Sharing Experience

Analysing focal length data in Lightroom

2009-10-28T21:12:00.000Z

I occasionally want to analyse a set of images to work out what focal lengths I used most to create them; typically they will be in a collection in Lightroom. There is no easy way to do this within Lightroom (up to v2.5 at least) other than to laboriously look at each image's metadata or search in the text for specific focal lengths. ImageReporter allows you to do this and this posting gives more details.

Recently I selected 247 of my favourite images and placed them in a collection. I wanted to know which focal lengths I used most to produce these images to inform me where I should spend any spare cash on lens upgrades.

For some reason there is no quick way to do this in Lightroom. Marc Rochkind, however, has written a free utility called “ImageReporter” that allows me to query Lightroom for this data. It is available from [ here] along with a short description/tutorial of how it works by Marc [ here ].

The screenshot below shows the user interface:

The selectable search criteria are pretty limited, but you can choose from several file format types via a dropdown (see screen shot above), star rating and rough time periods. You can also search the whole catalog, picks or the quick collection.

To search my top 247 images in their collection I simply put them into the Quick Collection in Lightroom, ticked the appropriate box; hit the report button and a few seconds later the results came back – see below for a sample of the output.

It produces a whole range of reports grouping the data by lens make & model, camera make & model, cropping factors, the average focal length for each lens, ISO setting and more.

There is no print function in ImageReporter so I saved these reports (via the option in the File drop down menu) and opened them in Notepad – you can use Word or pretty much any text editor I guess.

ImageReporter rounds all focal lengths reports to the nearest 10mm which personally I find irritating, but it does allow for some brevity in the report and is much better than the alternative manual methods for extracting the data.

Conclusion
No doubt Adobe will get around to including this sort of data reporting in Lightroom one day, but until then ImageReporter is a very useful and simple to use piece of software –especially good as it’s free.

Building a PC for photography and Lightroom

2009-07-12T15:11:00.005+01:00

A couple months ago I decided to build a desktop PC designed mostly to produce a good price/performance with Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. The posting and a few follow up ones describe what I built and how much faster it was than my old PC.

My criteria for selecting the components for my new photography optimised desktop PC build were:

A good balance between price and performance
Reuse my Windows XP software and transfer my existing applications with the least hassle
Large capacity storage for digital images
Cool and quiet operation
Upgradeable
A total price of around £600

Processor choice
The core to the whole system is the processor (CPU). After a good deal of research I decided to use an Intel Core2 duo E8400 as it shows up very well in several reviews, including CustomPC’s on image processing (go - here - for a graph from CustomPC showing the relative GIMP performance of a large range of processors). As well as being powerful it also uses less power than most processors and wins on the price/performance ratio scale. I decided to cool it with a Scythe Kama Angle cooler. Also if need be the E8400 is supposed to be highly overclockable.

When I went to buy it I discovered that Scan.co.uk offered an OEM version of the faster E8500 at only a couple of pounds more than the E8400 retail version – The retail version comes with an Intel cooler so since I planned to use a specialist CPU cooler it was a waste – so I bought an E8500 (£150), along with the Scythe Kama Angle (£28), which came from an eBay shop, with Artic Silver Ceramique CPU coupling compound.

Motherboard choice
The E8500 is a 775LGA socket processor, but my old Foxconn board would not support it – after a bit of looking at reviews (which mostly seemed to focus on the overclocking options of the board) I decided that the Asus P5Q Pro (£108) would “do” – while not the best overclocker it seemed to offer good standard speed and I don’t really plan to go into overclocking unless I have to.

Power Supply Unit
I wanted a good reliable, energy efficient modular power supply unit (PSU), with enough power to allow me to upgrade if need be – I decided that the BeQuiet Dark Power 650W (£106) would do the job.

PC case
I have never really given much thought to such a mundane thing as a computer case before, but I have now realised that if I want to have a quiet, cool case which is pretty easy to build a PC in and then to upgrade that the case makes a lot of difference. After a good deal of web searching I bought an Antec P182 (£105) – which is solid, has three 120mm Antec Tricool variable speed fans and plenty of space for discs and peripherals. It also has sound absorbing side panels and a front door to keep it quiet. This came from eBuyer.

Memory
I decided to transfer the 4gb of Crucial DDR2 PC2-5300 from my old PC

Hard disks
I was planning to transfer the Western Digital 640gb Green HD from my old PC with the Windows XP operating system installed on it along with the eSATA external hard disk (a twin of the operating system disk) as backup. During the build I found that the Samsung SpinPoint F1 1tb (1,000gb) which seems to be the current best size/speed deal around at the moment had come down in price at eBuyer (£78), so I bought one of those as well to store images on.

Optical discs
I toyed with the idea of upgrading to a Bluray disc, but decided to wait until the media prices come down. So I transferred the LG & Pioneer DVD read/writers from my old machine to the new one.

Graphics card and monitors
I wanted to keep the twin monitor system from my old PC so I transferred the Asus EAH 3650 256mb DDR3 twin DVi card along with the Dell 24” Ultrasharp and my old NEC 18.5” LCD screens.

The build
Never having built a PC from scratch I asked my brother to supervise and set aside a day to do it. The actual build was quite easy for the most part – I had prepared by watching several videos on the web of people building PCs and read a “How to build your own PC” book – so working slowly and reading instructions I installed the PSU, the motherboard, the processor, CPU cooler, hard discs, memory, optical discs and graphics card (in that order).

I had anticipated that installing the CPU would be the most hairy moment, but it was remarkably easy. I had never really realised that when manufacturers talked about “zero force insertion” that they meant that you simply put the CPU on the socket and clipped it into place with a lever over it – it really was “zero force” and extremely easy.

The real problem was the installation of the Scythe Kama Angle CPU cooler. It took both of us several attempts to clip the four legs of the cooler into place and some sweaty moments before we were reasonably sure that the cooler was installed properly. We then discovered that the secondary power socket for the motherboard was located “under” one of the arms of the cooler’s radiator – having to take the cooler off again to plug in the power did not appeal at all given the problems we had had in getting it installed the first time. Luckily there was just enough clearance and access through the top of the case to work the plug into place without taking the cooler off – but it was a very close run thing.

The rest of the build was just a steady progression with no dramas or problems.

Turning it on…
I never expected it to turn on and work seamlessly – that would have been just too easy, and so it played out.

When I first turned it on it started and then the dreaded “blue screen of death” came up with an error message – the helpful Microsoft advice to solve the error message was to reinstall the old motherboard…

After several hours of booting from CDs and using various pieces of test software (such as Memtest98) we concluded that the hardware was OK and that it was an OS problem, so we decided that we simply had to reinstall the operating system and that the change from the old system to the new one was simply too much for it to handle. This we did, which, along with all the service packs, patches etc, took a couple of hours.

During the installation my brother suggested that I put the operating system swap file in a separate 4gb partition on the faster Samsung to speed up general operation – which I did.

Then it simply turned on again and worked!

In use…
All my original software worked as well and when they were plugged in all the peripherals such as scanners, graphics tablets etc worked too. The only thing that did not work, and after several weeks of trying still does not, was the eSATA disk. It simply refuses to work and stops the PC from booting up if connected. Since the caddy it is in has a USB2 port as well which seems to work fine I have decided to put it down to experience and move on.

The PC is very quiet – in fact I have to put my ear to the box (under my desk) to hear much at all when it started up at first – this is with all three fans set to their intermediate speed setting. After a bit I started to notice that the graphics card fan was making a bit of noise, but compared to the old PC it was much, much quieter.

The CPU seems to run generally at around 37-40°C moving up to just over 50°C under stress testing – so I am very happy with the overall cooling of the system.

The whole package cost £575 (£497 without the extra Samsung hard disk) from a variety of suppliers, along with the transfer of pieces from my old PC. Well within my budget so I am again happy so long as it delivers the promised performance improvement. I could have done it much cheaper by re-using my old PSU & case, but I wanted a more reliable, upgradeable and quieter package than that would have allowed - but it would have saved £211, and without the extra hard disk the whole upgrade could have been done for £286.

Over the next few blogs I am going to report on how the new PC actually performs against my expectations – which previously I thought should be 3x-4x my old Pentium 4 based PC along with a few tweaks that I will make to the system.

Test of Inov8’s replacement battery for my Panasonic G1 digital camera

2009-07-08T23:31:00.000+01:00

A month or so ago I said that I was going to try a generic battery from a reputable manufacturer – Inov8 – in my Panasonic G1. Here is my experience of it over the last few weeks.

Inov8 are one of a number of reasonably reputable replacement camera battery brands. Since they were the first one to offer a replacement for Panasonic’s expensive Li-ion DMW-BLB13E I decided to try it, although it was not exactly cheap in its own right at £26.95 from a reputable eBay seller.

Below is a photo of the blister pack that the battery arrived in – followed below by a scan of the back of the packaging with details including Inov8’s stock code for it - B1346.

The Inov8 battery says it is a replacement for the DMW-BLB13 – I don’t know if the missing “E” is significant.

Below are a couple of photos showing the product details printed on the Panasonic and the Inov8 batteries respectively.

As you can see both are made in China, both operate at 7.2v and the capacity of the Inov8 is slightly larger than the Panasonic- 1300mAh versus 1250mAh, so it ought to last longer. The Panasonic also shows a 9.0Wh rating whereas the Inov8 does not offer a Wh figure.

I put the Inov8 into the Panasonic battery charger that came with the camera and charged it up – which seemed to work fine. I then popped it into the G1 and was rather concerned when the warning in the photo below came up on the screen.

A message saying the “This battery cannot be used” is a bit scary. I turned the camera off and on again and the message went away, but it has resurfaced each time I have taken the battery out and put it back in again. After this on/off/on cycle the camera seemed to work fine so I took around 100 photos as a test and all was well, so I charged it up and took it along as a backup on a weeks holiday.

On holiday I recorded the number of shots I took with each battery (the original and the Inov8) to try to get a feeling for the comparative battery life.

The first use of the Inov8 to exhaustion only yielded 110 photos – although I probably used the image viewing more than usual and had liveview on more than normal I was alarmed by the low number – I measured 300+ when I first got the G1 in much colder Winter weather. You can find my earlier battery life results posted – here.

I was also surprised how quickly the battery meter progressed from two bars (three bars indicates it is full) to “Red” to exhausted – around 10 shots. This was much quicker than I remembered from previous tests on the original battery.

Somewhat alarmed I then repeated the test on the original Panasonic battery trying to use it in a similar way – This yielded 195 photos; much less than my original tests, but nearly double the supposedly larger capacity Inov8.

To be fair I repeated the test with the Inov8 battery and the second test yielded 135 photos and again the progression from 2 bars to exhausted was very rapid. The second test almost certainly used liveview much less as around half of the shots were taken in quick succession in one session.

Conclusion
After my tests I am very disappointed in the performance of the Inov8 battery. It seems to have much less capacity than the original Panasonic, despite rating itself as having a slightly larger one. It seems to fail much more quickly than the original (e.g. it goes from 2 bars full to exhausted) very quickly – within about 10 shots. The opening message saying “This battery cannot be used” is not at all reassuring, even if it is easily cleared. Perhaps the “E” on the Panasonic battery code explains all this – perhaps it stands for something like “Electronic” and this explains the error message and rapid exhaustion with little warning.

All-in-all I am pretty disappointed with this battery – it is not dirt cheap at around half the price of the Panasonic version and while I shall use it and keep it as a back up battery I don’t think that I can rely on it. It certainly does not live up to its billing on the packaging of “Superior lasting performance”.

I suppose that it is possible that the battery is not a genuine Inov8 battery and that someone is selling cheap imitations repackaged in Inov8 packaging, but I have no way of telling – of course if anyone from Inov8 reads this review and wants me to try one from them direct I would be only too happy to oblige.

Canon G9 – test of image quality after “Lens error, camera restart” incident

2009-07-07T23:25:00.005+01:00

In my last posting I worked through what I did when my G9 suddenly experienced a “Lens error, camera restart” incident – go here for more details. At the time I did a quick image quality test to check that all was well. I have now done a more detailed test and here is my experience.

I am about to go away for a week and want to take a compact camera with me and the G9 would be ideal, but after the recent incident I was only willing to do this if I could convince myself that the image quality had not been impaired by the fairly robust treatment I had had to give the lens to get it working again.

In order to do this I decided to try to replicate an image that I took a few months ago that I was happy with and which had printed up well. This is an image of a window from my local church which has quite a lot of fine detail all over the image – the original image is below.

I looked up the original EXIF data to replicate it; this was ISO 80, f5.0 with aperture priority, auto focusing with a focal length of approximately 29mm.

This afternoon I set out to replicate the image, which is shown below.

Apart from it being a different season (there are leaves on the tree now), totally different light conditions and a slightly shorter focal length (25mm vs 29mm) the image above is good enough for my test.

I synchronised the settings in Lightroom so that the same settings that might affect image sharpness etc were used on both; such as clarity, contrast, vibrance, sharpening and noise reduction etc.

I have looked over the whole of both images and found that the image quality on the post incident image is as good as the earlier one – in fact it may be better… I have checked centre to edge and the two 100% extracts of the same part of the image below show that there is no loss of detail in the post incident image and the auto focusing is working fine.

Conclusion
The G9 is behaving itself again and its image quality is as good as it was beforehand, so I shall be taking it with me on the trip.

Canon G9 – “Lens error, restart camera” error

2009-07-02T21:07:00.001+01:00

I went to use my Canon G9 compact digital camera recently after a long lay off for it while I explored the Panasonic G1. I charged up the battery and turned it on just before putting it in my suitcase for a three day trip – all I got was some whirrs and bleeps and a message on screen saying “Lens error, restart camera”…

The lens shutter opened, the lens projected a bit then stopped, with the whirrs and bleeps and then a message on the LCD screen saying “Lens error, restart camera”. It then turned itself off. The photo below shows the screen error message (please excuse the finger marks - I was in a hurry) and the one below that the position the lens stopped in.

Not panicking I decided to turn it off, leave it a few minutes and try again - no change. I tried it a couple more times; still no change. I then took out the battery and left it for 10 minutes; still no change.

Since it was now time to catch the train I took out the battery and left it on the shelf with its lens partially extended to sulk and consider its future until I came back and picked up the Panasonic G1 instead.

When I returned three days later from my trip I popped the battery back in and tried again – no change. I tried a few times with the odd prod of the lens to try to encourage it to move. Nothing happened so I left it and had a search on Google for solutions.

The general message I got from various sites was that Canon was unlikely to be interested in fixing it as they nearly always claim that this sort of problem is due to sand/grit etc in the mechanism or being dropped and hence not covered by any sort of warranty.

My camera is about 18 months old, but very lightly used – it has only taken about 500 photos as it has only really been used as a back up to my DSLRs and rarely needed. I have taken a good deal of care of it and when not in use it has been kept in its Lowepro D-Pods 30 case that I reviewed earlier and that review can be found – here. I have certainly never dropped it or abused it.

I’m not wildly patient and after reading about the problem and its solution on several web sites I followed the most comprehensive advice that I found – here.

The 7 Fixes...
I followed the suggested fixes - which as you would imagine are progressively more risky – through to the final level – Fix 7.

Fix 1 - Essentially what I did initially – turn it off and on again.

Fix 2 - Again essentially what I did next – taking the battery and memory card out; putting in a new battery and then trying again.

I rummaged around in the loft to find the USB AV cable as recommended when I reached Fix 3.

Fix 3 - Insert the AV cable in the camera and turn it on – the idea is that this turns off the screen and diverts a little extra power to the lens motor and that might do the trick. It didn’t for me.

Fix 4 - Lay the camera on its back and press the shutter release while turning on the power – this might trick the camera into moving the lens as it tries to focus while powering up – didn’t work for me though.

Fix 5 - Blow compressed air around the lens to try to shift any particles clogging up the works. I didn’t have any compressed air, but I do have a large Giottos “Hurricane” blower which I tried – to no avail.

Fix 6 - Tap the USB cover on the camera against a hard surface a few times – This is getting into serious “you do this at your own risk” territory as it may make things works or solve the problem but damage something else inside the camera in the process. Not feeling as if Ihad much to lose I gave it a go – again to no effect.

Fix 7 - “Try forcing the lens” is the advice. It could really do terminal damage, but if you don’t fancy a big repair bill and the camera is out of warranty then … I didn’t feel that I had much to lose so I did some extensive wriggling of the lens, pushing it and pulling it – all the while listening for the telltale click that says it has reseated itself. I thought I heard it a couple of times and occasionally the lens moved and the lens changed the position it ended up in, but for probably about twenty tries I kept getting the same error message.

Naturally I got a little less gentle as time progressed and eventually the lens closed as I pushed it back in against a flat surface.

When I turned it back on the lens came out and protruded much further than before, but it was still not right. After going through the cycle around five more times the screen lit up and instead of the error message I got a camera settings screen – progress at last.

I pressed the shutter release and the flash fired and an image appeared on the screen – but the image was very out of focus. I tried zooming which worked and then gently (now I was beginning to think that it might be OK I became more cautions) wriggled the lens about.

I turned the camera off and the lens retracted and the shutter closed – when I turned it on it seemed better, although the familiar "Powershot G9" turn on screen did not come up; just the camera settings screen.

After a few more tries the camera started working normally again and the focus seemed OK.

I took the camera out for a quick test and viewed the images in Lightroom at 100% - they seem OK.

Result
After several on/off cycles it is still working fine – so it looks as I have brought it back to life; but more by luck than skill I feel. In reality most of the movements I tried with the lens were firm but not sharp shocks or knocks.

Maintaining and upgrading my desktop PC for photography – Part 4: How fast is my system?

2009-05-22T19:38:00.006+01:00

Having upgraded and reduced the noise levels from my PC I decided to ask myself how fast my three and a half year old Intel P4 based PC is compared with a reasonably priced new one…

There are lots of bespoke PC speed benchmarks used by various reviewers, but most of them are either pretty esoteric or focused on PC gamers; my interest is really how quickly I can get through Lightroom and Photoshop jobs.

Looking through the various benchmarks I decided that Custom PC magazine’s benchmark suite (downloadable from – here) with its GIMP based speed test was a reasonable way to compare my system with its Intel P4 CPU with the current generation being tested by Custom PC.

The screenshot below shows the results from my system.

Essentially my system is slow; very slow when compared with modern processors.

The GIMP result ("Image editing" in the results screenshot above) of 370 compared with Custom PC’s measurements of 1,135 for their recommended Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 processor, which was overclockable to 1,623 in their test (May 2009, pg 79 – see table below)

Double click the graph above if you want to see it in more detail - the blue part of the bar is the speed for the CPU at its rated clock speed; the red part represents the speed the Custom PC managed to achieve by overclocking the processor to something like its maximum stable clock speed - in the case of the E8400 the base clock speed is 3GHz and the overclocked speed was 4.4GHz

In theory a PC using the E8400 should be 3x - 4x faster in my image processing applications than my current outfit.

At this point I decided to get a new computer as the Foxconn motherboard would not take the twin core processors, despite being an Intel LGA775 socket system. Since I was going to have to change the motherboard I decided to go for a new system – on top of that I decided to build my own to optimise the re-use of existing components, make as quiet a PC as reasonable from the start and to build in an upgrade path for future upgrades.

As an extra incentive modern power supplies should be more energy efficient, and the processors and hard disks should be as well.

That will be the subject of my next upgrading posting – I will work out some “real life” tests to run on my old system so that I can convince myself the upgrade is worth it.

Conclusion
My PC is slow and it is time to update!

Maintaining and upgrading my desktop PC for photography – Part 3: Upgrade the main components

2009-05-20T22:45:00.005+01:00

Having done some simple software system maintenance which successfully boosted the system’s performance and improved the system and CPU cooling and reduced the PC's noise levels it is now time to think about further hardware improvements.

There are several hardware areas that can be reasonably easily upgraded without any specialist knowledge or much risk to the system as a whole; and they are sensibly priced. These are:

System memory (RAM)

Upgrading a USB 2 external hard disk to an eSATA interface

The main internal hard drive

The graphics card for a twin monitor system

System memory
It is generally accepted that one of the most effective ways of boosting performance is to add in more system memory (RAM). Since I already had all four slots on the motherboard filled with 4x 512mb memory modules giving me 2gb in total I needed to change at least some of the memory. I have always been a bit mystified why if there was 2gb of memory installed the system only thought there was 1.5gb (as reported by right-clicking “My Computer” and looking at the “Properties” option under the “General” tab), but that’s PCs for you.

Windows XP will only recognise up to 4gb of RAM with the system’s “Physical Address Extension” turned on (which it is in Service Pack 2 onwards), unless you move to a 64 bit version of XP or Vista, so there is no point going above 4gb.

I like to use memory from a reputable supplier, and Kingston and Crucial came immediately to mind. Crucial have a neat system scanner utility [downloadable from – here] that scans your system and recommends compatible upgrades, which they guarantee will work with your system if you buy it from Crucial. I ran “Crucial Scan” and it recommended a set of 2x 2gb memory modules for my system, giving 4gb in total. I was slightly wary as the manual for the motherboard (a Foxconn 925XE7AA) says that it only supports up to 1gb memory densities, but with the Crucial guarantee I decided to risk it – when the manual was written I suspect that 2gb memory densities were not available. I ordered it, along with an anti-static wrist strap to use while installing it. They arrived in the post a couple of days later, along with a free 2gb Lexar USB memory stick – all for £38 – not exactly a huge investment.

I installed it with the usual concerns about zapping the entire system with static or some act of clumsiness; but using the anti-static wrist strap, natural material clothing and avoiding static creating environments I installed the memory. This was not without alarm, however… It did not simply succumb and meekly sit into the memory slots; no it resisted and I thought that I was going to damage the motherboard, so I re-read the instructions a couple of times and noticed in a diagram that I should be pushing at the ends of the card, not in the middle where logic told me I should. After a bit of jiggling around they both eventually popped into place.

When I turned it all on it booted up fine and on checking I could see that more memory was installed – again rather puzzlingly 2.75gb, not the full 4gb. I gather that this figure is after some system overheads have been deducted, such as graphics cards etc; but in any case it nearly doubled the available RAM.

Did it make a difference?
Well it is not immediately obvious – the system seems more resilient with more applications open so it is almost certainly working, but I guess that there is some optimisation I have yet to do in Photoshop and Lightroom, but I am confident that if I end up with some huge multi-layers image files in Photoshop the extra memory will come into its own.

Upgrade external hard disk to an eSATA interface
eSATA is a connection standard just like USB, FireWire etc. It is based on the Serial ATA (SATA) connection initially used inside computers for internal hard drives as a replacement for IDE standard drives; connecting directly into sockets on the motherboard. SATA disks can be used as external hard drives using SATA enclosures, but most of them use the USB2 standard interconnect to connect too the PC.

eSATA stands for external SATA. By installing an eSATA plate in the computer case connected to a spare socket on the motherboard you can create an external connection for an eSATA enabled external hard disk. This should boost the connection speed from USB2’s max of 480 mbits/sec to 1.5 or 3gbits/sec depending on the SATA generation (I or II) used. The cable length, however, can only be about 1-1.5m and no power is available so the connected disk will need its own power supply. The diagram below, from sata-io.org, shows the relative typical interface speeds for the common inter connection types – 1394 is better known as FireWire.

This performance boost seems worthwhile, especially if Photoshop is using an external hard disk as a scratch disk in your set up, as it is in mine.

I chose to buy an high quality Icy Box 351 3.5” SATA enclosure (about £35 on eBay) offering USB2 and eSATA, which come with an eSATA plate and connector, which I planned to use as part of my hard disk replacement process, as described in the next section.

I installed the plate using the same precautions against static as I used for the memory, along with an extra set of 4x USB ports for good measure. Both installations were very straight forward – the eSATA plate is the one with the red cable coming out of it in the photo below.

Internal hard disk upgrade
My main internal hard disk has been doing sterling duty for 3½ years and I should probably replace it as a precaution in any case as it occasionally makes ominous grinding noises on start up. But in that 3½ years technology has moved on apace and now faster, bigger, lower energy and cheaper disks are around.

After looking around it seems the Western Digital currently have a good reputation. In their range the current best price/performance model seems to be the 640gb disks, which come in a low energy “Green” variant. I bought a pair Western Digital 640gb Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm 16MB Cache - OEM Green Power from eBuyer for about £50 each – one to transfer the system hard drive to and one for the eSATA box.

To transfer to the new hard drive I wanted to use one of the disk image transfer systems as I did not fancy reinstalling all my software with all the tweaks that have accumulated over the years. To do this I chose Acronis’ Migrate Easy 7.0 – they offer a 15 day free trial (from – here) which was all I needed to try it out. The software was easy to use and transferred the 200gb disk to the new one in the eSATA box in about 2 hours – and it worked fine when I swapped them over.

Twin monitor system
I have wanted to upgrade my system to a twin monitor system for some time. I decided to buy a 24” Dell Ultrasharp 2408WFP monitor and keep my old NEC MultiSync 1850X as the second screen. To use both in DVI format I needed a new graphics card with two DVI outputs; not knowing a lot about graphics cards and not planning to do any really graphics intensive activities like gaming I rather randomly chose an Asus EAH3650 with 256mb of DDR3 memory.

