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There are many movies portraying professional photographers. The characters in the movies make their living taking pictures, and you would expect them to be skilled in the use of a camera. It would be nice if the actors appeared to be similarly adept; but that doesn’t often happen.
Here’s my analysis of a few films.
Blood Diamond. Jennifer Connelly has a nicely-worn M-series Leica with a moderate wide-angle lens for most of the show. She holds it with her fingertips. When she shoots through a chain-link fence, she lines up the rangefinder window with the opening in the links, leaving the lens pointed at the chain. It’s not her fault, but the foley folks’ problem that when she releases the shutter, it sounds like an SLR, not a RF camera. When the picture she “took” is flashed on the screen, it’s been made with a moderate telephoto. Late in the picture, she changes to a Nikon SLR with a longish zoom, which she holds more credibly, but she looks through the camera with both eyes open, not something you would do with a lens that long.
Ghandi. Candace Bergen starts out with a Graphic 4×5 press camera, and manages to pull the dark slide at appropriate moments. Later, she switches to a Rolleiflex, and sort of waves it around as she takes pictures.
The Bridges of Madison County. I cringed a bit when, in his first scene with a camera, Clint Eastwood fumbled around setting up his tripod, but that turned out to be an aberration. For the rest of the film, he handled the camera skillfully and convincingly. There’s a slightly confusing little detail: Eastwood’s character’s Nikon F has the add-on motor drive, but he always advances the film manually.
The Weight of Water. Catherine McCormack, playing a photojournalist, starts out holding her M-series Leica with her fingertips, but in a later scene manages to hang on a little tighter. She never quite figures out that you have to stop moving the camera when you depress the shutter. She does a bit better with a Nikon SLR. She handles a Hasselblad, but never takes a picture with it. Probably just as well.
Salvador. James Woods wields a Nikon F quite credibly. He does hold the camera still for a very short time at the instant of exposure, but he plays a pretty hyper guy, and maybe he’s a quick focuser and is using a fast shutter speed.
Deep End of the Ocean. Michelle Pfeiffer gets a solid B for her Nikon handling, and an A+ for rapid lens changing. When it comes to swapping lenses, she’s much faster than I’ll ever be, but then again I probably care more about not dinging the camera or the lens in the process. She hand-holds a Hasselblad really strangely, wrapping her right hand around the body with her index finger reaching down to depress the shutter release. That lets her focus with her left hand. We never get to see her take a picture this way. If we did, we’d see that her method requires her to juggle the camera, grabbing it with her left hand to free up her right to advance the film.
Delirious. Steve Buscemi playing a sleazy paparazzo, gets a C in camera handling. He holds his Nikon DSLR with his fingertips, focuses an AF lens the same way, and rests his long lens on the shoulder of an excited assistant to steady it. When the time comes to line up the money shot he is really slow; by the time he has things lined up, a real photographer would have filled the buffer and been on to the next subject.
The Killing Fields. John Malkovich’s photojournalist has a weird thumb on the bottom focusing style. Every time we see him tripping the shutter he’s running, dodging, or tripping. There’s never an unforced shot, and most of the time he’s concentrating on staying alive, so we don’t get to see much photographic style.
High Society. Nothing in this movie is realistic, so the photographic portrayal is no surprise. Celeste Holm plays a magazine photographer who accompanies Frank Sinatra’s character on a story. She pulls out her Nikon S2, and does a fairly good job of holding it still when the shutter goes off (the foley effects are dead-on), However, she holds the camera symmetrically, with the index finger of both hands along the top of the body, rather than putting the palm of the left hand on the bottom of the camera, as you’d expect a real photographer to do, even if they were focusing with their right index finger, as you can on the S2. Holm holds her incident light meter in front of her with the dome pointing at her body, rather than at the light source. Later, after Grace Kelly has knocked her Nikon off a table and broken it, she produces a Rolleiflex TLR. She only takes one picture with it, a no-focus, barely-glancing-at-the-waist-level-finder exposure of a moving person indoors from three feet away. An impossible shot, even without considering the reversal of left and right that occurs in the finder.
