tight spaces, I did love it for product shots, especially with the 60mm macro lens. The hot shoe makes it possible to use radio triggers which again is awesome for studio shoots.

But there is a very big drawback, as with the first DSLR’s the camera, absolutely doesn’t perform well in low light conditions. For me in color the photos until 800 iso are acceptable, in b/w you can go up till 1600 but after that you’re out of luck. Too much noise, especially color noise.

Conclusion

I have mixed feelings about this camera. I do like the interface, but I don’t like the quality of the photos. So if you are looking for a small, interchangeable camera with most use being during the day or in studio settings, definitely go for it. If you are looking for an allround camera, don’t go for this one, there are better alternatives out there.

Over here we have a nice setup for our wireless network and playing music in all the rooms of our house. It’s supported by Apple airports. As you can see in the above screenshot. We use an Airport extreme as the router and 3 Airport expresses as relays. Last saturday evening however, disaster struck and our Airport extreme died. Well it did not die completely, it stopped serving internet through the wifi connections and there was only connection via ethernet connections. The wifi clients however could still connect, authenticate and got an ip-address, but there it all stopped. I tried everything to restore the connections, but despite all my efforts for about 3 hours. Rebooting, resetting, hard resetting nothing worked. So I setup a temporary solution and went out today to get a new Airport extreme.

Let’s get to the technical part of this article. How do you setup a network of 4 airports across the house on the same network with wpa2 security enabled? The first and most important step is to hard reset all the airports, the only way to do that if the airports don’t come straight from the box is to hold down the little reset button while pluggin in the airport. If you don’t know how, check this support-page on the Apple.

Configure the base station or WDS main

You start by selecting manual configuration in the airport utility, don’t use the wizard, as you will not be able to setup WDS. On the next screen, you’ll see a couple of tabs, but none of them shows WDS, at least when you have a recent airport extreme.

1. Now setup your Base Station like always, fill out the name, choose a password, … under the Base Station tab.
2. The next tab is the Wireless tab, this is 1 of the 2 tabs where all the magic will happen.
   
   In the dropdown menu next to “Wireless Mode” select “Participate in a WDS network”, if you don’t see it, hold down the “option” key, it will magically appear.
3. You setup your network as always, but make sure you select the checkbox “Allow this network to be extended”, leave the Radio mode on Automatic, choose WPA/WPA2 Personal, choose a password, go to the Wireless Network Options, set your country and leave all the rest. (Hint: Write down all settings, we’ll need them later)
4. Next is the WDS tab, that has appeared after you selected “Participate in a WDS network” in the previous step. Select “WDS main” in the dropdown from “WDS Mode”. Select the checkbox next to “Allow wireless clients”.
   
   Fill in the Airport ID’s of the soon to be remotes, you find the airport ID’s on the bottom of the airport it should be a string of 12 alphanumeric characters.

That are all the steps for the configuring the base station.

Configure the WDS remotes

For configuring the remotes, repeat steps 1 till 3 exactly as in configuring the WDS main station. Make sure you have all the wireless settings exactly the same, as for the WDS main station. Make sure you did not miss any setting and if you must choose a channel set it to 11, because otherwise the remote station can’t connect with the WDS main.

To finish the setup, go to the WDS tab and choose for “WDS remote” in the drop down next to “WDS Mode”. Select the checkbox next to “Allow wireless clients” and fill in the Airport ID of the “WDS main”, update and test.

Repeat the steps for the airport remote for as many times you need it. You should now be able to use the network and if you activated airplay under “Music” you should be able to play music through every airport with boxes or a headphone connected.

A last piece of advice, if you configured a airport and it doesn’t connect or shows up, put in a ethernet cable so that you can access it again. This will save you a lot of time, because the only other option is hard resetting the airport.

If you look at name apple gave the image, it gives you a very clear hint at how they see their founder. A hero, he was and still is one of my personal heroes.

