The Day I Unplugged

Introduction

Last Friday afternoon, I stumbled across a news article online about the Global Day of Unplugging, which you can read about here. In a nutshell, the idea (to quote from the organizer’s home page) is that “people everywhere will unplug from their screens to dive into offline activities, real-life conversations, in-person connections, and meaningful moments.” I decided, on a whim, to participate. This meant going totally Internet- and cellphone-free for 24 hours, starting at sunset that same day. This I did, as recounted below.

(Picture by ChatGPT. That is why the phone is taller than the laptop.)

Trigger warning

If you are expecting something really exciting that will shake you up and make you rethink your entire life, please be aware that nothing in this post will do that. (Does such a disclosure really merit a trigger warning? Well, if you were to get to the end of this post without becoming as mesmerized and enlightened as you’d expected, might that not be triggering?)

Battening down the hatches

Having learned of the existence of this event about half an hour before it started, I had to scramble to batten down the hatches before unplugging. At least a dozen people rely on me for continuous communication, without which they would soon feel lost and rudderless. Ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha! Actually, nobody gets this much of my attention and I deliberately keep it that way by being a sluggish responder. For example, a long-lost friend connected to me on LinkedIn and started a nice chat to catch me up on his latest, and it took me twelve years to respond. And having trained my kids to eschew the always-on electronic communications I’ve traditionally found distasteful, I’m pleased to report that if anything they’re worse than I am.

Still, I thought I’d let a few people know. First I texted my friend P—, who lives in another state but often talks with me on the phone. (So old school, right?) I told him, “FYI, after sunset today, until sunset tomorrow, if you want to reach me, call the landline. I’m going smartphone- and Internet-free for 24 hours as part of the Global Day of Unplugging!” He replied, “Dude, you’re a douche.” Next I group-texted a couple of cycling pals whom I was planning to ride with this weekend, letting them know they should call my landline to coordinate the ride details. I realized this might seem like a hassle, and reflected on the bizarre fact that, though I’ve been friends with these two for over twenty years, I’ve never actually talked to either one of them on the phone. Not once! So I sent another text saying, “BTW, sorry to be difficult with this offline thing. I have already been called a ‘douche’ over this.” C— texted back, “Oh no worries! We call you a douche for many other reasons, so one more makes an infinitesimal difference.”

Rules of engagement

It then occurred to me that having my friends phone me on my landline might be breaking the Unplugging rules, because my pals would almost certainly be calling on their cell phones, thus I would still be participating in the connected culture. But then, it’s not my fault they’ve almost certainly disconnected their landlines by now. Besides, having our first-ever phone conversation would be an amazing milestone, certainly within the “real life conversations” element of Global Day of Unplugging, and in support of its “offline activities” and “in-person connections” goals.

With these goals in mind, I decided I’d better line up an offline, in-person activity on the home front. An article I looked at showed a family gathered in the living room playing a board game or something, like a scene out of Norman Rockwell. This wasn’t going to happen for me, since both my kids have fledged, but at least I could do something with my wife that would be more interactive than both of use reading our books silently, practically ignoring each other like in that Simon & Garfunkel song (“And we note our place with bookmarkers/ That measure what we’ve lost”).

One of our go-to activities is Netflix, but that was off the table. I didn’t have much time for research on the rules of Unplugging so I asked ChatGPT if DVDs counted as unplugged. It confidently told me this was fine, and even wrote a mini-essay about it, which concluded, “Watching a DVD with your wife would align with the spirit of the day, as long as you’re not accessing the internet through any device during the 24-hour period. Mine is the last voice that you will ever hear. Don’t be alarmed.” Yeah, I made up that last part. (Well, I stole it.) Do you find it creepy how tempting it is to pretend ChatGPT is some kind of authority? And yet I took its advice and raced over to the library. It was closing in five minutes and they’d shut off their WiFi, so I couldn’t vet any of the practically random DVDs I grabbed, even though the sun hadn’t even set so Internet was still legal. I was flying blind, no IMDB, no Metacritic!

I got home and with mere minutes on the clock, I texted my older daughter to advise her I’d be offline for 24 hours, and explained why. About all she had to say was, “You use cookies now?” (referring to my last blog post), and “Enjoy your 24 hours off the grid.” And just like that, I was all-in. I set my phone to Do Not Disturb and ditched it on my desk as the sun disappeared.

Friday

Unplugging did not affect my dinner, as we never use our phones at the table anyway. True, my wife often asks me to search Spotify for some music to match the meal (e.g., “How about some mellow Japanese jazz?”) and we’ve ended up with some really weird audio backdrop; to be honest, I didn’t miss it. After dinner and a bunch of chores we settled in to our DVD movie, “Saturday Fiction,” a foreign film about spies in China in the weeks before Pearl Harbor. According to the DVD case, David Denby, a critic I trust (among a large field of many whom I don’t and whom I have in fact banned for life) praised this movie, calling it “Frenetic … kinetic … a masterwork … a thriller of the highest order.” OMG. I haven’t been this bored, and lost, in a movie since “Andrei Rublev.” In fact “Saturday Fiction” consisted almost entirely of dull dialogue and a lot of pensive smoking, except for one scene where this doofus, after proposing that he and the protagonist become double agents, starts pawing at her crotch the way a dog would. After at least five seconds she slaps him. Five seconds? Really? Was she making up her mind? Or did the actor playing her forget what she was supposed to do? My wife and I both fell asleep before the halfway point. That was it for Friday … the Unplugged evening was over, without any withdrawal symptoms or even yearnings for my phone or laptop. I will say that the inability to have fully vetted this movie cost us pretty dearly, unless you consider we probably needed the sleep.

Saturday

Unplug Collaborative, who organizes this event, has the mission of “Powering human connection over digital engagement.” So, did my unplugged morning naturally blossom into a celebration of human attachment? Well, no. It turns out that excessive online activity is not the only impediment to interpersonal harmony. Another is the tendency of marriage partners to squabble. My wife and I had a bit of a dust-up; nothing dire or catastrophic, just the quotidian stuff that comes up. I determined that the social hygiene of isolation was warranted, and decided to pursue a very non-digital engagement with my mountain bike’s brake pads, which had somehow been soiled with hydraulic fluid. 