The Caller. Elliot Gould plays a private eye who specializes in photographing his subjects in compromising positions. His camera is a Nikon D80, which is a surprise; maybe his clients don’t pay very well. The name and model number are blacked out on the neck strap — a nice touch. He uses the Nikon 80-400mm zoom, zoomed all the way out most of the time. Pretty tough to get much quality if you shoot that rig while walking, but he does. In one scene he quite properly braces the lens by putting his elbows on a table.
In all of these movies, the consistent winners are the props people. The cameras are mostly classics, period-correct, and appropriately well-used/beat-up.
Last summer, I joined the ImageMakers of Monterey. Part of the application procedure was a photographic autobiography. Some of you may be interested in the early part.
In 1951 or 1952, when I was eight or nine, my parents bought me a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye camera. It took 12 2 1/4 square pictures on a roll of 620 film, was made out of Bakelite, and had a not-very-precise waist level finder and a shutter release you pressed with your thumb. I loaded it with Super-XX film, and started making a pest of myself. It soon became obvious that drugstore processing was going to be way too expensive. My father then purchased a rudimentary darkroom kit: a plastic Kodak developing tank with an apron that took a day to dry, a Kodak Tri-Chem pack (developer, stop, and fixer in tiny foil packets), a 15 W light bulb that’d been dipped in red dye, three plastic five by seven trays, and a small contact printing frame. I’d load the film into the developing tank in a closet and develop and print in the bathroom, washing the film and prints in the sink. This didn’t exactly endear me to my mother, but I loved it.
Flash forward ahead five years. It’s the spring of 1957 and I’m a freshman at a boarding school in Connecticut. During spring break, I get the idea of taking pictures for the school newspaper. I talk my father into loaning me a Weston Master light meter and his folding Zeiss Ikon camera: 16 pictures on a roll of 120 film in a format that today we’d call 6×4.5, no rangefinder, and the film traveling from side to side so that the normal orientation of the picture was vertical. Back in school, I present myself to the newspaper staff, and they decide to give me a trial assignment. “Do you know how to develop film?” they ask. “Sure,” I answer, thinking of all the rolls that I’d put through the Kodak tank. I go off to make the picture. It’s a pretty boring shot: all the seniors who were elected to cum laude that year, lined up in two rows. It’s 7:30 by the time I’m done, and paste-up is supposed to start at 10:30. I head for the school darkroom. I find the chemicals, but the developing tank is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. It says “Nikor” on it. The tank itself, the lid, and the cap seem to be easy enough to figure out, but what’s this stainless steel spiral? If I’d had any sense, I would’ve used an unexposed roll of film to teach myself how to load the reel, but I just turn out the lights and struggle for 10 minutes. After the film is fixed, I open the tank to see how bad off I am. It’s pretty bad; the film is stuck to itself in lots of places, and those places aren’t fixed. I finally find an intact frame. While the film is drying (I turn the drier thermostat up so high I’m lucky the film didn’t reticulate), I turn to the enlarger. I’d never seen one before. It turns out to be pretty easy to figure out. After the prints are washed, I even figure out the print drier. I get the prints in on time and my career as a photojournalist has begun.
Yesterday, I attended Charles Cramer’s excellent lecture at the Sunset Center. Charlie asked me to say a few words about soft proofing. Some things occurred to me that I would have said had I more time and presence of mind. Fortunately, I have this blog.
Soft proofing is visualizing the final hard copy from an image on a monitor. The concept goes back to the eighties when computer systems became popular in publishing. In those days getting a hard copy proof was by no means as simple as hitting control-P and waiting for the printer to do its thing. To get an proof from an offset press involved having highly-paid craftsmen fire up to a large machine and run many copies (since the first ones wouldn’t exhibit representative colors). There were some ways to simulate in hard copy what the press would eventually produce (eg 3M’s Matchprint). These were less cumbersome than actually running an offset press, but were still time consuming and expensive.
Because getting to a hard copy proof was so difficult and expensive, there was a great deal of interest in being able to proof on the monitor. This turned out to be fraught with difficulties, many of which persist to this day.
The first difficulty is for the most part solved today. That’s getting the monitor and printer calibrated so you can produce the same colors on each as desired.
