Posted August 23rd, 2008
by admin
If you’re looking for a bargain on a screen cover for your iPhone 3G and you have 4 friends who want in, its darn near impossible to beat the deal that DLO is offering on their Surface Shield screen protectors.
For a grand total of $14.99, you get a 5 pack of anti-glare screen protectors. A little mathematics brings us to the conclusion that you’re going to be running $3 per screen if you break the pack up. Money isn’t the only factor in play though, its just the beginning - the Surface Shield is actually an excellent product - even if it cost $15 for just one. The application process is very easy (comes with adhesive backing so you just place it on) and if you’re not quite on with the screen positioning, you can pull it off and adjust it without any consequence - it stays sticky. Just make sure your screen is clean and you don’t get any dust or hairs while you’re putting it on and it goes on great.
They’re anti glare shields - and they live up to their name. In direct window light, they cut down on bright shiny reflections, big time.
Some people prefer the unskinned, glossy surface of the naked iPhone but I personally love the texture and look that the anti-glare skin gives. It cuts down on the saturation a tiny bit, but it still looks great and in most cases, better than without the shield because you can actually see it when you’ve got sun or bright light overhead.
I recommend the DLO Surface Shield on the basis of cost and quality. Price to performance relationship is unbeatable and its an excellent product to begin with. If you can round up a couple buddies to split the bulk pack up with, it costs almost nothing but even if you’re just keeping them as spares, its an excellent value.
Tags: dlo surface shield, iphone 3g screen protector, iphone 3g shield, iphone 3g skin Posted in Photography, Testing, iPhone
Posted June 15th, 2008
by admin
The two biggest players in the photo management game for OSX are Apple’s Aperture and Adobe’s Lightroom products. Both take RAW files in and make it easy to do basic editing and processing to greatly reduce the time required to process your images. Today, we will be testing the speed of imports, as well as their respective processing outputs, with sample images and 100% crops.
We used the latest versions of Aperture 2 and Lightroom 2 private beta (available to owners of Lightroom and by invitation). To test import speed, a Sandisk Ultra 2 card was filled with 21 RAW images, taking up 144.6MB space. It was placed in a Digital Concepts USB 2.0 CompactFlash Card Reader and connected via USB to an Apple Macbook Pro laptop with a 5400RPM hard drive. We used a clean install of Mac OSX 10.5.3 Leopard and new installations of Aperture and Lightroom. The camera used for testing was a Canon 30D.
First up - the import speed test. This was fairly self explanatory: both immediately recognized the CF card when it was inserted and were ready to roll.
Aperture was by far the big winner here, clocking in at 20.5 seconds to import our 21 RAW files.
Lightroom had a much poorer showing, though it is currently a beta version. It took 35.5 seconds to import our test files.
But what do measly seconds mean when the greater issue is image quality? We did a comparison test using the automatic tools built into Aperture and Lightroom to compare the final image quality. Thought you will always get the best results out of an individually processed file in Photoshop, Canon DPP or Nikon Capture NX, a photographer trying to process thousands of RAW files on a deadline doesn’t have time to edit each file. These presets and automatic adjustments are huge timesavers if the end result is acceptable. We used factory default settings and clicked Auto Adjust for both programs.
Lightroom
Full size (resized for web)
100% Crop (resized for web)
Aperture
Full size (resized for web)
100% Crop (resized for web)
In my opinion, Lightroom is the winner in terms of image quality using the automatic settings. Quality is completely subjective and I encourage readers to voice their opinions using the comment form as to which they feel is the better result, but the Lightroom sample is more pleasing to my eye then the Aperture sample. It may be due to more aggressive sharpening or higher contrast, but the Aperture version looks softer. Again, no sliders or settings were manually adjusted; only auto tools were used. It does appear that the Lightroom crop has more digital noise then the Aperture crop, perhaps a byproduct of the sharpening (or a lack of noise reduction, which can make an image less sharp).
Like any test, please take this with a grain of salt. Hopefully this has helped shed a bit of light on the best options for photo cataloguing and processing.
Tags: adobe, aperture, aperture 2, apple, beta, editing, lightroom, lightroom 2, photo, Photography, raw, Software, test Posted in Photography, Software, Testing