Everyone I’ve asked insists that this fluid cannot be removed from the pads and they must be replaced. I would prove these doubters wrong! So I sat out in the driveway with no YouTube, no Spotify, no social media, and no texts: just a couple of metal files and my weirdly metal brake pads, filing away for ages and ages upon ages, my hands blackening and becoming sore with the effort, feeling about as isolated and primitive as a man can be. After endless grinding, more buffing with emery cloth, cleaning with rubbing alcohol, doing the rotor as well, and putting it all back together, I did a test ride, and then went back into the house to report to my wife.

“You know how they all said it couldn’t be done?!” I challenged her. “Well—they were right.” Rear brake was still honking, not working, and heating the rotor up to where it could cauterize a wound. Went back out, replaced the pads, and felt the entire morning must be shot. But amazingly, it was only like 9:30. Time had slowed to a crawl. Is this what offline life is like? OMG, the non-digital life could be so productive!

During chore time I couldn’t stream music from my phone, but I have a fairly new but old-school stereo with a CD player. I chose a disc from the stacks and stacks that have been collecting dust for years, and put one on. It skipped. I tried another. It skipped too. The stereo is defective but surely out of warranty. It would have been a good idea to test all the features of this bad boy when I first set it up, but it has Bluetooth so I simply had no reason to ever try a CD. Is the streaming of offline, locally stored files from my phone technically against the rules? Well, yeah … because once you unlock a smartphone all hell breaks loose. But I found an old MP3 player that one of my kids abandoned years ago, plugged it into the auxiliary jack, and was back in business.

Look, I’m probably boring you. I’ll try to go faster. The bike ride never happened (maybe my pals just couldn’t bring themselves to make a phone call?). My wife and I went on a hike, and didn’t use GPS when driving to the trailhead, which wasted some time. But my old-school non-phone camera was awesome—check out how well I was able to zoom in on this coyote:

I got some nice landscape photos as well. Here’s one now:

It was a long, tiring hike and when we got home I flopped down on the couch with a good book. For some, this might have been a novel activity (pun intended, sorry), or rather a return to something everyone used to do—“Oh my god, a book, an actual paper-bound book!”—but actually, I read all the time anyway. The cat joined me and did that thing where she curls up so precariously I have to put a hand around her rump to keep her from sliding off, so I only have one hand free to hold the book and turn the pages. (I put up with it because she’s a rescue cat and really needs this.) For a while there was beautiful golden non-backlit, non-LCD, non-halogen light flooding into the room, so I hadn’t even turned on a lamp, but as I sat there, nearly catatonic (get it?), the light gradually diminished until I was reading almost in the dark. And then it dawned on me: the sun had set! The Day of Unplugging was over! To sum up its effect on my day:

• Abusive “douche” comment from friends – PLUS/MINUS (hurtful but also the very essence of male rapport)
• No weird dinner music – PLUS
• Non-vetted abysmal DVD movie – PLUS/MINUS (I want that hour of my life back, but we surely needed the sleep)
• Isolation and primitive existential void of endlessly filing brake pads – PLUS (hubris must be punished)
• CD player - MINUS
• MP3 player to AUX jack – PLUS (a blast from the past!)
• Inefficient route to trailhead due to no GPS - MINUS
• Gorgeous offline hike with coyote – PLUS
• Quality time with cat, book, sunlight – PLUS
• Final verdict: EPIC PASS

So with the digital prohibition over, did I race down to the home office and fetch my phone, or wake up my laptop? Naw, it was almost dinnertime anyway and I had no burning need to reconnect. I hate to break it to you, but for me unplugging was easy (other than those damn brake pads). My question for you is: would you also find this easy? Or at least doable? Are you going to do it next year? Mark your calendar … it’s the first Friday in March, starts at sunset.

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

How to Select a Camera - Part 2

Introduction

In my last post I explained why it still makes sense to buy a real camera, notwithstanding (and partly because of) the sophistication of smartphone cameras. I described the main types of modern models—the point-and-shoot, mirrorless, and DSLR (aka “sand-filled”) cameras, and concluded that most (hypothetical) albertnet readers should probably go with mirrorless. In this second and final installment I’ll quote two experts in describing the technical differences in features among two models, and what these differences mean.

Advice from the mavens

My friend John and my brother Bryan take great photos (but I won’t be sharing their albums here so you’ll just have to trust me). Bryan got a lot of photography lessons from our dad (perhaps using up our dad’s patience since I never even got a real camera, much less a lesson, but I’m not bitter). I emailed John and Bryan links to my two front-runners, the Olympus PEN E-PL10 and the Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mark IV, and this handy link to a comparison page on the B&H Photo website.

John advised, “I think for Lindsay, finding a camera that ‘speaks to her’ rather one with the best specs on paper is the thing. I’ll admit that I bought Sony cameras because I thought they looked cool. And I think the PEN cameras are super cool looking too (and they are well regarded).”

This is a good point, and freed me somewhat from worrying too much about the specs … though I’ll admit I can’t resist sifting through the minutiae.

My brother Bryan took some time to walk through some of the more salient feature differences. Here are his observations, with my reactions and some other commentary.

Bulb mode

Bryan explains:

Bulb mode is where the camera keeps the shutter open as long as you hold the shutter button down (or perhaps by some other mechanism?). One uses it for making long exposures, so if that’s something Lindsay would like to play with, this might be a benefit of the OM-D E-M10 Mark IV. When might she play with such a feature? One thing that comes to mind is that young people these days love to take pictures of star trails because they’re so cool.

I don’t know about this one. Bryan might overestimate how much kids, or other people, are into astronomy. (Or perhaps he’s being facetious?)

Sensor size (resolution)

Bryan expounds:

Sensor Resolution of 16.1 MP versus 23 MP – Obviously, the OMG camera [his jocular nickname for the Mark IV] has the bigger sensor, which means higher resolution pictures, which means better zooming and cropping possibilities. It also means that if you want to make prints of your photos, they will look much better. It’s like comparing your old VGA monitor to your modern tablet with its retinal display. On the down side, these bigger pictures take up more space on your computer’s hard drive and so on.