But I will not mourn, I will honor his life as he did himself. Watch his commencement speech: “How to live before you die”

We got a tour around all the different products and in the mean time, there was a contest organized. I saw some nice products, but the most are not suited for me, because I have a fondness of the keyboards and mice/trackpads from Apple. The keys are just nicer from apple then any other keyboard I have used. However the accessoires for the ipad were very interesting, sadly enough the most interesting ones, like the keyboard cover are not suited for my iPad 1. But I can understand why a company developing products for Apple lines, are developing for the current versions alone.

The contest had a pretty interesting take, because Logitech and Hill and Knowlton anticipated that we would cheat. So they had a guess question included, which was how many tweets with the logitechmagic tag would be posted between 20 and 22h during the evening. As everybody was working together on finding the answers to the questions this actually was the only relevant question to receive the prices.

The range of prices was impressive, there was a surround system with a value of 350 euro to mice of 30 euro. But at least everybody got a price. I managed to get a set of Logitech 600vi in-ear phones. I’m currently testing them and I have to say the are amazingly great. These earphones are from the ultimate ear line, which is the same product line where a lot of professional musician are wearing headphones from during their concerts. The pair Sara and I got have a price value of 109 euro, which for me is very steep. That price means I would have never bought them myself, because I have a very bad track record with headphones. They tend to lay around and get tangled, ripped, get loose connections and so on.

These seem very nicely and sturdy designed, so we’ll see how they handle my abuse in the long run. The sound experience is quite impressive. I get a wide range of tones without any distortion or scrambling. The nice part is that there is a whole range of foam and plastic tips so you can choose the ones that fit your ear very nicely. I have a rather small ear channel and most tips don’t fit my ears, but the ones with the logitech ear phones actually fit my ear quite comfortable. I’m wearing them already several hours in a row, without getting any problems with having them falling out of my ear or without any discomfort. So my initial experience with these in-ear phones is very positive. So thanks a lot Logitech for a quite expensive goodie of good quality.

As a huge Apple fanboy, it’s a very sad day for me. Steve Jobs just announced his resignation as a CEO of Apple inc. Below you find the most significant part from his resignation letter:

I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.

Steve Jobs – Resignation Letter august 24, 2011

We all know that Steve’s health was on a bad streak, starting with his pancreas cancer in 2006, his liver transplant in 2009 and the indefinite leave of absence due to health issues. Every keynote we saw a sleeker and sleeker Steve at this rate, he would be no more than a skeleton by the release of the iPhone 6. But I hoped that Steve would recover and kick some more butt in the years to come. Sadly that won’t be true anymore. Let’s just hope, that Steve can now focus on his health a bit more.

Why do I say, the end of an era? A look at his track record, which reads like a good novel and is a string of successes, says it all. The story starts in 1976 with the release of the Apple I, a computer built in a garage by 2 very young guys, dreaming that one day they could earn a profit from it. Little would they know that was the beginning of a dream come true. Although Wozniak left Apple and Jobs was fired in the nineties and hired back afterwards, in which time he founded, build and make Pixar huge. Now Apple not only has produced great products, but it has also become the biggest company in the world.

With Jobs now resigning as CEO I still believe in Apple and they will keep on producing great products, but there won’t be anymore iconic black turtle necks, no more casual “There’s one more thing” to drop a bomb on a market. I fear that the cult of mac, will no longer exist, it has lost it leader. Apple will probably become a dull company that still makes great products, but doesn’t have me sitting in suspense during a keynote what they will announce.

Off course Jobs is not without fault, I’m the first to admit it, but he is kind of a hero for me. Creating a company from scratch and making it this big, but still maintaining the suspense when announcing something new. There is no other company that I know of where one man had such an impact on the development, announcement and sales of a product that nobody needed before it was announced. It also takes a great man, to resign due to health reasons from the company you built from the ground up.

I hope that one day, I can look back at my life and say I made an impact, as did Steve Jobs, my personal hero business wise. It doesn’t has to be as significant as Steve’s impact, but I would like to know that I have done well according to my expectations.

