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I’ve always been a cricket fan. Last week I attended a T20 Big Bash league match at the Sydney Cricket Ground and found that the Cricket Australia terms and conditions of spectator entry regarding photography inside the venue were seemingly arbitrarily enforced.

When entering private land you consent to rules that land owners impose on you including re: photography. Unfortunately rights to take photos in public areas are becoming equally restricted and often mistakenly overpoliced by security guards (see http://photorights.4020.net)

This prompted me to write an article about the matter for Technology Specator:

If you take a photo at an Australian cricket match this summer and publish it to Twitter or Facebook you could be slapped with a ban from Cricket Australia thanks to draconian rules in place to protect media broadcast partners.

Amatuer photographers theoretically risk being “prohibited and disqualified from purchasing tickets for or entering into” any Cricket Australia match or event ever again, but cricket venue entry rules regarding photography are honoured more in the breach than in the observance.
- read more at http://technologyspectator.com.au/emerging-tech/social-media/cricket-australias-poor-twitter-form

That evening I got invited to discuss the issue on ABC Radio NSW and ACT Evenings. Click on the link below to listen to the 10 minute discussion about the democratisation of photography and how corporate rules and the law are lagging behind the reality of cheap omni-present digital cameras.

Listen to my 20/01/2012 discussion on ABC Radio NSW and ACT Evenings with Dominic Knight re Cricket Australia photography rules. MP3 recording courtesy of ABC Radio.

Several days later Cricket Australia’s CEO commented on the issue so I wrote a followup story highlighting that:

In the meantime, the official Cricket Australia Twitter account and least two Big Bash T20 teams are openly encouraging fans to take match photos and share them online, muddying the legal waters around Cricket Australia’s terms of venue entry for spectators.
read more at http://technologyspectator.com.au/emerging-tech/social-media/cricket-australias-twitter-reality-check

Hopefully by the time the 2012-2013 Cricket season starts Cricket Australia will officially allow photos to be taken at venues for non-commercial personal uses such as publishing to personal blogs or social media accounts like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook or Flickr.

Otherwise fans will not be able to capture photo memories of the atmosphere and famous players at matches as I did during the 2005 Super Test series (Flintoff, Mcgrath and Lara pictured below).

Visit the Rambling Thoughts Blog regularly to read articles about Technology, Personal Finance, TV Shows, Politics, Environment, Books and more

Republishing in full not allowed without permission.. Source: bhatt.id.au/blog/

Two compact ultrazooms are competing to be king of the ultra zoom digital cameras. I put Canon and Panasonic’s new geotagging marvels to the test. Compact ultrazoom cameras have progressed a lot in the last five years, It’s fair to recognise the great success of Panasonic’s Lumix TZ cameras in leading the pack but Canon’s new PowerShot SX230 HS is an impressive new challenger, so I took the opportunity to test it against the latest Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ20.

To check these credentials in addition to general use and image quality, I took the Canon SX230HS for a roadtrip through New Zealand’s picturesque South Island, and headed to the rugged Kimberley area in the North of Western Australia with the Panasonic TZ20. Because these cameras are made to travel…

Aside from their compact goodness, both cameras also feature GPS tagging of photos, which allows easy access to your images by location, as well as new possibilities such as creating map tracks of the places you’ve travelled through.

I write short articles as well as long feature “explainer” articles on topics including: Google Android Smartphones and Tablets, National Broadband Network (NBN), Space, Civil & Military Aviation, Ebooks and the Publishing Industry, Electric cars, Technology augmenting human capabilities etc for Geare Magazine. The editor of GEARE has kindly permitted me to post articles here after the magazine issue the article was printed in has passed its shelf life. I have added updates where new information is relevant.

Canon PowerShot SX230 HS ($350)

Sensor: 12.1MP High Sensitivity CMOS
Processor: DiG!C 4
Focal length: 5.0-70mm (28-392mm 35mm equivalent)
Aperture: f/3.1- f/8.0
Shutter speed: 15-1/3200 sec.
Zoom: optical approx. 14x;
Image stabiliser: Optical (lens shift type)
Video: Full-HD 1920 x 1080/24 H.264
Features: GPS tagging, face detection
Dimensions: 106 x 62 x 33mm
Weight: 223g (with battery and SD card)

I asked for black but as luck would have it, Canon offered me a choice of pink or pink. I braced myself for the inevitable ridicule from companions on the New Zealand trip.

I encountered ease-of-use niggles early in particular with the flash on the SX230 HS which pops up at top left as soon as the camera is powered on, even when flash is disabled. And it stays popped up. Top left is where many users will naturally hold the camera – your finger and hand block the pop-up and strain the pop-up motor. I also noticed that flash can’t be used for close-up macro photos as the lens casts a shadow in the bottom right of photos.

