Photography by Bas Bettenhaussen

Adobe has made available Creative Suite 4 themed wallpapers and screen savers and you can download them here.

Adobe CS4 Wallpapers

Adobe CS4 Screen Saver - Mac

Adobe CS4 Screen Saver - Windows

I found an amazing piece of software, It totally rocks! Read this entry and check out their website!!!

Want to capture everything on your screen? 3d games bogging down ordinary screen capture software? Those days are over: welcome to iShowU HD. Built for speed. Built to “just work”… 

iShowU HD has been rebuilt from the ground up to provide blazing real-time performance with a brand new, easy-to-use interface. With professional features like drag-and-drop to Final Cut and multi-channel audio capture just a single click away, iShowU HD has all the power you’ll ever need at a price you can deal with.

Yes I do!!!!

The acronym ‘UDMA’ - which stands for Ultra Direct Memory Access - has become the new watchword for high performance in compact flash memory cards. Several newly launched DSLR cameras support the UDMA protocol and UDMA memory cards rated at 266x, 300x and higher are now on sale.

UDMA - what’s it all about?

So just what is this exciting new UDMA technology? Actually, in IT terms, it’s pretty ancient and became prevalent over ten years ago as hard disk drive technology evolved. History is repeating itself as solid state flash memory devices play catch up with electro-mechanical disk storage technology. DMA is a process by which data can be moved from a storage device very efficiently, without labouring the host device’s processor. Ultra DMA is a set of definitions for faster and faster theoretical transfer rates ranging from Mode 0 (16.7 megabytes per second or MB/s) to Mode 5 (100 MB/s). You may have heard of ATA ratings for hard disk drives and these mirror UDMA Mode numbers, so UDMA 3 is the same as ATA 3 or even ATAPI 3.

But enough of the jargon - how fast is a UDMA card? Most card manufacturers, the one exception being SanDisk, rate their cards with ‘x’ numbers, 60x, 80x, 100x, 133x, etc. These numbers represent the theoreticaldata transfer speed performance compared to a standard CD music player, which plays data at a rate of 150 kilobytes (Kb) per second, or 0.15 MB/s. A 100x card is a hundred times faster than a CD music player and so is rated as being able to transfer 15MB/s. The very fastest Compact Flash cards currently available are rated at 300x, or 45MB/s.

High speed reality

So what does all this performance mean to photographers? In theory, if you can copy your photos off a card at 45MB/s, a 1GB card will only take 20-odd seconds to empty. However, typical previous generation 133x high speed cards tend to take about a minute and a half to unload using a USB card reader. That’s around five times slower despite a rating that is only just less than half as fast.

Rated card speed is just one factor that determines actual transfer rates. The speed of the host computer does affect transfer rates, or more notably the kind of system interface that the USB port is connected to internally. USB also erodes raw speed through protocol latency - basically it’s never 100% efficient. In our recent tests using a state of the art PC, we achieved just over 17MB/s with a 133x category card (SanDisk Extreme III), or about 113x.

We managed to achieve a transfer rate of 31.3MB/s with a 300x Lexar Professional UDMA card, or 209x, but only using a Lexar UDMA compatible card reader connected to a FireWire 800 port, itself connected to a high bandwidth PCI Express bus on the PC motherboard. The same card read using a standard USB 2.0 High Speed card reader only managed a 16.9MB/s transfer rate - slightly slower than the Extreme III card on the same reader. But in turn, the Extreme III card was notably slower when read using the UDMA reader compared to a standard USB reader. We also discovered wide variations in the speed that cards could be read via the USB ports of our test cameras.

Write performance

Reading a card is only one side of the coin. Write performance is important when the card is in the camera and being bombarded with shots produced continuously at high speed, as the latest cameras are capable of. In continuous shooting mode, images are first shunted into the camera’s internal memory, or buffer, before being dumped onto the card. The buffer to card interface can be critical to the sustainability of continuous shooting. Both the Sony Alpha A700 and Olympus E-3 we tested are UDMA-compatible, but it was the Canon EOS-40D that impressed the most, despite not being UDMA compatible. Instead, the Canon relies on a more efficient onboard JPEG compression and buffer management system. The 40D does eventually choke during a lengthy continuous JPEG shooting burst, and the shooting rate drops dramatically, but it’s capable of many more more high speed shots before this happens. Only when shooting for long stretches in RAW mode, over 15-16 continuous shots, do the UDMA DSLRs show better performance. (Source: Sandisk.com) 