So hereby I salute you, Steve, you are a great man and leader. Take care.

Yesterday a pretty serious thunderstorm passed over Belgium. I setup my tripod in the bedroom and tried to shoot some lighting. I got one shot that worked out great. This one…

Last year when Saravdv and I went to Paris for the iPad launch at the louvre Apple store, we were asked if we could be filmed for a possible promo film for Apple. As we got some iTunes gift cards in exchange, we did agree.

Since then we did not hear anything about it anymore, until last night when I watched the keynote, to my surprise I could see sara and myself during the video of “2010: the year of the iPad.” as I’m a very big applefanboy, I’m quite proud to be in the video that his Steveness showed during a keynote. If you want to check it out, watch the keynote at Apple event website. You can see us very briefly at 9:49 min in the keynote.

Update, you can also watch the video of “iPad: Year One” on Apple’s YouTube channel. I have embedded the video also here, you can see Sara and me at 0:35min.

Although it’s not a total solution for cleaning, it does a very good job keeping the house clean, when you set it on a daily routine. It takes a structured path, which takes it through the most part of the room. During it’s path, it tries to cover the whole area, but misses some spots. Luckily it doesn’t take the same path everyday and does the missed spots the next day.

Once a week we empty the container containing the dust and hairs,. So it doesn’t require a lot of maintanance but whenever you forget about putting away all toys for the cat or the floorcloths, we use as doormats, something is bound to get stuck in the rotating brushes. Then the robot stops and starts beeping, until you fix the problem, that’s annoying and drives our cat crazy when we aren’t at home. But apart from that, it doesn’t get trapped under furniture, it doesn’t wrecks anything around the home. It only bumps into the furniture that has legs that are smaller than 5cm because it is in the blind spot of the sensors. Even when it does bump into your furniture, it doesn’t really damages it, because of the rubber bumpers.

The only very annoying thing about the robot is whenever you use the guards, it gets confused because the beam of the guard spreads wider then you intend and that leaves areas around the guard without cleaning. Our robot also had a little defect, which broke the system that makes the back brush rotate and we had to send it in for repair. Since then it drives around and cleans the whole area very good.

If you are looking for a decent robot vacuum cleaner, then this is definitely what you need. It does a really good job keeping the house clean, without you lifting a finger, it’s definitely not perfect but it’s a great aid. For us it is a great tool and definitely cheaper than paying a cleaning lady. So yes, it’s an expensive buy, but it will pay off after a while, because maintenance is not expensive at all. Even after 2 months we didn’t have to change any of the brushes.

Unboxing Garmin Forerunner 210 from PitsLamp on Vimeo.

I already trained twice with the forerunner 210 and it behaved as advertised, except for 1 thing. It does not calculate the calories I burn during the training. But after searching on the internet I found a solution for that. You have to hard reset the watch, because there is something wrong when you receive it from the factory, which makes that the user settings aren’t used during the training.

The hard reset procedure you need to perform is pressing the page/menu and lap/reset at the same time, and holding them until you see a prompt (about 3 seconds). This clears all data on the watch, it also clears your history so be aware that you upload the data first, before doing this reset.

We started looking online for reviews and different types. It turns out there are only 2 different manufacturers of robot cleaners, the one we all know, iRobot with the roomba and Samsung with their navibots. There doesn’t seem to be a great difference between the different manufacturers at first sight. So why did we choose the navibot instead of a roomba.

Our cat looses a lot of very fine hair so we needed a robot that could deal with that problem. After reading a lot of reviews and watching some YouTube videos about the different models, we decided that we needed the roomba pet series or the navibot VCR8855. So we went to the shop to actually see the robots. We didn’t find a roomba pet series in the shop, but we could examine the 555 series. After talking to the person responsible for the robot vacuum cleaners at vandenborre, the thing that made us decide is the difference in cleaning. The roombas wander around randomly while the navibot follows a structured path, to clean. So in our opinion the navibot cleans more thorough and more like we humans do. Although the navibot costs 499, euro vs 429 euro for the roomba, but with the navibot you get more accessories, but you’ll find that out in the video.