Once I got accustomed to working around those issues, the Canon delivered superb image quality and colour for outdoor photos. While the fully automatic mode was good, I felt that the camera’s abilities were best exploited by manually setting the ISO, white balance and your ‘colour mode’ preference (I liked ‘Vivid’).

The 14x zoom lens worked surprisingly well across its range of 28-392mm, though I wish it was a bit wider (e.g. 25mm) to fit in a wider field when taking landscape and large group photos.

Make sure to keep the camera set to the default 4:3 aspect ratio as this uses the whole camera sensor. Setting it to 16:9 widescreen mode will result in the top and bottom of captured photo image information being lost.

While just out of the coveted f2.X range, the Canon’s f3.1-8.0 capability at the wide end and f5.9-8.0 at the long end of the lens worked well with Canon’s DiG!C 4 processor and new 12.1MP high-sensitivity CMOS sensor to produce sharp photos. Optical image stabilisation is a further bonus here.

I was pleasantly surprised to be able to take relatively good low-light photos, even up to ISO800. Once my shots were loaded onto Flickr, praise came even from photographer friends who shoot strictly with SLRs.

The camera’s GPS functionality is not bad for Canon’s first effort. GPS Logger works well outdoors (even in a helicopter!), but not from inside a car or building. Canon’s Map Utility application imports the GPS Logger files from your camera or SD card and displays the track on screen. Then you can import photos which will be matched to the track and you can export a KML file to view in Google Earth.

GPS tagging is similar, in that only outside photos will have GPS coordinates tagged. Even for those the camera has to be switched on for a bit of time so it can find the satellites before you can start tagging photos. If you turn the camera on, snap a few fast photos and then turn it off, it’s probable none of the photos will get tagged.

The SX230 HS would make a good compact camera on which to learn photography, thanks to its ability to switch between Easy, Auto, Program, Shutter priority, Aperture priority and full manual modes. Full HD movies can be taken in any mode simply by pressing the red-dot ‘record’ button.

I can see why TIPA gave its award for Best Superzoom Camera to the Canon PowerShot SX230 HS at its 2011 awards ceremony. In my view it is an excellent compact super zoom digital camera, highly competitive camera for this sector, and if the company were to fix the flash design, make the lens a bit wider and avoid getting sucked into the megapixel marketing race, the next generation could take the company to leadership in the compact ultrazoom camera market.

Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ20 ($400)

Sensor: 14.1MP 1/2.33-inch MOS
Lens: Leica DC Vario-Elmar
Focal length: f=4.3-68.8mm (24-384mmn 35mm equivalent)
Aperture: F/3.3-F/5.9
Shutter speed: 60 – 1/4000 sec
Zoom: optical 16x; digital 4x
Image stabiliser: Optical (lens shift type)
Video: Full-HD 1920 x 1080/50 AVCHD
Features: GPS tagging, face detection
Dimensions: 100 x 55 x 21mm
Weight: 142g (with battery and SD card)

This is an example of the increasingly valid argument against having more pixels for their own sake. The Panasonic sensor has an effective 14.1MP over the Canon’s 12.1MP, but comparing its photos with those from the SX230 HS at 100% size, it’s clear that the TZ20 photos have more digital noise and loss of detail, especially in shadow and highlight areas.

Don’t get me wrong – many people will be quite happy with the TZ20’s image quality. I set the TZ20 to my preferred setting of ‘Vivid’ and the resulting photos were indeed vibrant and full of life. They brought out the rich earthy tones of the iron-oxide-rich Western Australian land and its wildlife without being too punchy or saturated.

Photos taken at the long-end of the zoom were reasonably sharp, which is a difficult thing to achieve with a compact camera. Macro mode on the TZ20 was also better than the corresponding mode on the Canon, thanks to the wide-angle 24mm lens, which allowed me to get really close to the details of tiny hermit crabs (smaller than your thumbnail) scampering about on the sandy beach at Broome Bird Observatory.

The wide angle also allows more landscape to fit into a photo as well, while the plethora of manual settings lets the TZ20 user choose between tweaking through experience, or going ‘novice’ with the camera’s Intelligent Auto setting.

High-definition 1920×1080/50i video shot in good light was excellent, and the one press movie start/stop recording button can be used in any scene mode, which is handy.

GPS tagging was again useful for pinpointing locations on Picasa, Flickr etc. It’s worth remembering, however, that turning off GPS except when needed can save a lot of battery power – also that by leaving such information on sites like Flickr you are potentially telling strangers where you and your family live, what’s in your home, etc.