“……………………………The 24MP sensor in the “5D Mark II” is going to enable extremely low light photography. Combined with our fast lenses, the possibilities are mindblowing. Prepare to take pictures in your living room during the day at 1/4000s, f2.8, ISO 100. We’re so confident about the low light capabilities, we haven’t even included a built in flash on this camera. In fact, the use of flash is going to be only for creative purposes from now on…………………………” 

More on this page of “Chuck Westfall”

Keep your eyes open for tuesday the 16th of September! 

Amstelveen, The Netherlands, 26 August 2008: Canon today strengthens its EOS range with the addition of a powerful new digital SLR: the EOS 50D. With a 15.1 Megapixel CMOS sensor, 6.3 frames per second shooting and Canon’s latest DIGIC 4 image processor, the EOS 50D delivers unparalleled speed and resolution at a price point that is unique in today’s market.

Outstanding, clean images

A newly designed 15.1 Megapixel CMOS sensor delivers ultra-detailed, low-noise images – ideal for large-scale reproduction or creative cropping. New manufacturing processes, plus redesigned photo diodes and microlenses, extend the light gathering capabilities of the sensor – allowing more pixels to be fitted on the CMOS sensor without compromising image quality. These changes ensure improved high ISO performance and low noise. High-speed, low light shooting is enabled by ISO levels of 3200, expandable to an ultra-sensitive 12800.

The EOS Integrated Cleaning System – including the improved Self Cleaning Sensor Unit with a new fluorine coating – increases protection of image quality by helping to reduce, repel and remove unwanted dust from the sensor. Stubborn particles can be removed automatically in post-production with Dust Delete Data and Canon’s included Digital Photo Professional software.

Rapid-fire performance
Canon’s new DIGIC 4 processor is fast enough to allow up to 6.3fps continuous shooting, in bursts of up to 90 JPEGs with a UDMA card. Used with Canon’s wide area AF system, which locks onto subjects with 9 individual cross type sensors, stunning action sequences can be captured – even in low-light conditions. This makes the EOS 50D particularly suited to sports and wildlife shooting.

DIGIC 4 works with the CMOS sensor to deliver 14-bit image processing, for smooth gradation and natural-looking colours – as well as ensuring ultra-fast startup times and near-instant image review after shooting.

See everything
A new 3.0” Clear View VGA LCD provides extra-large and wide angle-of-view image review, with plenty of clarity for accurate focus checks in playback. By switching to Live View mode – which displays a real-time image on the LCD – photographers can enjoy simplified shooting from awkward angles, or connect to a PC for remote shooting. Live Mode now offers three ways to auto focus: Quick AF, Live AF, and new Face Detection Live AF, which optimizes focus based on faces detected in the frame – for fast, spontaneous portraiture.

Control and ease
The famously intuitive EOS menu system includes a new Quick Control screen, for instant access to the most commonly-changed settings. A new Creative Auto mode offers automatic focus and exposure – while still allowing creative ‘tweaks’ to settings such as background sharpness.
“For advanced amateurs and semi-professionals – or professionals looking for a powerful backup model – the EOS 50D stands alone,” said Mogens Jensen, Head of Canon Consumer Imaging, Europe. “No other camera in this price bracket offers a comparable combination of speed and image quality.”

Some Specs

• 22.3 x 14.9 mm CMOS sensor
• DIGIC 4
• 14 bit 
• 4752 x 3168 Image Size
• RAW (.CR2; 14-bit) 
• sRAW1 (7.1 MP)
• sRAW2 (3.8 MP)
• 1.6x field of view crop
• H1 (6400) and H2 (12800) expansion ISO
• 3.0 ” TFT LCD
• Live TTL display of scene from CMOS image sensor
• Burst Buffer: RAW: 16 frames
• HDMI connector
• Compact Flash Type I or II (inc. FAT32) - Supports UDMA cards
• Weight: With battery: 822 g (1.8 lb)

Set a Guinness World Record and Enjoy a Better Web

Sounds like a good deal, right? All you have to do is get Firefox 3 during Download Day to help set the record for most software downloads in 24 hours - it’s that easy. 