The next obstacle was actually handled better in a prepress environment than it is by most current photographers: getting the viewer (that’s you) adaptation standardized, both for the print and the monitor. Businesses painted entire rooms neutral gray, bought D 50 fluorescent light bulbs, sealed off all the windows, and constructed special viewing booths for looking at hard copy output. Most photographers don’t go to all that trouble, and I sympathize. It is important, however, to make your monitor viewing adaptation consistent, which usually means restricting the amount of daylight that enters the room.
The next step is getting the brightness the same for the monitor and the hard copy. In the old days it was hard to get the monitors bright enough to match the lighting levels normally used for hard copy evaluation. These days, with bright liquid crystal displays, the situation is typically reversed, with the monitor being so bright that the actual prints tend to be too dark.
Once the brightness is standardized for both the monitor and the hard copy, the next step is getting the white point the same. Since the standard viewing conditions in the prepress industry call for D50 lighting, the old method was to adjust the monitors for that white point, even if it made the low monitor light level even lower. These days, it seems most photographers choose D65 for the white point, in spite of today’s brighter monitors. I suspect that the yellower appearance of a monitor with a D50 white point puts off people who aren’t used to it. I’m one of those people; knowing that my work will hardly ever be viewed in D50 light ) actually, it will probably most often be viewed in light that is even yellower than D50), I set my monitor to D65 and count on the white point adaptation mechanisms of the human eye to smooth over the differences.
The next thing to consider is the surround. Almost all photographs are displayed with a white surround, and it makes sense to use a white surround on your monitor as well. In order for this to be effective the surround has to dominate the visual field. This means displaying the image that you are judging so that it is much smaller than it is when you’re editing it. I think having the maximum image dimensions about a third of the overall monitor dimensions is about right, but that’s not possible to achieve in Lightroom if the files are big.
Next up are gamut mismatches between the monitor and the hard copy. The usual monitor can display a far greater range of colors than just about any printer can print. This means that it’s easy for a photographer to produce colors during the editing process that the printer can’t print. You can deal with this problem by using the soft proofing feature of your image editing program, which will show you how the colors in your image file will be mapped for your particular printer and paper. However, one gamut mismatch problem remains: what it your monitor can’t display all the colors that the printer can print? The monitor is good at displaying bright, highly chromatic colors. Printers are good at handling dark chromatic tones. There may be some dark blues and greens in your print that you can’t see on your monitor. There is nothing that can be done about this at the soft proofing stage except to keep it in mind.
The last difficulty involves the way the brain perceives color. If it decides that something is self-luminous, rather than just reflecting the light that falls upon it, then it tends to respond to the colors differently. This is not a very strong effect, but it was of sufficient concern that about 20 years ago, researchers went to a lot of trouble to hide the fact that the monitor was producing the proof image by covering the edges with a mask, controlling the lighting of the mask, and keeping the viewer from getting too close. All of these shenanigans yielded more accurate soft proofing.
In brief: soft proofing isn’t accurate enough for artists to dispense with actual hard proofs. Calibrate your monitor; standardize your adaptation; get the brightness and the white point right; use a white surround in your image editor; watch those dark greens and blues. That will get you close. For the final tweaks, you’ll need to make a real proof.
In most of the last half of the 20th century, the weapon of choice for low-light candid photography was the 35mm rangefinder camera. There were lots of reasons.
- The cameras were small and light.
- The focal-plane shutters were quieter than SLR shutters (except for the tiny number of SLRs with pellicle mirrors), and not much noisier than the between-the-lens shutters of TLRs and 4×5s.
- Focusing was faster and more accurate in dim light than with an SLR or TLR.
- Fast lenses were available. Fifty millimeter lenses usually had f/1.4 or f/2 apertures, which was fast compared to the lenses on 2 1/4 square cameras, and really fast compared to those on 4×5s. f/1 lenses were available, although they were huge and expensive. To be fair, soon after 35mm SLRs became popular in the early 1960s, they got similar lens choices.
- Films such as Tri-X allowed high film speeds with acceptable grain. Actually, the use of these small negatives with high speed film produced prints with a pronounced grain structure, which, over time became acceptable to viewers, and even became a kind of advantage as the look grew to be associated with gritty, unposed images. Push-processing increased contrast and accentuated the raw look.
