Kodak HD

High def­i­n­i­tion? Huge dis­as­ter? Hor­ri­ble dis­ap­point­ment? Heinously difficult?

Photo of a roll of Kodak HD film

I went to buy a three-pack of 24 expo­sure 35mm film for my SP 500 today, and, because it was on spe­cial (prob­a­bly because the film expires next month), treated myself to Kodak’s over-marketed offer­ing that I’ve always been a lit­tle dubi­ous about. Dis­claimer at this point — I don’t think there’s any­thing tech­ni­cally wrong with the film by any stretch of the imag­i­na­tion. I’m sure it’ll pro­duce great shots. But the brand­ing and mar­ket­ing of this doesn’t exactly assist the pho­tog­ra­pher (I so nearly wrote “end user” there — must get out more.) in cap­tur­ing great shots, at least not in terms of exposure.

To explain: this film is billed as being multi-purpose. It does every­thing. Appar­ently. It also does it well. Apparently.

Okay, noth­ing wrong with that. You could use good qual­ity ISO100 stock to do “every­thing”, albeit with a lit­tle bit of pain. By the same token, this film stock does “every­thing”. It’d just help if I’d known what I was using before I got home and had time to look up the specs online.

The bot­tom line is this: on the exte­rior pack­ag­ing there is absolutely no men­tion of the speed of the film enclosed, aside from fleet­ing com­par­isons to other Kodak prod­ucts, say­ing “look, this is bet­ter, it does more stuff” — never mind that if you inspect closely it’s actu­ally slightly dif­fer­ent stuff. Decep­tive mar­ket­ing cer­tainly plays a part in the problem.

So, I couldn’t find infor­ma­tion about that any­where on the pack­ag­ing. I loaded it into my cam­era and ran off a roll of it, with the ISO speed set to 400 (that’s some­thing I’d per­son­ally con­sider fairly use­ful, if not overly ver­sa­tile — cer­tainly some­thing I’d con­sider prob­a­ble if they’re mar­ket­ing a con­sumer brand high-quality stock), try­ing not to worry too much about it.

Adjusting exposure and ASA (ISO) speed assigned

Yeah, a recipe for disaster.

I got home, checked Kodak’s specs, and it turns out the film was ISO/ASA/DIN/whatever you want to call it 200 speed film. Noth­ing I can do about it now, of course, apart from hope that post-processing will be able to clean up the under­ex­posed mess. I went and had a closer look at the car­tridge after I’d thought about it for a bit, and it does say the speed on the side of it — but of course, I didn’t think to check this until I’d already wound the film on, so even had I thought of it at the time it wasn’t the best option.

Why can’t film man­u­fac­tur­ers label their prod­ucts more thor­oughly and cut down on over­hyped mar­ket­ing that fails to actu­ally inform the con­sumer of what their prod­uct is?

# by Josh on July 1st, 2005 Tags: , , , , , , ,
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A new theme: SC 500

A screenshot of the new theme
I’m just post­ing so that the RSS mob realises some­thing has indeed changed. ;) Yeah, that was a joke. Kind of. Not a dis­cus­sion for now, any­way. The theme is built around my film SLR cam­era, a Pen­tax Asahi SP 500. Vaguely inspired by Dale’s somewhat-cynical com­ment a few days back, although more out of a knowl­edge that I really should stop being lazy and build my own theme, and a gen­eral re-design itch, I whipped this up over the course of today.

I shot a range of pho­tos of the SLR cam­era to use as a design base, and even­tu­ally wound up chos­ing one as the main design ele­ment, crop­ping off part of another to inte­grate within that after some edit­ing (that’s the “SC 500″ and ser­ial num­ber you see burnt onto the front of the lens bevel), and scal­ing one down to use as a back­ground for the search area.

The search area, inci­den­tally, is inspired by a post of Matthom’s a few months back enti­tled “Attrac­tive, acces­si­ble web forms.” The image I’ve used is one of the length of the lense — the the­ory behind this being that the pur­pose of a search func­tion, as with the lense on a cam­era, is to focus and zoom — one being images, and the other, information.