Only time will tell if the navibot works for us, but that is the subject of another post. So now without further ado here is the unboxing video.

Unboxing a Samsung Navibot VCR8855 from PitsLamp on Vimeo.

So why did I not like the camera, it wasn’t intuitive. I tried to get over it and carried it with me for the whole week. The menu is not very logical, when I got the camera, I popped in a sd-card and wanted to format the card before taking pictures. Too bad it took me over 5 minutes to locate the format option in the menu. Because once you are in the menu, there are several submenu’s but the problem is that they are located vertically below each other and the camera stops scrolling for a little bit once you reach the end of the first menu. So you assume you reached the end of the menu and need to continue in another menu.

Next to that I was very annoyed by the startup time, it takes the camera 3-4 seconds to be able to take a picture. That’s too long for me. When I turn on a camera I want to be able to use it and not wait and loose the moment.

But the most annoying thing was the fact that once you entered either photo or video mode, you could not review the results of the other mode without going to the unlogical menu.

So overall the camera is very nice, it would have been a great competitor compared to the samsung NX10, but sadly enough I didn’t take a lot of pictures because after the first day I got just very annoyed with it. Let’s hope sony fixes the each of use for their next release of this camera, it has a lot of potential but I would not recommend the camera to a friend.

“The social network” is the film about Marc Zuckerberg the founder of Facebook.com, a site I and probably you use every day. That for starters makes it very weird to watch the movie. I knew a bit about how the story of facebook goes and have to say, it stays very close to what happened in real life.

I’m not that big of a film geek, that I know what the director made before and what the main actors are known for, but I can appreciate a good movie and have some attention for how the film is filmed. The first thing I noticed is a very distinctive style of filming and the great use of subtle light. That makes a movie already more interesting for me. Also the fact that I’m a geek, helps when the movie is about a geek creating the biggest social network.

The movie was very fastpaced and has two law suits from in the first years of facebook nicely intertwined with the story of how facebook grew from an idea to having 1 billion members. At moments it is a bit too fast to follow, so you’ll probably miss a lot of subtle humour. But at other moments the story seemed to drag along, with the biggest anticlimax the launch of thefacebook.com. Just a press on a button and that was it, not even a beer was cracked at that moment. A bit pity but if that’s the way it went, although just for the film’s sake I would have put it in, anyway.

Although 2 hours is already pretty long for a movie, I found it disappointing that the biggest move facebook ever made, was not included in the film. I mean the film stopped at moving over to the UK universities and reaching there 1 billion members. I would have loved to see how it all grew and why they made the brightest and biggest move facebook could ever make, which was giving up being exclusive and going open to everybody, so that you and I now can be on facebook too.

I’m still trying to figure out the feeling that I have after seeing the movie. I liked it, I liked it a lot. However, I don’t think it’s a movie that will be a big hit, because of the niche of people that it will appeal to. I will definitely see it again, when it comes on tv or on dvd, if not only to figure out the feeling I’m left with.

Enjoy the trailer and thx Adhese for inviting me.

I already knew the project, had followed it on the website, so I did not think very long and agreed to take part. My first assignment was already 4 days later, but I managed to photograph and upload in time.

The reason I said yes, is because it is perfect to try out some new ideas and to start with a theme and make a picture around it. Anyway these are my first 3 entries.

Theme: Concrete

Theme: Human Body

Theme: soft

I used the NX10 to shoot some behind the scene material during a wedding with Bert Stephani. The photos are taken with the 20mm pancake lens and as jpeg in monochrome mode. The results are very good and I like the speed, the sharpness and the fast focus it has.

I also tried the NX10 during the “dijlefeesten” festival in my hometown and during some other low light conditions. The results are quite exceptional, the noise is very acceptable, that’s mainly because of the large sensor, it’s actually only a 1.5 crop factor. But not only the noise is very acceptable, the autofocus is also very good and fast even with the lights on stage flooding the frame.