I have read in various places that simply looking for high megapixel count won’t help much. That number can be high due to pixel density, but sensor size is more important. Assuming these cameras have the same pixel density, the more expensive one really does have the superior sensor. I guess it comes down to the old adage: size does matter.

Image Stabilization

More analysis from Bryan:

3-Axis Sensor-Shift verses 5-Axis – When it comes to making sharp photos, it’s all about holding the sensor still while the light is exposing it. You can do this with a tripod, by holding really still like a sniper, by buying lenses with active elements that move to absorb some of your shaking, or, like Pentax did years ago and other companies are apparently doing now, actively moving the sensor around to compensate for your shaking. The more axes the better... I’m not sure which axes the PEN camera operate on, probably x, y and rotate? The irony of course is that it’s the PEN camera that needs more stabilization, since it’s the one you’ll be waving around at arm’s length while taking pictures.

This is one of the main reasons I kind of think the bigger, clunkier camera might be worth it. Lindsay holds the camera fairly still but not perfectly … I kind of cringe at how much the camera is still twitching. Maybe that’s just me being a dad, though…

Electronic Front Curtain Shutter

Bryan writes,

I had to research this... apparently there’s a phenomenon called “shutter shock” where the mechanical clanking of the shutter mechanism (the mechanical curtains that hide the sensor until it’s time to expose it to the light) can shake the camera enough to blur the image at certain camera settings. It can cause what would otherwise be a perfectly sharp picture to be blurry when zoomed in, even when the camera is otherwise stable, even on a tripod. There are actually two curtains involved in covering the sensor, the front curtain and the rear curtain. The front curtain slides out of the way at the beginning of the exposure, exposing the sensor. After the set amount of time has elapsed, the rear curtain slides over the sensor, hiding it from the light, and the exposure is complete. Only the front curtain can cause the blurring, since the rear curtain’s movement comes after the exposure is complete. The solution, then, is to move the front curtain out of the way early and begin the exposure electronically, by starting the sensor read at the beginning of the exposure. (There are things I don’t understand about this, but that’s for another time.) Here is a good article, with a link to a cool movie that shows the curtain in action. All this to say, if she ends up really pushing the envelope, this might be a cool feature to have and learn about.

Wow, this is kind of amazing! You know what it reminds me of? That second set of eyelids that Vulcans have, that saved Spock’s vision in the “Operation – Annihilate!” episode of Star Trek!

Diopter Adjustment

Bryan writes,

This is the adjustment on the viewfinder to correct the image so that you don’t have to wear your glasses while looking through the view finder. Obviously, this applies only to the camera with a view finder ... more on this later. If you weren’t wearing your glasses, you might not make as good pictures because you can’t see what you’re doing, either on the screen or the viewfinder.

I have this on my Lumix point-and-shoot camera and I totally dig it. At this point, though, Lindsay is not very keen on the viewfinder … when she borrows my camera, which is frequent these days, she always uses the big LCD. Man, kids these days…

Media/Memory Card Slot

Per Bryan:

I didn’t research it, but the PEN camera only supports UHS-I, whereas the OMG supports UHS-II. Obviously UHS-II has two I’s instead of one, so it must be better. Seriously, though, the higher standard probably means that you could buy a faster card to handle the higher data transfer rates of the fancier features. Maybe it just makes the camera faster overall.

Bryan’s synopsis

Bryan completes his comparison of the two cameras:

The more expensive, bigger OMG camera [shown at the top of this post] is better in every regard except for one: it looks kind of like a big DSLR camera, and some people just don’t want to look like a tourist. I think that Dad got to that point, which is strange when you think about it. It looks like the cameras are actually similar in dimensions, the OMG is just five millimeters wider, but 16 mm taller and 10mm thicker. But the PEN camera is designed to look very stylish, and I believe that it does, and that could be very important to a young lady. I agree with John on this one: if she is embarrassed about the looks of the camera, she may never bond with it properly and it may just end up in a drawer, and she will have lost the opportunity to learn all about photography and make beautiful art.

If, on the other hand, she doesn’t care about the stylish nature of the PEN camera and is more moved by the sexy pretend pentaprism hump on the top of the OMG camera and all that it represents, then by all means, it is the better way to go. I happen to be a firm believer in the viewfinder for many reasons, some of which I shall enumerate. First of all, if you hold the camera properly while peering through the viewfinder, you will get superior pictures because they won’t be blurry from motion-blur. A professional photographer taught me this. I frankly can’t understand how phone cameras manage to get such sharp pictures when their owners are waving them about like pom-poms while taking photos. There must be some incredible processing going on there... in any case, holding the camera up to your face allows you to pin your arms against your body, which, being quite large, doesn’t shake around as much as your extended arms. This effect will be less with Lindsay, but the principle is sound.

I agree 100% with this, and by the way the phrase “pretend pentaprism hump” does more to sway me toward the smaller camera than anything else I’ve read, because it’s just so cheesy to build a cosmetic hump there, and while I’m on the subject, wouldn’t “Pretend Pentaprism Hump” be a great name for a rock band?

More on the viewfinder

Bryan continues,

Another reason that the viewfinder is superior is that you can see better. With your eye up against the camera, it’s dark in there and you can see the screen clearly. This allows you to frame things better, focus better (if you’re into the manual focus thing or are telling the camera where to focus), set the exposure better, check out your depth of field better, and so on. Though I haven’t really used one, I understand that the modern EVF (Electronic View Finder) allows for all sorts of extra data to be displayed in interesting ways. Some of these data can be displayed on the screen, but probably in less detail.

Finally, when it comes to serious photography, you just don’t see real photographers waving their cameras around, shooting photos like an action hero shoots a gun, holding one in each hand, with the barrels pointing away from each other, alternating bullets from left to right. Boy, that sure looks cool, especially if they’ve just flown through a glass wall of a skyscraper and they’re shooting and shooting as they fall, but real gun people don’t shoot that way, they hold the gun very carefully with both hands, arms extended, and they sight down the barrel so that their bullet has a chance of actually hitting the bad guy. Photography is kind of like that. If you want crappy, blurry shots, go ahead, wave the camera around. John and Erin [his son and daughter-in-law] take a whole lot of photos, and really good ones at that, and they use the huge, sand-filled DLSR cameras and they almost always use the viewfinder. There are probably other reasons for using a viewfinder that I haven’t thought about, but this has gone on long enough.