It all worked well enough, although the first Dell monitor arrived and went pink within a day or so, but Dell replaced it without demur by overnight courier so I can forgive them that quality issue this time, but I found out that I can only profile one of the monitors with my ColorVision Spyder 2 monitor profiling system – so I chose to profile the Dell and accept the inaccuracy on the NEC – not ideal and not something I had thought about in advance.

I have also found that there are plenty of peculiarities about using a pair of unmatched monitors, but one free utility I have found useful is the MultiMonitor TaskBar – available from here – which allows easy switching of applications to the other monitor and adds a task bar to the second monitor.

Having gone to some effort to reduce the PC’s noise the fan in the new graphics card increased it a little…

Conclusions…
I have a quieter machine which is a bit quicker and more nimble, now with twin monitors.

Generic replacement battery for the Panasonic G1

2009-05-19T21:43:00.002+01:00

In my previous postings about the Panasonic G1 I have noted the high cost of Panasonic’s DMW-BLB13 replacement batteries for the G1. I refused to pay the price, waiting for the better known replacement battery manufacturers to come up with their own versions. These are now coming through…

OEM camera manufacturers’ prices for spare batteries for their cameras are nearly always very high and I have for years bought generic batteries for my digital cameras and never had a problem. As an added bonus the generics also tend to have a larger power capacity than the OEM versions, so in theory should provide more images per charge.

I do, however, make sure that I buy either a reputable replacement battery brand such as Hahnel, Hama, Ansmann, Uniross or inov8, or a reputable dealer who offers a guarantee and has a reputation to lose. I tend to avoid the no name versions of unknown provenance available through eBay from the Far East.

I have, however, been monitoring eBay for an early sign that people are making batteries for the G1 as the Far Eastern versions tend to show up first there and herald the arrival through more reliable channels.

Sure enough for the last few weeks my automated search for the battery on eBay has been producing results for versions of unknown provenance, but today a version from inov8 showed up - more details about inov8 from the website - here.

The versions available from the Far East range in price from £13 upwards – the inov8 version is priced initially at £26-95 through a UK based supplier, which while still a bit more than I would expect to pay is pretty much in the right ballpark. So I decided to buy a spare.

When it arrives I’ll test it out and report on how it works.

Update on my experience with my Panasonic Lumix G1 – three months on

2009-04-19T17:59:00.004+01:00

It is about three months since I posted the last review of my experience with my Panasonic Lumix G1 with its two lenses – the 14-45mm and 45-200mm zooms. This posting is an update on how I feel three months on from the initial enthusiasm of buying and trying a new camera to the reality of which camera do I choose to use every day?

It is quite simple really – three months on I still like the G1 very much. I find that it is the camera I pick up to take for a walk, to wander into the garden to take a photo of a flower or to take a photo for a blog posting, or simply want to take out on the off chance that a photo opportunity might arise – in short it has become my every day “go to” camera. The twin lens set up covers most needs and its compact lightness makes if an easy companion.

What have I learned about it in the last three months?

Using the live view screen
I have been surprised how easily I have moved from religiously using the view finder to frame every photo to mostly using the liveview screen on the back of the camera. I find that I now usually use it in preference to the electronic viewfinder (evf); not because the evf is no good, but because I am developing a new way of working with the G1.

I find myself holding the camera above my head and on the ground to seek out new angles; taking the articulated screen for granted. I also use the camera to look around corners – for instance rather than unplugging my computer monitor and dragging it away from the wall to read its serial number I simply stuck the G1 behind it with the ISO turned up to 1,000 and used the articulated screen to search out the label and photograph it. It is much quicker…

In many circumstances I find that the eyepiece sensor is too sensitive when using the camera in tight spaces (such as the use above) so I have turned off the sensor (via Custom Menu 1) and use the dedicated button to switch between the evf and LCD screen as needed.

Handling
The more I use the camera the more I like the handling. Direct access to ISO settings with a dedicated button and the “My Menu” feature all speed up my most commonly used features.

I have occasionally had to resort to the manual to work out how to do something – for instance how to scroll through pictures on the camera’s LCD while keeping the enlargement I wanted (done via the press button in the hand grip) to check focus.

Camera strap
I have found myself using a conventional neck strap to carry the camera about – I normally use Op-Tech quick release straps on my cameras, but they are too big and bulky for the G1, so for the time being the best strap I have been able to find is the one that came with my Canon G9. This, of course, does not have a quick release option so I have bought some small 10mm quick release clips to try, but have not yet got around to making up a strap with them.

Spare battery
I have learnt that I can live without a spare battery until someone comes up with a much cheaper generic version that Panasonic’s ridiculously over priced OEM version. 300+ images per charge is enough for me.

Tripod mount
On my cameras I use various Arca type quick release components and all my DSLRs have either Kirk or Really Right Stuff L brackets on them. Kirk do not make a G1 plate yet and RRS make a small bi-directional plate for the G1. Since importing direct from the US to the UK is now so expensive (a combination of low exchange rate, high import taxes, duties and fees that can double the price of a small component like this) that I have stopped doing it, so I tried out a generic Wimberley P-5 camera plate. This worked fine until I wanted to change the battery, at which point I realised that the plate partially covers the battery compartment door. I have now resorted to using a basic small universal Kirk camera plate that comes with their BH-3 ball heads. This is just small enough not to foul the battery compartment door.

Image quality
Image quality is excellent, but I still find it a bit lacking in contrast compared with my Canon 40D, mainly in low light. On the other hand I find I am taking photos in light that I would not normally bother to carry the heavier DSLR kit around in, so it may just be a perception problem – in any case I am finding that more and more of the images that make it into my photo portfolio are taken with the G1. The photo below was taken on a visit to a local pottery after a rain shower – I would not normally have taken a camera with me, but I took the G1 and this photo really grew on me…

I continue to only use RAW capture and I pretty much do all my image processing through Lightroom 2 and I am very happy with the results, with the occasional help from Photoshop.

I routinely use ISO ratings up to 1,250 and, Yes, I would prefer there to be less noise, but to be honest in the days of film I would not have taken most of the photos at all and the only reason I normally need the higher ISO setting is because I am using it in low light situations where I would not normally have a camera on me in the past. So it is not really an issue for me – it just shows me how much the G1 is allowing me to take photos outside of my usual range.

Dust
I hate dealing with dust on image sensors – so far this has not been an issue with the G1. I change the lenses over regularly, but carefully in as dust free environment as I can find, and so far I have not seen a dust spot on any images I have looked at. Panasonic’s (thank you Olympus I presume) dust reduction system clearly works.

So dust has not been an issue I am happy to report.

Conclusion
I am very happy with the G1 – it encourages me to take more photos and the people who see them like the results and that is all that I can really ask of a camera.

I look forward to trying out new lenses as the come along.

Update on keeping my Epson 4800 printer clog free

2009-04-19T12:51:00.004+01:00

I have not written anything for about my clogging battle with my Epson 4800 inkjet printer for several months because there has not been much to report, but after a pretty clog free period since Christmas 2008 I thought it was time to give an update…

Essentially I turned my printer off for a couple of months through November and December 2008, but as the New Year approached I wanted to print again. I did not expect it to work straight away as the reason for turning it off in early November was that nozzle clogs had appeared after a period of not running Harvey Head Cleaner regularly due to pressure of work etc.

Sure enough several colours were missing and I ran through the gamut of clog recovery techniques, but was not getting too far quickly enough so I took a deep breath and ran a Power Clean cycle – the first time I ever have as I have always been advised to avoid them if at all possible. I then immediately ran a second Power Clean cycle quite by accident – I meant to tell it to run a nozzle check and hit the wrong button on the printer’s control panel…I desperately tried to stop it by turning off the printer, rebooting the computer etc but nothing deterred it; it just simply carried on from where it had got to in its cycle. I was not at all happy as the two cycles used 308ml of ink between them…

When I did eventually run a nozzle check all was OK except that the maintenance tank now needed changing (which I did using the technique I posted earlier – [here]) and the Light Magenta (LM) was completely missing. I ran a couple of prints and still it was missing, but the cartridge was nearly empty so I put in afresh one, ran a single cleaning cycle and all was perfect – not a single line missing in any of the nozzle check patterns.

Since then all has pretty much been sweetness and light!

Since the New year I have been religiously following my clog free method of printing a nozzle check once a day using Harvey Head Cleaner; print a full spectrum print either via Autoprint or a real photo at least every third day; all the while keeping the printer sealed in a all encompassing cover with a damp sponge inside the paper tray to keep the humidity inside the printer above 40% - for most of this year it has hovered around the 45% mark. Full details of my anti clogging regime can be found – [here].

I have had a single bout of colour channel loss – this was the Photo Black (PK) channel. Essentially running daily auto nozzle checks I had not noticed that there had been a paper jam and nothing had printed for a few days; this combined with the sponge drying out leading to lower humidity caused the problem. The paper had not fed because the tray holding the sponge had slipped down into the paper tray impeding the paper loading mechanism – to stop that happening again I put in a blob of Blu Tack (which is easily removable if need be) into the compartment to stop the tray sliding down.

A couple of weeks later PK disappeared again and this time the printer monitor was indicating that PK was running low, so I changed it. It immediately came back and there has been no problem again.

During all this time the printer was taking it upon itself to run its “auto something or other” cycle every week or so – each time using up about 9.5ml of ink; all to no purpose as far as I can see – see [here] for my previous observations and frustrations on this bit of the 4800’s story.

Conclusions
The power cleaning cycle seems to have cleared out the system admirably. This followed by my anti-clogging regime has kept the system working fine except when the regimen went wrong and when a cartridge had nearly run out. Which does rather reinforce my observations over the last couple of years that the most likely colour to give a problem is the one with the lowest ink levels in its cartridge – making me think that there is still something about ink levels and cartridge pressure to sort out…

Eliet Minor shredder – 1 year on report

2009-03-29T16:11:00.002+01:00

Around a year ago I published a couple of reviews on the Eliet Minor garden shredder. I thought that it would be useful to post my experiences with the shredder over the last year or so.

A year ago I bought an Eliet Minor garden shredder and concluded that I was happy with its performance – go here to read my previous reviews.

Am I still happy with it?
After a full year of use I am still very happy with the shredder and do not regret buying it at all. It gets through a prodigious amount of material in an hour or two so I have not had to use it too often, which was one of the reasons I bought it in the first place.

Does it produce good compost?
Yes – the shreddings compost down quickly and while some long’ish (about 6”) woody bits do find their way through the multi-purpose screen these are either easy to pick out and feed back through the standard screen or can be left in – they are quite heavily abraded as they pass through the blades and I have found that they tend to rot down more quickly than if they were simply cut to the same length and put on the compost heap.

I have, however, learnt a few things about the Minor in the last year:

Using the screens
I have found it necessary to swap between screens quite regularly as the standard screen does not like much in the way of wet and mushy material going through it – it quickly clogs up. It is not entirely obvious, but the multi purpose screen only fits in one way round and the as supplied standard screen fits more easily one way round than the other. To help swap them over quickly I have found it helpful to mark the top of the screens so that I put them in the right way round – as in the photo below.

Both screens are robust, being made from solid steel and tight fitting. I have thus found it helpful to have a small lump hammer and a crow bar to hand to speed up the removal and fitting process with gentle taps and tugs here and there to facilitate the changeover.

I have mislaid the screen securing pins a couple of times when changing over screens – on the last occasion I found one in the compost heap…

Really, really mushy material
On a couple of occasions I have wanted to shred the wet and mushy contents at the bottom of the pile. These even blocked up the multi purpose screen, so I simply take out the screen and push it through the blades without any screen in place. Since the area is protected by the micro-switched grill I can not see that this is dangerous. In any case I have only had to put a very small amount of material through this way.

Safety switches
I can confirm that the micro-switches on the grid protecting the outlet and the lever near the inlet both work. On occasion I have accidentally knocked the lever near the inlet and it immediately cuts off the engine. A couple of times the engine has been reluctant to start because one of the micro-switch’s contacts are not made properly. Just popping them back into place by re-closing the lever or grid sorts out the problem.

Is there anything not to put into the shredder?
Apart from the obvious things like stones the only plant material that I have found to avoid are Phormiums’ tough, sword-shaped leaves. These long fibrous leaves have properties a bit like flax (hence their colloquial name of New Zealand flax) and you could probably make rope from them. In any case in large quantities (we have several in the garden and they produce armfuls of prunings at this time of year) they tend to act like rope around a propeller, so I either feed them in very sparingly with a large amount of really woody material or use my old Scheppach Lonos 2 to crush them up enough for the compost heap.

Otherwise it takes everything in its stride.

Be a bit careful about what you shred…
With the low material flow rates through my older shredders I never found any fumes coming off shredded material to be a problem. With the Minor, however, with its large flow rates combined with its truly shredding action I found that shredding a large old Ivy plant caused some fumes to avoid. The shredder cuts finely and exposes a large surface area of material for composting, but this can also release a lot of fume if the material is prone to produce it – the Ivy clearly did. A bit of research indicated that shredding fresh Laurel leaves can also produce an unpleasant fume, so I now let Laurel cuttings go brown before shredding them.

Health and safety
Through long years of working in engineering environments I automatically wear safety glasses when using anything like this. I also wear ear defenders, along with a dust mask when shredding dry material. I double glove (eg a pair of thin nitrile coated inner gloves and a large pair of heavy duty outers) as I find that to keep up with the machine’s appetite for material it is impractical to check what you are picking up too closely and we have a lot of seriously thorny material in our garden. This solution keeps pretty much everything out.

Starting the engine
My Minor is fitted with the Briggs & Stratton engine option. This is started with a pull cord and as with all my petrol engined garden machinery it can be a bit reluctant to start after a long lay off. I don’t find this machine to be any better or worse than others in its ease of starting. When hot it restarts easily with a single pull of the cord.

Also…
Remember that this is a petrol driven engine and that it produces exhaust fumes. Standing by it while it is running for a long time can be a bit unpleasant, so I take regular breaks and work in a well ventilated (draughty even) area.

Conclusion
I am very happy with my choice and anticipate many years of service from it.

Maintaining and upgrading my desktop PC for photography – Part 2: Making the PC quieter and improving CPU performance

2009-03-28T07:56:00.002Z

Having done some simple software system maintenance which successfully boosted the system’s performance I decided that before doing much in the way of hardware improvements I would like to make the PC quieter; which led me down another speed enhancing route that I had not foreseen.

I watched a series of videos on making a PC quieter on Quiet PC’s web site; go - here - if you would like to watch them.

These videos did several things; they made me much more confident about digging around in the guts of my PC and gave me a whole lot of clues as to how to quieten my PC. Essentially most of the noise from a PC comes from the various cooling fans used on the case, CPU, graphics card, power supply etc etc.

One tip from the videos was that there is usually a switch in the BIOS that can turn on a CPU fan control circuit which will vary the fan speed (and thus noise) with CPU temperature. After a bit of delving I found the control in my BIOS and turned it on. This certainly worked and every time I turned on the PC from then on the fan started out at full (noisy) tilt and backed off after a few seconds – which initially made me think the PC had died. This made the system much quieter, but highlighted that the single 80mm case fan was pretty noisy.

To try to see how much work the fans were doing I found a really useful free utility called “SpeedFan” which essentially reads all sorts of useful information on temperature, fan speed and power supply voltages which it displays in real time. If you want to have a look at it and download a copy then go – here - where you can also make a donation to support Alfredo Milani Comparetti’s work. Usefully SpeedFan puts a digital readout of the CPU temperature in Window's system tray so that it is easy to keep an eye on it while running other programmes.

With the variable CPU fan speed function turned on I became aware that it was varying quite a lot – and the variable noise levels were almost worse than the previous flat out fan noise, but it did tell me whenever the CPU was getting hot. This audible warning combined with SpeedFan’s output made me aware that the CPU was getting pretty hot during intensive Lightroom and Photoshop work and that the hot CPU periods seemed to coincide with some of the sudden unexplained slow downs I was still experiencing with Lightroom.

The screen shot below shows that the CPU was regularly getting up to around 60°C and was usually around 47-50°C when doing anything much. It also shows that my power supply voltages are nearly out of spec, which might also contribute to erratic performance.

I read that Intel P4 CPUs don’t burn out when the get too hot – they just slow down until they cool down again and I guessed that this might be happening inside my machine.

So to reduce the noise and to improve the CPU’s cooling I decided to change the CPU cooler fan from the noisy Foxconn one that came with it for an Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro, using Arctic Silver Ceramique heatsink compound and Arctic Silver’s Arcticlean cleaner to remover the old thermal paste from the CPU and prepare it for the new installation. I also bought three Hiper 80mm case fans, along with silicone Acousti mounts to reduce the transmission of fan vibrations to the case. These replaced the single input fan and added in two output fans which the case had the fittings for, but were not installed before – thus drawing more hot air out of the case. All of this cost about £40 from eBuyer and eBay.

With a huge amount of trepidation I swapped over the CPU cooler – it was much easier than I thought although I am not convinced that I have got the attachment clips in place totally correctly. The clips rotate and I could not find a positive click stop to tell me when they were tightened properly, but it seems to work.

The photos below show the old Foxconn CPU cooler (along with the original set up before I started any of this work and the empty fan installation locations) and the new Freezer 7 Pro cooler and exhaust fans installed (along with various other modifications that I will be talking about in later postings).

What was the result?
The whole PC is now much quieter, but I think I can make it quieter still by reducing the voltage to the case fans a little, which reputedly reduces the noise a lot without reducing the airflow much. I plan to use some Zalman Fanmate variable fan speed controllers to achieve this.

More crucially, according to SpeedFan, the CPU now operates at around 40-44°C most of the time and does not go much above 50°C when running intensive photo processing work – so it looks as if the new CPU cooler is much quieter and, along with the increased case cooling from the extra fans, is reducing the CPU temperature by 7-10°C. This does seem to reduce the unexplained slow downs while using Lightroom further, but not quite completely.

All in all I am happy with these modifications – the PC is much more pleasant to live with and works better.

Maintaining and upgrading my desktop PC for photography - Part 1: simple system optimisation and maintenance

2009-02-23T22:47:00.006Z

There are a few really simple and essentially safe tweaks that you can make to the set up of your PC which may improve performance immensely. Here are three things I did to improve my PC’s performance.

Over time Windows allows new programmes to make all sorts of decisions on your behalf which may benefit the software being installed, but are detrimental to the PCs overall performance. Tidying up these will improve overall system performance as well as speeding up boot up times. There are some programmes that you may want to run automatically, such as anti-virus scans, which may have a bad effect on system performance when they are actually running – you should look at these as well.

There are two key areas to look at; the programmes that install themselves, or part of themselves, on start up and various services that are turned on when you start up the computer.

Start up programmes
To look at what programmes the system is starting up (and hence using up memory) when you turn on you need to run “msconfig”. As far as I know the only way to run this is from the DOS command line via the “Run” option in the start up panel (see screen show below)

Type in “msconfig” at the prompt and press "OK", as in the screen shot below

The “System Configuration Utility” window will open; choose the “Startup” tab – see screen shot below

Here you will find all the programmes that Windows is starting up for you every time you turn on your computer. Some are essential, but many are not necessary and just slow down the system. I worked my way through the list – using Google to check on the more obscure programme names and turned off about half of them by unticking the boxes next to the name of the programme (as you can see in the screen shot above). This is a pretty safe process as you are not deleting them, just telling the system not to start them up when it starts up. If you make a mistake then just tick the box again and it will be reinstated the next time you boot up. I accidentally turned off the ColorVision utility that loads up the monitor’s profile on start up, which was easily remedied by turning it back on.

The changes will take place when you next re-boot – when you exit “msconfig” it will ask you if you want to restart or not. When you reboot a window will pop up telling you that you have made changes. To stop it doing this every time you start up just tick the box in the bottom left hand corner before pressing “OK” – see screen shot below.

Doing this will both speed up your computer’s booting up time and make more system memory available for doing things you actually want it to do, boosting performance.

System Services
Another area where time and system resources are used up is in the system “Services” department. This is also a place where inter-programme conflicts may be set up. To see what is going on here right-click on the “My Computer” icon on your desktop and click on “Manage”. This will bring up the “Computer Management” window; see screenshot below:

Click on the “Services” option under “Services and Applications”. This will open the services window as shown in the screen shot below.

This lists all the services that are operating – they are either automatically turned on (Automatic is displayed in the “Startup Type” column), disabled or turned on manually as needed.

To change the status of the service right clock the name and choose “Properties” (as in the screen shot above).

The properties for the service you chose will appear in the window – as in the screen shot below. To change the startup action go to the “Startup type:” box where you will have a choice of three drop down options; Automatic, Manual or Disabled. Click on the one you want and press OK.

Work you way down the list – some are clearly redundant, some clearly essential and many need to be investigated as to whether they are necessary or not. Some are obviously downright dangerous – such as the old Symantec anti-virus services that were left over from when I changed over to AVG. Again the service is not deleted by the action and you can turn them on again if you make a mistake.

When I worked through this list (it took me about half an hour) I turned off about half of the services with no ill effects.

What difference does it make?
I have not done any fancy timing or benchmark testing to see what difference these changes have made but boot up is now much faster and the applications I use feel much more nimble and responsive.

If I needed convincing about what a difference it could make I then run “msconfig” on an old laptop which I had tried to resurrect a few months ago but it was so slow that it was almost completely unusable. It only has 256mb of RAM and I only turned off about half a dozen start up applications, but it totally reinvigorated the machine. I was delighted and amazed by how such a simple action could completely turn around the machine's performance, easily proving to me the value of this sort of simple and safe system maintenance.

How come it took me some many years to find out?

Checking background software operation
When using Lightroom and other processor intensive applications I often found that it slowed down hugely for no apparent reason and started ignoring two thirds of my mouse clicks. I usually rebooted at this stage but thought that it was time I found the problem and fixed it.

What I found, via the “Windows Task Manager” (reached via the “ctrl-alt-del” keyboard shortcut), was that my AVG anti-virus software was running a scheduled whole system background virus check – which, when I knew what to look for, I could see happening via the icon in the system tray. As you can see in the screen shot below a silver right arrow appears on the AVG icon when it is running.

The solution is either to change the scheduled scan or to right-click on the icon and choose the “pause all scans” option which turns off the scan while you are doing the processor intensive work. This paused state shows up in the icon as a classic pause button in silver – see screen shot below.

Results
These three simple and safe actions have eliminated the extreme slow down I experienced during scheduled scans and made the whole system feel much more responsive and quicker. In fact much like it was when it was new.
So this is a good start to the programme; now onto the next stage …

Maintaining and upgrading my desktop PC for photography

2009-02-21T07:58:00.005Z

As a digital photographer I spend far too much time in front of my PC and I would like to make that time as pleasant and productive as possible. Recently my PC has slowed down and I have had to decide whether to get my old PC running smoothly again or buy a new one – for reasons of both economy and trying not to waste more of the world’s resources unnecessarily I have decided to maintain and upgrade my existing system. This posting is the first in the series that I shall be writing over the next few weeks charting my course and the results.

I do nearly all my photographic work on a desktop PC running Lightroom and Photoshop CS3, along with a myriad of other software I have accumulated over the years.

The desktop I use was a pretty good system back in July 2005 when I bought it – just over 3½ years ago. It was built out of standard components to my rough specification by a small British company which no longer exists…

The main specs for the computer were:

Foxconn 925XE7AA motherboard – supports LGA775 Prescott-T processors
Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz CPU
2gb DDR2 RAM
200gb Maxtor DiamondMax 6L200MO SATA hard disk drive
XFX graphics card with the Nvidia GeForce 6200 TurboCache chip set and 256mb
Windows XP operating system, with Service Pack 2
+ LG DVD drive, 3.5” floppy drive, memory card reader and lots of USB 2 and Firewire ports
All in a tower case with lots of expansion options
+ the NEC MultiSync LCD1850X monitor I already had

Over the 3½ years I have kept the operating system up to date and added in a Pioneer DVD drive to supplement the LG, added in a card to provide more USB 2 ports, attached a Wacom Intuos 3 graphics tablet, hooked up various external hard disk drives and scanners via USB 2 and given up using the internal memory card reader as it was very unreliable in favour of an external Dazzle card reader; as well as investing in a ColorVision Spyder 2 to profile my monitor.

The only time I have had to get inside the case was to install the Pioneer DVD and USB 2 ports card, and to replace the power supply when it died after about 2 years.

Needless to say I have tried lots of software, installed and then moved on many packages and generally cluttered my system up with unused and potentially conflicting software – including changing from Symantec to AVG anti-virus software. I have kept an eye on disk fragmentation and run a couple of defrags, and tinkered a bit with registry cleaning applications, but I am generally wary of playing with the software guts of the machine as I do not really feel I know enough to not do more harm than good.

