My gear

I am currently using two laptops, one netbook and one tablet, apart from the mobile phone… let’s take them one by one:

Office laptop: HP Pavillion tx 1110us, an old but still functioning workhorse. It features an AMD Turion 64 X2 Dual Core Mobile Technology @ 1.60GHz, 2GB DDR2 SDRAM, 12.1″ WXGA High-Definition HP BrightView Widescreen Convertible Display (1280×800) (swiveling like a tablet but not touch-sensitive…), 120GB (5400 RPM) SATA Hard Drive and a Nvidia GeForce Go 6150 graphics card. With Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit installed, it works like a charm despite its age. In addition, it has been through a series of motherboard changes, as the infamous issue with the Nvidia GPU appeared and could not be serviced despite the replacement (twice!) of the motherboard. Finally, a colleague of mine decided to take the situation in his hands and managed to fix the laptop for good with only some thermal CPU paste and a 5-cent coin!

Now the laptop is stable and used daily for my office tasks (mostly emails, document processing and a lot of web browsing). Its three USB ports are always occupied by a two-button, optical HP mouse, a USB cradlewhich is used to sync my HTC Blackstone (Touch HD) and at the same time charge the 2nd battery, and finally a Western Digital My Passport Essential USB 3.0 500GB (Red), in which Portable Thunderbird and all my emails are stored. The inbox is backed up every 2nd day in my company’s data server (manually – I have to remember that!).

Next to my laptop sits the newest member of the gadget family, a pearl-white Lenovo Ideapad A1 tablet: 7-inch capacitive screen (1024X600), 1GHz CPU, 1 GB RAM and 16 GB of storage. It is my companion during my daily trips to office and back, so I keep some of its apps updated (e.g. Lifehacker, Popsci.com, mails etc.) to keep me busy during my commuting.

Home laptop: Back at home I mainly use a Lenovo G550, which is a no-thrill, basic laptop: 15.6” screen (1366×768) driven by an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD and powered by a Intel Celeron Dual-Core T3100 (1.90GHz, 1MB L2 cache, 800MHz FSB) combined with 2GB of DDR3 400MHz RAM. The OS is Windows 7 Home Premium (the favorite OS of low-end laptops), but it is ok, as this laptop sits on the arm of my couch just for web surfing/checking emails (and watching movies when nothing interesting is on the TV!).

Netbook: Another machine usually sitting in a drawer at home is an Acer Aspire One 751h netbook: It was initially purchased as a lighter alternative of my broken HP Pavillion tx-1110us, as I needed something smaller and lighter due to the fact that I kept commuting with my Dahon Boardwalk folding bike. Fortunately my laptop was fixed, as the 751h proved to be much weaker than I expected. It seems that in order to keep the battery life as high as possible, and taking into consideration the relatively large (for a netbook) 11,6” 1366×768 screen (HD resolution), they decided to combine it with a low-power Intel Atom Z520 CPU @ 1.33-GHz  and 1 GB of RAM, along with an Intel GMA500 GPU, which despite its decent specs, it always suffered from bad driver support… In most cases the 160GB HD at 5,400rpm keeps reading and reading and reading and the whole system (Windows 7 Pro) is usually so slow that I can hardly do any multitasking.  the bad thing is that due to the proprietary drivers of GMA500, it is only partially supported by a number of Linux distros, so I am stuck with Windows. Maybe a format and the use of Windows 7 Home Premium would be a solution to this issue.

This netbook is my companion in my business trips or during holidays, where only minimum usage is expected (e.g. web browsing, checking emails and storing the photos from my digital camera). The good thing is its battery life, which may be close to 5 hours of working.

During my daily commuting to office and back, I usually carry my staff in my dA PRO Digital Artist Backpack, a b-day gift from my colleagues. It is really slim and it took me quite a while to get used to it, as I used to carry much bigger backpacks with me. However, it looks really nice, it has some really nice pockets, a waterproof cover and I can stuff my tablet, calendar/notepad, a small umbrella (for the rainy days), some snack in a food container and a number of pens/markers, cables, chargers etc.