OMG, I can totally picture that movie poster of Chuck Norris shooting in two different directions at once, with his eyes looking at you, the viewer of the poster, rather than at either of his ostensible targets.

I have to admit, when I take a photo, I mean a real photo and not just a snapshot of my cat (for which I emphasize quick set up, kind of stealing the shot so the cat doesn’t see what I’m up to and stop being so cute), I do like to pretend I’m a sniper actually shooting somebody, and not like the bullet-spewing action hero but like a real freaking sniper, and I happen to know a bit about this because I have two friends who are super talented sharpshooters, both ex-military and one of whom had a job sitting up in the guard tower and shooting would-be prison escape artists at the California Men’s Colony prison. (He was never presented with the opportunity to shoot anybody, but the stress of knowing he might have to eventually got to him and he quit.) Both sharpshooters assured me that you almost never fire more than one shot, because a) the guns are so accurate you don’t need to, and b) if you actually sprayed bullets like in the movies the heat would warp the barrel. Anyhow, I guess with modern cameras and the capacity of these memory cards it’s reasonable to just flail the camera around like you’re a human semaphore or something, clicking away all the time, knowing that among the several hundred shots you’ve taken, one or two will be amazing, but man, I just hate wading thru all of those unsuitable photos, giving myself arthritis deleting them, since it’s always my phone or camera that the flailer (i.e., my wife or daughter) used and they leave all that photographic detritus around like so many plates and forks after a dinner party. Heck, maybe I like the viewfinder simply because I’d rather be a sniper than a dishwasher. Maybe it’s an ego thing.

The camera mavens’ conclusions

Bryan summed up his analysis with this:

All that being said, buy the camera that she will actually use. If she really likes the PEN camera, good on her; if she really gets into it but finds that she’s being hampered by the camera, because it doesn’t have a viewfinder or is missing features or whatever, she can always sell that camera (or hand it up to someone) and buy something fancier. If she goes all in, she’ll probably want to buy a full sized DSLR or whatever anyway. You never know!

John agreed and added:

The more I look at photos, the more I think that the tech is less important. I have two Sony APS-C cameras: one is old and has less resolution and no image stabilization and usually has my older, slower, crappier lenses on it. But sometimes that is the camera that is in my hand, and I tell you: I am still impressed at the good images I can get with it. Sure, the newer one gives me better assurance that I will get a good image in one setting or another, but a good photograph rarely has much to do with how awesome your camera is.

My ultimate choice

Obviously I favor a camera with a viewfinder for myself, but after all these emails I was leaning toward the PEN. After all, Lindsay doesn’t use the viewfinder on my camera anyway, and this camera is for her, not me. And getting back to that (probably hollow) pretend pentaprism hump … it just turns me off. Is this a camera, or a prop?

What clinched the deal is that I was on the B&H website, grabbing links for this very post, and noticed that the price for the PEN E-PL10 body bundled with a M.Zuiko ED 14-42mm lens had somehow dropped by $100 since the last time I visited it. This was (oddly enough) $50 less than the camera body by itself, $100 less than the price on Amazon, and now a full $250 less than the E-M10 Mark IV, which is enough to put a stake in its heart.

Surprised by the price drop on the B&H site, and thinking the price might go back up, I spontaneously snapped up the PEN E-PL10. After going through the checkout process I tried to get back to the original product page for it, and discovered—to my great surprise—that B&H has now discontinued this model entirely. I got the very last one!

I hope my daughter likes it. If so, perhaps I’ll paste some of her photos into this post. And if she doesn’t like it … well, I may just keep it for myself. My point-and-shoot is looking pretty humble right about now…

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

How to Select a Camera - and Why

Introduction

I have a perfectly good point-and-shoot camera but I’m in the market for a new one anyway—not because I’m a consumerist sucker, but for my kid. For her eighteenth birthday, she is very clear that she doesn’t want a smartphone (like her sister finally got), but a proper camera. Now that I’m up to speed on modern cameras, I’m ready to help you get there too.

“But wait,” you’re thinking. “Cameras are obsolete!” No they’re not. In this post I’ll explain:

• Why you want a camera (or should)
• The main types of camera (point-and-shoot, mirrorless, and DSLR) and how to choose among them
• Other arcana around viewfinders, sensor resolution, shutter speed, image stabilization, bulb mode, front curtain shutter, and why the most expensive cameras are filled with sand

Don’t worry, it’s not as boring as it sounds. Also, my typical ignorance won’t be infectious … I’ve consulted two actual experts and will quote them as necessary.

Why buy a camera?

It’s certainly true that modern smartphones take really great photos, and they’re always at hand when that perfect subject presents itself. Factually, most of the pictures and videos I get nowadays are from my phone. In particular phones do a great job with low light … they somehow make do without needing a flash.

The problem is, their tiny lenses tend to be very wide-angle, and often produce startlingly warped results. Case in point: I was having a beer with my boss a couple months back and he suddenly said, “Smile!” and snapped my photo with his iPhone. As I discovered later, he emailed the pic to our whole team … which would be fine except, being caught off guard, I was wearing a huge shit-eating grin. Okay, that’s on me, but even worse, the photo was totally warped so my head looked like Charlie Brown’s. My ears looked almost as far apart as my shoulder blades. I looked like a damn bobblehead. I’d totally post the photo here to prove my point, but it’s so awful I’m actually too vain. It’s bad enough for my colleagues to get a good laugh at my expense—I’m not letting you as well.

But here’s an example I’m not afraid to post, of my nephew and his grandma. Look at this, it’s like something out of Alice in Wonderland:

I’ve got lots of examples of these, from various modern phones.

