Equipment Review: Gretag MacBeth Eye-One Display 2

January 2007

Gretag MacBeth’s Eye-One Display 2 monitor calibration device has been the industry standard for quite sometime now. From my tests it does a great job of profiling not only LCD monitors but also my older CRTs and my laptop. I realize monitor calibration devices are not the most exciting topic but a properly calibrated and profiled monitor is key to any digital workflow. If your monitor is not correctly calibrated then everything we do as photographers with our images, specifically in regards to color, won’t translate into the real world. In the Winter 2007 issue of my newsletter, I wrote an article on Color Management as well as a how to guide which walks you step by step through calibrating your monitor.

In regards to the Eye-One Display 2, I can say that it seems to produce much more accurate monitor profiles than my old ColorVision Spyder. While the Spyder worked great for it’s time, technology has improved a lot since I bought it back in the late 90’s. The Eye-One’s software is also very easy to use and it helps you dial in the ambient light settings as well which is a big issue. Once you have finished the calibration the software tells you exactly how accurately your monitor has been profiled - a very nice feature. I calibrate my monitor every two weeks or just before I start working up a big job. With my Apple Cinema Display I’ve found very little color shift over a two week period. For more information go to www.gretagmacbeth.com.

Equipment Review: The Epson P2000

February 2006

When I dove into digital a few years ago I knew that lugging a laptop around with me wasn’t going to be an option for a lot of my work. Hence, I had to find a way of storing my images safely without the bulk or battery drain of a laptop computer. Enter the Epson P2000, announced about the same time as the Nikon D2x, this combo was what really sold me on the viability of digital in remote locations. I have been using the P2000 for about a year now and it has served me very well. My first big trip with it was rafting the Grand Canyon. I took a spare battery and had plenty of power for the two plus week trip.

In the past, portable Hard Drive storage devices have been less than stellar. Normally they are clunky, slow and have poor LCD’s or none. The P2000 far surpasses any other portable storage option I have seen yet. The P2000 has a 3.8 inch LCD that is by far the sharpest I have ever seen on a hard drive and it is much better than most desktop LCD’s as well. The P2000 is a 40 GB model and Epson just released the P4000 which is the same set up but with 80 GB of storage. So far I have yet to fill up the 40 GB model on any one photo shoot.

My workflow with the P2000 is to shoot on compact flash (CF) cards then download then to the P2000 and keep shooting on new CF cards - that way my images are both on the CF cards and the Epson P2000 which is safer than film ever was. If I am on an expedition or away from the computer for a few days or weeks I take two portable hard drives and back the CF cards up to both devices before erasing the CF card. I can work this way without a laptop because most of my clients don’t need immediate turn around. I realize this won’t work for many photographers but if I can save myself from having to carry a laptop and everything that goes along with it that lightens my pack considerably.

The only downside to the P2000 or any a portable hard drive is the fragile nature of an electronic piece of equipment. And since your images are stored in it, It is a good idea to take it easy on the unit. So when I know I’m going to be in rough weather conditions I carry it in a micro Pelican box (Model #1060) which protects it from the elements and adds quite a bit of padding. As with any hard drive they are either working or not working and sooner or later every hard drive fails so I would be careful about putting all your images on the P2000 or any other device and trusting it. So far the Epson has been fantastic and it also doubles as a great way to show off my images to art directors and models.

One other caveat is with the Nikon D2x and some of the higher resolution cameras you can’t zoom into the RAW files as you can with jpeg’s. And not all RAW file formats are viewable on the P2000 but for me this is a non-issue as I am usually trying to conserve battery power and not looking at the images save to make sure they are saved on the device. The P2000 also has a USB 2.0 connection for downloading to computers and it is faster than any of my card readers.

There isn’t really a lot else to say about the P2000 - it just works and that is about the best endorsement a product can get. It’s simple and easy to use and you can load movies and music to it as well so leave the iPod at home for those long trips. For more info on the P2000 go to www.epson.com.

Equipment Review: Apple Power Mac G5

November 2004

Eleven years ago, when I graduated from University, the end all be all of computers was the Cray supercomputer. It cost just over a million dollars, filled up a large room and could process one billion bytes of information per second. With the introduction of the Apple G5 we now have that same computing power in a desktop system for only $2000! Indeed, technology has come a long, long way.