During this time digital image files have grown and grown and inevitably the PC has become a bit sluggish, and on occasion downright unusable, needing frequent re-boots to clear persistent problems, usually just slowness, which when editing large image files is a major cause of dissatisfaction.

Recently I realised that the time to do something had come – should I bite the bullet and buy a new system, or try to get my current one back to new and upgrade bits that would make a difference? I also wanted to upgrade to a twin monitor system for work with Lightroom and Photoshop.

I am reasonably confident that I can take out and put in bits of kit without zapping them with static, but would not class myself as any sort of computer technician, nor really confident that I have the time or patience to work out what the relative value for money would be for the huge number of options available for my needs; which are to make a system specifically optimised for working with digital images (not video – yet).

Luckily my brother is a computer consultant and offered to advise – without his help I would not know what to do, nor feel confident that I could find a solution if something goes wrong.

So which option to take?
For a new system:

3½ years down the technology track should produce a big performance boost
Low power "Green" component options could reduce energy consumption
Clean install should eliminate accumulated system clutter

Against a new system:

Cash expenditure
The days of setting up, installing and configuring the system and software to meet my needs
Not environmentally friendly

For maintaining and upgrading the existing system:

Should be cheaper than a new system
More environmentally friendly
Choosing low energy "Green" component options should reduce power consumption
Should be able to mirror the old set up fairly quickly; so it should be much quicker to set up
More challenging and satisfying…

Against maintaining and upgrading the existing system:

It might all go horribly wrong!
Probably not ultimately as good performance as going for a new system

I decided to go the “maintain and upgrade” route.

After discussions with my brother I decided on a four phase approach:

Do some simple system optimisation and maintenance
Upgrade the main components that will make a performance difference that have an easy (and safe) upgrade path
Install the twin monitor system
Review and see if more drastic (and expensive) options should be considered

The blog postings over the next few weeks will plot my course and hopefully help other photographers faced with the same dilemmas.

Clearing a stalled printer queue / spooler

2009-02-02T19:41:00.004Z

Every now and again - actually it is every day or two now - when I print to my Epson 4800 via Windows XP the jobs just sit in the printer status queue nearly complete, but nothing ever actually prints. What to do?

This problem only seems to happen with my Epson 4800 printing via a USB port. My networked B&W laser printer has never done it.

I don't get any error messages - it simply sits there doing nothing much. Every subsequent print job joins the queue, but nothing can actually get anything printing.

One solution that often works is to simply reboot the computer, but this does not always work and is, in any case, a pain. If it clears, then all the queued print jobs print one after another, including all the multiple copies I have sent thinking that I must have forgotten to press the print button...

The easiest way I have found to clear the non-printing file is the following:

Go to the DOS command line (via "Run") and type:
Net stop spooler (see screen shot below)

Navigate your way to the following location:
For windows XP: Windows\System32\Spool\Printers
For Windows 2000: Winnt\System32\Spool\Printers

Delete the files in the Printers folder

Go back to the DOS command line and type:
Net start spooler (see screen shot below)

All should now be well.

I have not found any other way of clearing this problem. Deleting it via the printer status queue or from the printer does not work as you have to clear the spooler itself and neither of these two actions does.

If you do not stop the spooler, clear it and then restart it it will just keep on trying until you reboot, and then it does not always work.

To speed things up I have made a shortcut to the spooler folder on my desktop so that it is easy to find.

Panasonic Lumix G1 Review – Part 6 : 45-200mm f4-5.6 lens

2009-01-25T16:04:00.004Z

I picked up a Panasonic 45-200mm lens for my G1 on eBay at about half the current UK shop price. Here are my first impressions of the lens used with the G1.

The official name for the lens is the “Lumix G VARIO 45-200mm F4-5.6 ASPH Mega O.I.S” with a model number of “H-FS045200” – I will simply call it the 45-200 lens from here on. You can find out full details about it on Panasonic’s web site – here. I have extracted the key specifications and they are shown in the screen shot below. For comparison the details for the 14-45mm lens can be found – here.

Double click the image if you want to see it full size

For me the key specs are the size and weight, the focal length range with reasonably fast apertures, and that it has image stabilisation built in (since the G1 does not have it built into the camera body) and that it focuses quickly, accurately and quietly. Image quality is of course the key thing that I have to test for myself, along with the focusing requirements.

First Impressions
The first impression of the lens when I took it out of the box was how small and light it was. For a 90-400mm 35mm equivalent f4-5.6 lens it is tiny, as you can see in the photo below of it with its lens hood in place, compared with a Canon 40D + 70-200mm f4 IS L lens – the comparative weights of these set ups are 870g for the G1 and 1,850g for the Canon, making the G1 set up less than half the weight.

This ticks the size and weight box very nicely.

A quick look at and feel of the lens before putting it on the camera showed that it is from the same family as the 14-45mm lens that I already have. The lens mount is metal, the finish (colour and feel) is similar and the overall impression is of a good quality lens, although not comparing to a Canon L zoom (nor in size or weight either). The zoom and focus rings are similar and work the same way on the two lenses. They share the same 52mm filter size.

Unlike the Canon 70-200 mm L lens that I have the lens barrel does extend when you zoom from 45 to 200mm, extending the length of the lens from 99mm (152mm inc lens hood) to 136mm (189mm inc lens hood) (measurements taken from the camera body to the front of the lens or lenshood). Like the 14-45 lens the 45-200mm lens’ focusing is effectively silent, with no observable movement of any element of the lens when it focuses; so it must be an internally focussing design. The focus speed is good enough (much, much quicker than a Canon 70-300mm USM lens I once had).

Image Quality
As always I have only used RAW files to capture the images so any comments I have on image quality reflect what I see in RAW files in, or printed through, Lightroom 2.2.

The first set of images I took were in good light and one of my cats obliged by sitting still long enough to be photographed. When I looked at them I was pleasantly surprised and happy with the results. The cat’s whiskers and fur was nicely detailed and the colours were clear and punchy - see below taken at 200mm (400mm 35mm equivalent) with stabilisation turned on at max aperture of f5.6, 1/640^thsec, ISO 200 - the photo was taken through leaves so there are some areas with out of focus leaves in the foreground .

Image Stabilisation
The performance of the Image Stabilisation on this lens is much more important to me than on the 14-45mm as the longer focal lengths combined with the temptation to hand hold the combination could be an excellent recipe for blurred photos. Since this is likely to have a big impact on image quality I looked at this first.

I have done some real world tests hand holding the lens at 200mm with the IS turned on and off to test its performance at both long and relatively short range. I have also compared it with a Canon 70-200mm f4 IS L lens on a 40D – this lens is reputed to be one of the sharpest mid-range zoom lenses available, so it might be an unfair test.

In each case I have set the camera to shutter speed priority and varied the shutter speed taking whatever aperture that gave. In all cases I started at 1/500^th Sec and worked my way down in single increments to around 1/40^th or 1/30^th sec. keeping the ISO constant. With the wide range this covers the aperture has usually gone from f5.6 to the minimum available for the lens (f22). I did not use any additional means of support – just my two hands and as good technique as twenty years of taking photos has taught me.

I looked at the images at 100% in Lightroom using its compare function as well as printing off A4 prints.

How effective is the image stabilisation?
One of the first things to say is that I think that some of the image softness I saw was probably due to diffraction limiting rather than out and out image shake.

With the x2 multiplication factor on the G1 I would expect to have to use at least 1/400^thsec with the lens at 200mm. In all cases 1/500^thsec produced a sharp image. In the long range test with image stabilisation turned on the image started looking shaky at 1/160^thsec, but I was able to get some reasonably shake free images down to 1/80^thsec on and off.

With stabilisation turned off I was only able to get shake free images at 1/500^thsec, with some at 1/400^thsec. Below that no photos taken at 1/250^thsec or less was ever shake free.

So for reliable shake free photos the stabilisation system seems to be good for about 1 stop, but for occasional shake free images it seems to offer a bit over 2 stops (the difference between 1/400^th and 1/80^thsec. This is a bit less than I was expecting, and may be due to the light weight of the overall system compared with the heavier DSLRs that I am used to using, giving it less inertia to counter image shake inducing movements.

As I mentioned I ran a parallel test with the Canon 70-200mm f4 IS L lens on my 40D… To make the test fair I reduced the focal length on the 45-200mm to 155mm (giving a 35mm focal length equivalent of 310mm on the G1 vs the 320mm on the 40D).

I have to say that the image sharpness and contrast from the Canon combo is noticeably better straight out of the camera than from the G1 combo, but until I looked at the Canon images on screen I was quite happy with the G1’s. After tweaking in Lightroom and printing them, however, they looked very similar. The Canon images still looked more contrasty and the colours a little more punchy, but that might be because I am simply more used to working with Canon images than those from the G1.

At 155mm with stabilisation turned on the G1 was shake free down to about 1/125^thsec; with it turned off I could manage shake free shots down to 1/250^thsec, but also some shaky images at 1/400^thsec – this equates to about a one stop advantage again, although it makes images at all speeds more reliably shake free; giving roughly a 2½ stop advantage with varying reliability.

The performance of the Canon combo was, however, much more clear cut and impressive. At 200mm the stabilisation system produced a noticeably more stable image in the viewfinder. In Lightroom and in print the stabilisation worked all the way down to 1/60^thsec, compared to 1/250^thsec with stabilisation turned off, although I was quite capable of producing shaky images at 1/320^thsec. This equates to at least a 2 stop advantage, with up to the 4 stops claimed by Canon on occasion; so about a stop better than for the G1 combo.

General image quality
I looked in detail at the images I printed at A3 from the G1 at 155mm and 200mm, and the Canon at 200mm – all shot at 1/500^thsec with stabilisation turned on and one stop down from their maximum apertures at ISO 200 to make sure that the image quality was as good as normal real life was going to produce, to get a feel for the image sharpness of the lens.

Comparing the Canon at 200mm and the G1 at 155mm showed them to be very similar. Both were sharp in the centre and held it to the edges – so a pretty good result. At 200mm on the G1 images at the centre were reasonably sharp, but softened towards the edges. This was not, however, dreadful and looking at the prints at a normal viewing distance was not really noticeable.

During the stabilisation trials I felt that I was seeing image softening due to diffraction effects at small apertures rather than image shake. I would have to run a tripod based trial to determine what the diffraction effect limits are for this lens, but that is rather missing the point of this camera.

My conclusions based on image quality are that this is a very useable lens. At the long focal length extreme the image quality is not as good as at mid-range – this if often the case with zooms and does not deter me from using for images that are likely to be printed to A3.

Conclusion
I am very happy with the lens. Image quality shows up well compared with a top of the range Canon zoom lens of similar specifications (albeit with a shorter focal length range). It focuses adequately swiftly, handles nicely and is a small, neat package to carry around – I shall be keeping it.

Panasonic Lumix G1 Review – Part 5 : Initial impressions of image quality

2009-01-01T14:23:00.009Z

I have been out and about on several trips recently with the G1 and have had a chance to look through several hundred images and print some from Lightroom 2.2 and show them to friends for comment. Here are my initial impressions.

My main use for the G1 is to be a very portable DSLR replacement which is able to produce better quality images than I can get using my Canon G9 or Ricoh GX100. Apart from the portability and inter-changeable lens options that the G1 offer my main interest is in image quality at high ISO levels.

So far I have not done any comparative image quality tests with my DSLRs or compacts. This would really be pretty meaningless for many situations as I do not tend to use my DSLRs at high ISO levels as I usually use a tripod rather than increase the ISO, although with the latest DSLRs’ high ISO performance this might change when I get one. I have always thought it ironic that I use compacts for their portability so they do not get used with tripods; this means that good high ISO performance would be ideal for them, but with the current state of the art their tiny sensors generally yield have poor image quality much above their base ISO levels of 80 or 100.

So I have simply taken pictures when the G1 was the most appropriate camera to use – e.g. when I planned to take available light photos, but did not really want to carry around a full DSLR kit to do so. In most cases the light levels were going to be low. I have hardly used the flash at all with all the photos that I have looked at in any detail being shot purely with available light.

Most of the photos I have taken have been taken at higher than normal ISO settings – based around the maximum useful 1,250 ISO noted by Michael Reichmann in his Luminous Landscape review – here. I have simply set the camera to aperture priority, multi-element evaluative metering and auto focus with a singe central focusing area; using exposure compensation and manual focusing as needed. I have only saved and used RAW images.

The G1’s normal ISO range options are 100, 200, 400, 800, 1,600, and 3,200 in 1EV steps – to access the intermediate settings such as 1,000 or 1,250 you need to set the camera to 1/3EV ISO increments via the “ISO Increments” menu.

The first thing to say is that the images on screen and in print are hugely better than the ones I saw through the electronic view finder when I took them!

The first occasion I used it was when I visited the “World Wildlife Photographer of the Year” exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London just before Christmas - go here for details of the exhibition. The exhibition was excellent with beautifully presented (backlit) images, nearly all taken with the patience and dedication I can only marvel at. Outside, however, was a lovely winter scene at dusk and after, with an ice rink, winter fair and merry-go-round, all surrounded by trees decked with fairy lights, lit buildings and a sky lit by London’s glow.

Even at 1,250 ISO I was getting speeds around 1/4 to 1/25th second at the maximum aperture, which varied from f3.5 at 14mm to f5.6 at 45mm (28-90mm 35mm equivalent). So the shoot was a pretty good test of the lens image stabilisation system as well. The tree lights made it easy to see whether there was camera shake or not (it was a cool and very still evening).

On the G1’s LCD review screen the images looked pretty good and on importing them into Lightroom 2.2 my first impressions were “wow”.

Below are a couple of shots taken on the day – they have not been tweaked in Lightroom at all except for noise reduction and standard settings for sharpening etc. Any image artifacts around areas such as the dome are due to the downsizing Lightroom did to create the small files I use in my blog – the actual images are fine.

Shooting at high ISOs meant that one of the first things I did was to look at shadow areas at 100% to look for the noise, and sure enough there is luminance and chroma noise there. I am no expert at optimising Lightroom’s controls to get the best image with noise reduction turned on, but I found that using settings of 50 for luminance (L) and 25 for colour (C) noise reduction reduced the noise enough without making them unacceptably soft to produce good screen images and prints. In any case after the chroma noise is reduced by the default setting in Lightroom of 25 C the remaining luminance noise is not really objectionable, and certainly no worse than most film grain would have been at lower ISOs.

Below is a set of three 100% crops with no noise reduction, 0 L & 25 C and 50 L & 25 C respectively of a noisy area around the dome in the background from the 800 ISO image above, taken at 29mm, ¼ sec @ f5.6.

The difference between them can be seen better if you double click on the images to see them full size
No noise reduction
0 L, 25 C noise reduction
50 L, 25 C noise reduction

Below is another set of three 100% crops with no noise reduction, 0 L & 25 C and 50 L & 25 C respectively taken from a 1,250 ISO image taken at 14mm, 1/20th Sec @ f4.5

The difference between them can be seen better if you double click on the images to see them full size
No noise reduction

0 L, 25 C noise reduction
50 L, 25 C noise reduction

Subsequently I have taken images ranging in ISO from 100 to 1,250; mostly at wide open apertures, or one stop down.

The shot below was taken in the Covered Market in Oxford at 33mm, 1/40th Sec, f5.4, 400 ISO.

I also went out in a hard frost with grey skies and took a range of still life and semi-action photos of my cats prancing around the garden. When I downloaded the photos into Lightroom I was a bit surprised to see that they almost looked like B&W photos – the colours were very de-saturated and muted; but then so was the light. I experimented with close up shots – not using a tripod made it impossible to use much more than wide open apertures at the 45mm setting, and they were not brilliant. I was, however, quite happy with the detail I got when everything came together, but in general the images were soft. Not surprisingly the semi-action shots of my cats were not great, but when they sat still for a moment or two they came out nicely, although also suffering from very flat lighting.

I have printed a selection of images at A4/letter and A3 size on my Epson 4800 and I have to say that the response from friends and family is very gratifying – they love them.

Whatever noise I can see on screen at 100% pixel peeping is not an issue in print – even the high ISO prints at A3.

Apart from the noise most of the images, except for those taken in flat grey light, have been pretty good straight out of the camera and I have not tended to do much in Lightroom other than tweak the sharpening, noise and, when needed, the exposure.

14-45 lens and Image Stabilisation
I can not say how many extra stops the image stabilisation allows, but I was happy with the photos taken at ¼ sec (and resting on a railing for extra support) and in general I found that camera shake was not much of an issue. There was plenty of motion blur in many shots, but plenty of images with little evidence of camera shake. So my general conclusion is that the Image Stabilisation is working; I just can not estimate how much.

The lens itself performs pretty well – I do find its high maximum apertures a bit limiting and would like to try out faster fixed and zoom lenses when they become available to try to balance the “size and convenience” vs. “ease of use and image quality equation”.

Conclusion
I am very happy with the image quality I am seeing – this camera excels as a lightweight high quality walk around camera. Most of the best photos have been taken at high’ish ISOs and when I would not have wanted to have a better quality, but weightier and intrusive DSLR kit in tow.

While there is noise in the images Lightroom is able to deal with them quite easily – I have not had to resort to Noise Ninja yet, and they print up beautifully to at least A3.

At the moment I am thinking of the G1 as a keeper, best used for fairly slow paced available light scene and street photography.

I would certainly like to try out the 45-200mm lens if I can borrow or find one at a sensible price – the prices for them are much higher in the UK than the US; being about the same number of £s in the UK as $s in the US, nor are they widely available in the UK yet – and other lenses as they come on to the market.

Panasonic Lumix G1 Review – Part 4 : Battery life

2008-12-31T13:52:00.006Z

Since spare batteries are so expensive for the G1 I have spent some time monitoring battery usage in my typical real life use of the camera for the last 10 days or so. Panasonic’s quoted battery life is approx. 330-350 shots – Here is my experience.

The G1 takes Panasonic’s DMW-BLB13E Li-ion rechargeable batteries, rated at 7.2V, 1,250mAh, 9.0Wh. Manufacturer’s quoted battery lives can be pretty meaningless as the life can vary hugely with variables like temperature, flash usage, the amount of reviewing and chimping done, image stabilisation, etc etc – in fact it will be different for every photographer and every time you use it, so my experience can only be a guide to how much anyone will get out of the battery.

I charged the battery a few times in the first few days to make sure that it was operating properly and then simply charged it and put it in the camera to use as and when I felt like it. For the last ten days I have carried the G1 around with me and used it when opportunities arose.

Over about ten days, without recharging the battery at all, I took 309 photos before the battery died. The conditions that I used it under were broadly as follows:

Mostly outdoors in temperatures of -2°C to +10°C
Hardly any flash usage – 5-10 shots with flash as fill in
Image stabilisation – on; for all but a few shots
Shooting and saving RAW files only
Reviewing and chimping – a reasonable amount, but I do not look after every shot so am probably a light user on this front

The G1's battery life indicator is a typical three bar representation of a battery which shows up on the LCD screen or viewfinder, as shown in the diagram below from the Operating Instructions.

I noticed that the battery indicator dropped from full to two bars at about 220 shots and it then dropped to the next bar down within about 30 shots. This was outdoors in nearly freezing temperatures – when I took it back indoors it went up a bar. The next day I spent time in sub-zero temperatures and took a further 65 images before the camera stopped working. For the last 20 or so the battery indicator was flashing red to tell me of its imminent demise.

A few minutes after I took it back into the warmth the battery came back to life enough to allow me to review all the photos I had just taken.

Conclusion
Using the G1 in typical (UK) winter shooting conditions the battery life for me would seem to be about 300 shots, so long as I am not using the flash much. In warmer conditions I am sure it would more; but in any case I am happy with this life for the type of photography that I will be using the G1 for, and Panasonic’s figure is a pretty reasonable estimate.

Panasonic Lumix G1 Review – Part 3 : RAW writing times

2008-12-22T11:00:00.006Z

In my first post I reported on the RAW file writing speeds using a 2gb Sandisk Extreme III SD card. I have done some more testing with the following results.

Since I tried the Extreme III I have used a couple of other 2gb SD cards in the G1. They are a Transcend 150x and a X4store card – the latter has no rating and since it came free with a camera I suspect that it is a pretty cheap low speed card.

The table below shows the results.

	7 or 5 shot time	Buffer full time between shots	Clearing full buffer time
Sandisk Extreme III 2gb SD	2.5 secs / 7 shots	1.25 secs	7 secs
Transcend 150x 2gb SD	3 secs / 7 shots	1.5 secs	10 secs
X4store 2gb SD	2.5 secs / 5 shots	3 secs	16 secs

The key point is that the X4store card only allowed 5 shots to be taken before the buffer filled up, rather than the 7 shots that the G1 is supposed to take. The other two were fine, so the G1 specs seem to assume a certain write speed for the SD cards in use.

The Sandisk Extreme III allows faster continuous shooting than the Transcend 150x. The X4store card is really noticeably slower in all aspects of use, slower continuous shooting, much slower shooting when the buffer is full and it takes an age to clear the buffer.

Conclusion
Card speed matters, but so long as you are above a certain write speed not hugely. Cheap no-name or own brand cards are likely to be slow and disappoint on the RAW writing speed front.

Panasonic Lumix G1 Review – Part 2 : Updating software

2008-12-19T19:44:00.000Z

Since I bought the G1 two updates have become available - Adobe Lightroom 2.2 and a firmware update for the G1 body.

Firstly and most importantly for me Adobe have released Lightroom v2.2, which supports several new cameras' RAW file conversion, including the G1.

Lightroom 2.2 update
Since I currently run Lightroom v1.4 I wanted to try out v2.2 before buying it - so I downloaded Adobe's free 30 day trial from here

It installed without any problems and when I first ran it it told me that it had detected my Lightroom v1 Catalog and asked me whether I would like to import it. Mindful that I did not want to commit to v2 just yet I said "No" and started a new Catalog for Lightroom 2 trials.

Up until now (as the final hangover from my workflow before I started using Lightroom a year ago) I have used Downloader Pro from Breeze Systems to download files and put basic copyright data into each file. This, however, does not recognise the G1's files at all - it does not even think they exist, so I tried Lighroom's import feature (previously I have told Lightroom simply to monitor the folder I download new images to and import any that arrive there, which has worked well).

So I imported some trial images into Lightroom 2.2 from my card reader and sure enough the G1's .RW2 RAW files popped up and I was able to make the usual changes and convert them into JPEGs just as I would expect.

So it appears that the RAW workflow is sorted - now all I have to do is to take some images worth looking at and work out how to get the best out of them in Lightroom 2.

G1 firmware update
Updates for the G1's firmware can be found here

The camera as supplied was running "Body Firmware" ver 1.0 and "Lens Firmware" ver 1.0. The update available is for the "Body Firmware" ver 1.1.

I followed the instructions and tried to download the firmware update file via the USB cable directly from the PC to the G1. When I did that an error message came up saying that the drive (the G1) was locked. So I formatted the SD card again and popped it into my card reader and copied it across - which worked fine.

The instructions do not actually tell you what to do next!

On another page of instructions I found that pressing the playback button was the way to proceed. This brought up a screen like the one below - pressing "Yes" updated the "Body Firmware". The instructions recommend re-formatting the SD card (otherwise problems may occur; to quote the instructions - "otherwise it may cause the camera body to malfunction").

So I now have a trial version of my preferred RAW workflow software to play with over the next couple of weeks and updated camera firmware.

Panasonic Lumix G1 Review – Part 1 : First impressions

2008-12-15T19:34:00.007Z

I was recently tempted into buying a Panasonic G1 with the standard 14-45mm lens. Here are my first impressions – I shall be writing more as time goes on.

Background
I have been tempted to like the Four Thirds format since the Olympus E-1 appeared; I especially liked the ultrasonic sensor cleaning system as I hate having to clean sensors all the time. So while most serious DSLRs now have an equivalent dust reduction system I will always have a soft spot for Olympus’ innovativeness in leading the way. I did in fact I have an E-1 for about a year, but I could not justify having two DSLR systems so I sold it in favour of expanding my Canon EOS system – the E-3 was just too late in arriving.

But I always liked the feel of the E-1 and recently read Michael Reichmann’s review of the G1 (go – here – to read it). Michael has not previously been a fan of the Four Thirds format, describing it as an “evolutionary dead-end”, so when he produced a pretty positive review of the Micro Four Thirds format G1 it set me thinking – especially his finding that images from the G1 are very usable in 13x19” prints upto about ISO 1250.

The idea of the Micro Four Thirds system is that it can retain the same sensor size as a conventional Four Thirds camera, but by eliminating the mirror and prism, and using a liveview only system with an electronic view finder it can shrink the mount, reduce the distance between the back of the mount to the sensor (from 40mm to 20mm) and shrink the lenses to make a really significantly smaller package than a conventional DSLR. I guess the resulting format is more like a rangefinder in lens/sensor configuration than a DSLR – since Panasonic have a commercial tie up with Leica and use Leica badged lenses on many of its digital cameras it is reasonable to assume that Leica’s expertise in designing excellent and compact rangefinder lenses will percolate into Panasonic’s Micro Four Thirds lenses. By keeping the same sensor size as the Four Thirds format it retains the 2x magnification factor relative to 35mm systems. Unlike a bridge camera with its fixed optics the Micro Four Thirds system is all about interchangeable lenses.