By the way, the official date for the launch of Firefox 3 will be posted here soon - so check back! 

Wow, this morning I had a problem posting new items on the Blog. I didn’t know what was wrong. It could be two things. First something could be wrong with the database at my provider. Secondly something could be wrong with my Wordpress installation. 

I figured out that it probably had to do with Wordpress. I Googled around and found some more entries on the web about blank pages. It somehow related to PHP 4 or 5 or it had to do with the Wordpress Plug-Ins. So I decided to remove all the Plug-Ins all together, this didn’t help much, I still couldn’t post anything. I found out that I could do other database related stuff at that time, so now I knew it had to be Wordpress related. 

Wordpress self does not provide information about this problem, so I had to search and find on the web. Because I removed all the Plug-Ins and the problem still wasn’t solved, It had to be something else. Then I found a blog which described that you had to use the ’deactivate all’ plug-ins button. Since I had removed all plugins this button was not available. Darn $%^%&^@#. So I installed a new Plug-In and then I could use this descibed button  ’deactivate all’. 

This finally worked!!!!!

Thank you Google, and for Wordpress, keep up the documentation dudes!

 Important Lightroom 1.4 and Camera Raw 4.4 Update

The Lightroom 1.4 update for Mac and Windows has been temporarily removed from the Adobe.com web site.  Those Lightroom users who have installed Lightroom 1.4 should uninstall the update and install Lightroom 1.3.1.(Mac, Win) until a further update can be provided. For those not in immediate need of the updated camera support available in Camera Raw 4.4 or the DNG 4.4 Converter, it’s recommended that you also continue working with the 4.3.1 versions. (Mac, Win)  This decision is based on the following errors that have been discovered with the recent update

The Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom® 1.4 update includes these enhancements:

• Additional camera support for the Canon EOS 450D (Digital Rebel XSi/EOS Kiss X2), Nikon D60, Sony A350, and more
• Updated printer driver compatibility for Mac OS X v10.5 (Leopard)

See the Lightroom 1.4 ReadMe file for additional details.

FILE INFORMATION
Product    Lightroom
Version    1.4
Platform    Macintosh
File Name    LTRM_WWEFG_mac_1_4.dmg
File Size    42.9MB

Also new the Adobe DNG Converter and Camera Raw 4.4 update

Camera Raw 4.4 update
Support for the following cameras has been added. Visit the Camera Raw page for a complete list of supported cameras.
• Canon EOS 450D (Digital Rebel XSi/EOS Kiss X2)
• Fujifilm S100FS
• Nikon D60
• Olympus SP-570 UZ
• Pentax K20D
• Pentax K200D
• Sony A200
• Sony A300
• Sony A350

Apple released new MacBooks and MacBook Pros today which incorporate the new 45nm Penryn processors, an upgrade from the older 65nm Merom processors. The jump from Merom to Penryn is not a dramatic one as previous benchmarks demonstrate.

Penryn Advantages

Overall, the high end Penryn’s may have marginal improvements in performance due to higher L2 cache (6MB vs 4MB), though the low-end Penryns (2.1GHz and 2.4GHz) actually have less L2 cache (3MB vs 4MB) than their Merom counterparts. Whether this results in any real world difference is unclear. Early benchmarks of the new Penryn 2.4GHz MacBook Pro reveals a comparable GeekBench score (3086) to the older Merom 2.4GHz MacBook Pro (3094) despite this L2 cache difference.

One new feature all Penryn processors share is the SSE4 instruction set. Similar to the PowerPC’s Altivec instruction set, SSE4 can provide dramatic speed increases (40% faster) for applications specifically written for it.

- The new MacBook Pros have a Multitouch trackpad, but the MacBook does not.
- The Apple Remote control is no longer included, and must be purchased separately ($19).
- Teardown photos of the new MacBook Pro.
- BestBuy’s inventory system incorrectly reported the MacBook part numbers as MacBook Pros, leading to some confusion about the planned updates. For future reference, BestBuy may be fed part numbers ahead of time, but has no actual knowledge of specs or price points, and clearly used placeholder information in this instance.
- Unboxing of new MacBook Pro

Click here to read Scott Kelby’s review on the new Nikon D300 Digital SLR Camera, It gets a good review, and even as a Canon user I am impressed!!