A few niggles emerged. The TZ20 doesn’t rotate vertical photos to fill the screen if you turn the camera on its side in playback mode, so it’s harder to tell if they’ve been taken sharply. And the TZ20 lens took a long time to fully extend when powered on, compared with that of the SX230 HS. That can be the difference between grabbing a photo and missing it.

Button controls and the four-way rocker on the TZ20 are generally user friendly, with the exception of the tiny ‘exposure’ button. This actually controls shutter speeds in Shutter Priority mode. Either it should be removed (and the shutter speed changed via the four-way rocker) or it should be renamed to shutter speed.

I found the three-inch LCD touchscreen relatively unresponsive… it will certainly frustrate people used to the high sensitivity and speed of a modern Apple or Android smartphone. I expected this as soon as I saw there was a stylus supplied with the camera! Thankfully use of touch is optional, as everything is duplicated by hard buttons.

Final Verdict

Both cameras took photos with good colour and sharpness, and this is a rare occasion where I have to declare a tie. There are merits and flaws in each so your choice will depend on how their relative strengths/weaknesses fit your expected usage.

The SX230 HS needs two things – better design of the pop-up flash, and a wider lens to enable better macros and landscape photos when at its widest un-zoomed setting.

For Panasonic to regain the crown of outright best superzoom it should return its focus to image quality. While the TZ20 has a clear advantage in the areas of zoom and wide angle, the SX230 HS has taken the lead on overall image quality, with impressively low digital noise and good capture of details.

This article was originally published in GEARE Magazine issue #67. It is “digitally reprinted” here with permission from the editor. I have added updates where new information is relevant.

Visit the Rambling Thoughts Blog regularly to read articles about Technology, Personal Finance, TV Shows, Politics, Environment, Books and more

Republishing in full not allowed without permission.. Source: bhatt.id.au/blog/

Until recently Foxtel and Austar have been the only mainstream ‘subscription’ pay TV options available to Australians. Fetch TV seeks to shake up this duopoly by providing subscription pay TV content delivered through broadband internet, connected to a dedicated digital video recorder that comes as part of the deal. It’s an interesting idea that has been limited until recently by being available only to ADSL customers of iiNet, Internode and Westnet. But with Adam Internet and Optus coming onboard as well in late 2011, Fetch TV will be much more widely available. I tested the Fetch TV service provided using Internode, to see how it compares with free-to-air digital TV and Foxtel.

I write short articles as well as long feature “explainer” articles on topics including: Google Android Smartphones and Tablets, National Broadband Network (NBN), Space, Civil & Military Aviation, Ebooks and the Publishing Industry, Electric cars, Technology augmenting human capabilities etc for Geare Magazine. The editor of GEARE has kindly permitted me to post articles here after the magazine issue the article was printed in has passed its shelf life. I have added updates where new information is relevant.

Cost of Internode Fetch TV

Fetch TV PVR Box: $339 outright* (*= PVR rental included with 24-month contract)

Lite plan: $5.95/$14.95 a month (depending on whether you buy/rent PVR)

Full plan: $19.95/$29.95 a month (depending on whether you buy/rent PVR)

Fetch TV PVR (Personal Video Recorder) box

The dedicated Fetch TV PVR / Set Top Box (STB) looks a standard-enough box, with clean lines and the illuminated blue dog’s head logo of Fetch TV. You connect your TV antenna in order to access free-to-air digital TV channels but also an Ethernet cable to your modem or Ethernet switch in order to access the Video on Demand (VOD) subscription channels, various free TV shows/movies and streaming subscription channels (like Animal Planet and Al Jazeera English).

This PVR can be rented as part of your package, or can bought outright for $399. That’s a pretty sweet price considering it has a 1TB drive, double the norm for PVRs around this price, plus three tuners so you can record two programs and watch a third at the same time. It’s well provisioned at the back as well, offering not only an HDMI output, but component and composite video options as well, even digital audio via an electrical SPDIF output.

One caveat is that 45% of the hard drive is partitioned off for video on demand, so there’s not much more than your normal 500GB left for free-to-air recordings – still that’s enough for more than 500 hours of standard-def channels (which is most of them these days). PVR power consumption is rated at 25W, similar to a TiVo or any other PVR, so I expect it would add about $40/year to your electricity bill (if you don’t have a PVR already).

Fetch TV Data Downloads via Your Internode Broadband Internet

All downloads used by the PVR are unmetered, which is just as well, because there will be a lot of them. That’s because Fetch continuously preloads its bundled free content, regularly downloading hours and hours of material you may never want to watch – free VOD TV, movies and pay per view content.