If you want more technical information than Micheal Reichmann’s offers then DPR Preview has it - here.

Amateur Photographer have recently (13th December 2008) printed their review of the G1. They give it a fairly warm welcome. One of the criticisms of most standard Four Thirds cameras is that their dynamic range is not as good at their competitors. I noticed in the AP review that they are saying that Panasonic (or perhaps Kodak) seem to have solved this problem. In the review AP measured an 11EV (11 stops) dynamic range, which they say is on a par with Sony’s Alpha 900 and better than Nikon’s D300 or Canon’s 50D. In previous reviews AP measured the Olympus E-520 at 8-9EV, the Olympus E-3 at around 9EV, the Sigma DP-1 at 7EV, while saying that it was 1EV better than most compacts, including the Canon G9 at 6EV. If true this should make it much easier to produce images with good highlight and shadow detail.

I have a couple of Canon EOS DSLRs (a 40D and a 30D) which I use for most of my planned photography and a couple of compacts (a Canon G9 and a Ricoh GX100) to carry around on the off chance. So while I am pretty happy with the two compacts when I can keep the ISO rating at their lowest ISO settings they are not much good for any situation needing ISO 200+. Also both are a compromise in other ways such focal lengths available, RAW writing speed, focus speed and accuracy etc. Since I am mostly concerned with image quality I always use these cameras in RAW image capture mode.

On the subject of image quality – digital image quality is usually related to individual sensor pixel size, assuming similar quality lenses. Both the Canon G9 and the G1 have 12.1 megapixel sensors; the Canon 40D’s is 10.1. The table below shows the relative sensor areas and consequent individual pixel sizes.

	Canon G9	Panasonic G1	Canon 40D
Mega pixels	12.1	12.1	10.1
Sensor size - mm	7.6 x 5.7	18.0 x 13.5	22.2 x 14.8
Sensor area - cm²	0.43	2.43	3.29
Pixel size - μm	1.9	4.5	5.7
mp per cm²	28	5.0	3.1

As you can see in the table the G9’s sensor and hence pixels are much smaller than the G1’s, which should result in better signal to noise ratios and better high ISO performance. In fact the G1’s pixel size at 4.5μm compares favourably with Canon’s 50D at 4.7μm.

What I really want is a camera of compact dimensions, low weight and interchangeable lenses which is capable of producing excellent image quality that I can carry around when I know I will want to take photos, but don’t really want to have to lug the whole DSLR kit around – I would guess that nearly all DSLR users would like this.

The G1 at least seemed to offer this possibility. It was announced in September 2008 and started shipping around November 2008. I had a look around at prices and found one on eBay for around £400 so I bought it – about £100 less than the cheapest on-line retailer that I could find. Now quite why someone would be selling after having it for only a few weeks I can not say.

First Impressions
For the record the Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1 is a 12.1mp camera and it came with Panasonic’s Lumix Vario G 14-45mm f3.5-5.6 ASPH/Mega OID (optical image stabiliser) lens – which I will simply call the “lens” from now on.

Handling
My first impression of the kit was that he lens was tiny – really much smaller than normal DSLR lenses.

I have reasonably small hands and when I first picked it up it felt solid and like a serious camera, despite it being essentially a plastic camera. The surface is quite a tactile and the grip is quite substantial - It simply feels comfortable in the hand.

It is small as can be seen in the photos below of my Canon G9, the G1 and my Canon 40D with a standard 17-55mm f2.8 lens attached (along with a Really Right Stuff L bracket).

Photos showing the relative sizes of the Canon G9, Panasonic G1 + 14-45 f3.5-5.6 lens and Canon 40D + 17-55mm f2.8 lens combinations

The table below lists the weights of these three cameras in their ready to use configuration as in the photos above; eg including lens, battery, storage card, lens hoods & caps as well as the camera straps and in the case of the 40D the L bracket.

	Canon G9	Panasonic G1	Canon 40D
Weight – g	378	666	1,720

While the G1 is pretty light compared with the 40D, being more than a kilo lighter, it is much heavier than the G9. The G9 easily fits into a jacket pocket (the Ricoh GX100 fits into an even smaller pocket), but the G1 does not – mostly because the G9’s lens withdraws into its casing when it is turned off and the G1’s does not. It really is a camera to tuck into the corner of a small bag or to carry around in one hand or slung around your neck. That said, it is however, much easier to carry than the 40D and much more unobtrusive. Although I have not yet tried or even handled the 45-200mm lens for the G1 the specs for it indicate that it is both much smaller and lighter than any equivalent lens for a DSLR, so as a system ranging from the 35mm equivalent of 28mm to 400mm it looks pretty compact and light. Panasonic plan to market a 20mm f1.7 lens in 2009 and this might be thin enough to make the whole set up (jacket) pocketable, especially if it is a “pancake” type lens.

Ease of use
I am not a great one for reading manuals and I found that simply picking up the camera and using the accumulated knowledge of working with a dozen or more digital cameras over the last few years I simply “got on with it”. I found it pretty intuitive to use, although I did have to resort to the manual to work out how to set exposure compensation as I noticed when reviewing some images on the LCD screen that I had accidentally dialled in compensation when I had not meant to – I discovered that it is quite easy to do that as the front dial on the hand grip just below the shutter release button toggles between setting the aperture (in aperture priority mode, which is the one I nearly always use) and exposure compensation by pressing it in; rotating the wheel changes the setting.

I like the array of buttons that can be used to make changes as searching through screen menus often means missing the shot. There is a dedicated ISO setting button, but I prefer the G9’s dial for changing ISO setting, although it is quite easy to accidentally knock it. Many of the most commonly used settings can be reasonably quickly accessed via the Quick menu (Q.MENU) button just behind the shutter release. This also remembers the last Quick menu item you used to change settings so repeated changes of a particular setting during a shoot is reasonably quick if that is what you only use the Quick menu button for. The Fn button might be useful if you could set which functions it accessed, but the camera works this out for you from what you recently used so it is not reliably useful.

So my first impressions of ease of use are that it is much like most digital cameras these days and easy and quick to pick up how to use most of its main functions. No doubt I will have to delve into the manual in due course to extract more from it, but for now I am happy to just use it.

The Lens
The lens has a slower f-stop range than I would ideally like in f3.5-f5.6 – I would prefer a constant f stop, such as Canon’s f4 lens range, and for it to be faster, but this would almost certainly make it bulkier and more expensive; so I will just see how it performs over time.

The lens is made from an engineering plastic, but the lens mount is made from metal, indicating to me that it is a quality lens - there is little slop when the zoom is extended, and the front element does not rotate when focussing (making the use of filters easier – it has a 52mm filter thread). On the left hand side is there is a single switch the turn the image stabilisation on and off. The supplied lens hood is the usual bayonet mounted petal type and it fits snugly and feels to be good quality. The lens cap is a centre squeeze type so is easy to take on and off.

The zoom ring is quite stiff and a bit stiffer towards the wide angle end of the range - I prefer this to it being too sloppy. The manual focus ring has no effect if you are in an autofocus mode, but in manual focus mode it immediately switched the EVF or screen into 5x mode to make focussing more accurate; the focus area can be moved around the screen with the arrow buttons – I like that. The focus ring itself is light, but not too light, and moves easily.

The focussing motor is essentially silent – I do not think that it makes any more noise than my Canon USM lenses. When it focuses in autofocus mode nothing seems to move.

All-in-all the lens looks, feels and works fine.

The Electronic View Finder (EVF) and Display
I have never really got on with an EVF before, but the reviews said that it was much better than most and that is exactly what I have found. It is certainly grainy to look at and flickers. When I zoom in and out or move the camera about the EVF image wobbles and flickers, but it is only momentary. The actual image is very contrasty and tends to flip flop between dark and bright when you scan around for the right composition; again this tends to be fairly short lived. So far I have not found it a limiting feature, but it is not for capturing fast moving action.

The main 3” display is pretty good – not as good at the latest DSLRs’ screens, but good enough for most use. It does, however, have one huge advantage in that it is a fully articulated screen. It can be turned around to protect the screen in transport, or swivelled into any angle so that it can be used above your head, at waist level, looking left or right, or even behind you) – in fact pretty much any direction that you might like to use. As you move the screen about flipping it over to look left or right the camera senses the change and flips the image to compensate to that it is always the right way up.

Sensors on the EVF detect the presence of something close – normally your eye – and automatically switches the main screen off and the EVF on. I have found this fine so far, but it might be irritating if it tends to turn off when not up to you eye. So far it has not annoyed me, but in any case the feature can be turned off. There is a switch to manually swop between the EVF and the screen. The EVF also has dioptre adjustment.

When you press the shutter release the EVF blacks out just as a DSLR would when the mirror flips up, but it seems to blank out for longer than a DSLR would – even with quite fast shutter speeds the black out time is quite noticeable.

Autofocus
While this might not normally seem much of an issue the G1 (and I guess all Micro Four Thirds cameras in the future) uses contrast detection autofocus rather than the phase detection system that is used in DSLRs. This is the same system most liveview implementations in DSLRs use and it is usually slow and painful.

Panasonic, however, seem to have worked out how to do it as I have found that the camera focuses quickly and accurately. It may not be up to the standard of top notch DSLRs, but it is much better than the compacts I have used and I have no complaints - again I do not anticipate using it for fast moving action shots.

There are plenty of choices for setting auto or manual focus, with options like face detection, tracking focus, multiple area (23 areas) focus or single area focus. The latter can be resized and moved about. I tend to leave it in the middle and use the normal half-press method to lock the focus, then recompose for the final shot.

With the 14-45 lens the focusing is pretty swift – perhaps not a snappy as a Canon with a USM drive lens, but pretty quick. I have certainly used much slower focusing lenses on DSLRs. The image tends to glide quickly into focus rather than snap in, but I was pleasantly surprised by its speed and accuracy. When focus is found the focus area marking lines in the EVF turn green, a green spot appears in the top right hand side of the screen and the camera beeps.

Battery
Batteries are pretty critical to digital cameras – without juice the camera is dead regardless of how good it is. The G1 takes a DMW-BLB13E 1250mAh li-ion battery. It is quite a chunky battery – about the same length and width as the Canon G9’s NB-2l, but about 50% thicker – the dimensions are 43.5 x 36.5 x 21.5mm, with the actual contacts protruding about another 1.5mm from one end.

Since battery power is so important I like to buy a spare battery as soon as I buy a camera, but this battery ranges in price from £59 to £83 in the UK with no generic replacement available yet as far as I can find. This is way more than I am willing to pay, so I will wait until I decide whether to keep the camera or not before buying a spare, and in any case I will wait until the price comes down or a generic from a reputable maker such as Hähnel appears.

I have no idea how long a charge will last for yet – I’ll do some real world tests and report the results later. I did fill up a whole 2gb card (138 shots) while testing burst rates etc without any noticeable drop in battery charge level, but that is not much of a real world test as I did not look at the reviews very often during the test.

RAW file burst rate
One of the drawbacks of the Canon G9 and Ricoh GX100 is their tardy RAW writing times. The G1 is supposed to have a 7 image RAW file buffer with a burst rate of 3 frames per second in its high speed burst mode setting.

Using a Sandisk Extreme III SD card the G1 took 7 shots in about 2.5 secs before the buffer became full, which is about 3 frames per sec, and from there on took about one shot every 1.25 secs – after a dozen shots I got bored so I presume that it continues firing at that rate until the card is full. After the burst the buffer takes about 7 secs to clear. If you start shooting again before the buffer is clear it takes as many shots at 3 fps as there is space in the buffer for before switching to the 1 shot every 1.25 secs rate.

I am pretty happy with this and I don’t think that it will limit my picture taking at all as I do not really anticipate using the G1 for action photography.

With RAW files only (not with JPEGs as recorded simultaneously as I never seem to use them and they just take up more card space) the 2gb card holds about 135-140 images; being about 14mb each.

Image Quality.
The colour space is switchable between sRGB and Adobe RGB – I set all my other cameras to Adobe RGB, so the G1 is set to that too.

Since the whole point of this camera is superior image quality in a compact and portable package this is the key for me. I set the camera to record RAW files and looked forward to looking at them and printing them from Lightroom. Oh, but…

I have Lightroom 1.4.1 and guess what? Adobe has stopped adding in new RAW file compatibility to this version, only Lightroom 2.

If I want to use Lightroom as a RAW converter for the G1, along with recently launched cameras such as the Canon 5D MkII and the Canon G10, then I will have to spend £100 to upgrade to Lightroom 2 whether I like it or not. In fact Adobe’s web site is currently saying that Lightroom 2 will not support these until sometime in December when Lightroom 2.2 is due. If I wanted to use Adobe Camera Raw instead (which does support them, but only the version compatible with CS4; not CS3) I will have to upgrade to Photoshop CS4, although I am quite happy in every other way with CS3 for the time being.

In fact the Adobe site says that its DNG converter does not work properly yet with G1 files – it triples their size! Apparently they are working on this and it is due to Adobe only being able to do linear demosaicing, which triples the file size.

So I have not actually looked at image quality yet…

I will download the 30 day trial version of Lightroom 2 from Adobe when version 2.2 is released and hope that this is in time to be able try it out over Christmas. Hopefully I will not then mess up my existing Lightroom set-up (I seem to remember in a review I saw somewhere that the catalogs are not interchangeable so once converted to Lightroom 2 I suspect that there is now way back to Lightroom 1.4). This will tell me whether I am going to keep the G1 or not.
I could use the supplied Silkypix software, which is reputed to produce OK RAW conversions, but to have a clunky user interface. Since I moved from using a multiplicity of packages (Capture One, Breezebrowser, Qimage to name but a few) to using Lightroom as the core of my digital workflow I do not want to learn a new piece of software just to be able to use a particular camera – there lies madness. I simply want to spend more time taking pictures and less in front of a computer working on them. If this is not sorted out properly then this would be a deal breaker for me – perhaps why the camera appeared on eBay so quickly…?

Perhaps I ought not to sulk and just try Silkypix (or perhaps I should call that Sulkypix?).

Conclusions
So, a nice little camera to use, but a shame I can not view and convert the RAW files in Lightroom without upgrading to Lightroom 2.2, whenever it appears. Perhaps Panasonic would like to start using DNG files… just a thought.

I shall be adding to the blog over the next few weeks as I use the camera and get to know it better – and I start to print images from RAW files taken with it.

My photographic Santa wish list for 2008/09

2008-12-13T11:07:00.004Z

What would I like Santa to bring me this year – photographically speaking?

Three things really:

1 ) A printer equivalent to my Epson 4800 Pro that simply works when I ask it too – even if I leave it unused for weeks at a time. Is that too much to ask for?

I don’t want extra image quality, more colours etc – I am quite happy with what my 4800 produces – I just would like it to work on demand; not when its temperament allows it to.

I don’t care who it comes from; Epson, Canon or HP… perhaps even Sony, Kodak or Fuji. Whoever…

2 ) I have been waiting for an update to the Canon 5D for a year or more – what I had in mind turns out to really be a Nikon D700. So the 5D MkII has 21mp and video, whereas what I really wanted as an up to date 5D with 12mp (or perhaps a few more, but 12 seems fine for what I want to do) with improved noise or dynamic range capture, plus weather sealing, better autofocus, anti-dust systems, etc etc and a competitive price.

I also don’t really want to have to upgrade my computer to take the huge files that will result from the MkII when I mostly print at A4 & A3, going up to A2, and stitch together into large panoramics… If it weren’t for my substantial investment in lenses and systems accessories, like flashguns, I would switch to a Nikon D700 and a D300 today.

3 ) Which brings me onto my third wish – software that is supported for more than a year or so. Last Christmas I tested out Lightroom; liked it and bought it. I moved pretty much all my workflow into Lightroom. Now Adobe have released Lightroom 2 and guess what?

If I want to use it as a RAW converter for any of the recent camera launches (such as the Canon 5D MkII, the Canon G10 or Panasonic G1) then I will have to spend £100 to upgrade to Lightroom 2 whether I like it or not. In fact Adobe’s web site is currently saying that Lightroom 2 will not support these until sometime in December. If I wanted to use Adobe Camera Raw instead (which does support them, but only the version compatible with CS4; not CS3) I will have to upgrade to Photoshop CS4, although I am quite happy in every other way with CS3 for the time being.

So, Santa, if you are listening – are these wishes really too unreasonable or difficult to deliver?

Turning off my Epson 4800 printer for a month or more…

2008-10-26T16:53:00.003Z

If you have read many of my posts in this blog you will realise that I have had lots of problems with nozzle clogging on my Epson 4800. Recently I realised that I was not going to be able to pursue my normal strategy to reduce nozzle clogging for a month or more, so I decided to try a different one based on my recent observations and experience. This post is about what I did and what happened.

To keep my 4800 happy and readily available for printing I normally follow a strategy of using Harvey Head Cleaner to print a nozzle check daily, along with printing a full spectrum print every three days through MIS Autoprint and keeping the printer humid by using a sponge full of water in the paper tray and a printer cover to keep the humidity in.

Recently, however, I have found that while this works very well the automated “something or other” (this posting gives more about my thoughts on this) that the printer does about once a week is quite likely to knock out various colour channels and that there is nothing I can do to stop it. Turning off all the auto nozzle checks and cleaning options has no effect. Some people have called this a “priming” function – but whatever it is it seems to do more harm than good and uses up a lot of ink.

About 6 weeks ago I realised that I was not going to be able to use the printer much at all nor be able to service the normal anti-clogging routine. So what to do?

I have become convinced that the key to a happy printer is humidity and avoiding the priming (or “something or other”) routines if possible. So I decided to turn off the printer and molly coddle it in a different way.

This I what I did:

I filled the sponge in the paper tray with water
I did a puddle soak to make the print head as humid as possible
I put in an additional water pot inside the printer cover as near the print head as possible
I wrapped the printer cover as tightly as possible to keep the humidity in
I reset all the Oregon weather station's humidity max & min readings - I use this to monitor the humidity inside the printer

Before bedding the printer down it was running perfectly with a perfect nozzle check.

I left the printer like this for a bit over a month (my records say it was 37 days). During that time I did nothing more than to refill the water sponges and about mid way through I set up another puddle soak.

Last Saturday I needed to do a biggish batch of printing so I woke it up.

How was it?
When I turned it on it did its “auto something or other” (which used 9.5ml of ink) before running the nozzle check I requested. Of the eight ink channels 5 were still perfect and the Light Black, Light Magenta and Light Cyan were completely missing – I can’t say I was surprised.

I ran a single nozzle clean and all three came back perfectly. The nozzle clean used 4.6ml on ink. I was pretty happy and relieved with this result!

So after 37 days of no use one single low intensity nozzle cleaning cycle restored the printer to a perfect nozzle check.

During that time the humidity inside the printer was mostly in the range 50-55% and according to the Oregon weather station the minimum in that time was 46% and the maximum was 67%. The reading from the paper tray was 53% min & 72% max, and from the room itself the range was 39% min & 63% max.

So I am more convinced than ever that humidity is the key to a happy nozzle clog free printer.

Why?
These printers seem to run OK for 12 to 18 months and then start experiencing these problems. This makes some people say that humidity can not be an issue as why would it suddenly change?

I do not know, but I can make some informed speculations.

I suspect that it is all to do with contact or wetting angles (go here for some background to wetting and contact angles); essentially the ease with which a liquid wets the surface it is sitting on or in contact with. Because the main problem I (and many others) experience is sudden whole ink channel loss it implies that it is not really about clogging – more likely the ink simply separates from the print head, which could easily be caused if the wetting angle is humidity sensitive. This sudden ink channel loss could also be due to an air bubble in the line, but personally I have never seen one of them.

If, however, the ink no longer wetted the surface of the nozzles/print head any slight loss of pressure might cause it to detach from the nozzle/print head, which would cause all the nozzles for that specific ink channel to stop working all at the same time.

Why might this start happening after 12-18 months?
I can think of a couple of reasons:

One final thought: All of this is obviously quite challenging if you live/work in a desert…

The Mystery of my Epson 4800's auto cleaning…

2008-09-05T20:20:00.002+01:00

For some time, since I have been keeping the humidity high in the region of the print head and running Harvey Head Cleaner daily (I have reduced it from twice daily to once with no ill effect) with an MIS Autoprint every three days, I have only really had one problem with my 4800 – every now and then (about once a week) the printer does “something or other” which looks and sounds like a cleaning cycle. Sometimes a whole ink channel or two are missing after this, but the nozzle check says that no more ink than usual has been used up since the last one. So what is happening?

Since I have turned off both auto nozzle checking & cleaning on the printer’s control panel it ought not to be running cleaning cycles without my asking it to.

For some time, however, I have suspected that, since this “auto something or other” looks and sounds like a cleaning cycle, it probably is. I have noticed anomalously high ink usage every now and again on nozzle check printouts and wondered if there was a connection.

This morning it did its “auto something or other” before printing out the nozzle check requested by Harvey Head Cleaner. Yesterday the nozzle check was perfect, but after this “auto something or other” cycle this morning both Light Magenta & Cyan inks were completely missing, but the nozzle check said that only 0.2ml had been used – the normal amount for a nozzle check. I immediately ran another nozzle check, without doing anything else, and guess what – the printer thought that it had used another 10.4ml of ink since the last one, which is about right for a cleaning cycle, but much too much for sitting around doing nothing for a minute!

I have noticed this before and I am now convinced that it is running auto cleaning cycles about once a week despite my having told it not to and that it only reports the ink usage in the nozzle check printout after the one immediately after it does the cleaning cycle.

For some reason these cleaning cycles often mess up a printer that was working perfectly – although I do find that a single cleaning cycle usually restores the ink.

Can anyone cast any light on this?

Upgrading Epson 4800 printer driver from v5.55 to v6.50 – think before you do it!

2008-08-24T12:10:00.012+01:00

Recently I was trying to work out why my Epson 4800 printer was not printing on A3 and roll paper properly. As a part of the process I installed Epson’s latest printer driver v6.50. I quickly discovered that I would really rather not have done so.

For a couple of months I have been living with the fact that whenever I printed on A3 paper the printer would leave a 14mm or 20mm margin at the top or left of the page, whatever it had actually been asked to print. Since this was happening using both Lightroom and Qimage to print I determined that it was the printer or driver, not the printing applications themselves. Printing using roll paper was also not working properly – it was not starting to print in the right place and not cutting at all. Printing using A4, however, seemed to be OK…

I decided to fix the problems and did the usual things to fix these types of problems – reinstall the driver, and if that does not cure it, then the firmware.

First I downloaded the latest printer driver from Epson v6.50 (dated the 7^th March, 2008), replacing v5.55 which was the one I had been using. I did not see any harm in this, but I was wrong (more on this below). This did not cure the eccentric printing, however, so I downloaded the firmware (the same version as the one I had been using) and installed that via Epson’s LFP Remote Panel. Initially LFP would not recognize the printer’s existence (although it was printing OK), but after a few cycles of re-booting the computer and the printer it accepted that it was really there. After updating the printer started printing accurately on the page where requested.

But…
Printer driver v6.50, however, was a pain. Basically for two reasons.

Firstly all my paper and set-up specific settings carefully saved in both Qimage and Lightroom were lost. Both remembered the ICC profile settings (happily), but both lost all the other settings; such as media, paper handling and quality settings. So I had to go back through all the combinations and reinstall them, and since I had not exactly copied all of them down as they were stored in the applications and backed up I had not thought it necessary, this was a time consuming and frustrating process.

Secondly it has changed the layout and operation of the various panels so I had to relearn all of them and I can not find any documentation from Epson about what the changes are.
Below are screenshots from the Main, Page Layout and Utility panels - double click on them is you want to see them full size.

There is an extra panel, to the right hand side in the screenshots above, showing the Current Settings which can be turned on or off as desired.

They seem to cover the majority of the previous functions in much the same way, but annoyingly different, so setting up quality for a particular paper is a bit hit & miss.

There are a few interesting enhancements – the main one I have noticed is that the custom paper settings are replicated on the Media Type dropdown (see screenshot) below, rather than hidden in the custom settings panel.

The printing status screen (see screenshot below) has been re-worked to include cartridge codes (but they use Epson's old ones, not the new ones - e.g. the LLK cartridge options are listed as T5649 & T5659 , not T6059 & T6069 for the 110ml & 220ml versions respectively that Epson currently uses)

Conclusion
If you use pre-sets or saved printing settings in applications such as Lightroom and Qimage think very carefully before upgrading, unless you really want some of the enhancements in v6.5 (whatever they are). If you do, then carefully record what they are before the installation or you may lose them as I did.

Sources of advice on restoring old photographs

2008-08-16T17:52:00.007+01:00

Every now and again I get asked to copy an old family photograph, which usually involves restoring it as well. Although there is a lot of useful information and tutorials on-line to help I find that since I do not do these restorations very often I find it easy to forget what worked last time and where I found the methods in the first place. In this posting I recommend a couple of books that have helped me immeasurably when I need it.