Ten years into the new millennium, things have changed. Digital sensors first improved to the point that they offered superior image quality to high-speed films at the same sensitivities. In the last few years, image quality has continued to improve, while usable sensitivities have skyrocketed. To my way of thinking, the breakthrough camera in this regard was the Nikon D3, which allowed creamy-smooth, high-dynamic range images at ISO 3200. The D3s has recently raised the bar even higher. Canon has recently introduced a camera for which they claim great low-light performance, although I haven’t used it and can’t verify their assertions.
In the eighties, autofocus cameras began to be popular. At first they weren’t so wonderful in dim light, but the technology available in professional-level cameras has advanced to the point that in all but the very darkest situations — so dark that you need a tripod — the camera can focus much faster and more accurately than you can do manually.
In the 1950s, the 35mm rangefinder was the mainstream camera. By the end of the 60s, it had been pushed aside by 35mm SLRs. At the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the following decade, as there got to be enough professional digital cameras for the concept of a mainstream to be meaningful, it was dominated with 35mm-sized SLRs, first with smaller than 35mm (24×36mm) sensors, with full-frame sensors growing in popularity.
Until recently, the 35mm-sized digital rangefinder camera was a mostly-unfilled niche. That all changed with the introduction of the Leica M8, with a sensor with a 1.3 focal length multiplier, and a few months ago with the M9, an otherwise-similar full frame camera. Both can use almost any M-series lens, many of which are truly remarkable. Both handle like a real 35mm Leica M-whatever, and both preserve most of the advantages and disadvantages of the legendary line.
However, for low-light photography, the world has changed since the 1970s, and the biggest changes served to improve the digital SLRs that are the M8 and M9’s competition. I mentioned low light autofocus before. In dim light it’s so difficult for me to focus an M8 with a 50mm f/1.4 lens that at a few feet only about a tenth of the images shot wide open are critically sharp. With a D3, achieving precise focus is easy. With the combination of continuous autofocus and movable aim points, it’s not hard to get crisp images of moving subjects, something I wouldn’t even attempt with an M8.
The D3 at ISO 4000 has about the same noise as the M8 at 400. That’s more than a three-stop advantage. Let’s say you were in a situation where you really needed to use the $10,000 f/0.95 Leica Noctilux at full aperture. Let’s be generous and say that, because of the absence of mirror slap, you could use a shutter speed a full stop longer than with the D3. Because of the sensitivity advantage of the Nikon, you could use an f/1.8 lens on the D3, and it would be stopped down two-thirds of a stop.
The Noctilux is a sharper lens than the Nikon lens (it should be; it costs eighty times as much), but the vastly improved odds that the Nikon pictures will be in focus more than nullifies that advantage. As a bonus, you’ll have a lot more depth of field at f/2.2 than at f/0.95. It looks like the M9 and the D3s have improved low light performance by about the same amount, so the comparison should hold with the newer cameras.
The big Noctilux cuts into the weight advantage a rangefinder camera traditionally enjoys: the M8 or M9 with the fast 50mm lens weighs three ounces less than the D3 or D3s with the f/1.8 lens.
What’s left as an advantage for the Leica in dim light? The shutter is quieter, you can see things outside the image area in the finder, and the M9 has higher resolution. The disadvantages are higher cost, inferior battery life, slower operation, the obscuring of the lower right corner of the finder by the lens, and less precision in framing because of the bright-line finder and finder parallax, in addition to the reduced depth of field and focusing difficulties previously discussed. Doesn’t seem like a difficult decision to me.
Maybe outfitting the Leica with the superfast lens is a little extreme. Going for an f/1.4 lens on the Leica instead of the f/0.95 saves a ton of money and a pound of weight. Now, for the same image noise, the Nikon lens needs to be stopped down a little further than f/2.8. That raises an interesting possibility. Now, maybe the Nikon lens for the comparison is the 24-70mm f/2.8. The combination of that lens and the D3 is definitely going to lose the size and weight contest, but it’s going to provide sharper real-world images in dim light, because of the focusing difficulties of the rangefinder camera under those conditions and the additional depth of field. The extra versatility of the zoom lens is a big bonus in many circumstances, although it goes is the wrong direction if you buy into the Leica minimalist approach.