If you’re thinking this seems an incredible waste of bandwidth (not to mention power, CO2 etc) for the ISPs involved, but the trick is the use of multicasting, a ‘one-to-many’ delivery system that serves content down a tree structure, storing copies at key nodes which are then delivered to individual users at off-peak times.

Since it’s unmetered, users simply needn’t worry about – except that, just as part of your hard drive is partitioned off, Fetch TV also reserves several megabits of your broadband bandwidth specifically to use for all this downloading.

In my tests, I experienced a drop in ADSL sync speed from 10.3Mbps to 7.7Mbs down, and from 1.2Mbps to 963kbps up. Internode says that customers with more than 5.5Mbps sync speed are eligible and won’t notice this loss of bandwidth for web surfing etc but I disagree. If you have an ADSL sync speed less than 10Mbps and your household uses the internet a lot, than Fetch TV may have too great an impact on other internet uses to be worth it.

You will also most likely require a new modem. The way Fetch VOD is distributed over the internet means the PVR only works with modems that support that IP multicast technology. Internode has certified only four such modems (FRITZ!Box Fon WLAN 7270, FRITZ!Box Fon WLAN 7390, Billion 7800N and Billion 7800NL). I used a FRITZ!Box 7390 lent to me by Internode.

Fetch TV Programming – Pay TV Channels and Video On Demand Movies/TV

What you can view using Fetch TV depends on whether you choose the ‘Full’ plan or the ‘Lite’ plan. The Lite offering has free-to-air digital TV, a Fetch TV EPG over the internet, and pay-per-view movies. This is available to any Internode broadband customer.

I feel the Lite service is dubious value. $5.95-$14.95 per month for a nice PVR with the main feature of being able to spend more money on pay-per-view movies. Where’s the value there, compared with online rentals like iTunes (no monthly membership fee) or even visiting one of the few remaining video rental stores in your neighbourhood? (Or being realistic, downloading via torrents?).

The ‘Full’ service is more interesting, although Internode can only offer this plan to customers connected to its own Agile then access subscription pay TV channels
like National Geographic and MTV, a fixed selection of 30 free VOD movies at any time, a selection of free TV shows on demand, and over a dozen music ‘genre’ stations.

Subscribers to the ‘Full’ service can also purchase additional subscriptions to packages of European Football, and ‘world’ channels from China, India, etc.

What are these 30 “free” VOD movies and TV? They are the kind that would be cheap weekly rentals at a video rental store – think Dirty Harry: Magnum Force. The TV shows are heavily skewed towards children’s entertainment, with a selection of dramas, docos and sci-fi as well. The free movies and TV shows are updated over time (seven movies per week; the PVR regularly downloads new content and deletes the old). The same free content is pushed out to everyone, so whether there’s anything you want to watch is a matter of luck.

I watched free-to-air and subscription channels both live recorded and played back from the PVR hard drive. The user experience was very smooth, including an intuitive menu and easy-to-use remote.

Just recently Fetch TV announced that they have added YouTube. Apparently adding DLNA features and ABC iView is possible in the future.

These additional features would differentiate Fetch TV a lot from Foxtel and if they don’t add to the monthly subscription fee, could be enough to tip over a lot of hesitant people into signing up. I can see why Optus decided to join as a partner which will enable it to tap into the consumer TV market, just as Telstra has done with its far inferior T-Box PVR.

Conclusion

The ‘Full’ service should appeal more – it gives access to a good selection of subscription pay TV news, music, documentaries and specialist channels, not to mention that powerful PVR. Even if you have to pay extra for a multicast-compatible modem/router, it’s a much lower price than Foxtel’s most basic package.

This article was originally published in GEARE Magazine issue #67. It is “digitally reprinted” here with permission from the editor. I have added updates where new information is relevant.

Visit the Rambling Thoughts Blog regularly to read articles about Technology, Personal Finance, TV Shows, Politics, Environment, Books and more

Republishing in full not allowed without permission.. Source: bhatt.id.au/blog/

The Sigma 120-400mm F4.5-5.6 DG OS HSM provides SLR camera owners an excellent value for money option for wildlife, astronomy, bird watching and other photography subjects that are far away and require a telephoto long zoom lens. It doesn’t matter which brand of SLR you own because Sigma offers the lens at the same price in mount versions for Canon, Nikon, Sony, Pentax and Sigma SLR cameras.