Typically what happens is that I am given an old print or seven and asked to “just make a couple of copies” of them. They are usually faded and spotted with damp, mould or tarnish, as well as being a bit care worn with folds, rips and holes. There is often an unfaded line where the frame held them and colour photos are usually not only faded but also colour shifted. On top of all that the paper they are printed on originally is often textured, which a decent scanner will pick up beautifully, making the whole image look very unhealthy (see a 100% crop from a typical sample below).

I usually scan them into Photoshop using an Epson Perfection 3200 Photo scanner, which produces a pretty good starting point.

But what to do with them?
As I said earlier there is a lot of really good advice and tutorials on-line and in magazine articles, but I want to be able to remember what I did and find solutions to new problems efficiently (no two projects have the same problems and solutions). So I have resorted to the old fashioned method of buying books on the subject – this means that I can easily find what I want quickly and know where to find the methods that worked for me the last time.

The one technique I use on nearly all scans is to use the “Dust & Scratches” filter with the history brush to remove all the little specks and flecks that were both in the original and on the scan.

I have settled on having two books as my source for most restorations. They cover similar areas of the topic, but have quite different approaches.

Firstly I use Katrin Eismann’s book “Adobe Photoshop Restoration and Retouching (Voices That Matter)” – full details can be found on Amazon but clicking the icon below.

The second is Ctein’s book “Digital Restoration From Start to Finish: How to repair old and damaged photographs” – full details can be found on Amazon but clicking the icon below.

While Eismann and Ctein cover the same sort of restoration ground they have different preferences. Eismann prefers to use masks (not too surprising as she wrote what many regard as the definitive book on masking – “Photoshop Masking & Compositing (Voices That Matter)”), whereas Ctein mostly avoids using masks in favour of using radical moves with curves.

Personally I find Eismann’s way easier to replicate, but at times I can only get a decent result using Ctein’s methods.

Review of the Phottix TR-80 - a generic version of Canon's TC-80N3 remote release

2008-08-09T16:24:00.001+01:00

One of the reasons for buying into a complete camera system, such as Canon’s EOS series or Nikon, is the range of accessories available, which is also one of the pains when you realise how much the manufacturers charge for even the simplest accessory. This is a review of a cheaper generic version of Canon’s TC-80N3 remote release with its digital timer functions.

Canon’s TC-80N3 remote release fits any Canon EOS camera fitted with Canon’s proprietary three pin N3 remote release. In the UK they typically cost around £99 each. This is one of those nice to have, but not exactly sure what I will do with it, sort of accessories that I have thought about getting for years, but due to the price I could never justify it to myself.

The TC-80N3 incorporates the following programmable functions:

Self-timer
Interval timer
Long-exposure timer
Exposure count setting feature
+ operates as a conventional electronic remote release

The three timer functions are programmable in the range 1 sec. to 99 hours, 59 minutes, and 59 sec. (in 1 sec. intervals) and the exposure count function operates in the range 1-99.

The sort of thing that I would be interested to use the interval timer function for is to do time-lapse photography to monitor the unfurling for a butterfly from its pupae or the blooming of a flower. These days there is software around that can convert a series of these images into a video.

If you look on eBay you will see a reasonable variety of generic versions available, nearly all from China. These range in price and quality, but even the better looking clones cost about a quarter of what Canon charge, so I was tempted to try one since I have been happy with my Chinese generic version of the simple RS-80N3 that I have reported [ here ] in my blog.

You will also see that it is possible to buy purportedly genuine Canon versions from Hong Kong for around £80, which is not much of a saving over the UK price and you are then at the mercy of customs, who, in the UK, are pretty hot on charging duty, tax and fees that might hike the cost above the genuine version…

I chose a version that looked as much like the Canon as possible and bought it for £27.50, all in, including delivery from China which accounted for much of the price.

Was this a good idea?
Since I have not got a genuine Canon TC-80N3 remote release, in fact I can not remember ever having handled one, I can not make a comparison, other than with the Canon’s spec.

The photo below shows the Phottix TR-80 in its Canon N3 form.

The TR-80 comes with a printed manual in Chinese and English – the English version is 17 pages; it is well printed and pretty well written, and covers all the functions of the timer in detail. It is a pretty good manual. Below is a scan of the nomenclature page of the manual

The first thing to notice is that it does not have the metal locking cap on the N3 plug that the Canon has, but I was not expecting it to have one as the eBay photo clearly showed that it had a bare plastic plug. I do not plan to use this in anything other than studio or very tame outdoor environments so this does not worry me.

In the hand the Phottix feels solid and well made; the cable length is 8cm longer than the specified cable length at 88cm. It has a holder on the reverse side for cameras that have removable N3 socket covers so that you don’t lose them – since none of my cameras have such a thing (they all have rubber flaps to protect the various plug holes on the camera bodies) I can’t vouch for them. All in all it looks and feels like a nicely made piece of kit.

The push-in connector works fine, although you do not have the security of the lock to make sure it stays there during use.

The TR-80 is powered by a CR2032 3v Li button cell battery, which was included with the remote. The manual says that it is expected to last for 3 years, but the CR2032 is cheap and easy to buy if need be.

First I tested to check that it worked as a standard remote release, which it does happily on a series of DSLRs – 10D, 30D & 40D – without a problem. The half-pressed release mode to set the auto-focus and exposure functions going on the camera works OK and it has a sliding lock for the fully pressed switch position to allow long exposure times or continuous shooting. The half-pressed position is more akin to the Nova remote release I tested earlier (go [ here ] for the earlier review) than the standard Canon remote release.

Moving on to the digital functions…
I got it to do pretty much what I wanted it to do without reading the manual, but felt it was better to read it to get a handle on all that it can do and how it does it. Below is the page that sets out fifteen of the combinations possible with the TR-80. Setting multiple functions stack up the actions performed by the timer.

Double click on the image to expand it so that you can read it

For instance if you set the self-timer to 30 secs, the interval timer to 15 mins, the long exposure setting to 1min 30 secs (you have to set the exposure time on the camera to “bulb” for this to work) and set the exposure count to 75 and press the start button the timer will tell the camera to wait for 30 seconds; then take one 90 sec exposure; it will then wait for another 13mins and 30 secs, take another 90 sec exposure and keep on doing this until it has taken 75 images in all. At any time you can over-ride the timer by pressing the manual remote release – meanwhile, the timer will continue until you press stop.

When you ask it to perform this sort of multi-function programme all the icons representing the set functions light up on the LCD and the one currently being undertaken flashes. In the scenario above the self-timer icon disappears once it has done its job, then the interval timer icon flashes. It is, however, not possible to see how many shots are left in the exposure count function once the programme is under way.

Essentially it seems that the TR-80 has the same functionality as the Canon TC-80N3.

The photo below shows the control unit in more detail.

I have tested all the functions, some in more depth than others, and they all work as promised. The LCD back-light works, but is pretty faint and the first time I tried it in daylight I did not think that it was working – in the semi-dark it is fine and stays on for about 6 seconds.

The mode button scrolls between the four functions and the jog wheel to the right hand side of the unit rotates to select the numerical value you are looking for – rotating the jog wheel up decreases the number; down increases it. To change between selecting seconds, minutes or hours you press in the jog wheel to move from one to the next – the time being set flashes. If you just want to select seconds then set them and press mode to move on to the next setting, or simply press start – you do not have to go through all the possible settings in any given mode before moving on to the next one. It all works nicely and intuitively.

When you press the start button the programmed functions kick off – if it is a count down the display counts down, and resets to the start at the end of each cycle. During operation the mode that is showing flashes to tell you that it is in action. 5 secs before taking an exposure the timer wakes up the camera to set the auto-focus and exposure so that everything is ready at the allotted time to take a photo. It will not fire the shutter if the camera would not let it – for instance if auto-focus is not found on the Canon 40D I tested it on.

The exposure counting function takes a photo every second unless you set a longer interval with the interval timer. For most purposes you should probably set the frame rate to single as it may cause some unexpected results if set to a high frame rate.

Cleary if you set an impossible combination (such as asking it to produce 90 sec exposures every 60 secs) it will not do what you want. It is quite easy to come up with impossible combinations, but things like exposure bracketing are possible with a bit of juggling.

It is possible to run with mirror lock-up in action, so long as you set an interval to less than the self-cancelling time for the camera – in the 40D’s case it drops the mirror after being locked-up for 30 secs. In continuous exposure count mode (with the interval set to 0) it will effectively take an exposure every 2 secs rather than every 1. If you want to run in a more realistic scenario with mirror lock up set to take a photo every 15 mins then it will not work (or at least I have not found a camera/timer combination that will allow this yet). Since the conditions that will allow mirror lock-up to be used are not really very useful this is a limitation if you want to use mirror lock-up.

The settings remain in place after it has completed the programmed actions. This is useful if you want to repeat the programme, but you have to remember to cancel the various times etc after use if you do not want to repeat the programme, otherwise you may unintentionally do things other than your chosen function the next time you come to use it. Fortunately it is possible to cancel all the settings in one easy operation by pressing the Mode, Backlight and Jog wheel all at the same time. It is also possible to lock all the buttons and jog wheel so that you do not accidentally make any changes by pressing the Backlight button for 3 secs.

If the battery runs out you can simply use it as a standard manual remote release as that function carries on working fine without a battery.

In use I find that it is best to secure the unit to a tripod leg with a Velcro strap – I tried using Blu-Tack, but it kept falling off.

Conclusion
So was it a good buy? Yes – at a 1/4 to a 1/3^rd of the price of the Canon original it is good value. In fact, apart from the plug, if someone put a Canon label on the front instead of Phottix I would be happy to believe it was from Canon.

It has an impressive range of features and options, and the user interface is well thought out and presented. Only time will tell whether it is reliable and durable over the next few years, but there is no reason to suppose it will not be.

If you want to try out a TC-80N3, but can not justify the expenditure then I recommend the Phottix TR-80.

Review of the Nova version of the Canon RS-80N3 remote release

2008-08-07T20:08:00.003+01:00

One of the reasons for buying into a complete camera system, such as Canon’s EOS series or Nikon, is the range of accessories available, which is also one of the pains when you realise how much the manufacturers charge for even the simplest accessory, such as an electronic remote release. This is a review of a cheaper generic version of Canon’s RS-80N3 remote release.

Canon’s RS-80N3 remote release fits any Canon EOS camera fitted with Canon’s proprietary three pin N3 remote release. If you use a tripod at all you are going to want one or more of these things and in the UK they typically cost around £45 each.

If you look on eBay, however, you will see a huge variety of generic versions available, nearly all from China. These range in price and quality, but even the better looking clones cost about a third of what Canon charge, so you may well be tempted to try one. You will also see that it is possible to buy purportedly genuine Canon versions from Hong Kong for around £30, but you are then a bit at the mercy of customs, who, in the UK, are pretty hot on charging duty, tax and fees that might hike the cost above the genuine version…

I originally bought a genuine Canon RS-80N3 remote release so as not to risk any damage to my camera, but I found I needed more than one and in any case they are not very robust and could easily get damaged or lost in the field, so I wanted a spare or two around just in case. I thus decided to try a Chinese clone.

I picked one of the higher priced versions available on eBay that looked well made and had the same metal sheath/locking cap as Canon’s version – many have a plain plastic plug with no metal locking cap. Two years ago (June 2006) I paid an all-in price, including delivery, of £15.40 to a Chinese based eBay seller – Nova. It arrived in the UK in about a week.

Was this a good idea?

The photo below shows the genuine Canon and Nova versions side-by-side.

In the hand the Nova version feels solid and well made, although not quite a good as the Canon. The N3 plug also looks much the same as the Canon. The Nova version’s switch (the bit that you hold in your hand) is significantly bigger, but despite having small hands I find it more comfortable to use than the Canon, which I find a bit small. The Nova does not stint on cable length either, being 6cm longer than the Canon’s 90cm. Both have a holder on their reverse sides for cameras that have removable N3 socket covers so that you don’t lose them – since none of my cameras have such a thing (they all have rubber flaps to protect the various plug holes on the camera bodies) I can’t vouch for them.

The whole push-in connector on the Nova is slightly longer than Canon’s (24.6mm vs 23.2mm) and the metal locking cap is a bit sloppier on the Nova. The actual N3 plug is the same on both. Both fit the cameras OK and lock into place - although the Canon version makes a more reassuring “click” when it locks into place, both of them lock and unlock the plug fine.

The first test of a remote release is the most important – does it work without damaging the camera?
Yes – I have used it on a series of DSLRs – 10D, 30D & 40D – without a problem.

Secondly – does it work reliably?
Again – Yes. Over the two years I have had it I have used it interchangeably with the Canon version, probably using the Nova three times the amount of the Canon, and noticed no difference – it has always worked when I asked it to. There is no damage to either and only normal signs of wear and tear (I am pretty careful of my equipment), although the cable on the Nova has become a bit twisted, whereas the Canon has not.

Both the remote releases provide the half-pressed release mode to set the auto-focus and exposure functions going on the camera and both have a sliding lock for the fully pressed switch position to allow long exposure times or continuous shooting. The half-pressed position is slightly more depressed on the Canon making it a bit easier to use, but I have had no problem using either – in fact I had to check this out specifically before writing about as I was not sure if there was a difference, so it has been a non-issue for me in use.

Essentially the Nova switch is functionally the same as the Canon.

I bought my remote release from www.novaphotography.biz and this is printed on the cable, but Nova seems to have disappeared. Looking though eBay, however, I see sellers selling what looks to be exactly the same product, although the price seems to have crept up…

Conclusion
So was it a good buy?

Yes – at 1/3rd the price of the Canon original, with good but not quite as good build quality as the Canon, the Nova was good value. It has worked reliably for 2 years and continues to do so – what more could you ask?

Inside an Epson 4800 220ml inkjet cartridge

2008-08-02T16:54:00.004+01:00

Have you ever wondered what the inside of an Epson 4800 220ml inkjet cartridge looks like? Here I have a look at a used cartridge and muse on why Epson does not like re-use…

It was easy to open up one of these cartridges. I just slit the paper label around the shut line with a scalpel and prised the top off with a couple of wide screwdrivers. The whole lot is simply clipped together with twelve securing tabs, which you can see in the photo.

The result is shown in the photo below (and it was only while I was adjusting it in Lightroom that I noticed the letter heading “The Shame of Litter” in the newsprint…)

Inside is an aluminised plastic bladder with a valve (see close up photo of it below) for the ink to be drawn out into the printer. It slips out quite easily, being held in place by the neck of the valve. There is no connection between the ink container and the cartridge so there is no physical connection with the cartridge’s chip.

This lack of connection means that it would be pretty easy for Epson to re-use the cartridges by simply putting in a new ink bladder and resetting the chip. It would also be pretty easy for Epson to supply re-fills for users to put in themselves, but that would mean that Epson would have to sanction or sell a chip re-setter, which Epson seem dead set against. Epson’s recent aggressive defence of their intellectual property trying to put a stop to third party ink and cartridge suppliers indicates that this is far from their thoughts.

I am very happy to re-use the maintenance tank (see this link for my instructions on how I do that), but refilling a used bladder seems to be too much of a risk to me.

Epson seem pretty set against doing anything “green” that would challenge their current business model of selling a reasonably priced printer and making their money on the ink – of course that might upset us, the users, if we had to pay for Epson’s profit in the printer purchase price – we might not like the numbers that came out – but not re-using something that seems eminently designed to be re-used seems perverse in the current sustainability climate.

Think Tank Digital Holster 20 review

2008-07-30T06:28:00.003+01:00

Recently I went looking for a case to hold my Canon 40D with a range of lenses attached and ended up buying a Think Tank Digital Holster 20 after trying out several in the shop (Morris Photographic in Chipping Norton) from Lowepro, Kata, Crumpler and Tamrac. This review covers my experience of it so far.

Ever since I stopped using “ever ready” cases with my old film SLRs I have tended not to use a case to protect my camera with lens attached; rather I have relied on transporting them in a camera bag such as my Lowepro Magnum or just wrapped them in a fleece and stuffed them into a rucksack.

Recently I was going on holiday flying by Ryanair and wanted to put my camera and lenses in carry-on baggage. When travelling I try not to look like a photographer so I use a non-descript rucksack with photo gear inside it. Ryanair’s cabin baggage sizes are, however, quite tight, being 55 x 40 x 20cm – the 20cm (4”) restriction being pretty small, so I needed to be more careful than usual about carrying and protecting my photo gear.

I wanted a case to protect my camera with a lens attached (normally an EF-S 17-55 f2.8 IS zoom, but I wanted some flexibility to put a longer lens on if possible) that would take up as little space as possible in a small rucksack, be able to meet the 20cm thickness restriction and weigh as little as possible. Many of the options available did not meet the 20cm criteria, but the Think Tank Digital Holster 20 did. It also had a number of nice additional options on offer (more about them later), so I bought it. The photo below shows it with the 40D in it.

Think Tank Photo is a relatively new kid on the block, in Europe at least, and I had not seen any of their products before. Their mission statement says:

“We are a group of designers and professional photographers focused on studying how photographers work, and developing inventive new carrying solutions to meet their needs. By focusing on “speed” and “accessibility,” we prepare photographers to Be Ready “Before The Moment,” allowing them to capture those historic moments that reflect their personal visions and artistic talents. For some companies, it is only about the product. For us, it is more: It is about supporting photographers doing their job. If we can design products that help photographers travel easier, take pictures faster, and organize their gear more efficiently, then we will have accomplished something beyond the bags themselves.”

At first glance their equipment looked a bit old fashioned, which probably means that it is designed to do a job other than look good in the shop, but when I came to try out all the options the Digital Holster 20 met my needs best.

Think Tank offer a range of five Digital Holsters (10 to 50) which can be seen here. All of them offer their “pop down” feature – which allows the holster to offer two different lens lengths options. Essentially the bottom portion of the holster has a zip around it which holds it in the closed position for the shorter option or you simply unzip it to allow the full length of the holster to be used. The photos below show the holster in the short and long configurations.

The holster is made out of a thick’ish black ballistic nylon type outer material; a relatively thin foam padding down to the “pop down” section, where it becomes a soft pliable padding, and a combination of grey smooth and brushed nylon inner. The whole holster feels solid but not bulky and it can stand up on its end (lens down). It therefore fits inside my rucksack without taking up unnecessary space or weighing too much, while offering reasonable protection against every day wear and tear.

My Digital Holster 20 in the closed configuration holds my Canon 40D snugly (with a Really Right Stuff L-plate fitted) with the Canon EF-S 17-55 f2.8 IS lens attached, with lens hood reversed (it will just take it with lens hood attached, but it feels too tight for comfort). With the holster at full extension it takes the 40D with a Canon 70-200 f2.8 IS lens attached, with lens hood reversed and the tripod ring and Arca plate attached – although it is much easier to fit in with the tripod ring rotated to the portrait position with the raincover taken out to create a bit more space. There is space to take a lens about 25mm (1”) longer than the 70-200 f2.8 IS if need be.

With the internal divider supplied it is possible to place another small lens, extender, extension tubes etc into the bottom of the holster; depending on what lens is fitted to the camera.

I discovered by accident that there is an added unexpected benefit to having this variable holster length option. Essentially when closed the extension material is squashed up into the bottom of the holster and this acts as an excellent impact buffer for the contents. I found this out by accidentally dropping the holster with the 40D + 17-55 lens attached (lens hood reversed) onto a stone floor (I extremely rarely drop my cameras etc as I am normally pretty paranoid about protecting them, but accidents happen…). The whole lot landed lens cap down and I immediately feared the worse. It, however, landed right on the end of the holster where the squashed up extension material was thickest and to my immense relief everything was absolutely fine. It almost certainly paid for itself many times over in that one incident, especially as I had only taken a compact as backup with me on holiday.

The Digital Holster 20 has the following features:

Variable lens length option
Detachable seam sealed raincover
Adjustable LCD protection pad inside the holster
External pocked for memory cards/batteries etc
Adjustable internal lens separator
Carrying handle mounted on the lid of the holster
Zipped clear compartment inside the lid
Clear business card holder underneath the external handle
Rotate or lock mechanism for use with Think Tank speed belt
Comes with a removable shoulder strap
Comes with a “No rhetoric warranty” see here for details

Key measurements (note these are somewhat different from those quoted in Think Tank’s literature and are measured from my own Digital Holster 20):

Width: 21cm (inc buckles & pocket)
Length: 24cm (closed) to 33cm (extended)
Thickness: 14cm (With 40D + RRS L-plate inside)
Weight: 535g complete
400g exc. the shoulder strap
340g exc. the shoulder strap and raincover

Comments on features:
The raincover sits neatly inside the holster in its own Velcro closed pouch, attached to the holster with a ribbon fixed with a Velcro tab, so it is easy to remove and fit or simply to leave behind to save weight (it weighs 60g) and space inside the holster (it does take up quite a bit of room inside, so if space is tight taking it out may help). It is made from a thin black rip-stop nylon type material and has two elasticated draw strings secured with toggles to seal the cover in place. It is, however, not the simplest cover to install that I have experienced – I guess it has to accommodate the holster in its two length configurations, so it is a bit more complicated than it might be. The toggles make sure that there is a snug fit over the lid protecting the zip, and covers the whole of the front, sides and bottom of the holster, but leaves an uncovered patch at the back (presumably to allow attachment to the speed belt?), much like the cover on my Lowepro Magnum. So it will protect from rain but not dropping into water; not surprising since it calls itself a “raincover” and does not claim to be waterproof. Below are front and back photos of the raincover in place with the holster in its closed configuration.

I would recommend trying the raincover out before using it in anger as it took me some time to figure it how best to fit it the first time I tried it. The All Weather cover on my Lowepro Magnum is much more intuitive and easier to fit with its elasticated edges and Velcro fastening.

The LCD protector flap also allows you to stow something else above the camera, such as a camera strap, inside the holster without it rubbing directly on the back of the camera/LCD display.

The external memory card/battery pocket is useful. It is outside the foam padding of the main holster but if you overfill the pocket it will intrude into the body of the holster. I found that it would comfortably take two spare 40D (Canon BP-511/512 type) batteries in it, either side-by-side or end-to-end. I keep spare memory cards in the pocket inside the holster’s lid.

I tend to leave the shoulder strap off this type of bag (in fact I left it in the shop when I bought it to take on holiday and only got it back when I returned – Morris Photographic kindly rang me to tell me that I had left it on their counter) and use the carrying handle or if I really want a shoulder strap I use the one fitted to the camera – in my case an Op/Tech neoprene strap. In due course I might fit a couple of Op/Tech’s quick release tails to the D-rings on the holster so that I could transfer the strap from the camera to the case if need be.

Since I did not buy the Think Tank speed belt at the same time I can not comment on the ease of use or usefulness of the Rotate or lock mechanism.

Conclusion
The Digital Holster 20 is thoughtfully designed and well made, without being bulky. The versatile variable length “pop down” feature allows me to use it for a wide variety of camera/lens combinations.

It does everything I asked of it and most probably saved a lens and/or camera body when I dropped them on a stone floor – I am very happy with my choice.

Note:
I have no connection to any of the suppliers or retailers mentioned in this posting other than being a happy customer.

Epson Stylus pro 4800 inkjet printer error codes

2008-07-14T22:16:00.003+01:00

Recently I had a "Service Req." message come up on my 4800. There have also been a few questions on Forums about what various error messages mean, so I thought I would post a listing that I have for the Epson 4800. This is not an official Epson listing, but it appears to be accurate in the few cases that I have had to use it

Firstly please excuse the lack of formating of the listings below, but it would take me too long to put it into pristine formatted text and it would never arrive - I think anyone looking for the info should be able to find it here.

There are two types of error codes. Those indicating a maintenance issue that can usually be sorted out by resetting a counter or checking something is still OK after its nominal end of life. The second set are service errors that may need a technician to fix them, although many of them seem to respond to a certain amount of informed and sensible "fiddling" about; in some the descriptions indicate the action that should be taken to resolve the problem.