I can keep on talking about the technical stuff of this camera. Samsung had to make some compromises to keep the camera small but the experience with this camera is just great, I mean it just awesome to use, it’s small, fast, easy to use, but most of all it’s fun to use. Samsung keep up the good work.

Last wednesday I was invited on the “Obsessed with sound event of Philips” in the Galaxy studios in Mol. The purpose of this event is to submerge us in sound with one of their three heroes for the campagne, the producer of the soundtrack of batman begins, Geof Foster.

Bert Van Daele gave us a little history lesson about how Philips has and still is obsessed with sound since the beginning. Their main ideas since the beginning are that sound should be of best possible quality and sound should be available to everyone. Along those lines they created the first affordable radio in the 1920′s called “het kappelke”

In the 1940′s philips introduced the vinyl and created the philigraph. They kept on innovating in the 1950′s and they developed the kinetic tape. By the 1960′s Philips Hasselt developed the compact cassette and since then it became and still is the main music carrier. In 1968 they developed the cassette in the car. In the 70′s they developed the laser disc and they used the mpeg file format for video and audio. But in the 70′s the emphasis for Philips was more on video then on sound. In 1982 the audio cd was invented, it gave better quality and far more storage capacity. In the 90′s they started with DVD and SACD, where the DVD took of pretty well, the SACD was and still is a niche market. 2004 marked the date of the ambisound release and is another way to create surround sound without all the different speakers. And today we are here to see and hear the 360 sound speakers and systems.

Geof Foster was next up, he is the chief engineer for the batman begins soundtrack. He explained his workflow for making film music.

It all starts with spotting, which is basically putting some existing music against the different scenes. This process ends with a template to direct the composer. The second step is writing the music through the unique sound of the composer. The third part is scoring, this means choosing from the different sound generators like an orchestra. And the last part is a the actual mixing.

Geof gets involved mostly at the scoring stage, to record and create the sound, a big part of the scoring is choosing the layout and venue for the orchestra and the recording. He uses the batman begins soundtrack as an example. The recording is mostly done in separate parts. The very last thing is putting the music against the film and the sound of the movie itself. There is some more fine-tuning and listening if everything is in place.

Geoff also explained why the soundtrack is a little different from the music used in the film. Most music in the film is not always very interesting music wise, so they tweak it a bit for the OST

After that Bert explained what the 360Sound is all about. It’s aimed at people that like good sound, but the speaker system has to be stylish. The 360Sound system has a front facing speaker and two speakers on the sides. The speakers on the side are aimed at bouncing of the walls to create a surround sound. The 360Sound is completely developed in Leuven, be.

The last product is the free floating tweeter, where they created a speaker which creates a full 360 degrees sound experience when the speaker is placed in the middle of the room. I like the idea, although the sound is not perfect, it is nice to have a device that sounds ok and it doesn’t matter where you are in the room.

Philips also released a couple of iPhone/iPod dock speakers, they sound pretty awesome, but I don’t think they will take off until the one with the battery is released.

Because the whole event took place in the Galaxy studios in Mol, one of the best recording studios in the world, we were entitled to a tour trough the complex, complete with the a movie from the late 80′s filmed during the building of the complex. It was quite impressive to see what they all did to make sure the best sound is recorded.

You can check out the pictures at Flickr

I liked the event, I liked some of the products, but I’m not convinced they will take off with the high prices. I would have loved some more light to photograph the products. But thx Talking Heads and Philips for the invite and the Philips GoGear, which I will try to review a bitter later.

I’m not planning on giving you a full technical test of this camera, for such a review I’ll point you towards dpreview, who did an in depth review of the specs.

I’ll write a more once I have tested and worked with the camera for ten days. Right now I’m going to write down my first impressions.

The camera is very lightweight, fast, easy to handle and produces pictures of astonishing quality for such a small camera. Because it works with the same size chip as the entry level dslr’s, the higher iso are acceptable in the tests I did so far.