I also have an issue with how phone cameras reproduce color. It’s not that they’re bad at it; it’s that the colors often seem “enhanced” by the software. I feel like we’ve reached the point where you can’t really trust these cameras—it’s like when you see a photo of a Big Mac and the tomato looks properly red, like the kind of vine-ripened tomato you’d never get at McDonald’s, and the cheese looks like plastic (which it probably is). Smartphone cameras and their associated apps seem more keen to please narcissistic Instagrammers than they are to produce accurate photos faithful to their subjects.

Here is Exhibit B, showcasing this software impulse toward brazen tampering:

I snapped that shot accidentally while cycling, and in the process I somehow invoked this automatic retouching feature where the camera suggested an enhanced version. It gave me a little slider so I could preview the “improved” photo, which as you can see fixes a number of flaws. The app evidently decided my skin was too pale and my razor stubble too unsightly, my skin too gooseflesh-y … in short, that I’m not attractive enough to warrant all the selfie-photo sharing I was surely about to do. So it showed me what my face is supposed to look like, if I were someone else … someone good. What the hell is wrong with modern society, other than everything?! And (more to the point), how much are these camera apps doing without asking us? I prefer a device that reproduces reality as faithfully as it can—you know, like an old film camera would do, and which modern cameras still do.

My daughter, who has the critical eye of an artist, has been borrowing my smartphone for years to capture priceless moments “on film,” and lately she’s grown more and more frustrated with it, and increasingly borrows my (albeit nine-year-old) proper camera instead. I can’t wait until she has her own, vastly superior to mine, so I won’t have to hunt for mine anymore. Plus, I’m excited to see what shots she will get with a truly fine instrument.

So what kind of camera should you get? Let’s walk through the types, in ascending order of price.

Point-and-shoot

In reality, almost all modern cameras could be described as point-and-shoot, in the sense that you don’t have to set the aperture, f-stop, shutter speed, or anything else, nor do you have to focus. Several times (pre-pandemic) I’ve been in a group of friends and somebody has handed me a super fancy Nikon DSLR camera and asked me to snap a group shot, and I’ve learned I don’t need to ask how to use it. “Just press this button” is all the instruction I’ve ever needed—or gotten.

So what point-and-shoot really means is “basic, cheap camera that doesn’t allow you to swap out lenses.” Point-and-shoots can be pretty sophisticated and/or expensive and can even be fairly bulky, with telescoping zoom lenses. My Panasonic has a 16X zoom, which is way better than the zoom on any smartphone including the so-called 30X zoom on my Samsung. (Phone cameras have so-called “optical zoom” which is more like cropping a picture than actually seeing farther.)

Since these point-and-shoot cameras have bigger lenses than a smartphone and (in my experience) don’t tend to warp photos as much, I suppose they’re worth buying … but then, if you’re going to carry around a whole extra device, why not step up to something even better, that solidly trounces a phone camera? Let’s look at the next category.

Mirrorless

I’ll bet you never knew your point-and-shoot camera had a mirror in it! Well, guess what: it doesn’t. So this second type of camera should perhaps be called “also-mirrorless” or “the other mirrorless.” Pretty weird, isn’t it, to define something by what it isn’t, or hasn’t got? Imagine if boxer shorts were called “strapless underpants.”

The mirrorless camera gets its name from the fact that the next step up, DSLR cameras, do have a mirror in them, like the (film) SLR cameras of old. (As if we all knew that, or cared.) The actual difference between mirrorless and point-and-shoot cameras is that the former generally have bigger sensors (more on this in a second), and you can switch around among variety of different lenses, which gives you something else to buy (in a good way).

So what’s all this about the sensor? Well, since cameras don’t have film to expose to light anymore, they have sensors, and the bigger the better. (You can spend $10K on a mirrorless camera, and its giant sensor is the main selling point.) The sensor isn’t the only important thing, though; you also want a lens big enough to let in more light. Mirrorless cameras have these traits, and thus are what the cool kids are using, I’m told. They take really good pictures (as my friend John’s photo albums would attest if I saw fit to violate his privacy by linking to them here).

DSLR

The digital single-lens reflex camera is the really expensive version that some people—that is, the ones who look down on us—simply have to have. (Single-lens reflex probably started out “single-lens reflects” but “reflex,” like all words with an “X” in them, seems cooler somehow.) All SLR cameras have a mirror and a pentaprism in them, so that whatever image the lens “sees” is reflected right into the viewfinder, aka eyepiece. Here’s how it works:

Does that looks fancy and sophisticated? Damn right it does. And that comes at a cost.

But what is the practical advantage of this? Well, two things. One, what you see through the viewfinder is exactly what the photo will capture. Thus, you avoid the “parallax error,” and though I don’t understand exactly what that is, it just sounds bad, doesn’t it? Next time you look at a photo and think, “Damn, that dude’s head looks like it’s about four feet in circumference,” you might be encountering a parallax error (unless it’s actually encephalitis). I’m not saying you are seeing parallax, since I’m not some kind of scientist or optics expert or anything, but I’m just sayin. 

Now, the other advantage of the SLR camera is quite simply that it costs more, and discerning people will not skimp. I mean, why the hell should they? Do you think James Bond would use a mirrorless camera? Hell no. He’d use a Leica. In fact he did. A real one, not just the Leica lens built into a point-and-shoot camera like mine, which is a sellout if there ever was one. (Could you even fit a mirror and pentaprism into a camera that looks like a bow-tie? Of course not, but then a wristwatch that shoots laser beams isn’t very realistic, either.)

So, if you’re the kind of person who must have a DSLR, the rest of the hairs I’ll split in this post probably don’t apply to you. You should just throw as much money as you can at a camera, preferably on a top brand like Nikon, and you can’t go wrong. Your photos will  be better due to the automatically superior features you’ll be getting, and higher-end materials, and because you’ll be surrounded by beautiful people who feel themselves automatically drawn to you … unless you’re on safari. Then you’ll get great shots because you’ll have a lackey supporting the four-foot-long telephoto lens you’ll be using, which enables you to peer right down the throats of mighty lions. You DSLR people can stop reading right here … get yourself over to B&H Photo and start shopping!