Error Codes (Maintenance)

0002 Carriage Motor / Ink Tube end of life (Clear Carriage Motor Counter)

0004 Nozzle check error

0008 RTC error (Real Time Clock) (Check the Battery and reset the Date and Time)

0010 Multi Sensor Error

0020 Print Head life counter (Reset the Head counter)

0040 Cleaner Unit end of life (Clear the Cleaner counter)

0080 Date is not set (Set the date and time (RTC))

0100 RTC Battery low (Replace the battery, and reset the RTC)

0200 Paper feed roller life (over 75,000 sheets) (Reset the ASF counter)

Error Codes (Service)

00000088 RTC (Real Time Clock) data is corrupted

00000101 Carriage Motor life (Reset Carriage Motor Counter, check for leaky ink tubes)

00000103 RTC (Real Time Clock) battery is defective

00000105 Print Head end of life (Inspect print head and reset head counter)

00010000 Paper Feed Motor encoder check error (Check Sensor and Timing Disk)

00010001 Paper Feed Motor out of step

00010002 Paper Feed Motor overcurrent (Check for mechanical binding of the feed rollers / motor)

00010003 Paper Feed Motor in-position time-out

00010004 Carriage Motor encoder check error (Check sensor and Timing Disk)

00010005 Carriage Motor out of step

00010006 Carriage Motor overcurrent (Check for mechanical binding, If not replace motor)

00010007 Carriage Motor in-position time-out

00010008 Servo interrupt watchdog time-out

00010009 System interrupt watchdog time-out

0001000A Carriage home position error (Check Sensor and mechanical components)

0001000C Platen Gap home position error (Check Sensor and mechanical components)

0001000F Carriage Motor PWM output faulty

00010010 Paper Feed Motor PWM output faulty

0001001B Head driver (TG) temperature error

0001001D Carriage servo parameter error

0001001E Paper feed servo parameter error

00010020 CSIC read / write error

00010022 Ink type error

00010023 RTC (Real Time Clock) (Reset RTC)

00010025 CSIC ROM communication error

00010026 RTC (Real Time Clock) communication error

00010028 Head error

00010029 Unidentified NMI

0001002A Carriage ASIC ECU error

0001002B Paper feed ASIC ECU error

0001002D Cleaning Unit end of life

0001002F 360 DPI writing time out error

00010030 Multi Sensor failure (1. Check sensor, 2. calibrate sensor, 3. replace sensor)

00010031 ASF (Auto Sheet Feeder) home position error (Check Sensor and mechanical components)

00010032 ASF (Auto Sheet Feeder) Drive Switch error (Check Sensor and mechanical components)

00010033 Exit Roller home position error (Check Sensor and mechanical components)

00010034 Eject Roller lifted (Customer Safety Sensor on the eject roller)

00010035 Pump Home Position Error (Check Sensor and mechanical components)

00010036 Type B 1394 (Firewire) board installation (Remove Firewire Card / not allowed)

00010037 Print Head thermistor error

00010038 Head Driver thermistor error

00010039 PG adjustment value NVRAM error

0001003A PG adjustment value NVRAM error

0001003B Carriage Lock / Cutter Error

0001003C Carriage Lock / Cutter Error

0001003D Carriage Lock / Cutter Error

00020000 NVRAM error

00020002 SDRAM error

00020003 BOOT program SUM error

00020009 Flash memory SUM error

0002000A Program load error

0002000B Internal memory shortage error

0002000C Review error

100000E0 CPU address error (load misalignment)

10000100 CPU address error (storage misalignment)

10000180 CPU reserve command code exception error

100001A0 CPU slot illegal command exception error

100001C0 AC disruption (AC Power) (Unplug and wait 30 sec., then plug back in)

100005C0 CPU DMA address error

0003xxxxx –

0Dxxxxxxx CPU error

Epson 4800 Error message - Service req. 100001C0

2008-07-10T21:46:00.002+01:00

I was printing quite happily on my Epson 4800 one evening recently, but the next morning the automated nozzle check sent by Harvey Head Cleaner did not print and there were a couple of flashing red LEDs and the printer’s LCD display was saying “Service req. 100001C0”. What to do?

I was about to set off for the day job so I just had to leave it flashing away as I had no idea what to do, but fear the worst...

I did a quick web search that evening and found very little, but a couple of posts seemed to think that turning off the printer was the solution.

I had a look at the Espon Field repair guide that I have and found the following in the error codes section:

100001C0

AC disruption (AC Power) (Unplug and wait 30 sec., then plug back in)

I have the printer plugged into a power surge protector block so there should not have been any problems and no other equipment was saying that there had been a power outage, but...

So I turned off the printer and left it for a day while I got on with the day job again. When I turned on the printer there was a lot of whirring while it went through its “auto something or other” routine (see previous postings for my thoughts on this) which I watched with a lot of trepidation as this often converts a perfect nozzle check into one with one of more colours completely missing.

Eventually it told me to press pause and then went into it’s “Ready” mode.

I ran a nozzle check and it came out perfectly, so all was well again.

Review of the Giottos MH 1302-655 ballhead used with a Gitzo GT1541T Traveler tripod

2008-07-06T16:13:00.007+01:00

For some time I have known that the best way of improving my on-the-move photography was to use a tripod, but I have always balked at carrying my normal tripods and at the cost of the specialist lightweight travel tripods such as Gitzo’s Traveler range. This year I finally decided to take the plunge, but was not sure about the ballhead.

Gitzo offer three traveler tripods (full details here) – the GT1541T and the GT1550T are the ones that interested me. They are about the same weight (1kg), with the GT1541T having a four section leg configuration; the GT1550T has five section legs, folds slightly smaller (35.5cm long vs 41cm) and comes with its own miniature ballhead (G1077M), while the GT1541T does not come with one. With the G1077M head the maximum load capacity of the GT1550T is only 2kg, although the legs on their own seem to be rated at 4.5kg. The rating for the GT1541T is a much greater 8kg.

With my normal tripods I use either Kirk BH-1 or BH-3 ballheads with Arca type quick release platforms and plates – I equip my DSLRs with L-brackets from either Really Right Stuff or Kirk (RRS by preference, but they don’t have an importer in the UK, whereas Kirk does, and customs duty and “fees” add about a 30% price premium to buying direct from RRS) and have a selection of camera and lens plates, and quick release platforms from Wimberley, Kirk & RRS – so one key criterion is that the travel tripod must be Arca compatible. Below is a list of my key criteria for choosing the tripod/ballhead combination:

Arca quick release system compatible
Maximum load capacity of at least 4kg
Lockable panoramic rotation capability
Adjustable friction control for the ballhead
Side notch to allow the head to flop over if necessary
Tripod socket of 3/8”

The G1077M fails on several of these criteria: it is not Arca compatible; it’s maximum load capacity is only 2kg; it has a rotating base but it is not lockable; there is no friction control on the ballhead – it is small and light, but it does not do what I wanted.

Also I am happier with a four section leg tripod than a five (quicker to set up and less spindly) so I chose the GT1541T Traveler tripod (accepting that it is slightly less compact than the GT1550T). I was, however, not aware of any suitable ballhead to partner it with. The smaller Kirk ballhead I use, the BH-3, weighs in at 560g so is hardly the ideal partner for the lightweight GT1541T.

My search was pretty fruitless until I received a “Birds as Art” bulletin from Art Morris extolling the virtues of the Giottos’ MH 1302-655 ballhead – if you go here and scroll down the page to the section titled “The Perfect Tiny Ballhead for Wimberley and Mongoose Users” you can see Art’s review. Essentially it met all the criteria and was as compact and light as I could imagine. Failing to find one for sale anywhere in the UK (there were some with non-Arca platforms) I bought one direct from Birds as Art in the US, which arrived in about 10 days – pretty good and great communication from them as well.

Details can be found on Giottos’ web site here.

The ballhead designation is MH 1302 with the 655 part being the Arca compatible quick release platform. It is rated at 8kg, weighs 320g, is 92’ish mm tall and has all the functions I wanted. It also has a bubble level in the platform and the tightening knob

The first thing I did was remove the safety stop (with a 2.5mm Allen key) as I wanted to use all the Arca plates I have and they will not work with the stop in place – this was easy – and then play around with it on the GT1541T. Below is a photo of the set up.

Installed on the Traveler the whole lot weighs 1.3kg.

One of the unique features of Gitzo’s Traveler tripods is that their legs fold through 180° making it just a bit shorter. Gitzo’s diminutive G1077M ballhead is designed to fit inside the legs when folded – does the Giottos?

Well, not really. There are three control knobs on the MH 1302 (ballhead tension, friction control and pan lock) which are set at 90° to one another (you can clearly see this in the photo above).

Since the ballhead sits inside the folded legs of the tripod at least one of the knobs rests against one of the legs (see photo below) – they would have to be 120° apart to be able to sit between the legs of the tripod. This is OK, but it of course means that there is a chance of damage either to the ball head of the tripod leg if they are crushed. I have decided to either travel with the ballhead dismounted, attaching it (which takes no time at all) when I want to use it or to not fold the legs back in transit.

Does it produce a stable photographic platform with the Traveler?
In a word – yes. I recently took the rig on holiday to Tuscany where its light weight and portability meant that I had it around when I needed it in low light dusk situations, as well as using up as little as possible of my luggage allowance. I also took with me my new Canon 40D, which I equipped with a generic Wimberley plate until I get around to buying an L-bracket.

The photos below show it in use in both horizontal and vertical mode, with the tripod centre post at full extension. In all the cases I used it in it performed perfectly. I have not experienced any slippage, so when I tighten the head the lens stays pointing where I intended it to.

Conclusion
The Giottos MH 1302-655 ballhead partnered with a Gitzo GT1541T Traveler tripod makes an excellent travel set up. The load capacity is fine and the kit produced excellent results with the lenses I have used (up to 200mm on a Canon 40D).

To make it just that bit better Giottos could space the knobs out at 120°, or some other mix of angles so that allows them to fit between the tripod's legs, and make them a bit smaller perhaps to fit in between the tripods legs with they are folded back – that really would make a magnificent combination.

English manual for a Canon macro twin lite MT-24EX

2008-07-02T21:33:00.004+01:00

I recently bought a used Canon macro twin lite MT-24EX flash system, it was in mint condition and came with a manual, but unfortunately (for an English speaker) it was in French! I thought that it would be easy to find an English version on line but Canon do not seem to offer it. This is where I eventually found two.

I initially searched for a MT-24EX manual and could not find anything other than other people looking for one. Eventually I twigged that if my manual (see image of the cover below) was for both the Macro ring lite MR-14EX and as well as the MT-24EX and that the MR-14EX came first in the heading I should probably search for the manual for the MR-14EX as well.

Using this search strategy I did manage to find two copies.

One 11mb pdf manual at: http://akamaipix.crutchfield.com/Manuals/280/280MR14EX.PDF

And one at around 25mb at Safemanuals:
http://safemanuals.com/user-guide-instructions-owner-manual/CANON/MACRO%20RING%20LITE%20MR-14EX-_E

Both indeed only mention the MR-14EX in the download title. But sure enough both cover the two macro lites (MR-14EX and the MT-24EX) and are in English.

The 11mb manual is more neatly copied at one page of the manual per pdf page whereas the 25mb version is a straight (well actually it is often quite un-straight) scan of an actual printed version of the manual with two pages per page in the pdf.

The 25mb version is (not surprisingly) much higher quality in terms of image and print reproduction, but there is quite a lot of print through from page to page and the pages are quite skewed at times, although not losing anything significant. The 11mb version is pretty poor for image reproduction, but much neater and the text is easy to read.

Below are copies of the same page from the two versions for you to compare, although the conversion from pdf via Photoshop to a jpeg (required since blogspot does not support pdf file uploads) has not done the larger version any favours as it looks much lighter in the jpeg than in the pdf:

Extract from the 11mb version

Extract from the 25mb version

Conclusion
So for speed of download and neatness go for the 11mb version. For ultimate reproduction quality, but less neatness, go for the 25mb version

Does Printer Jockey’s channel flushing function clear nozzle clogs?

2008-06-29T19:18:00.006+01:00

When I reviewed Printer Jockey recently (here is the original posting) I found that it did not recover total ink channel loss on my Epson 4800 inkjet printer, but I did not know whether the idea that single channel flushing might be able to solve the odd nozzle going missing would work or not. After a couple of months of trying it out here are my conclusions.

Originally I found that even running selected channel flushing several times at its full intensity it did not cure the complete loss of single or multiple ink channels that I have experienced. I was not sure, however, whether channel flushing would be able to restore the odd clogged nozzle without having to resort to a full cleaning cycle. It has to be said that I was really hopeful that it would as this would potentially save quite a bit of ink.

In the last couple of months I have had a few instances of the odd line of the nozzle check going missing and each time I have tried to use Printer Jockey’s selected channel flushing mode to clear it. Sadly it has had no effect in the all the cases I have tried it on – around half a dozen. In each case a small number of lines (1 to 4) in the nozzle check were missing and I tried to flush the affected colour on its own. I have tried different combinations of channel flushing in several different intensities and repeatedly, but to no avail.

Unlike the experience I had with completely lost ink channels (where no ink was used at all during channel flushes of the affected channels) channel flushing with just the odd clogged nozzle does certainly print the selected channel/s and plenty of ink comes out on the page, but this does not clear the clogs.

In each case a single running of the standard cleaning cycle cleared the problem.

Conclusion
So my conclusion is that, sadly, Printer Jockey’s channel flushing mode does not clear nozzle clogs at all. I am disappointed as I really hoped it would work…

Is humidity the key to avoiding nozzle clogging on my Epson 4800?

2008-06-26T10:51:00.006+01:00

Recent experience has told me that 40% humidity is the bottom end of acceptable to keep my 4800 running relatively nozzle clog free - I try to keep my 4800 at 50%, along with a routine of printing a little often - see this posting for details.

I recently had to go away without leaving the computer on for 10 days so I could not use my normal regimen – so what happened?

Because I could not follow my tried and almost trusted regimen of printing a little often along with keeping the humidity at around 50% I had to come up with an alternative to try to keep my printer clog free.

I puddle soaked the print head to make sure that the print head in its capping station was humid/wet; I added a pot of water inside the printer cover to the usual wet sponge in the paper tray and really wrapped up the printer in its cover, including wrapping it under the paper tray, and turned off the printer.

When I came back the humidity inside the machine was reading 72% (according to the max/min function on the weather station I use, 73% was the maximum that it reached in the 10 days I was away), with 73% in the paper tray - the room reading was around 50%.

When I turned on the printer it ran an auto cleaning cycle (I have called this an "auto something or other" before, but this time I watched the print head move around and the following nozzle check showed that it had used 9.6ml of ink since I turned it off, so I am pretty certain that it is auto cleaning, despite this function being turned off via the LCD panel...). This would normally cause a whole ink channel or two, or three, or four… to drop out, but the following nozzle check was perfect and I then ran a batch of 30 A4 prints without a hitch.

During this the fan inside the printer reduced the humidity to 43% so I put the water pot back inside the print cover to raise the humidity to 50% again as quickly as possible... leaving myself a note to remind me to take the pot out before turning on my computer or Harvey Head Cleaner would initiate a nozzle check automatically with nasty and expensive results.

Strangely the printer also ran an auto clean before the auto nozzle check first thing the following morning – why? The printer had been recently used the nozzle check was perfect etc. Luckily the following nozzle check was also perfect.

Anyone who has looked at the rest of my blog postings will see that I have had lots of problems with nozzle clogging on my 4800 and this episode just makes me think even more that humidity is the key, along with a really all enveloping cover and printing a little and often.

Two different types of Costco / Kirkland Signature Professional Glossy Inkjet Photo Paper tested

2008-06-11T20:31:00.009+01:00

For some time I have used Costco’s own brand Kirkland Signature Professional Glossy Inkjet Photo Paper as one of my draft/proofing (before committing ink to an expensive paper) and contact printing papers and for prints for friends & family with my Epson 4800, and before that on my Canon 9000S. I have been very happy with it, but noticed recently that the box had changed and whereas all the paper I had used before was made in Switzerland, the latest batch was made in the USA. So are they the same? If not, what’s the difference?

According to the gossip on the web Costco sell several papers under their Kirkland label, with the paper made in Switzerland being rumoured to be made by Ilford and the USA made paper being made by Kodak. There are also some stories about it being made by Epson as well.

For several years I have bought A4 Kirkland paper in the UK mostly via eBay as I do not have a Costco account and until recently it always came in boxes containing 125 sheets and was made in Switzerland - below is a scan of the box top. Initially the paper was rated at 260gsm (69lbs), but this changed to 255gsm (68 lbs), although both were 10 mil thick and had the same product code: 77755 (circled in the image below). Since the rumours had it being made by Ilford and that it was the same as Ilford’s Smooth Gloss Paper I did try it with Ilford’s SGP ICC profiles – the results were OK, but I decided to get a bespoke profile made; which unsurprisingly was better still. The two different weights of paper seemed to look identical (or so I thought – see below) so presumably used the same paper substrate and ink receiving layer coating.

The most recent batch (May 2008) came in a 150 sheet card wallet rather than a box, and said that it was made in the USA, and although the same weight and thickness, it had a different product code: 80623 - below is a scan of the front of the wallet, with various key clues to its difference circled I red.

So before using it in anger I put it through my normal paper test process (If you want to know how I test papers I wrote about it in an earlier posting here) to see which if any of these papers it behaves like.

The Comparison
First off I was quite confused for some time in this test as my perceptions changed each time I looked at the prints, until I realised that the Swiss made Kirkland papers I was using were different – some from the 260gsm box and some from a 255gsm box. I thought that they were interchangeable until I realised that the 260gsm paper was whiter on the coated side than the 255gsm paper; or was it the other way around?

I compared sheets in Northern morning light from the Swiss (the whiter one was actually used) and US made batches of Kirkland papers with a sheet of Epson Premium Gloss, and Ilford Smooth Gloss and Omnijet papers (I have never used any Kodak paper so do not have any to hand to compare with).

Looking at the coated sides shows that the Ilford Omnijet is the most cream coloured, with the Swiss Kirkland the whitest, with the other two looking extremely similar; but slight variations of light shifted my perceptions. The less white Swiss Kirkland looked much the same as the US Kirkland and the Epson.

Looking at the back of the papers, however, showed up significant differences (besides having Epson printed all over the back of the Epson paper). The USA made paper was whiter than the other four, and the Ilford Smooth Gloss looked whiter than the Swiss made Kirkland, which looked much the same as the Ilford Omnijet; the Epson was the most cream coloured and had a more glazed look to it and was smoother. The Epson and US Kirkland had the most fibrous looking backs in certain lights.

Since the USA made paper was rumoured to be made by Kodak I looked for a generic profile to try and the only one I could find was for their Professional papers (the same profile seems to cover both gloss & lustre papers) @
http://www.kodak.com/global/en/professional/member/photoPrinters/ICCProfiles.jhtml

I made the following test prints through Qimage:

The Swiss made paper with its bespoke profile
The USA made paper with exactly the same settings as the Swiss paper (profile, printer driver settings, rendering intent, black point compensation etc).
The USA made paper with the Kodak Pro profile with all the settings as per Kodak’s instructions; most notably with black point compensation (BPC) turned OFF.
The USA made paper with the Kodak Pro profile with all the settings as per Kodak’s instructions; but with BPC turned ON (because I do quite a lot of printing from Lightroom 1.4 and, as far as I can see, there is no way of turning BPC on or off in Lightroom).
The USA made paper with standard Epson Premium Glossy Photo Paper (PGPP) settings, using the Pro4800 PGPP profile – in case it is actually made by Epson.

I let the prints dry for 24 hours and then examined them.

In the Northerly morning light the most striking difference is between the B&W prints made with the Kodak profiles and the rest. Both the Kodak prints have a distinctly less neutral look to their B&W renditions, looking much warmer - on the yellow side. The other three look pretty similar with neutral B&Ws. With its whiter base the Swiss Kirkland looks cooler with there being very little to choose between the bespoke Swiss Kirkland and canned Epson profiles on the US Kirkland paper. The bespoke Swiss Kirkland profile probably makes the closest rendition of B&W images on the US paper to the Swiss paper, but the Epson profile is pretty close.

In the colour images things are a bit different.
The main difference is between the Swiss made Kirkland with the bespoke profile and the rest. The blues are more solid and skin tones are better, but the differences are pretty subtle. The Prints made with the Kodak profile look a bit brighter and thinner than the others. The mountain range image (in the multi-image test print I use) looks brighter with slightly less dense shadows, but skin tones look a bit washed out and greens look yellower.

Viewed in isolation they all look pretty acceptable, and friends and family were quite happy with prints from all of these combinations and even viewed side-by-side no one picked one over another consistently.

Even looking at the colour bars at the bottom of the test image nothing was clear – I had to look pretty carefully and stare and shuffle strips around to see any difference. Changing the light made much more difference than the profiles.

I could not see any effect of turning the BPC on and off with the Kodak profiles, so printing through Lightroom should be fine if I chose to use this profile.

I might have been able to see some numeric differences between the profiles’ actions if I had looked at the per channel ink usage information that the Epson LFP Remote Panel utility produces, but by the time I had thought of that the data was overwritten by subsequent prints. Perhaps another time, but I do not plan to redo the prints just to gather this data.

Conclusions
As is often the case B&W images show differences in printers, papers and profiles better than colour. The Kodak profiles clearly produce a warmer, slightly sepia look, while the others produce a more neutral, cooler image.

So assuming that colour rendition is not absolutely critical for contact printing or friends & family prints then the US Made Kirkland paper looks pretty good with a range of profiles – I’ll probably get a bespoke one made in due course just to be sure. In the meanwhile I’ll use the bespoke profile made for the Swiss made Kirkland as it is easier just to treat all the Kirkland papers the same to avoid confusion.

Unless the real difference in B&W rendition is deliberate then I do not think that this batch of US made Kirkland paper is made my Kodak, or the profile I used (which is the only one I could find on Kodak’s web site) is for a completely different paper altogether.

In any case I am quite happy to continue to buy Costco’s Kirkland paper for non-critical prints whatever the source is.

Testing inkjet papers to use with an Epson 4800

2008-06-05T20:12:00.002+01:00

This posting is about how I test new inkjet papers for use on my Epson 4800 inkjet printer; in future postings I will go into what papers I currently use for my for B&W and colour printing. Since I only use gloss paper, partly because that is what people seem to like and partly to avoid having to switch between the Matt and Photo ink cartridges with all the ink loss that that incurs, I can only share my experience of printing on gloss papers. I also include sources for several printer test images available on the web.

I bought the Epson 4800 so that I would be able to print images onto all sizes from A4 up to 17” width roll paper. I want to be able to print B&W prints as well as colour and I have three basic print modes; Exhibition, draft/proofing and friends & family prints. The criteria for paper choice clearly vary considerably from Exhibition prints needing excellent quality and longevity, through draft/proofing prints needing to represent what the final exhibition print will look like as cheaply as possible, to friends & family prints looking about right first time at a sensible cost.

I have never been one to blindly use the papers that the manufacturers sell as they are almost never either the best quality or the best priced solution. So when I got the 4800 I got hold of samples of all the likely candidates available in the UK, along with any ICC profiles that were available to use with them. As new papers have come out that look interesting I have tried them out as well.

I am not going to go into technical aspects of paper properties such as Dmax etc as I do not have the test equipment nor do I really understand what the technical results mean! I am most interested in how the prints look – there are plenty of technical paper tests around the web and published in magazines. I tend to have a look at them before trying a new paper just to see what professional testers think of them.

I test a paper by printing out known test images and comparing them in the light that they are most likely to be viewed in with a library of competitor papers prints that I have created and keep stored out of the light.

Over the years I have accumulated several printer test files that I use to evaluate new papers. These represent a wide variety of images on one sheet of paper, for both B&W and colour images. I have also collected some specialist B&W images to use. If I like the test prints I then use some of my own “keepers” to finally decide whether I want to invest in a new paper or not.

There are quite a few printer test files available on-line and I have listed some below:

Multi image B&W and Colour from Neil Barstow
http://www.colourmanagement.net/downloads.html

B&W multi image and tone gradient file from Northlight Images
http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/article_pages/black_and_white_test.html

Both a multi image B&W and Colour file and a B&W and toned images file from Marrutt
http://www.marrutt.com/print.php

A B&W Tonal range printer test chart and a multi image colour file from Tim Grey
http://www.timgrey.com/books/ccdownloads.htm

Three multi image B&W and Colour files from Imageplace
http://www.imageplace.co.uk/testfiles/downloads.html

Multi image B&W and Colour from Digital Dog
http://www.digitaldog.net/tips/

Three multi image B&W and Colour files from InkJet Art
http://www.inkjetart.com/custom/

The printouts that I find give me the most information are the first two: the multi image B&W and Colour file from Neil Barstow and the B&W file from Northlight Images (both shown below). I also use the B&W tonal range file from Tim Grey to check likely shadow and highlight detail properties for a paper.

Over the last two years I have tested dozens of gloss and semi-gloss/satin papers from manufacturers such as Permajet, Lyson, Fotospeed, Tetenal, Ilford, Harman, Epson, HP, Da Vinci, Olmec and Fuji as well a own label products from Costco (Kirkland), MX2 and 7dayshop etc etc, with prices ranging from 7p per A4 sheet to £1. You can pay a lot more, but I tend to research the cheapest source for papers (nearly always on-line) before trying a paper and I nearly always find widely varying pricing.

I always leave the prints to dry for at least 24 hours to make sure that they are fully dry - I have noticed that some papers seem to have a magenta tint at first which disappears on drying and some also look "fuzzy" before drying.

Lowepro D-Pods 30 case for Ricoh GX100 compact digital camera

2008-06-02T20:22:00.007+01:00

A couple of months ago I posted my experience of the Lowepro D-Pods 30 case with my Canon G9 - Click here to read it. Recently I have been able to play around with a Ricoh GX100 compact digital camera, so I thought it would be useful to report on my experience with it and the D-Pods 30 case, and to compare it with the G9 as well.