Although I love most of the camera there are a couple things that need some work in my opinion. The real drawback is the electronic viewfinder. I understand they had to drop the optical viewfinder for an digital one to keep the body very small and lightweight. What I don’t get is that the viewfinder’s image quality is pretty bad. For sure if you compare it to the LCD on the back.

The second thing i don’t like is the manual focus. First you either have to select it on camera or on the lens depending on which lens you have mounted. That’s confusing and I don’t like it. Second the the viewfinder zooms to help you focus, but the zoom is just showing you the same info in 4 pixels as before in one pixel. This makes it very hard to focus because what you see is all the time a bit unsharp.

Although I’m complaining about the manual focus I can only be amazed by how accurate and fast the autofocus is. It uses the contrast to focus which makes it hard to focus on a rather shallow contrast scene, but for any other circumstance it works wonders.

The 30mm f2 pancake lens is awesome but the kitlens (18-55mm) as with most entry level dslr’s isn’t very good. Although the image quality is pretty ok for a standard low quality lens what disturbs me is it’s size. The whole camera is build to being small and portable. With the kitlens the camera becomes bulky.

The pancake lenses are just great because of there compact size. Although at the moment you can only buy the 30mm f2, my contacts at Samsung Belgium have assured me that before the end of the year there will be a wider range of lenses available.

I said it would be a short review but it turned out to be an almost full review. I’m going to take some more photographs with the camera now and will include some in the next post.

Half may Sara Van de Velde quit her job at Queromedia as a SEA consultant, because she felt she was not at the right track in her career. During her search for a new job she discovered that her resume gets put in the pile of other applicants for that same job.

To stand out from the crowd she created an online campaign, through the website Sara zoekt werk (in dutch) she is blogging about her search for work. Not only does she blog about her own jobhunt, she also shares tips and tricks on what works when you are looking for a job.

Sara is looking for a job as online marketeer. If you want to support her or know any good job openings that might interest her. You can contact her through her website, Twitter, Facebook fanpage or LinkedIn.

I love catching up with my RSS feeds, reading and replying to e-mails, writing blogposts and booking a hotel. The size of the screen makes it a great device for presenting pictures and watching series or movies streamed from my MBP.

Typing on the ipad is actually pretty good, you can’t use your regular typing position but typing with 6 fingers works very well. It’s just an awesome device to use all the time and everywhere.

But there are a few small things that annoy me. First of all Apple should have included some way to prop up the iPad when resting it in your lap or putting it on the table to type with 2 hands. Now I’m always looking for a way to elevate it a bit and most of the time I’m putting my wallet under it, because that’s the perfect height and doesn’t slip. But at the moment I did not find any great case yet. I would love the DODO case but they are backordered for 4 to 6 weeks and they are missing a nice height for watching movies

Another annoying thing is that at the moment there is no Twitter client that I like and definitely no app that satisfies my needs for google reader, but off course there’s an app for that at least over time there will.

But the most annoying thing is taking it out of your bag in Belgium. once you take it out to usef it, there’s always somebody who starts saying that there are better things to use, you can’t do this or that,… Basically I like my iPad, it serves the purpose where I bought it for, so just let me use it and don’t think I’m taking it out to brag, I just want to use it.

Now I’m going to stop this blogpost so I can watch chase jarvis live

Yesterday I did some live blogging during the presentation, but last night and today I had some time to think about the evening and all the stuff we’ve seen. My initial thoughts are, the organisation could have been a bit better. Although the venue was very fine, the little food I got my hands on was good and the goodie bags were awesome.

The presentations could have been less confusing and the quiz afterwards should have been organized better. It was a very nice way of letting us vote, but apparently some of the remotes didn’t work, which off course manipulated the results quite a bit. Not that I was harmed by that, I just don’t know enough info about movies. Very important I think there should have been a round for questions after every presentation, because a lot of people had questions about the TV’s that could have been interesting for all of us.