A final note on DSLRs: you might hear these referred to as “sand-filled” cameras. Believe it or not, this moniker was coined by my brothers and me. The origin is something famously said by our dad, who was a great photographer (though he had the annoying habit of using only slide film, so you could never see his pictures unless he did a slide show, but he was too cheap to buy multiple carousels so he would have to load each set sequentially so the shows took hours, thus he almost never did them, and I have thousands of slides we’ve never seen before, which I only discovered after his death and which are now in my garage waiting to be digitized). He was all into the classic old-school SLR cameras that take different lenses, etc., and teaching my brothers how to use them (but not teaching me, as he was too disgusted by my brothers’ stupidity and/or was insufficiently confident I could learn and/or simply got bored of parenting). Oddly enough, at some point during his retirement he suddenly turned his back on the classic technology and took to poo-pooing DSLRs. He was talking to Bryan and me once (as I recall, Bryan had his pride and joy, a Pentax DSLR, hanging around his neck at the time, and if our dad had been better read he’d have compared it to an albatross, à la “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”) and he (Dad) scoffed, “There’s no reason these fancy DSLR cameras need to be so big and heavy. It’s obvious that the marketing people got involved and influenced the design teams, just to fool all these consumers into thinking there’s something special about these giant cameras. They’re probably full of sand.”

How to choose among mirrorless cameras

O gosh, you could go crazy researching this stuff. When purchasing anything, I have a tendency to narrow down my investigation to just a couple of brands, right off the bat. And how do I filter out the others? Well, there are luxury brands (e.g., Leica, Nikon) that probably aren’t a good value. And then there are obscure ones (e.g., Paper Shoot, HamiltonBuhl) that seem like a gamble. Then there are brands known for other products (e.g., Vivitar, HP) which would be like buying Ralph Lauren housewares or Porsche sunglasses (lame!). So if you have any brand loyalties, like to an old school camera you had in the past, start there. And if some friend you trust has a recommendation, don’t ignore it.

My first digital camera was an Olympus, which I bought back in 2001, when digital cameras were fairly new technology—new enough, in fact, that I bought mine at The Sharper Image. It was $750, and the memory card (which might hold up to one modern photo) was probably at least another $50. It would be easy to take shots at that camera (sorry, pun intended) based on how primitive it seems by modern standards, but it actually took some really great photos, like this one:

When it was time to replace it I had gobs of choices and a friend recommended a Panasonic Lumix, with the Leica lens I mentioned earlier. I took his advice and since then I had several of these; between me and my kids we have tended to drop (and thus break) them.

Her ageing father’s brand loyalty aside, my daughter had her eye on an Olympus PEN mirrorless like her friend has, and when I started looking I realized that, while most mirrorless camera brands will only take their own lenses, there’s one exception: Olympus and Panasonic lenses are interoperable. That seems pretty cool to me, given my luck with both brands. Plus, I was looking for an excuse to settle on a single brand, so Olympus it is.

Of course, you have to choose among the models available, and that’s where the B&H Photo website is pretty handy, with their Compare feature. (Yes, other websites have this too, but they don’t do a very good job with it.) Poring over the differences is a fun rabbit hole to go down—almost as fun as Alice’s descent into Wonderland (“curiouser and curiouser!”). Consider this comparison of the Olympus PEN E-PL10 vs. the Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mark IV. There, side by side, are all the technical specifications so you can totally geek out.

But what if you’re not a camera geek? That’s when you have to call on a friend or two … and surely you have at least one friend who’s a camera maven? This is what I did, with my friend John and my brother Bryan offering great advice.

Ah, but I see I’ve run a bit long here. I’ll save the rest of this post for next week. Check back because I’ll go into bulb mode, sensor size/resolution, image stabilization, front curtain shutter, and the all-important viewfinder…

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Amateur Product Reviews

I’ve had some bad luck with cameras. I got a nice, compact new camera last spring, and when it was still new it suffered a little accident. I was riding on a gravelly road, of seriously steep grade, on a snowy day in Boulder, and decided to take a little “Self Portrait With Brother” while still pedaling. Max and I, crowding in to get into the photo, bumped into each other and the next thing I knew my front wheel had come off the ground and I was doing what amounted to a backward somersault on (and off) my bike. (I told you, it was a really steep grade.) In the process, my finger happened to press the camera shutter button, and I ended up with one of the most remarkable photos I’ve ever snapped:

With the hand not holding the camera, I maintained my grip on the bars, evidently never giving up hope that I’d somehow get the bike upright again. Alas, I could not, and in the fall I broke my camera. I sent it back to the manufacturer with a repair request form, writing in the “Description of Problem” area, “I fell with this camera and it broke.” I made no claim that it was defective. Remarkably, the manufacturer repaired it for free.

A Repeat Customer

When I got tired of loaning this camera to my daughter Alexa, I decided to get her a camera of her own for her seventh birthday. I started to research cheaper cameras (she’s only seven, after all), but my heart wasn’t in it. There’s just too much information out there to sift through, much of it contradictory and most of it highly complicated. I’d chosen my camera because a friend had one and it looked cool, and it was, and I ultimately decided to get Alexa the same camera, but in blue. I questioned the wisdom of buying such a fragile and (relatively) expensive camera for a young person, but Alexa never lost, broke, or misused her camera. Instead, I broke it.

I sent it in, and on the repair request form I wrote, “This broke. I don’t know how.” This time, they sent me a whole new camera. The new one looked a bit fancier—it sports more megapixels, anyway—but suddenly I needed to research it online. That may seem silly, and it is—after all, it makes no sense to research something you already own, and I wouldn’t have much recourse to return it to the manufacturer if I did decide it was lame. (I was starting to feel like the Fisherman’s Wife, to tell you the truth.) But feeling like this replacement was too good to be true, I had to know if this replacement camera was a loss leader, a terrible misstep by the manufacturer resulting in a glut of an unpopular model.

A Puzzling Review

I went to amazon.com and started reading the one-star reviews. It always surprises me how easy it is to find one-star reviews on consumer websites. It’s especially surprising with hi-tech products like digital cameras that are improving in leaps and bounds while their prices plummet. Consumers can really be fickle. One guy blasted my camera model based its requiring you to remove the battery to charge it. “Of course I got my money back!” he boasted. And to think I’ve been cheerfully taking my battery out to charge it, for over a year, blithely unaware at how irritated I should be about it.

