Posted December 11th, 2008
by admin
Greenpeace can be a real stickler when it comes to companies ‘going green’. In their latest “Guide To Green Electronics” Greenpeace still has found many ways that Apple can continue to become a more green company.
Looking at Greenpeace’s ‘Guide Chart’, it really doesn’t look like Apple is doing that great of a job at all. That is of course you can even trust Greenpeace’s reports.
Apple has begun to try and improve their green standings. Their latest push comes by way of announcing greener Macbooks.
Apple has this to say about their new line, and how they plan to positively impact the environment, “When we redesigned the new Macbook, our designers and engineers set a goal of making not only the greenest notebook Apple ever produced, but the greenest family of notebooks. So every new Macbook has been built using materials that are highly recyclable and free of many harmful substances present in other computers. Apple engineers also designed the software and hardware to work together, in order to maximize energy efficiency and minimize the carbon footprint of the MacBook. Even the packaging was reconsidered and reduced, so there would be smaller boxes to ship and less material to recycle. The result is exactly what we hoped for: the greenest family of notebooks ever made.”
Here are some actual examples of what Apple has done to improve their Macbook line:
-Arsenic-free Glass
-LED backlit display with no mercury
-PVC free cables
-41% smaller packaging
Take THAT Greenpeace.
Tags: apple, chart, green, Greenpeace, guide, LED, MacBook, monitor, technology Posted in Hardware
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