If you go longer than 50mm, the difficulties in focusing the rangefinder lenses get even greater, so the results favor the D3 even more. But what about shorter? Many people would say the standard focal length for a Leica is 35mm for the M9, and maybe 24mm (translates to 32mm) for the M8. Leica offers an attractive array of fast lenses in the 21 to 35mm range. In the street, lenses 35mm and wider can be zone-focused, and you don’t even need to mess with the rangefinder — the generously sized depth of field markings on the Leica lenses make zone-focusing really easy. But when things get really dim, you’re a few feet away, and the aperture is set wider than f/2, you need the rangefinder. The percentage of in-focus shots is higher with the shorter lenses because there’s more depth of field, and parallax is less of a problem with the wider angle of view. All is not roses, however. You can only go as wide as 24mm on the M8 and 28mm on the M9 before you need to use an auxiliary viewfinder. At wide apertures, going to the shoe-mounted viewfinder creates problems beyond convenience; the time spent shifting from one finder to the other mean that small movements of the subject will mean fewer sharp pictures, and there’s that temptation while you’ve got the subject perfectly framed in the auxiliary finder to try to compensate for small motions by guessing what’s going on and moving the camera, a really tricky feat to pull off. In addition, the 24mm lens, when mounted on the M8, occludes the lower right corner of the frame in the finder.
When you get really wide, the Leica lenses lose their speed advantage over the Nikon ones. Indeed, the situation is reversed, with the Leica 18mm and the 16-21mm zoom (marketed as a triple-focal-length lens and not a zoom because the auxiliary “Frankenfinder” has only three focal length settings) both having apertures within a third of a stop of f/4, and the Nikon 14mm, 20mm, and 14-24mm zoom all having f/2.8 apertures.
So, in sum, the only range of focal lengths where the Leica rangefinder is even close to being as good a tool for dim light photography is between 21 and 35mm, and that’s only if you seriously value the Leica’s small size, light weight, and quiet shutter.
I can hear you thinking: “OK, so Nikon got the jump on Leica with their sensor technology. Surely Leica will catch up.” Well, they may make some progress, but they’ll not be playing on a level field because of decisions made by both Nikon and Leica in the 1950s. It’s amazing how decisions can have repercussions far beyond the horizons of the decision makers. Perhaps you know how the Roman Empire chariot wheel-to-wheel spacing determined the standard railway gauge two millennia later. If not, take a look here.
A crucial specification in camera design is the flange focal distance, or back distance, the separation between the image sensor plane and the flange that the interchangeable lens mounts against. For the Leica M mount, the standard used on the M8 and M9, the distance is 27.8mm. The Nikon F mount flange focal distance is 46.5mm. The reason the Nikon distance is greater is to allow room for the mirror to flip up. The designers of the M mount, because they had no mirror to worry about, picked a more compact configuration that gave them a smaller camera. In addition, SLR lenses (with a very few exceptions, like the original Nikkor 8mm fisheye, which required that the mirror be locked up before the lens was installed) are designed so that the lens elements don’t extend back into the camera body, to make sure that the mirror doesn’t hit the back of the lens. Lenses for rangefinder cameras are not limited in that way.
Because the M mount lenses sit closer to the focal plane than SLR lenses, as you move away from the center of the image, the light hits the image sensor at a greater angle in he rangefinder camera. With film sensors, this wasn’t such a big deal; maybe there was a little more light fall-off towards the edge of the image. With the exception of the Foveon sensors, digital cameras have an array of filters over the light-sensitive semiconductors to convert what is basically a monochromatic device into a color one. There are microlenses over the filters to make the sensor more efficient. These lenses don’t work right when the light comes from way off vertical. Leica’s solution is to offset the lenses as you go further away from the center of the image. It works pretty well, but it’s got to be a compromise since different lenses have different characteristics in this regard. Because Leica needs a sensor with special lenses, it can’t just employ the best device around.
Today I received a letter from Dell. It started out:
Dear Current Occupant:
Your dedicated account team is now in place to help your business.
I didn’t feel much like reading further.
I’ve been playing with a tilt/shift lens on a digital SLR. I’m hoping to get sharper landscapes by not having to stop down as far to get the foreground and background in focus. Thus, the tilting action of the lens is what’s of interest to me.