Description and specifications
The D-Pods 30 was designed by Lowepro for small digital cameras. It is made from a black stretchy, water-resistant fabric; it has a Velcro secured belt/SlipLock™ compatible loop on the back, a battery/accessory pocket on the front of the case and a memory card pocket in the inside of the front flap. You can also slip something under the memory card pocket (as shown in the photo below). It also comes with a removable shoulder strap and the table below lists the dimensions. In the UK it costs around £7.99.

	Interior - Inches / cm	Exterior - Inches / cm
Height	4.9 / 12.5	5.4 / 13.8
Width	2.8 / 7.0	3.2 / 8.2
Depth	1.4 / 3.5	2.5 / 6.3

Lowepro D-Pods 30 case with the Ricoh GX100 in it, along with a spare battery in the front pocket and a spare SD card in the memory card pocket. The GX100 has the supplied wrist strap fitted.

What is it like in use?
Well the good news is the GX100 fits nicely into the pouch; it is not nearly as tight a fit as the G9 and it is easy to get the camera in and out. Being a looser fit means that you can not really feel any of the buttons, dials and flash bracket through the case that you can with the G9. This is also partly because the GX100 has a smoother body outline with fewer protrusions than the G9.

You certainly can not use the case with the VF-1 electronic viewfinder attached to the GX100, but it fits OK into the bottom of the case without the VF-1’s supplied case; but I feel that the “naked” VF-1 might well get damaged in transit. With the VF-1 in its supplied case I could fit it in at a squeeze with the Velcro closure tab just making contact, but I felt that it was just as likely to damage the VF-1 as protect it. I suppose for “gentle” transport situations it would be OK – at least the viewfinder would not get lost – but not for carrying on the belt or hanging off a rucksack strap.

The Ricoh DB-60 battery for the GX100 (I also use Hähnel HL-005 batteries with the wide range of Panasonic, Leica and Fujifilm cameras that use the same battery) is much slimmer (10mm vs. 16mm) and lighter (26g vs. 43g) than the Canon NB-2LH battery used in the G9, (as shown in the photograph below) so it fits into the front pocket very neatly without making the whole package too bulky, as you can see in the photo above. In fact I did not really notice the battery in the pocket at all as it fits in nicely just below the GX100’s lens bulge in the case.

The Canon battery on the left - the Ricoh on the right

A SD card fits neatly into the memory card pocket, which is made from stiffer material than the stretchy outer case. If, however, your camera takes Compact Flash (CF) cards then it might be worth knowing that the memory card pocket is not big enough to take a CF card. CF cards will slip in behind the memory card pocket, although it is not as secure as the proper pocket and might easily fall out. The front pocket takes a SD or CF card in a protective case quite securely.

The weight of the whole package (camera, strap, spare battery and SD card, and VF-1) comes in at 386g. Without the VF-1 it weighs 364g. By comparison the G9 weighed in at 500g.

I found it much easier to slip the GX100 in and out of the case when on my belt than the G9.

I have not used the neck strap so have no comment to make on it other than it looks like the standard one that Lowepro supplies with most of its small cases.

Conclusion
All-in-all it is a pretty good choice for a Ricoh GX100. It is a good fit; slipping in and out easily. It is no bulkier than it needs to be and gives good enough protection against accidental knocks and abrasion that occurs when these things rattle around inside bags, glove compartments and sundry other places day-in and day-out.

There is, however, no room for any much larger accessories such as wide angle attachments or with a viewfinder attached (although it can take the dismounted VF-1 at a pinch) – for these you will need a bigger case.

Epson 4800 nozzle clogging solved - well, nearly…

2008-05-28T20:44:00.003+01:00

About six weeks ago I was despairing that my Epson 4800 inkjet printer would ever be reliable again and that it would forever more be clogging/losing ink channels.

This may be premature and stupid, but thanks to the advice from lots of people (an example of mass collaboration?), mostly on the Yahoo 4000/4800 forum, I think that I have pretty much resolved the problem (now that is a really stupid thing to say…) – here’s how.

If you want to know the sort of frustration I have had with this printer over the last six months then clicking the “Nozzle Clogging” label will show you, most specifically – this posting.

In a previous posting I said that I was going to try someone else’s solution – here are the details. At the time I was not that confident that it would work simply because I had tried the “print often” approach to try to keep the printer happy; and it had not worked for long. Anyway I tried it and it initially did work, but after about a week the printer went back to its bad old ways and I went through a particularly traumatic weekend trying to coax it back into health, which I managed very early on the Monday morning, just in time to go to my day job. Being a bit sceptical that the new regime would work I did not use a cover because I could not find one, although I did use a wet sponge inside the printer cover; but I had been trying that for sometime anyway.

I decided to redouble my efforts.

That was six weeks ago – since then I have tried a few more things, learnt quite a lot, but most importantly I have only suffered from 5 clogs/ink channel losses, all involving the LM ink and twice the LK as well. In nearly all the cases this happened after an "auto something or other" happened - it sounded awfully like an automated cleaning cycle, but I have turned that function off, so I am completely in the dark as to what is actually happening when this happens and why.

In the first four cases only one simple nozzle clean brought back the nozzle check to perfect, with no repeated clean/rest/puddle clean cycles – the fifth, and most recent, took a full set of clean/rest/puddle clean cycles to clear, but I think I know why...

This is what I think is the reason for the worst case of clogging happening – Initially I bought a cheap interim solution (see cover posting here) and then bought a bespoke cover for the 4800 in anti-static vinyl on eBay. I used the cheap one for a couple of weeks and when the bespoke one arrived I put it on. I had stopped monitoring the humidity inside the printer by then. I restarted it when I had the problem and was very surprised to see that the humidity inside the printer head had dropped to about 40% – clearly, given my recent experience, this is on the borderline.

The bespoke cover fits better, but is not as long, leaving a gap around the bottom of the printer; does not have an apron to wrap around the under the paper tray (which is actually the transparent zip around top of the cheap storage bag/cover I tried – see photo below) and has a big gap at the back to allow access to the roll paper cover etc. All this means that there are plenty of gaps for the humidity to escape from the machine with the proper cover; much less so with the cheap interim one. I have now reverted to the cheap one and the humidity has climbed back to 50+% again. Leaving the under wrapper undone causes the humidity at the print head to reduce by 5-10% points (e.g. 55% to 48% humidity) – I guess, because humid air is heavier than dryer air, it simply falls out the bottom of the printer…

So effectively the printer has been available to print whenever I wanted it to except for one day.

So what have I done?
Below is the recipe for what currently works for me.

The recipe comes in three parts:

General set up and printer configuration
Printer exercise routine
Materials and techniques to have to hand

1. General set up and printer configuration

First – USE A COVER… an all enveloping cover, for the reasons described above – see photo below with the apron tucked under the paper tray.

I believe that this was the single most important thing I did. The cover is not to keep the printer clean, although that is not a bad idea in itself, but to keep the humidity inside the printer up. In a previous post I reported on what I found it did for the humidity, but essentially I found that combined with a wet sponge it keeps the humidity inside the printer at about 50%. I believe that keeping the humidity up is the key to a happy (not-clogging much) printer.

Place a wet sponge in a tray in the paper tray – see photo below – the aim is to provide a source of humidity inside the printer. I find that I need to refresh the sponge about once a week.

Be careful not to put too deep a tray in the paper tray. The paper lifting mechanism lifts across the whole paper tray width and if the sponge tray is too deep it will be pushed into the rod (arrowed in the photo above) and cause miss-feeds.

I also now permanently monitor the humidity inside the cover by placing a wireless remote sensor out of the way of the print head carriage to the far left of the printing area - see photo below. This sensor tends to read about 10% points below the sensor near the sponge in the paper tray (e.g. paper tray humidity reads 60%, inside the cover it reads 50%). If you do this be careful not to impede the print head movement at all, or you will hear a nasty and probably expensive crunching sound!

Turn off the auto nozzle check and cleaning function on the printer – this only seems to cause clogs. See my earlier posting about why and how to do this.

Turn off the auto paper size checking function – See my earlier posting about why and how to do this, but suffice to say that you will be using plain paper in the printer as part of the print “little and often” routine. I have found that this tends to cause the printer to stall as its sensitivity to correct paper size seems to be greater than the size tolerance on plain paper.

2. Printer exercise routine

Fill the paper tray with plain paper – I have found 100gsm paper to feed more reliably than normal cheap 80gsm copier paper.

Download and install the free utility MIS Autoprint (see here for instructions on how) and choose a purge file that exercises all the ink channels (here is why). Also make sure that you have “Print Preview” turned off in the printer set up, as that will stall the process as well. In my set up this uses about 0.6ml of ink a time, or 1.2ml a week.

Buy a copy of Harvey Head Cleaner – unless you are willing and able to print nozzle checks manually every morning and evening. Harvey makes sure that, by running a small amount of ink through all the ink channels by printing a nozzle check, you exercise the whole print head regularly. I have set Harvey to print twice a day at 7.00am and 7.00pm; I have also set it to run if I turn the computer on within 24 hours of the last scheduled run time – circled in red in the screen shot below. This makes sure that you automatically run a nozzle check even if you turn your computer on after the scheduled time.

The printer reports using 0.1-0.2ml of ink per nozzle check, although this seems high compared with 0.6ml for a full page of colour for the Autoprint output. In any case it uses around 2ml of ink a week, which is about the equivalent of 1-2 A4 prints, or 1/50th of the ink to clear a bad clogging problem.

The combined Autoprint and Harvey ink usage over a year would be around 180ml of ink if you religiously stuck to the regime, although even over a month I have only really managed to do 90% of it. This equates to a couple of major cleaning bouts – only you can tell whether the time and frustration vs. routine ink wastage equation works for you.

I am pretty sure that I can reduce the actual number of nozzle checks and Autoprints, but don’t want to tempt fate just yet. As you can see in the screen shot above you can also tell Harvey to "Skip check if printer used within xx hours".

For me the reduction in frustration and the increased availability of the printer to print when I want it to are well worth the effort, even if it is something that Epson should be ashamed of…

(If you think that this is wasteful of paper I put the nozzle check paper back into the paper tray so that I get 4 checks per sheet…).

3. Materials and techniques to have to hand

Learn how to do a “Puddle Clean” – my method is posted here.

Become aware of the head cleaning protocols that have built up as “lore” for Epson printers. This effectively amounts to:

Do not use Auto nozzle check – it often just moves the problem around
Only run two consecutive nozzle cleans before running a full page print of some sort
It is often wise to let the printer rest for an hour or so if a couple of nozzle cleaning cycles and full page print have not cleared the problem
For major clogging/ink channel losses use puddle cleaning

Buy some “Fixyourownprinter” head cleaning solution – I have found it is very effective in clearing clogs; more so than distilled water.

Useful things to have at hand are:

A small torch/flashlight
A 20ml syringe with plastic extension (Kwill filling tube)
Distilled water
Lint free wipes – Pec Pads, the same ones I use for sensor cleaning on my DSLRs - I use these wrapped around a stick instead of cotton buds which might leave strands of cotton around to upset the print head etc
A sense of humour
…and one final requirement: patience!

So if I have one piece of advice it is – KEEP THE HUMIDITY UP AT AROUND 50% – all the rest helps but does not do enough if the humidity drops significantly below 40%.

Now all I have to work out is what the "auto something or other" is and how to stop it and why the LM channel is always the first one affected – any ideas?

Good luck – please let me know if you have any suggestions, refinements or comments to make.

Just one more thing - I have no commercial connection with any of the companies producing any of the products or services mentioned in this blog, other than as a happy customer.

Speculation over new Canon DSLR models

2008-05-15T19:54:00.002+01:00

I have a pair of Canon DSLRs – a 10D and a 30D. I have hankered after a 5D since it was launched and would generally like to upgrade. Like most people I do not want to buy a camera and find a newer, better and cheaper one launched the next week, so I have been looking into what the speculation is.

The table below lists the announcement dates (and the sensor’s megapixels) for the non-Pro Canon DSLRs launched since the 10D. I have broken them into the two families of double and triple digit ranges, and included the 5D. I have also put in the time in months between the intra-family launch dates.

Model / Megapixels	Model / Megapixels	Date announced
10D / 6.3		27/2/03
+ 18 months	300D / 6.3	20/8/03
20D / 8.2	+ 21 months	19/8/04
+ 18 months	350D / 8.0	17/5/05
30D / 8.2	+ 15 months	21/2/06
+ 18 months	400D / 10.1	24/8/06
40D / 10.1	+ 19 months	20/8/07
+ ?	450D / 12.2	24/1/08
	+ ?
5D / 12.7 - full frame		22/8/05
+ 32 months and counting

Firstly the 5D is getting on a bit in terms of the digital world product life cycle; there has been a lot of speculation about its possible replacements – 3D & 7D, 5D mkII etc, whichever rumour you believe. Northlight Images have a useful rumours page here. There were strong rumours that Canon would be announcing something on the 22nd or April this year, but nothing materialised. There are rumours again for the 22nd May, but my bet would be on Canon announcing something in August 2008 - around the end of the month, somewhere between the 20th and the 26th, as they seem to stick with mostly February or August announcements towards the end of the month, unless they want to see even more defections to Nikon.

The 5D price has come down considerably since its launch and there are plenty of near mint used ones around so I could buy one now, but I would really like to have a newer version with all the advances such as weather sealing (partial or otherwise), Digic III / IV processor, 14 bit processing, the dust reduction and removal systems, improved focusing etc etc. I also anticipate Canon having to respond to Nikon’s recent resurgence with its fantastically well received D3 and D300 DSLRs, so I expect the 5D replacement to be a considerable step up.

I’ll wait…

I would ideally like a full frame and cropped frame camera in my arsenal as they meet different needs. The 30D is OK for the time being, but the 40D is tempting. Looking at the table above Canon have stuck with an 18 month replacement cycle for the double digit range, but the 40D is under severe attack from Nikon along with Sony, Pentax/Samsung and Olympus so the 50D (presumably based on the 12.2 megapixel 450D) may not wait until the 18 months is up (February 2009).

Canon do not seem to be so fixed on their triple digit family replacements cycle – varying from 15 to 21 months – probably responding to market challenges more promptly.

All in all I think I’ll wait – Canon have to respond to Nikon in these market segments and soon. I have even thought of moving to Nikon myself, but for the time being my investment in Canon lenses it too great, but I’ll not wait for ever… (actually probably not past the end of the year) and with eBay to help sell old gear the cost of switching is not as great as it used to be.

MIS Autoprint purge file update…

2008-05-11T10:58:00.003+01:00

In a recent posting I suggested changing the purge file used with MIS Autoprint from the MIS 8 ink file to a multi patch file. I said I would post any evidence that I got that it was worthwhile or not to make the change when I had it – here it is.

Recently the LK & LM ink channels dropped out on my 4800. So I ran the MIS 8 channel purge file and the combined 936 patch file through Autoprint manually to see whether it was worth changing the purge file.

Firstly – the MIS 8 image file printed out exactly (to my eye at least) as it had with only LM missing. So it looks as it the LK is not doing much either.

Below are scans of the combined 936 patch file. The first image is with all nozzles firing perfectly. The second is the same file printed, onto the same paper with the same printer settings, with both LM & LK missing (confirmed by nozzle checks before and after the prints were made).

As you can see there is quite a lot of difference between the two, mostly in the columns from “K” onwards. It is also clear that the M ink is being used, which it was not in the 8 ink file.

So my conclusion is that it was worth making the change.

Changing the purge image file I use with MIS Autoprint

2008-05-08T20:29:00.003+01:00

In a previous posting I have gone through my experience with setting up and running MIS Autoprint. I have recently changed the purge pattern I use – this posting tells why I felt I needed to and what I changed it to.

In my previous posting I have explained what MIS Autoprint does and how it fits into the nozzle clogging avoidance scheme for my Epson 4800 inkjet printer.

The whole point of using Autoprint it so “exercise” all the printer’s ink channels more thoroughly than just printing frequent nozzle checks alone manages.

I thought I was doing this by using the 8 channel purge file supplied by MIS, but recently I found a printout of it printed with the LM channel completely missing, as confirmed by the automated, via Harvey Head Cleaner, nozzle checks printed out in the morning before and an hour after the purge file automatically printed.

Below is a scan of what the 8 channel purge print looks like when all nozzles are running perfectly:

Below is a scan of what it looked like with the LM channel completely missing (but the M channel was perfect):

The M & LM ink blocks have tuned blue with no sign of M in either, and the blacks (K, LK & LLK) have taken on a bit of a green’ish tint; the Y, C & LC look normal. This tells me that whatever is going on the purge print is not faithfully using all the ink channels as I thought it was – which rather misses the point of the whole exercise. It is possible that the paper setting affects what inks the 4800 uses, but I don’t have any way of checking that without losing a channel again – which I have not intention of doing deliberately. Currently I use copier paper in the printer for these maintenance prints with the media type setting set to "Plain paper" in the pinter settings.

So now I have swapped the MIS 8 channel purge file – if you want to know how to do this then look at an earlier blog posting here – for one I made up myself (see below). This is derived from a couple of colour patch files from Permajet used for creating ICC profiles of their papers; each set having 936 patches. While I have no proof that they are any better at exercising all the ink channels than the simpler 8 channel purge file from MIS, it seems logical to think that it has a better chance.

If/when an ink channel goes missing I will check out the results and post them.

I have done that now and here are the results

Eliet Minor shredder review follow up

2008-05-05T11:12:00.005+01:00

Two months ago I posted a review of the Eliet Minor garden shredder. Two months later I have had a chance to review the composting results from the resulting shreddings and to test the courage of my convictions following the test results to decide on whether I would buy one or not.

Composting results
When I trialed the Eliet Minor two months ago I had basically two types of material to deal with. The first was general woody garden prunings and trimmings etc; the second was the contents of a rough mixed open composting bin that had a mix of semi-rotted down woody and soft material gathered over about a year.

Two thirds of the first lot of shreddings was mixed into a 1m³ wooden composting bin along with what was already there and the general composting material over the next couple of months, including the first lots of lawn mowings. The rest was put into a bin with the product from the second type of shreddings. In the two months that have passed since the shred-fest this material has essentially rotted down into usable compost. It has been turned into a 0.5m³ (500 litre) bin where it is maturing and being used as needed. The Head Gardener is very happy with it.

My experience (about a decade of competent composting) tells me that this is pretty quick for the time of year. Since we have had a cold couple of months and I have not done anything exceptional to make this material rot down quickly I am impressed and can only conclude that the claim from Eliet that its “Hatchet Principle™”, which cuts the woody stems lengthwise, does indeed work and produces material that composts quickly.

The Minor dealt with the second lot of material with the optional general purpose screen. At the time I picked out the largest unshredded bits (the screen is pretty course) and re-shredded them. The rest filled a second 0.5m³ bin along with the remainder of the first type of shreddings, where it was watered occasionally and turned once in the two months it was in it. After about two months it was pretty much completely rotted down and it was then spread onto the borders as a mulch. The Head Gardener was pretty happy with the quality of it.

So my conclusion from observing the composted shreddings for the Eliet is that it produces shreddings that rot down quickly and easily.

So did I buy one?
Recently I realized that we had built up a mound of woody material needing shredding as big as the one at the end of February. So presented with the choice I had to decide whether to spend days (literally) with my old Scheppach Lonos, hire or buy.

It was really a very easy decision– I bought the Eliet Minor, along with the optional general purpose screen.

I looked around for the best price and delivery option and decided to buy it from the on-line UK retailer Gardenlines (who often appear in Google AdSense listings). They were helpful and courteous on the phone, both before and after the purchase, and it arrived exactly when they said it would.

I have just spent most of a day shredding the mountain of mixed woody and mushy material, producing about a cubic metre of shreddings which is now in my compost bins steaming as I write. The time consuming bit was not the shredding itself, but getting the material to the shredder and carting the shreddings away from it. The actual shredding was as easy as I remembered it.

So I am happy and I expect this lot to rot down in record time.

In case you think that I have any commercial relationship with either Eliet or Gardenlines, then I can categorically say that I have never had any dealings with Eliet and my only dealings with Gardenlines were for this one transaction. I am just a happy customer.

Turning off auto paper size check on an Epson 4800 Pro inkjet printer

2008-05-04T18:37:00.002+01:00

I find that the Epson 4800 is very sensitive to paper size variations. This post tells you how to turn it off, and why you might want to.

Why would you want to turn off auto paper size checking off?
On the face of it having the printer automatically check that you have loaded the right sized paper every time you print sounds a really helpful idea.

In reality, however, I print a lot of nozzle checks via Harvey Head Cleaner and purge prints via MIS Autoprint to try to keep my printer nozzles clear. I use a stack of copier paper for this and I often find that the odd sheet brings up the “Wrong paper size” warning message, although I can not ever remember the nozzle check failing because of it – the printer does not seem to check for paper size when doing nozzle checks. I also quite often get this problem in a print run using A4 or letter photographic paper. Since this is inconvenient, or in the case of automatic timed printing to reduce nozzle clogs completely counter productive, and since I can not remember every trying to print on the wrong paper size I turn off the auto paper check function.

The risk of course is that the printer will print on the wrong sized paper. If the paper is larger than needed it is just a bit of a waste, but if it is smaller you risk having it print all over the platen – which is, at best, messy.

You could of course just turn it off when you are running in automatic mode and need to be sure it will print each time.

The choice is yours.

How?
The picture below shows the LCD printer display and the various buttons mentioned in the instructions below.
You can turn off the auto paper size checking function by following the button pressing sequence detailed below in the LCD control panel on the printer:

With the display saying “Ready”, press the “Menu” button twice – the screen will display “Printer setup” then “ Platen Gap” on the second line of the display

Press the “down arrow” button five times – the screen will display “PPR SIZE CHK”

Press the “menu” button once - you should see “PPR SIZE CHK, *On”

Press the “down arrow” button once - you should see the word “off” on the second line of the screen

Press the “menu” button once – an asterisk should appear next to the word “*off”

Press the “left arrow” button three times to bring you back to the “Ready” screen

To turn it back on just follow the sequence again, swopping “on” for “off”.

Review of Printer Jockey v1.2.0 software as a nozzle clogging combating utility for Epson printers

2008-04-29T22:41:00.019+01:00

Printer Jockey is an advanced printer utility from C-Horse Software. This review will focus almost exclusively on the features that it has that might help Epson large format inkjet printer users to reduce or cure nozzle clogs. I have been using Printer Jockey v1.2.0 with my Epson 4800 and as you can see in my various blog postings nozzle clogs/colour channel loss is a major bugbear for me.

Printer Jockey is a Windows based printing utility that adds functionality to the standard printer drivers. The main target market for the utility appears to be direct-to-garment manufacturers and apparel decorators – full details of what features are on offer are listed on the Printer Jockey website. A basic version of the software is available to download free of charge from the site.

Before I review the software a short reprise of what the problem is I am trying to combat. The Epson 4800 print head has 180 separate nozzles for each of its eight ink channels; 1,440 in total, delivering variable ink droplet sizes down to 3.5 picoliters. I am not trying to clear the odd clogged nozzle as I do not suffer from that much. What I, and many other Epson 4000 & 4800 Pro users, repeatedly suffer from is the complete loss of a whole colour channel - all 180 nozzles turning off at the same time, resulting in a nozzle check like that shown below, where the whole LM ink channel is missing.

Even more frustrating is the fact that these channel outages seem to be able to move around the print head, meaning that when one channel is cleared another drops out.

I was drawn to the Printer Jockey utility to try to combat this problem, specifically for its ability to flush selected nozzles and to print timed colour patterns. The free version of Printer Jockey does not have either of these two features enabled, so the full version is needed, which costs $99 for three activations (e.g. to run on three separate computers). The activation procedure is a bit convoluted, but it gets you there in the end. It comes with a pdf User’s Manual and there are tutorials on YouTube – even so I found that I had to email Tech Support at Printer Jockey to find out how things work; so they are neither very intuitive nor fully covered in the manual. Fortunately Tech Support, in the from of Fred Padilla, was extremely helpful and quick to answer questions – a real treat compared with many Tech Support functions I have come across.

The Channel Flush (and alignment grid) feature is supported on the following Epson printers:

Epson Stylus Pro 4000
Epson Stylus Pro 4800
Epson Stylus Pro 4880
Epson Stylus Pro 7800
Epson Stylus Pro 7880
Epson Stylus Pro 9800
Epson Stylus Pro 9880
Epson Stylus Pro 11880
Epson Stylus Photo 1400
Epson Stylus Photo R1800
Epson Stylus Photo R2400
Epson Stylus Photo 2200
Epson Stylus Photo 2100
Epson Stylus Photo 1280/1290 - soon

On running Printer Jockey you are presented with a list of the printers available on your system – the nozzle manipulation features I was most interested in are in the “Printer Options” tab (see screenshot below).

Not all of them, however, are there. To access features like timed printing and running a nozzle check (after a nozzle clean for instance) you have to double click the relevant printer and select “Printer Options” in the new window that pops up. Here is the full suite of options available - the screenshot below shows the options available for my Epson 4800.