But on the 3D itself now. I’m still not convinced about the whole concept of 3D. I don’t really like watching a movie in 3D, first of all, it still feels very unreal. The biggest drawback is that in order to experience 3D TV, you still need to wear a pair of glasses, who are btw very expensive.

Imagine following situation: you’re coming home after a day of work, you eat something, decide to watch some relaxing television, but wait…, where did I leave the glasses, I mean I’m already having trouble locating the remote control of the TV. Let’s say I found them, apparently our cat decided that the glasses were to play with and has left some scratches and bite marks all over it. Well, still not really a problem, let’s just try them on, oh wait, they are not charged anymore, because i forgot to put them in the USB charger. By now my relax evening of watching TV has been ruined already. So I decide to ditch the glasses, turn off the TV and get behind the computer to get some more work done. Great

This is fictional, for the moment, but at a certain point this could turn into reality. I don’t want that kind of reality. Give me a 2D screen, which I turn on, look for the remote for about a minute and further on I can watch the 50th rerun of “Allo, Allo” or something. I find it a pretty stupid concept to try to mimic 3D in film or a serie, because you can’t interact with the world that’s living around you. So in that perspective I think gaming in 3D has a future, yesterday I played a bit with avatar in 3D and I very much liked it. Because you are in the 3D environment you can better experience the game and interact with it. Although I still think that for a game to be using 3D to the fullest you really need to be in the middle of the game terrain, like it was promised with Virtual Reality.

All in all I had a fun evening, met some nice people, saw the regular crowd again and as usual shot some photos (find more in this set). But I don’t think anyone of the people at the event will buy a television that starts at 1800 euro with only 2 glasses and without a lot of quality content.

To start we have Bruno Tassert, product manager at Samsung. He’s giving a product overview of the 3D collection of Samsung. It started in the eighties but with the clumsy glasses in cardboard it was not a real success. Until the film avatar last year 3D stayed without success. Today 3D is possible because the technology permits it. The movie studios have adopted the technology and now it’s time for the consumer to use 3D in their own homes.

3D is basically two images who are projected next to each other. At first in 2 different colors but now the technology has evolved and uses different polarities in the glasses, this is the way it is used by the movie theaters, it’s passive. The tech used in the in the samsung tv is with an active component in the glasses. One side is just shown on TV the other one is shown and filtered by the glasses. This technology uses 200mhz. This is called the shutter technique. The last way is like the photos in 3D which has the big disadvantage that you can’t look at it from a side and the 2D experience really sucks. Although they all have their disadvantages, the shutter technique is the only one that makes it possible to show HD content.

As you would expect you can put the 2 different images side by side or on top of each other. Now we are getting in to the really technical stuff, so I’m just going to skip that part if you want more info about it, you can search for it yourself on the Internet.

You have to choose for Samsung, according to them because they launched 3D as first and have all the other devices ready for it. But the most important reason is because they use conversion by object based depth processing, while the other ways of 3D just separate the objects in a vertical direction.

For 3D you only need a television, a blue Ray player and off course the glasses. There are 3 different types at the moment, ranging from 2000 to 5000+ euro for the LCD and LED. But they also have plasma. Next to that they also have the blue Ray player and the 3D home cinema. The glasses range from 79 euro for the children glasses and going up to 99 euro for the adult version. There are 2 sizes in adult sizes, because not everybody has the same face.

The content is available from movies, games like avatar which we can test here and there are a couple of channels that start their emissions in 3D

Now we arrive at the real history of 3D, in 1857 the first real 3D machine was build, in the 1950′s there were already about 60 movies released in 3D, but it was a real PITA to watch a full length movie. In the sixties they tried some 3D in color but it still didn’t work, after another try with Jaws they left the idea for a while. The first real 3D were the Imax movies in theme parks. That worked but it was very expensive and time consuming to make Imax movies. We had to wait till this century before they started to do some new things in 3D, where they started again with animation films and the real breakthrough was reached last summer with the release of several 3D movies.