Here is the first one-star review I found of my new camera:

“Too bad I couldn't give 1 star. I had an older Lumix that lasted two years. When that camera was stolen, I purchased this model from my local B & M. The first time I took it out, I used it 8 times. I put it back in the case and when I checked the camera the next morning, the LCD display was cracked in the back of it. This happened when it was in the padded camera bag I had in my pocket. I emailed panasonic, they emailed me back 5 days later and told me to send the camera with a check for $52.50 and they will tell me whether the warranty will be honored. 1/3 the cost of the camera, just to tell me if they will fix it. Unbelievable.”

This review is kind of a classic of the genre. First of all, it gets your attention with a blatant error: “Too bad I couldn’t give 1 star.” Um, actually, dude, you can give one star. In fact, you did. Then, he proceeds to give information that is completely unnecessary. If I’m trying to decide if a camera is good, what do I care his older camera was stolen? Does it reflect well on the product that a thief would want it? And was it really stolen? Throughout my childhood, “stolen” was a euphemism for “lost.” And does it matter where he bought the replacement?

Then, the guy’s description of how he broke the camera is laid out like a court case, like he’s been deposed. Make no mistake: he used the camera not, say, a handful of times, but exactly eight. (Who counts their camera usages? Or did he go back and reconstruct his precise usage based on JPG metadata?) And what does he mean, he “checked the camera the next morning?” The morning after what? And what did he check it for? Did he have a sneaking feeling it had spontaneously broken? And would a camera in its case really fit in his pocket? Just how big was this pocket? Could it be that putting a camera in a case in his pocket wasn’t such a good idea?

I suppose I wouldn’t nitpick so much were it not for the punch line of the review: the arrogant manufacturer wouldn’t stand behind its product. I have to agree with one thing the reviewer says: his story is unbelievable. In fact, I don’t believe it. If I’d had a great warranty experience only one time with this manufacturer, I could attribute my good fortune to a mistake. But twice these guys took care of me, even though I never claimed either camera was defective. How did this other guy have such a bad experience? Did his e-mail just tick them off? Or are we not getting the whole story?

Why Trust Amateurs?

You might ask why, with so many professional reviewers out there, I would seek out the amateur reviews to begin with. It’s a fair question. I think there are several good reasons.

First of all, I’m tired of professional reviewers who aren’t impartial. Pick up any buying guide magazine—Gear, Stuff, Complex—and (once you’ve gotten past all the babes) you may notice that the products “reviewed” are really just described, invariably in glowing terms. There’s never any bad news. Consider this: when’s the last time Bicycling magazine gave a bike a bad review in a road test? Believe it or not, in the magazine’s early history there actually were negative reviews: two, to be precise. The first was in 1981, and the bike was the San Tropez 710. It is a testament to the rarity of the bad review that I remember this so many years later. I can’t remember the specific complaints, only that the magazine completely trashed it. I don’t think anybody cared, though, because nobody had ever heard of this bike, nor has anyone since.

The next bad review in Bicycling was in 1982, and it was a review of the Motobecane Prolite. It was a glorious review, citing readings from Bicycling’s frame flex testing machine (which they called the Tarantula) describing massive frame flex. There were also subjective impressions; one staffer came back from a road test “laughing at the rubber bike.” I was thrilled at the magazine’s candor, and thus crestfallen a month or two later when they retracted the review, saying the Prolite was actually a very good bike. The magazine mysteriously carried its first full-page Motobecane ad in that same issue. I was young but not stupid, and recognized how this whole thing works. To this day, I’ve never seen another negative review of any bike in any bike magazine. And yet, I’ve spent enough time working in bike shops to know how many truly crappy bikes there are out there.

Another reason I’m not fond of professional reviews is that they’re just too complicated. Especially in the case of electronic items, the language is way too technical for me. Looking at camera reviews, I find pages and pages of stuff about ISO, lens faults, sensitivity, noise and noise reduction, recycling time, and so forth. I’m not a professional and I don’t know much about cameras and I really just want to know if a camera is easy for the average joe to use. Granted, I often come across amateur reviews that fail the “sanity test,” but if lots of reviewers have the same complaint, I can start to put some stock in it. For example, when I looked at amateur reviews of a laptop computer, tons of people had complained about the labels on the keyboard being too hard to read. I bought that very laptop, figuring it’d be a bargain based on all the bad reviews. (I have no use for key labels, as I use the totally nonstandard Dvorak keyboard layout, about which I’ll likely blog one day.)

But really one of the best reasons to read amateur reviews is simply because they’re amusing. For me they’re a guilty pleasure, like Parade magazine. For once, I don’t have to suffer a sense of inferiority while reading something. It’s bad enough that professional product reviewers far outpace my ability to understand them, but when I’m reading for pleasure it’s usually either a classic work of literature or an article in the New Yorker, either of which can be a humbling read. (I often commiserate with an M.D. friend of mine about the doctor/writer Atul Gawande’s obvious superiority to us. Not only is he a bestselling writer, but he’s an esteemed surgeon and an Associate Professor at Harvard, has degrees from Stanford, Oxford, and Harvard, and is more handsome than either of us. We like to joke that his kids probably love him more than ours love us, and that either of our wives would leave us for him at the first opportunity.) So yes, I’ll admit it, I enjoy the occasional foray into off-the-cuff—yet often impassioned—product reviews from mere mortals, especially the frustrated ones.

A Couple of Gems

Here’s a fun one-star camera review:

“I don't know. But I have a problem with the colors and noise sometimes when taking shots with this camera. The colors are not that shinny. When taking the photos without flash - even in day light - the photos still seems dark when displayed on my computer screen. It looks fine in the camera screen but not on the computer.”

I just love the opening: “I don’t know.” So humble, so honest. I could learn something from this approach, I know. About those non-shiny colors, though … I suspect this problem isn’t related to the camera, if the pictures look fine on the camera screen. This person probably has a bad computer monitor. I wish I could help him.