As an added bonus while the lense is designed for use with full frame 35mm digital SLR cameras it works equally as well with SLR’s that have medium size APS-C imaging sensors. The corresponding effective increase in focal length for APS-C SLR’s is 180-600mm for Pentax/Sony/Nikon and 192-640mm for Canon.

Example Images

The following example images show what the lens is capable of when paired with a Pentax K7 APS-C sensor SLR camera. Click any photo to view EXIF details at Flickr.

Most of these example photos were taken with lens stabilisation turned on and the Pentax K7′s inbody stabilisation turned off because this meant the image in the viewfinder was more stable. Bear in mind when viewing the photos that I’ve only owned the lense for 1 month so my photos taken with it will improve further over time.

Sydney Flight Path & Handheld Moon Photo

Australian Bird Watching

Wildlife Watching in South Africa

My Review

The lense is distributed in Australia by CR Kennedy and sold by all major camera retailers and online stores. Sigma’s official page for the lens has more details about specifications.

I bought my Sigma 120-400mm F4.5-5.6 DG OS HSM Telephoto Long SLR Camera Lens from Dirt Cheap Cameras for $940 Australian dollars.

No it isn’t super pin sharp or quite as fast at the 400mm end as some other telephoto lenses with a similar zoom range but it costs far less money than them. I found that it performed very well wide open and at mid-zoom. At full zoom the minimum F5.6 aperture meant much greater care had to be taken and the camera had to be kept far more still to take a sharp photo. Closing the lens down a few stops to around F9 resulted in quite sharp photos, even at full zoom.

The HSM (Hyper-Sonic Motor) ensures a quiet & high-speed auto focus and in lens stabilisation is impressive at reducing blur. Focusing is generally fast but can hunt a bit if you suddenly try and focus on something starting with the lens already at 400mm. I found it more effective to zoom most of the way to a far off animal, focus and then zoom to maximum 400mm and slightly readjust refocus.

Note that at 1.75kg it is not a light lens and you would get tired hanging it around your neck all day. Sigma includes a good quality padded case to store it in when not used and the lens survived being transported by numerous hotel porters and baggage handlers for 4 flights without suffering any damage.

Build quality is very good being largely metal so the lens has a solid quality to it. During my African Safari trip the vehicles I traveled in often generated a dust cloud but the lens is well sealed, has a large petal hood and did not suck any dust in. Zoom creep is an issue if you hang the camera off your neck partly zoomed. It’s best to fully retract it to 120mm and engage the locking switch.

Overall given strong to OK light and paired with a modern SLR this lense is capable of great results and is a good long term investment for any amateur/semi-pro photographers kit.

Other People’s Reviews

“Super tele lenses (400mm+) tend to be rather expensive being and as such often limited to professional use. However, there’re a few lenses where the manufacturers were able to keep a rather moderate price level and the Sigma AF 120-400mm F4.5-5.6 DG HSM APO OS is surely among to more popular options in this class. Besides a very long max. focal length it does also feature Sigma’s Optical Stabilizer (OS, ~4 f-stop potential) and that’s all for as little as around 700EUR/900US$. This may still sound a little steep in absolute terms but e.g. the Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 USM L IS, obviously its primary competitor, costs about 1200EUR/1600US$. Regarding this amount of price difference it may be worth to spend a thought or two … if the Sigma is capable of performing adequately.”
Photozone.de – Sigma AF 120-400mm f/4.5-5.6 DG HSM OS – Full Format Review / Lab Test Report

“Being priced at £675, this lens represents a good value choice for those looking for a super-telephoto lens, without the extortionate price tag associated with some camera manufacturer’s own lenses in this range. For it’s price, it has excellent build quality and a good range of useful features, such as Optical Stabilisation and silent focusing, but some aspects of handling could still be improved, like the looseness of the zoom mechanism. The lens does have some limitations, but so long as you are aware of these, it is still capable of producing very good quality images in the right hands.”
Ephotozine – Sigma 120-400mm f/4.5-5.6 DG OS HSM Interchangeable Lens Review / Nikon 700D test.

“As a landscape lens I really liked the Sigma 120-400 lens for its great range and convenience. It gave me as good as the results I currently get from my 70-200 and my 300mm Canon lenses and better results at 400mm than I get with my 300mm coupled with a 1.4x converter. So now I can take just one zoom lens and leave the two other lenses and the converter behind.”
Darwin Wiggett Lens Review: The Sigma 120-400 4.5-5.6 APO HSM Telephoto Zoom / Canon EOS-1ds Mark III test

Visit the Rambling Thoughts Blog regularly to read articles about Technology, Personal Finance, TV Shows, Politics, Environment, Books and more