Now we get a overview of what they showed in the Belgian pavilion

In 2005 they 5 biggest directors in Hollywood announced at DLP that 3D would be the future for the movies because that way it was almost impossible to pirate. Philips started with a project for 3D without glasses but had to stop production because it was too heavy, big and there was not enough quality.

There are apparently 2 different ways of filming, one is crossing the cameras, that’s what is used by Cameron in Avatar. The other way is, like it’s mainly used in Europe is by aligning the cameras parrallel which makes the images pop more. But on infinity it everything is in focus.

Now we have something to eat and will all participate in a quiz later on. My opinion on the whole experience I’ll post later with some pictures. Stay tuned.

So today was the day of the official release for the iPad In France. in the past days I have been researching a lot about the release on the internet. Well actually I was researching it with Pieter, we first thought of going to the fnac in Lille. It turned we could be left without an iPad to buy, so we decided to go to Paris.

Tonight at midnight we left for Paris accompanied by Sara and Davy. We arrived at 3h30 and found a parking spot surprisingly easy just around the corner of the apple store. There were already 6 people in front of us, but at least we knew we would have an iPad and so the waiting began.

When the hour got closer, Pieter and I were wondering about which one we would get, while Sara was deciding if she would get one. Unfortunately we didn’t have all the time waiting to decide because the press found out that there were some crazy Belgians in the queue. Most of them wanted to talk to us. We gave some interviews and were asked by a production crew of Apple to be followed while and after buying the iPad. We even got an iTunes gift certificate of 15€ out of it.

I haven’t found all the links to the videos and articles yet but I’ll add them once I’ve found them.

This post is typed on the iPad and I found it pretty pleasing to type a small blogpost like this one in the WP app. After playing with it for the last hour I’m even more convinced that I wanted this device. I’ll write a review and some app recommendations later aft i used it for an extended time.

On 2dehands.be I found after a lot of searching a original Rolleiflex Standard 622 from 1934 for 50 euro. I went to check it out, although it misses the plate with the serial number, everything else is in great shape. I went with it.

The Rolleiflex original standard model was made by Franke & Heidecke in Braunschweig, Germany from 1932 to 1938. The lens is a 75mm f3.5 uncoated carl zeis lens, the shutter goes from 1/500 till 1 second. And off course there is a bulb mode. Apparently famous war photographer and Magnum co-founder Robert Capa used this camera during WW II, next to a contax camera.

I tried some different film with it, at the moment I haven’t figured out which one I prefer but what I do know is, that this is an awsome camera. Just look at some of the results.

I love the colors, the square format and just everything about this camera. If you want to follow more the results just follow this set

I started researching the camera on the internet and found that it’s a vredebox made by a German company called vredeborch in Friedeburg. The camera uses 120 film, has a meniscus lens with an aperture of f11. Fastest shutterspeed is 1/30th of a second. There are 3 levers on the side, one for stopping down the lens to f16 and the other 2 to use the bulb setting.

Those settings are a bit of a let down, but I wanted to test it out anyway. So after Pieter gave me a roll of Ilford Delta 3200 pro, I started shooting with the vredebox.

Oh yeah, just so you know, the minimum focus distance on this camera is 3 meters.

Let me first post some results and then I’ll give a little review about the camera.

This picture was taken on Ilford Delta 400 pro film.

Taken on Ilford Delta 3200

Taken on Ilford Delta 100 film

If you want to follow my progress with the vredebox, I suggest you follow this set on flickr, I’ll post the results there when available.

Now for a short review of the camera. Although it’s technically not very good, I really like the box feeling and the way of taking pictures. Because of the lack of features or wide range of aperture and shutterspeed, I think a lot more before I make I picture. This makes that I’m more concentrating on the framing of the shot, which is not easy in the small viewfinder located at your stomach.

Until now I’m very pleased with the results of the box, a camera that’s at least 60 year old. It’s a decent and fun camera for hobby projects, so I’ll be playing with it a lot more in the future