The trick with a tilting lens, whether on a view camera or a little SLR is to find two representative spots in the plane of the image and get them both in focus. You’ve got two controls that affect the focus: the focus ring, which affects the distance from the lens to the image plane, and the tilt. The problem is that, once you get one spot sharp with one control, changing the other affects both. I try to deal with this by setting the tilt to zero and first focusing on an object in the middle of the image, then tilting the lens to bring the foreground and background into focus, tweaking the focus ring as necessary.
With a view camera, you can check focus with a loupe. With the SLR, it’s harder. The ground glass finder is nearly useless, especially with modern finders on autofocus cameras, which are not optimized for focus. You can take a picture and zoom in on an area to check sharpness, but there’s no interactivity there. I’ve found that the best tool is the live view mode.
It would be really nice if you could zoom in on two different areas of the image at the same time, but, sadly, this doesn’t appear to be an option. Maybe the camera manufacturers will add this ability as an inducement for their customers to buy the expensive tilt/shift lenses.
Outdoors, it’s hard to see the LCD display on the back of the camera. There are hoods and snoots you can buy to make it easier, but in my experiments, I’ve been using a simple darkcloth; the same one that I’ve used with a view camera. It seems anachronistic but it works. In addition to its practical advantages, I’m sure it provides amusement to bystanders.
Encouraged by the success of my two test upgrades, I upgraded my main workstation to Win 7. It went pretty smoothly. I ran the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor and found all the problem programs and drivers, and uninstalled or fixed them all. When I did the actual upgrade, the compatibility scan detected a problem that the W7UA hadn’t found: the Windows Mobile Device Center. Well, that was interesting. I’d had a problem with WMDC after the last upgrade, and had to remove it, but the compatibility scan hadn’t warned me then. What had changed? The Win 7 upgrade program, if you let it, updates itself from the web before running — you can see it restart. My guess is that in the few days between the last test upgrade and this one, Microsoft realized that WMDC was a problem, and fixed the compatibility scanner so that it flagged it.
I cancelled out of the upgrade, and removed WMDC and the associated driver update program using the Programs module in the control panel. When I tried the upgrade again, it flagged two drivers that I recognized as being associated with PDAs. I sighed, canceled out again, and went looking for the drivers. I couldn’t find them. They should have shown up in the device manager, but removing WMDC seemed to remove the tree branches to which they were attached. I said the heck with it and ran the upgrade anyway.
Two and a half hours later, I logged on to Win 7 for the first time. I verified basic function, then took a look at the error log. It was chock full of entries. I tried a few more things, with complete success. I did a restart, and took another look at the error log. This time there was only one new entry.
I let the machine run overnight and in the morning installed the 9 fixes it had found.
I plugged in a PDA to see what was going on with synching, now that WMDC was gone. The system recognized the PDA, automatically installed the driver, and, without asking me what I wanted, synched with Outlook. It even synched the desktop file folder with the one in the PDA, although it synched some files in the wrong direction, wiping out the newer ones (That was OK; I had backups on a flash card.). I went looking for the WMDC. It was in the control panel; it must have been installed by the upgrade. Also in the control panel, I found something called the Sync Center. The tooltip said “Sync files between your computer and network folders”, which didn’t sound right, but when I looked inside, I saw the PDA listed as a device. Anyhow, it all worked, if you ignore the wrong way synch. Actually, that’s designed in. Back in the ActiveSync days, you could specify that you wanted to mediate a conflict. Now, the only choices are: overwrite the files on the PDA, or overwrite the files on the desktop. This is a case where one size definitely doesn’t fit all, so I consider this omission a big step backwards.
I’m pretty much a happy camper. All the upgrades, including the last one, which was the only one that really counted, went well, as far as I can determine from limited usage.
This morning, conventional wisdom doesn’t look so bad. Last night, the new Win 7 system started responding slowly. Norton Internet Security was doing a full scan at the time, so I didn’t worry about it much. I brought up the Task Manager and didn’t see anything untoward. But then I couldn’t close the Task Manager.
This morning, the Task Manager was still hung, as was a window left over from the installation of the Epson 3880 driver. I tried a restart, and it hung on the “Logging Off” screen. I power-cycled the computer. After the OS came up, it said it wanted to install 10 updates. I let it have its way. The ensuing restart was normal.