I’m think­ing the typog­ra­phy doesn’t feel ter­ri­bly inspired, but I can deal with that given its clar­ity. The colours of the post header type, by the way, have noth­ing to do with Flickr — the link and link hover colours used to be more pink and more light blue before I noticed how sim­i­lar it looked to Flickr’s brand­ing! I’ve shifted it down a bit, but I thought I’d clar­ify now that any resem­b­lence is purely inci­den­tal, before some­one else said anything.

I haven’t decided if the header is cool or annoy­ing yet. I wanted it to be appar­ently com­plex, ide­ally with­out need­ing to use images, but I don’t know if this is tak­ing things a lit­tle too far — hover back and for­wards too quickly and it is a con­fus­ing expe­ri­ence. The inter­face can be sim­pli­fied eas­ily, but I thought I’d ask for feed­back on the weird/trippy ver­sion first.

Changes in summary

  • IMO cleaner markup than Placid (the pre­vi­ously used theme by Chris Lin)
  • Also lighter (band­width wise). This theme is a 58KB tem­plate, Placid was 130KB. Par­tially code/markup, but largely images. Reduced use of images in this tem­plate will also reduce hits and thus improve load­ing times.
  • Opti­mised for wider screens: fluid lay­out, works best from 1024 upwards. Moti­vated at least in part by my own acqui­si­tion of more screen real estate recently
  • Built for Word­Press 1.5 from the ground up — the first theme I’ve devel­oped myself for this web­site that’s had that advantage
  • Inclu­sion of a “Recent Com­ments” section
  • 3 col­umn lay­out using absolute positioning
  • “Bright” design, because I’ve been accused of always com­ing up with darker colour schemes, etc.
# by Josh on June 27th, 2005 Tags: , , , , , ,
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Neglected to mention…

… that my par­ents got me a dig­i­tal cam­era for the birth­day a few days back. It’s a Pen­tax Optio S40, has a 4MP sen­sor, 3x opti­cal zoom (and some dig­i­tal which I’ve of course dis­abled), a flash, 11MB inbuilt mem­ory (I pre­sume THAT means that there’s 16MB, 5MB of which is soft­ware stuff) and another 256MB SD card which we bought.

Every photo posted here from The Lazy Kings til now has been taken with that cam­era… yeah, I was using it before my birth­day, bad me :P

I main­tain that the other Pen­tax (SP 500 film SLR) takes bet­ter pic­tures, espe­cially at night, but it’s just so much more expen­sive to use all the time! Hav­ing said that, I’m not going to let it sink into a cup­board and dis­ap­pear: It’ll be on hand when­ever i’m plan­ning to take (good) pho­tos, whilst the new Pen­tax will be for gen­eral happy snaps and the like.

Qualms with the cam­era thus far? It didn’t come with a rechar­gable bat­tery. $90 later, and I’ve got a Sam­sung charger with killer bat­tery life, so that’s no longer a prob­lem — but it’s an expense that should be noted prior to pur­chase. Other than that, I haven’t fig­ured out how to man­u­ally adjust expo­sure, so if you’re tak­ing pho­tos at night with­out a flash (scenic shots, etc.) then it’s not a great idea. Hav­ing said that, the masssssss­si­i­i­iveee expo­sure in “Night” mode does do some cool blurry things to photos…

Standing on Coogee's North head, looking WSW towards the main beach and lights. January 19, 2005.

View of the Sydney Harbour Bridge from the Opera House, with lights from NYE 2005 still on display. January 17, 2005, with Tori.

The expo­sure time (accord­ing to the EXIF data) on the Har­bour Bridge image is 4 sec­onds, and 1 sec­ond on the first shot (Coogee) — but it felt like lots more, because it was really windy stand­ing on the head. (No, not stand­ing on my head… that would be talent!)

# by Josh on January 24th, 2005 Tags: , , , , , ,
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