Posted November 18th, 2008
by admin
I’ll be the first to admit, that I’m not a huge fan of Al Gore. But in a recent address to the Web 2.0 Summit, he brought up an interesting point of how the TV media, and internet/computer media are fusing together. This idea is more readily present in Apple TV than any other device, or service I’ve seen.
Before I get too heavily into the review let me preface by saying that Apple TV isn’t for everyone. It’s a niche device that provides very ample entertainment possibilities, if you’re the right user.
If you don’t own a widescreen TV, then your options for using Apple TV are severely limited. So, if you’re wanting to get the full Apple TV experience, you’ll need a new TV. No better time to make that decision to upgrade to HD.. 
Apple TV has had two different life spans - before the software upgrade, and the after. Before its massive software upgrade, Apple TV was nothing more than a means of having iTunes available on your TV. There were cheaper options available to allow music to play from your entertainment system speakers, so Apple TV didn’t have much to offer people. Later, they would allow the ability to play YouTube videos, so that sparked some interest, but very little.
Now, through its growing pains, AppleTV has become something that resembles a useful product. Unlike before, Apple TV has direct access to the iTunes store, which improves its convenience alot. The iTunes Store itself has improved by leaps and bounds. There’s now movies available with alot being offered in 720p HD. Flickr and photos from .Mac accounts are now available to be viewed.
The bottom line with Apple TV, is that it’s a very niche device. The casual computer user isn’t going to find a whole lot to like with Apple TV. If you’re into digital rentals, streaming, and having iTunes available through your entertainment system, then Apple TV is definitely something I could recommend.
Tags: Apple TV, iTunes, iTunes Store, review, Software, TV, upgrade Posted in Everything
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