I tried to break the OS. I started the Adobe updater and opened and closed programs while it was running, which is never a good idea. No problem. I opened a lot of programs at the same time. No glitches.
There was a weird thing that happened during the stress testing. The first time I ran Word 2007 I got a Window saying Office 2007 was preparing for the first use, and two error messages appeared in the error log. The messages were especially odd in light of the fact that I’d been using Outlook 2007 extensively. After that, all the Office apps worked as expected.
I stopped trying to make it crash and started to fix things.
I removed the Windows Mobile Device Center and its associated updater. That got rid of the wmdc.exe error.
I opened the error log and noticed that the Apple software updater was throwing a bunch of errors. I removed it, and all the Apple software it was trying to update (Quicktime and iTunes). PrintService reported a print spooler error and complained of an unreadable registry key. The printer referenced was a remote shared printer that I didn’t want to use. I finally removed it, but it was not easy. The printer didn’t show up in the new “Devices and Printers” window (now accessible directly from the “start” button, like in XP but unlike Vista, where you had to open the control panel first). Finally, I found a link at the top of the devices and printers window that gets you to a print server window, where you can uninstall drivers for printers that have been removed, but are still hanging around zombie-like, screwing things up.
I removed the printer driver for the printer connection. The error messages continued. Finally, in exasperation, I removed the branch in the registry tree having to do with the printer connection.
I had a Microsoft management console set up with all the snap-ins I needed to manage the computer. Some of them didn’t work under Win 7, including the reliability monitor, which I had always thought was a good idea in principle, but never seemed to work out in reality — I note that there is no Win 7 version.
I removed the Xerox 6250. I tried installing a new printer driver using the Xerox web installation program. I refused to print the test page, and Word 2007 abended when I tried to print from it. I uninstalled the printer again and tried installing the Xerox 32-bit global Postscript driver. It looked like it installed OK, but couldn’t print a test page. I ran the troubleshooter, and it said it could communicate with the printer, but that the toner was low. I printed a test page from another computer. It printed fine. I used the print server window to remove the driver. Finally, I downloaded the Xerox regular printer driver, and ran the setup program locally. Problem solved.
I let the machine run overnight, and look at the error log in the morning. Aside from a time synch problem that I’ll look at later, the only things wrong were two programs had unsuccessfully tried to run a component. The first was FlexColor. That was easy: the version that I had installed was ancient. I removed it. The second was Roxio Creator. I poked around and found that I had two versions installed. I removed the older one. That didn’t fix the problem.
With the errors in a running machine pretty much under control, I started to tackle the boot and log-in errors. The list was pretty impressive. There were 31 errors, 19 of which were related the system’s inability to start the circular kernel context logger. I poked around on the web, found that this is a known Win 7 problem, renamed the setup.etl file to setup.old, rebooted, and only saw four errors, none of which were related to the circular kernel context logger.
To get a handle on how much to worry about four boot errors, none of which looked particularly dire, I examined the error log of a well-running Vista x64 system, and found 14 boot and log-in errors.
All, in all, I’m pretty happy with the in-place upgrade to Win 7.
I gave up on the Win 7 upgrade that Amazon sent out groundinstead of Blue Label. So did Amazon; they sent a replacement even though UPS said it would get here in due time. On Turkey Day, I ordered another copy for Saturday delivery.
This morning, it showed as being prepared for shipment on Amazon’s web site. I called customer support. A gentleman in Asia assured me that I would get the software today, or, at the very latest, tomorrow. I asked if they had prevailed on their carriers to make Sunday deliveries. Without missing a beat, he said I would get the software today, or, at the very latest, Monday. I asked if it had been shipped. He said, “How close are you to Nevada?” This wasn’t going well, so I said goodbye and rang off, expecting to see the software next week sometime.
This afternoon about 12:30, there was a rumble in the driveway, and a FedEx truck pulled up and disgorged the software. With the OS upgrade safely in hand, I checked the Amazon web site; the software will ship soon, it said. [I just checked it again, with the same results.] I wasted no time installing it. The process took two and a half hours, on a fairly fast machine with a lot of software installed. A couple of times it looked as though it had hung, with no progress being indicated for twenty minutes, but patience won the day. The longest part of the operation was transferring programs and files, which took about an hour and a half. During this phase, somehow the Roxio Creator installation software got triggered, and complained that there was no installation CD in the reader. I cancelled out of it.