I purchased a G5 last month when my older iMac decided to have some start up issues and I was in the middle of shooting an assignment digitally. Digital workflow on my older G3 computer was nightmarishly slow and hence I also anted up for the Adobe Creative Suite which includes Photoshop CS. With Photoshop CS and the G5, my workflow is incredibly fast whether I am working with digital images or film scans. One measure of the speed of this computer is how much faster it allows me to make film scans. On my older G3, a 35mm full size scan at 4000 dpi took around thirteen minutes. With the G5 it takes one and a half minutes! I soon realized I had been living in the dark ages of computing.

Having never reviewed a computer, I find it hard to say anything critical about this speed demon. It is so much faster than any other computer I have ever used that I am reassured my investment will last for at least the next four years before I will need to upgrade. And I am looking forward to the higher resolution digital cameras knowing I have more than enough computing power to do just about anything.

I ended up getting the 2.0 GHz Dual Processor model with 1.5 GB of RAM. I will most likely increase the amount of RAM over the next few years since the G5 can handle up to an astounding 8 MB of RAM!

With the CS version of Photoshop and such a fast machine, I find that it is very quick to edit digital images and submissions. So for those of you who are photo editors and are looking for the best way to quickly edit and view digital submissions I cannot recommend this setup highly enough. I find that I can edit digital images just as quickly as I could with film, and in some respects much more quickly because I don’t have to sort the images and put them into slide sheets. I am still shooting a lot of film these days and I don’t see that changing anytime soon, but I do find myself editing my film images differently. After a shoot I scan the best of the best as a back up to the originals and also because many of my submissions are now digital. I am finding that I get a much better sense of how good a film image really is when I scan it. Maybe it is just the 20" LCD monitor, but I can look much more closely at the details of an image on the monitor. It’s like making an 11 x 14" print.

Last but not least one of the best things about the G5 is that it came with the OS X operating system. I was nervous at first about learning a whole new system since I was working on OS 9 with my old computer but it has been an easy transition and OS X is much better! The computer never crashes, freezes or has any problems. So if you need to speed up your workflow I would heartily recommend the G5. This thing is a rocketship! And I am finding I can’t afford to do without it.

Equipment Review: Nikon Super Coolscan 4000ED

July 2002

Note: As of 2006 I have upgraded to the Nikon 8000ED film scanner since I am shooting digital for 35mm and medium format film.

I recently purchased the 4000ED after extensive research. I have used many desktop film scanners, but none that have such powerful software and incredible resolution. The Nikon clocks in at 4000 ppi with a dynamic range of 4.2! There are many film scanners out there that can do 4000 ppi, but not many that have a dynamic range of 4.2. The dynamic range indicates how much detail you can get out of the shadows and highlights. With such a high dynamic range, the Nikon 4000 ED is closer to drum scan quality than any other desktop scanner on the market for under $2000.

After extensive scanning this past month I have to say I am impressed. The Digital ICE feature is a huge plus. ICE cleans up all dust and any damage on the film's surface, while ROC and GEM reconstruct color and equalize grain respectively. I have used all three functions and have had incredible results. The GEM feature especially helps in making superior high resolution images. At 4000 ppi, with GEM engaged, you get a digital scan that appears grainless even at 100% magnification. Another great feature is multi-scanning. You can choose how many times (1 to 16X) the scanner scans an image to gain as much possible detail and reduce noise. The software is also the best I have ever used for a scanner. The LED light source achieves incredible color accuracy with out much fuss. That makes for much faster workflow!

In terms of scan times you aren't going to break any speed records. I have found with Digital ICE engaged (and GEM on, but not ROC ) that a 4000ppi scan at 100% takes about 12 minutes. The other down side is that you have to allocate a huge amount of RAM to Photoshop or you won't be able to run Nikon Scan software as a plug-in. Hence if you don't have a lot of RAM (at least 1GB) you won't be working on anything else while the device is scanning. (You can always use Nikon Scan as stand alone software and then import images into Photoshop.)

If you are looking to buy a scanner, I would highly recommend checking out the Nikon Super Coolscans (the 8000ED can scan medium format images to 6X9). To get more info on this incredible scanner go to http://www.imaging-resource.com/prods/ls4k/l40a.htm. Image-resource has a very detailed and exhaustive review of this scanner and others. I found the review to be more informative than the instruction book/CD that Nikon include with the scanner!