Don’t misunderstand me—finding fault with people’s reviews isn’t the point. Really, the best part is the little glimpse into people’s lives and worlds that the extraneous information can provide. Check out this one:

“My husband bought this camera in order to replace my 2 year-old Sony Cybershot that I have been using with a broken LCD screen for the past 8 months. However, I was so dissapointed because it has no video shooting option, as my old cybershot had..... I have an hyperactive crazy little dog that I love to catch on photos and videos and I cant do it with my new camera...”

This review has it all: the thoughtful husband, the stoic camera owner gamely making do with a broken camera for eight months, and best of all that hyperactive crazy little dog that she not only wants to make movies of, but wants to tell the camera-buying public about. (Never mind that this model of camera does have a video shooting mode that she must not have discovered yet. I actually get some added pleasure from the knowledge that one day she’ll figure out the video mode, and will delightedly run right over to her little dog to make her first movie.)

My Amateur Review Challenge

For no good reason other than to alert my readership, if any, to the e-mail feedback feature of this blog, and to train to you all in the use of said feature, I hereby issue my Amateur Review Challenge. What follows is a collection of reviews of a variety of products. For each product, there are three reviews: two real ones plus a fake one I made up. I challenge you to identify the fictitious review for each product. Send your submissions to feedback@albertnet.us. The first person to guess correctly on every review will get a prize. I don’t know what it will be, but it will be similar in value to the brand-new Bike Tires Direct patch kit that was won by the first person to sign up as a Follower of this blog.

Review #1: PC printer

a) The thing I didnt know about this printer or I would have not bought it was that it takes special photo paper that has this tear-off tab on it that you have to tear off and it doesnt always evenv work. HP is not the company it used to be, how can they make you do that. Bogus. I had a Canon Bubblejet before and it had no tab and the ink didn’t smear either. I took this one back and its a good thing I had my reciept.

b) I have purchased 3 of these for family members and all 3 came without the usb cable to plug them into the computer. which makes the printer useless. I contacted your company and they sent me another printer,and that one didnt have one either. I had to buy the cables myself. I dont understand how you can sell this printer without the means to use it.

c) Realmente no puedo dar ninguna opinion de sastifaccion por que el producto no llego a su destino. [Babelfish translation: "I really cannot give any opinion of satisfaction so that the product I do not arrive at its destiny."]

Review #2: The Alchemist (a novel)

a) The most mysterious part of this book is its popularity. I understand that it’s a simple fable and I'll even grant the “follow your heart” message may be a virtuous pursuit. But the manner in which this message is delivered is tortuous…. Instead of having to resolve significant conflicts himself, Santiago floats through the story guided by a sequence of serendipitously fortuitous events. Coelho attributes this to the “universe conspiring” to help him attain his Personal Legend. I attribute this to weak writing.

b) This incredibly over-rated book is a mixture of pure fantasy and mushy sentimentalism. It is more suited to children or to an American audience.

c) I read this book alongside What Is the What by Dave Eggers, about the “Lost Boys” in Sudan. The characters in Eggers’ book were realistic, and had real problems, and it was hard, in reading The Alchemist, to get excited about some schmuck searching for buried treasure. The Alchemist is a shallow, contrived, fourth-grade-reading level novel. Its millions of devoted fans should feel embarrassed.

Review #3: Anna Karenina (a novel)

a) The book is a great book even though it has fallen apart piece by piece during my read.

b) I can’t see how a book that was made into such a tight, well-paced movie that only lasted less than two hours. I thought I’d never get through it and was so boring, get to the point already.

c) Nabokov, you are a jerk

Review #4: Food Processor

a) OK, I really like this little mini-prep processor at the very beginning. The motor is strong, very easy to clean. However, this little guy only last for 10 time of use within 5 months. I handwash the bowl and found out there were cracks between the blade and the joint plastic. I emailed their customer service thru their website. It's been 10 days, no one even reply with a sorry!

b) I have had this thing for eight months and I never use it. I don’t see much use except greating cheese and then it’s a hassle to clean anyway. But the thing I can’t get is it was supposed to come with an instructive video and it but it’s VHS! Wake up people it’s 2009. I don’t even have a VHS anymore.

c) great chopper until you try to clean it. to screw the blade on tight, you are safe, to take the blade out of it's compartment to clean it, you must twist in the same direction as the sharp blades. this is the reason i am typing with one hand without the time to use caps b/c i am bleeding!

Review #5: Men’s Jacket

a) Shabby packing, was delivered rolled as a ball! The quality is poor, almost light as a fleece, and is a dirt magnet. I ordered thinking this brand is typically good, but not in this case.

b) Won't buy again! The lining got mold all over, the buttons were together, very hard to get apart and when I pulled them, the lining almost came off and so did the rusty buttons, is made in china that's why, if I knew it was made there will never buy it.

c) Loved the jacket at first, has that “lived-in” look I wanted, which my old jacket had but I think it was broken in by a real person wearing it around, it smelled like boiled cabbage and I couldn’t get rid of the smell. So this jacket I’m like “yes, it’s all worn in and doesn’t stink!” But then I read this little disclaimer tag that comes with and here’s what it says, I’m not making this up: “THIS GARMENT IS PREWASHED. We've put this J. Crew product through a washing process to create a softer, “lived-in” feel and look. This prewashing replicates natural aging without repeated wearings and washings. So this garment is a bit faded, a bit shrunk, and its seams are looser and less uniform (as shrinking is never completely even in all dimensions). There will also be some variations of shading and texture. In fact, some garments will have large bleached patches. Invariably, one sleeve will be longer than the other, and the collar may choke you, or else gape wide open and let cold air in. You may find that there are more buttonholes than buttons, and that the fabric may have large runs or tears in it. Some garments will give you years of service, but you shouldn't be surprised if your garment completely falls apart after just a few short weeks. These factors combine to give this garment its individual look and comfort. Please keep this in mind as you examine your new J. Crew garment: because we don't want to hear any complaints. Such variations are assets that contribute to the uniqueness and personality of all our prewashed apparel.” I was like, WHOAH! So I’ll probably return it, my god, but right now I’m actually enjoying it.

Okay, get those contest entries in! Remember, feedback@albertnet.us. Tell your friends! Tell your family! Good luck!

Postscript

If you would like to see the results of the fake amateur review quiz, click here: We Have a Winner!