When it came time for me to log on to the newly installed OS, the only problem was that wmdc.exe (the Windows Mobile synch software) couldn’t find RAPI.dll. I said OK; I’ll sort this out later.
The new Win 7 installation looks great. It’s fast, and I’ve found no glitches except the ones I’ve described.
To review the bidding, I started with a Vista installation that was so trashed as to be unusable, upgraded it to SP1, which improved it immensely, then to SP2, which improved it a bit, and then to Win 7, which looks solid. It’s too soon to draw any definitive conclusions, but the conventional wisdom that in-place updates just perpetuate old problems looks suspect.
The 3880 came a couple of days ago. I went through the usual Epson shipping tape hunt, and found ‘em all. Setup was simple using the USB port. After my Ethernet problems with the 3800, I figured I’d save the network connection for later.
In loading the ink cartridges into the printer, I had a very pleasant surprise. Except for the two magenta cartridges, the inks are the same as the 3800. I can use most of my old ink, saving me a few hundred bucks.
I had to print the paddles for the CPA auction, and I figured I’d made that my first test of the new printer. Based on the suggestion of another board member, I intended to use a Hewlett-Packard heavy matte paper (Q5445A). I opened the box, put a single sheet in the main hopper, and brought up the driver. It looked pretty much the same as the 3800 driver, so I felt right at home. I printed a nozzle test page. All nozzles present and working. I put another sheet in the hopper and printed the first paddle. It looked good. I put 25 sheets in the hopper, started the whole job. I watched the first page feed and went off to do something else. When I got back, the printer had stopped, there was a blank page on the top of the output pile, and the printer was complaining about a misfeed. It had only printed three pages. I removed the paper from the hopper, shuffled it, squared it up and tried again. This time I only got two pages before the misfeed.
Abandoning the idea of testing the 3880, I put the matte paper in the front panel tray of a Xerox 6250 laser printer. It printed much faster, but misfed almost as often, even when I told it I was loading card stock (an option not available on the 3880). The person who recommended the paper to me has a 4800, and apparently his printer has no problem feeding it. My conclusion is that this paper is hard to feed (probably because it’s got enough tooth that the sheets don’t slide easily against each other), and that the fact that the 3880 can’t handle it is not a serious reflection on the printer.
I printed a run of 50 sheets on 20 pound bond with no problem. I printed a dozen 8×10s on Epson Premium Photo Paper Glossy (the paper formerly known as Premium Glossy Photo Paper; can anyone figure out why they felt they had to change the name?). The glossies printed with no problems.
Having put the main hopper through its paces, it was time to try out big paper with the rear feeder. I set the platen gap to “wide” and loaded up a 17×25 sheet of Harman Gloss FB Al. The printer took it. I printed a image, using the advanced B&W controls. It looked gorgeous. I queued up a color image, using the profile that came with the printer. I loaded another sheet of paper. I got the dreaded “paper skew error”. I tried again and again. After the fifth time, I gave up and turned the paper size check off with the printer front panel controls. Now I could load the paper. The print looked very good, but the colors weren’t quite perfect; I will have to make my own profiles, which is what I expected.
The Harman baryta-coated paper has some curl to it, much the same as baryta-coated fiber enlarging paper. I thought the curl might be giving the printer problems. To test this theory, I turned the paper size check back on and tried to load a few sheets of matte rag paper. No dice. Like with the 3800, the only practical way for me to use the rear paper feeder is to turn off paper size checking.
My conclusions are:
- The 3880 is quite a capable printer. It is small. It is quiet. It can switch back and forth between photo and matte black without wasting a lot of ink. Print quality is very high.
- The gamut is improved over the 3800 in the magenta direction.
- There is less metamerism on B&W prints than with the 3800, and the 3800 wasn’t bad in this regard.
- Except for the above, the print quality improvements over the 3800 are subtle.
- It doesn’t handle paper any better than the 3800, which was not great in this department.
- If you’re happy with your 3800, you should keep it.
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