Olympus E-PM1: How will it stand up against my E-300?

So after the sudden death of my Olympus E-300, I ended up with an Olympus E-PM1 double zoom kit (M.ZUIKO Digital 14-42mm f3.5-5.6 II R and M.ZUIKO Digital ED 40-150mm f4.0-5.6 R). It came in white color (body), with silver lenses, a combination that I don’t find really attractive; however, I didn’t have the choice since it was the only available model…

I have only spent about a week with the E-PM1 and I get to like it. It was not easy to compare it with E-300, as the latter was bulkier and had the style of a dSLR; on the other hand, the Pen Mini looks like a compact with interchangeable lenses! I tried to compile a list of things I like in Pen Mini and things I miss, compared to the E-300:

What I like:

• It is more portable, so I suppose I will start taking it with me in my business trips (it has been a long time since the last time I took E-300 with me, due to the weight and volume needed)
• It looks more fun to use, due to the interesting “artistic” effects and small size; I don’t look like a professional photographer now!
• These filters will minimize the time for post-processing; I used to do the same with my mobile phone (shoot and then process photos with filters and effects), now I will do it in a higher-quality manner. With my mobile phone I used to shoot first and apply the filters later; with E-PM1 I can shoot using the filters in advance!
• It shoots HD video, which is really appreciated. I already have a cheap but good HD camcorder but using one camera for both photos and videos is a plus.
• It uses the widely used SD memory cards and not the obsolete CF ones.

What I miss:

• Optical viewfinder: After almost 10 years of shooting through an optical viewfinder, I find it hard to get used to frame photos through the LCD screen.
• Menu dial on top: Even though I usually do not mess with settings (Aperture/Shutter etc), I was using the top menu dial switch for changing between different functions. I find that doing that through the menu is more time consuming and confusing
• The commands assigned to the dial on the back of the camera are not adjustable, so I am stuck with the predefined ones, which are not really convenient to me. I would like e.g. to have either a dedicated ISO button or at least a way to program one of the existing buttons to do so
• There is no hand grip on the body of the camera (front/back), which makes it rather awkward to hold with my fat fingers. E-300 had an excellent grip which was really convenient for holding the camera either way.
• Flash is not built-in, so I found myself looking for it in some cases (e.g. strong back light), when it was left in my camera bag.

That’s all for now. I guess that I will get used to it with time and I may get for once more into digital photography, a hobby that I have almost given up for many years now…

E-300: Dead for good

It must have been 2005 when I got my Olympus E-300, my first dSLR. I was an amateur photographer back then (well, I still am!), with previous experience only with small compact cameras.

E-300 was bulky but sturdy; it felt like a rock in my hands. Excellent construction and finishing, excellent quality of photos, wealth of settings and options. It came as a kit with the ZD 14-45mm f3.5-5.6, which was paired with a Sigma 55-200mm f4-5.6; however, I hardly used the latter, as I was shooting mostly landscapes. E-300 was a trusty companion in several trips, both inside and outside Greece and had been through some difficult situations but never showed up any sign of wear.

It was only during an event organized by the company I am working for back in December 2012, that was misused by a colleague and then stopped functioning properly; everything was working fine with no CF card in the slot but when a card was used, the camera would not even turn on… a visit to the official service in Greece proved that the camera could not be repaired, due to the lack of spare parts.

Even though I got a nice offer from the service (and I feel grateful for that), I have to admit that I am going to miss E-300. It was a workhorse which one was not afraid to use under hard conditions and in any case. I have thousands of photos taken with my E-300, kept as a legacy and proof of the quality images that were captured with my poor skills.

So long, E-300 and thank you for being here for me during all these years!

Darch wrist watch

I have bought one of the famous Darch wrist watches about a year ago, to use it as a cheap alternative to my main wristwatch and I am really pleased with it. I  just found a detailed review which provides an excellent overview of the watch: http://www.pmwf.com/Phorum/read.php?26,247314

I like the fact that it is light, comes with in one of my favourite colors and features both day and date. For a watch under 10 euros, this is a real catch!