The options of interest for nozzle clogging are “Channel Flush” and “Timed Prints”, with the necessary evils of “Nozzle Clean” and “Nozzle Check” available if they are needed – these latter two options replicate those available in Epson’s printer utility, although they simply do the action with none of the various options or fancy progress graphics that Epson offers. The “Print Alignment Grid” option is designed to help direct-to-garment printers who use two separate printers and want to match the output from both printers as closely as possible.

What is Channel Flushing and how do you use it?
Channel flushing is achieved simply by printing blocks of colour from the selected nozzle or nozzles.

The option is accessed by either selecting it from the drop down “Printer Options” menu on the main screen (after selecting the appropriate printer), or from the second “Printer Options” drop down menu on the screen that comes up when up you double-click the desired printer, or the direct button on the same screen – circled in red in the screenshot above.

The Channel Flush options screen pops up, shown in the screenshot below.

This allows you to choose which channels you want to flush, set the paper size and source, and use three different methods for determining how much ink you wish to flush each time.

First select the paper size and source you are using. The options include the standard US and European paper sizes that you are likely to use and offers the option of sheet or roll feed.

Then select the “Ink Channels” you wish to flush- it can be a single one, all of them or a selection of any of them. In the screenshot above the K and LM channels are selected (circled in red).

The three ways for varying the amount of ink flushed are:

Option 1 is the “Flush Ink Amount” option (circled in red above). This lets you decide how big a block of colour you want to print, although all the options are full page width; in four steps up to most of a page.
Option 2 uses the print “Resolution” to vary the inking – low resolution (360 x 360 min – 1440 x 1440 max). The higher the resolution the more ink is used.
Option 3 is a separate option to set the individual ink channels’ levels. This is accessed by clicking the “Levels” button (circled in red above). Sliders for the channels selected earlier appear in a separate screen. The screen shot below shows the screen that appears when K, C, M, LK & LM channels are selected. The slider allows you to choose levels from 100% (the default amount) down to zero, in increments (or decrements) of 1%.

Then simply press the “Create” button and the utility creates the relevant flushing programme and sends it to the printer.

The output has all the selected colour channels printed one on top of the other – so unless you select only one channel the output will not help diagnose whether some channels are printing, although if it changes as the print progresses some colour change might show up.

Personally I found this disappointing as I hoped to be able to use it for more than simple ink flushing. I gather from Tech Support that this could be changed reasonably easily – personally I would like to see the option of either superimposed or separate channel printing.

Does individual colour channel flushing resolve nozzle clogs/colour channel loss?

For me this is the key question and my raison d’être for trying Printer Jockey – to try to keep ink usage as low as possible when having to run the inevitable nozzle cleaning cycles that clogs etc require.

Sadly… no, in my experience it does not. Specifically if a whole ink channel "disappears" ink channel flushing will not bring in back.

Three times I have lost a complete single colour channel (LM in all three cases) in the couple of weeks that I have been trying Printer Jockey. In the first two cases I ran a couple of channel flushes; starting with the least ink option, skipping to the maximum ink option as soon as that did not work. In neither case did it print one discernable dot of the colour that I was trying to recover. The third time I simply went to the maximum and tried five times without any ink showing up on the paper at all. In all three cases a single conventional nozzle clean cleared the problem, which is unusual in itself as recently it has usually taken more to do the job. This is probably due to my new daily printer “exercise” routine of printing little and often, and keeping the humidity up; it is just possible that the single failed channel flushes helped, but I can not really see how.

Ink channel flushing and nozzle cleaning are clearly not the same thing. Using ink channel flushing to clear out the odd blocked nozzle may well work, but I have not experienced that (yet) so can not comment. [After a couple of months I have now tested this and my conclusions can be found in this posting].

What are Timed Prints and how do you use them?
Timed printing is a way of sending small jobs to your printer at pre-determined times; mostly to keep them exercised.

You access the “Timed Prints” option by double clicking on the printer you want to print from on the main programme screen; then select “Timed Prints” from the “Printer Options” drop down menu. The “Scheduled Print” screen (see below) appears.

On the right hand side you have the same set of Ink Channels, paper size and source options available as in the Channel Flushing screen, which you set up in the same way.

On the left hand side are the timer options – which are pretty self explanatory. You select the frequency from the list of “Day” options and the time of each scheduled print via the “Add Timer” button. To add in further timed prints just click on “Add Timer” and repeat the process.

Down the middle are a set of three “Print Pattern” options controlling what the actual timed print will produce, with a preview of what they will look like in the box below.

These various options essentially use differing amounts of ink. The image below shows the printout using Pattern 2 with just the Magenta ink channel selected. The print appears down the middle of the page with the pattern repeating four times on a US Letter sized sheet of paper.

When the timers are set, press “Save Schedule” which returns you to the main screen. Here you will now see a clock face to the left of the printer which will run the timed prints – see screen shot below.

You are now ready to go, but…

Printer Jockey does not create a task to run in Window’s “Scheduled Tasks” utility (which is what Harvey Head Cleaner and MIS Autoprint do) – instead it runs the schedule from within Printer Jockey itself and it does not seem to store them. This means that if you exit Printer Jockey and re-enter it the Timed Prints schedule disappears and you have to re-enter the data.

In other words – if you want to use Printer Jockey to run timed printing tasks you will need to leave your computer on all the time with Printer Jockey active.

This was a surprise to me – and I turn my computer off at nights or when I am out during the day (not withstanding my regime of printing nozzle checks morning and evening and some images every two or three days) to try to reduce my carbon footprint, so this does not really work for me.

Overall conclusion
I was really hoping that this interesting utility would help with the nozzle clogging challenges that Epson printer users face, but viewing Printer Jockey purely as a utility to help resolve or reduce the incidence of nozzle clogging/colour channel loss my conclusion is that it does not help, and at $99 it is not something I would suggest buying.

The ink channel flushing does not clear nozzle clogs/colour channel loss and the timed prints option is flawed as it does not remember the schedule and requires the computer to be left on at all times with Printer Jockey running. This does not suit me and MIS Autoprint can be made to do everything I really need, although it does not actually print from each specific ink channel – and it’s free.

I really like the option to be able to print specific nozzles in separate colour blocks – ideally I would like to be able to replicate the solid colour blocks that Epson’s auto nozzle check prints without the cleaning etc that accompanies it within a Windows Task Schedule.

I suspect that the developers could produce the ultimate printer conditioning software if they wished, but this does not seem to have been the original idea behind the software. A combination of Harvey Head Cleaner and MIS Autoprint printing the choice of conventional nozzle checks or the automated nozzle blocks from the Epson Auto facility for around $50 would be a very attractive piece of software - for me at least.

Even better would be an implementation in the printer's Firmware that did this without having to have the PC on all the time to run the routines externally. Epson's firmware based auto nozzle check and cleaning functions only make matters works in my experience so I have them turned off.

Of course Epson should not have produced a printer that needed this level of molly coddling, but that is a different story.

I stress that for those looking to use the other printing utility options that Printer Jockey offers I have no opinion to give as I do not need them and have not tried them.

Turning off auto nozzle check and cleaning on an Epson 4800 Pro inkjet printer

2008-04-27T19:07:00.002+01:00

I have frequently found that the auto nozzle checking and cleaning cycles that my Epson 4800 inkjet printer carries out at random times usually causes more problems than it could ever solve. I have found that turning them off helps. This posting explains why you might want to turn them off in more detail and how to do it.

Why would you want to turn them off?
On the face of it having the printer regularly check the quality of the output by doing a nozzle check and automatically cleaning the print head if need be sounds a really helpful and quality enhancing idea.

In reality, however, I and many other Epson 4000 and 4800 printer owners, have found that the printer often does “something or other” that looks and sounds just like a nozzle cleaning cycle without being asked to do anything – e.g. an automatic nozzle check and clean. The problem is that this often seems to happen when there is nothing wrong with the output before the action; but after it whole colour channels are often (I am tempted to say usually) missing, which require the usual palaver of cleaning and nozzle check cycles to get back to where we were before the auto “something or other” happened. This is both expensive in time (it can take hours or days) and money, in wasted ink.

In effect these auto actions seem to cause nozzle clogging/loss of colour channels, not reduce them. I have found that in my experience turning off these two functions is a good idea.

If you too suffer from continuous nozzle clogging/loss of colour channels then this may be a small contributor to reducing your problems.

How?
The picture below shows the LCD printer display and the various buttons mentioned in the instructions below.
You can turn off both the auto nozzle checking and cleaning functions by following the button pressing sequence detailed below in the LCD control panel on the printer:

With the display saying “Ready”, press the “Menu” button twice – the screen will display “Printer setup” then “ Platen Gap” on the second line of the display

Press the “up arrow” button three times – the screen will display “Auto Cleaning”

Press the “menu” button once - you should see “Auto Cleaning, *On”

Press the “down arrow” button once - you should see the word “off” on the second line of the screen

Press the “menu” button once – an asterisk should appear next to the word “*off”

Press the “left arrow” button once – the screen will display “Printer setup, Auto Cleaning”

Press the “up arrow” button once – the screen will display “Auto NZL CK”

Press menu once – you should see “Auto NZL CK, *On”

Press the down arrow once - you should see the word “off” on the second line of the screen

Press the menu button once – an asterisk should appear next to the word “*off”

Press the “left arrow” button three times to bring you back to the “Ready” screen

This turns off the two auto actions, although in my experience it does not completely stop the printer from running the occasional auto “something or other” cycle – it does, however, seem to reduce the frequency of them.

Setting up and trouble shooting MIS Autoprint 2.0

2008-04-23T22:11:00.010+01:00

Some inkjet printers are very prone to nozzle clogging and my Epson 4800 is certainly one of them. Frequent printing is often recommended as part of a package of solutions to try to avoid the problem. For those who do not need to print frequently this is a nuisance, but for those unable to do so because they are away etc this is a real problem. MIS Associates have very generously made their Autoprint utility freely available to help solve the problem.

I have tried to use the utility a couple of times and come across annoying little problems which stopped me using it, but given my clogging problems I thought it was about time I got it to work. Since I have now got it working and found solutions to several small issues along the way, this post is aimed at sharing what I have found out.

Initially the utility was only available for PCs but it is now available for various versions of the Mac operating system. My experiences reported here are all with Autoprint v2.0 on a PC running Windows XP SP2.

MIS Autoprint is available to download from MIS, free of charge.

It is simple to install – simply unzip the downloaded files, click on the Autoprint application file and follow the instructions; which, if you follow the defaults, will put the application in a folder called “MIS Autoprint” in your main “Program Files” directory and place a shortcut on your desktop. In the folder, along with the application file and instructions, are the jpeg files that it will use for automatic printing.

Autoprint uses the Microsoft Task Scheduler to print a jpeg file at a time interval that you select. Autoprint is not password protected, but it needs the authorisation of the User ID’s password to run. It will not run unless Windows is set up with a password protected User ID with administration privileges.

If you do not have a password protected PC then you can add a password to your User ID by going to the “User Accounts” control panel and setting one. If you do not want to set one for your main User ID then there is a workaround on the MIS Forum involving setting up a dummy password protected User ID, but I simply password protected my main User ID, which was probably a good thing to do anyway.

To set up an Autoprint task schedule and run a test print simply click the Autoprint desktop icon and follow the instructions – they are very clear and should not cause any problems, unless…

I run an Epson 4800 Pro inkjet printer and it is an 8 ink printer – The largest (most colours) option that came with the original download was a 7 ink option. Since the aim is to regularly exercise all the ink channels an 8 channel option seemed sensible.

Autoprint will, in fact, offer you the choice of printing any jpeg file that is in the same directory as the application file. MIS also offer a stand alone range of additional files to use (from here) which includes an 8 colour file. I simply dropped this into the MIS Autoprint folder, along with a jpeg version of a colour patch printing file I use for paper calibration (See screenshot below).

Click on the images to see them full size

And hey presto, these are now available options in Autoprint (See screenshot below).

The 8 channel ink print looks like the image below:

I don’t see any limit to the number of image files that Autoprint will offer so long as they are jpegs (it also appears to support .bmp, .ico, .emf & .wmf file formats, but I have not tried any of these and it did not work with tiff files I tried) and in the right folder (but I have not tried that many). The images supplied with Autoprint are sized to fill a US letter sized (8.5” x 11”) sheet of paper – I find that they work fine with A4 as well. I do not see any reason why you should not use a favourite photo if you prefer, so long as you are happy that it uses the full range of inks and it is sized correctly.

If you want to save some ink by printing smaller blocks of colour you can modify one of the files to make it smaller and use it instead.

Autoprint allows you to set the interval between prints (in days – 1-14 days in the dropdown menu, but it will allow you to enter more days if you wish, although I am not sure whether it actually works then, nor why you would want to go beyond 14 days…) and the exact time of day.

If you want to set up several schedules for more printers, or for the same printer but at different intervals or using different images (I have not tried this, but I can not see why it would not work) then there are instructions in the readme file to do this:

"The task that is created by the GUI can be edited to allow for more advanced schedules. However if you rename the task, then Autoprint will not find it and simply create another one.

This could be used for people with more than one printer. Basically the procedure here is to create a task with Autoprint, test it and then rename it. Then start Autoprint again and create another task for the next printer, test it and then rename it. This procedure can be repeated for any number of times to create multiple schedules."

You can edit the task name in the “Scheduled Tasks” control panel (see screenshot below) by right clicking on the task name, then “Rename”; you can also see details of the scheduled task(s) etc in the control panel (where you can also see that I use Harvey Head Cleaner).

Nearly done:
One last problem I had was that Autoprint now worked fine, but every time it wanted to print it opened the Epson Print Preview pane first and asked for permission to print – which meant that it did not print unless I said OK, rather missing the point of the whole exercise!

To solve this I went to the “Printers and Faxes” control panel; right-clicked the Epson 4800, and selected “Properties” (see screenshot below).

In the "General" tab, select the “Printing Preferences…” tab (circled in red in the screenshot below)

Then untick the “Print Preview” box (circled in red in the screenshot below). Since I shall be printing these images on plain copier paper I also selected “Plain paper” as the media type (circled in red in the screenshot below).

If you subsequently tick the "Print Preview" box in another application you may find that it stays ticked interrupting the next Autoprint - this happened to me when I printed something in Lightroom and ticked the "Print Preview" box; the next time Autoprint ran I found the purge pattern on screen awaiting my return for approval to print...

Now it all works fine!

When setting up a scheduled print I suggest you do run a test print at the end of the process as it will show up any likely problems, such as size, print previews etc. If it does not print anything it probably will not print on schedule either so it is best to sort it out at this stage.

Clearly this utility will only work if both your printer and computer are turned on when the scheduled task is due to run. In the default set up Task Scheduler will wake the computer up to run the task if it is asleep but unlike Harvey Head Cleaner it will not run the task next time the computer is turned on if it was turned off at the scheduled time for the task - or at least if there is a setting to tell it to do this I have not found it.

I have found that the 4800 is very sensitive to paper size - I often get the "Wrong paper size" warning message when using a stack of copier paper - on some sheets but not others.... Anyway this is not at all good news if you are running automated prints via Autoprint as it simply stops any printing until you clear the warning. So I simply turn it off as I can not remember actually trying to print on the wrong sized paper.

If you do not know how to do this I have posted instructions here.

I also find that plain 80gsm copier paper is prone to miss-feeding so I try to use thicker paper, such as 100gm, to avoid this problem. Again a miss-feed completely messes up the automatic process.

Cover for Epson 4000 / 4800 Pro inkjet printer & humidity readings

2008-04-21T19:52:00.005+01:00

One of the most common suggestions for reducing the incidence of nozzle clogs on Epson 4000 & 4800 inkjet printers is to increase the humidity inside the printer by putting a water soaked sponge in the paper tray and to put an impermeable cover over the top to keep the moisture in. This post is about finding a suitable cover and the humidity results using one gives.

Various people use polythene or bespoke covers. I could not find a suitable piece of clean polythene and in the UK I could not find any suitable bespoke covers anywhere - not even from Epson, so went looking for an alternative.

I did find one available on the US eBay site so I ordered one, but keen to try to solve my interminable clogging problems I wanted to find something to use now.

I looked around at general printer covers from the likes of Fellowes, but none were anywhere near large enough - the 4800 needs a cover about 850 x 850 x 400mm; much bigger than anything on offer.

I looked at other covers like BBQ covers, but none were remotely like the right dimensions. Eventually I came upon an underbed vinyl storage bag that looked nearly big enough - from Argos, in the UK. If anyone is interested the bag comes in a set of "2 Jumbo Vinyl Storage Bags", Argos' code: 875 0967, costing £3.99 for the pair.

In practice a single bag fits the printer almost perfectly (see photos below) even with 220ml cartridges fitted (or a mix of 220 & 110ml in my case).

I measured the humidity and temperature in the printer head area and outside the printer for the day before putting on the cover and for 2 days afterwards, using an Oregon Scientific Weatherstation with a couple of remote sensors. The temperatures were the same inside and out, but the humidity differed as shown in the the table below.

	Humidity outside printer - %	Humidity inside printer - %
With sponge but no cover	39 - 40	43 - 44
With Sponge and cover	39 - 40	50 - 53

Clearly even without the cover the humidity is higher in the printer due to the water soaked sponge and putting on the cover takes it significantly higher again. Whether these figures actually make a difference only time will tell.

As you can see in the extract below from the User Guide for the 4800, Epson recommend keeping the humidity in various ranges depending on what you want to optimise.

It looks as if a humidity around 40% is at the low end of good and 45-50% is a good range to aim for - so I am happy that my results put my current set up in the right range.

Generally people who report on nozzle clogging problems reckon that the higher the humidity the less the problem - but I have not seen any mention of a practical upper limit. Around 50% would seem a good target to me.

In any case at £2 a time the covers from Argos are a bargain and look better than polythene or bin liners.

Epson 4800 saga - 6 days on....

2008-04-19T11:14:00.007+01:00

Having cleared my printer to a perfect nozzle check early on Monday morning I implemented a new active routine: using Harvey Head Cleaner morning and evening to automatically print a nozzle check, a wet sponge in the paper tray (no cover yet as I can't find a suitable anti-static vinyl cover or bit of polythene big enough and no one, not even Epson, sell a cover for the 4xxx series printers in the UK) and occasional printing most evenings. So on Saturday morning, six days on how is it going?

Well, all through the week I have had perfect nozzle checks and enjoyed being able to print on demand. Come Saturday morning the auto nozzle check print showed the LM channel about 40% missing - this despite it printing both prints and nozzle check fine last night.

Trying not to despair I thought I would run the lowest level (according to the Epson manual) KK0 nozzle cleaning cycle from the LCD display on the printer (see my SSCL posting for more info on this). I then ran a nozzle check to confirm that the nozzles were clear and now I find that it is worse - nearly all the LM is missing, and to add insult to injury it has used up 14.1ml of ink, more than the 4-9ml range that cleaning via the printer utility normally uses. Below are the nozzle checks from yesterday through to this morning after the clean.

On top of that when I tried to run a nozzle check from the utility after the cleaning cycle the utility refused saying that the maintenance tank was full, while telling me that there was 87% left. Also that all the ink cartridges were empty... turning it off and on again solved that problem.

In disgust I have set the head to puddle soak in distilled water...

Also it has prompted me to look for a cover again - I have just found someone on eBay in the USA who sells them, so I have ordered one.

Someone else’s strategy for keeping their Epson Pro printer happy

2008-04-16T21:58:00.001+01:00

Coming down off the ceiling of despair caused by my recent trials I find that on the Yahoo 4000/4800/4880 forum someone posted a solution to keeping their Epson 4000 printing after being near to scrapping it due to continued nozzle blockages. This is their strategy plus some printing utilities that might help as well.

From ragnar22751:

Anyway, here is what has worked for me (for the last 3 weeks anyway)

1. The printer is left on

2. It's dust cover is draped loosely over it with a wet sponge in a dish placed on the left side of the paper tray. (I didn't think that liquids were a good idea as the printer would splash things around from the motion of the printer) Add water to the sponge as needed.

3. The Harvey Head Cleaner program runs a nozzle check twice daily.

4. The MIS autoprint utility is set to print the 8 color purge file every third day.

Of course it goes without saying that the printer is stuffed with standard laser print paper and not expensive ink jet art paper. I found that the nozzle checks alone were not enough to keep things clear although it did improve greatly when the printer was covered and the damp sponge was introduced.

Now that Harvey Head Cleaner works on my PC I shall give this a try – HCC’s current price is $39.99, with a free 7 day trial on request if you want to try it before buying.

The MIS Autoprint utility mentioned is another automatic printer utility (free this time) – this prints a bigger ink purge file, but I have not found their 8 ink purge - the largest option I can find is a 7 ink option. I don't use MIS Autoprint as on a Windows XP system it will not run unless Windows is set up with a user ID and password, although there is a workaround for this.

MIS offer a selection of purge files, including an 8 ink file, but I have not found that it isolates nozzles, so I simply use a colour patch file for inkjet paper calibration as a general purge file to exercise my printer when needed.

On the same forum another program called “Printer Jockey” has been recommended. This is a $99 utility that seems to do what HHC does as well as allow for individual ink channels to be cleaned, which, if it works, would really help save ink & money. I may have a look at it and decide which way to go, but at $99 with no trial period I think that I need some convincing that it really does work.

In my experience just printing blocks of colour when the nozzles are blocked does not do help clear the nozzles; that is what it looks as if Printer Jockey does - it does not say that it runs a cleaning cycle just for one channel. The YouTube tutorial seems to indicate that channel flushing is just printing through a particular colour's nozzles rather than cleaning. Anyone know any different?

Epson 4800 printer nozzle clogging – new strategy report no 2

2008-04-15T21:52:00.003+01:00

Some time ago I reported on a new strategy of not molly coddling my printer to see if it behaved any worse, or even better. Last time the report was indeterminate. I recently left the printer unused for about four weeks and this is my report on what happened when I turned it back on to use…

Before I go any further I shall use abbreviations for the colours in this posting, so in case there is some ambiguity here are the abbreviations I shall be using:

Colour	Abbreviation
Photo black	PK
Cyan	C
Magenta	M
Yellow	Y
Light black	LK
Light cyan	LC
Light magenta	LM
Light, light black	LLK

I wanted to make a load of prints so I turned the printer on on Friday evening and ran a nozzle check. Not surprisingly it was not very good (see below for a scan of the nozzle check – I apologise now for the quality of the images, but as you will see I was not exactly full of patience by the time I came to put this posting together!). Since the LLK channel was missing when I turned it off I was actually quite happy with the initial check (why should I be happy with it not being perfect? Well, that is what I have come to expect from this printer…)

Click on the images to see them full size

The exact details of what I did to resuscitate the printer are in the spreadsheet extract below (although I may have missed the odd nozzle check) and the sequence ink usage can be followed by looking at the ml count in the 6th column from the left.

A narrative description of the bare details in the spreadsheet goes as follows, with a representative series of the resulting nozzle checks (not all of them as that would be truly tedious):

I then ran a few printing exercises to help the printer limber up and test out Harvey Head Cleaner. Nothing much changed so I set it to puddle soak in distilled water overnight.

Saturday morning - The first nozzle check (See below) after the puddle soak showed some improvement, but not much.

I then spent Saturday doing Saturday things - After one nozzle clean I was really encouraged with all the colours except some M looking fine (see below). I then set it to puddle soak again overnight in distilled water.

Sunday morning and hopefully the chance to do some printing. I naively thought that one more cleaning cycle would sort out the M and it did – just that the C channel went missing! (See below)

At this point I had to change the LLK cartridge as the printer refused to run a cleaning cycle as it had hit the 5% full limit. Then one cleaning cycle later I was truly horrified to see that while some of the C had come back, PK, M, LC, LM & LLK had all disappeared completely. A much worse state than after leaving it untouched for four weeks. (See below).

A further cleaning cycle brought back all but M and C (see below).

Since I could think of better ways to spend a Sunday than tending the printer I set it to run an auto nozzle check & clean programme. I have not used this cycle for a long time as it often seems to make things worse, but I wanted to see what happened. After 5 cycles the printer gave up trying; it had improved things slightly, but a bit of LM and LLK, and most of M was still missing. The image below shows the results and also shows the problem that cleaning these printers often shows – the random loss or moving around of problem colours. In the third cycle the LM & LLK have suddenly decided to disappear…

Slightly better after a further cleaning cycle – see below, which also shows that the auto sequence used up 25.9ml of ink.

Then it all got worse again – some M came back, but all of LLK, nearly all of LM and some C went missing again…

A couple of cycles later all the colour channels were back except M was still missing about 30% (See below).

It was getting late so I decided to run an overnight puddle soak using Fixyourownprinter head cleaning solution. Then very early on Monday morning just before work one further cleaning cycle and the M was back; but LM went missing… howls could be heard around the house… (See below).

One more cleaning cycle and Eureka – every one of them was perfect (See below)

Just in time to leave it and go off to work… what a productive weekend.

This is quite a representative example of what it can take to get a printer back if the colours go missing. It took 96.3ml of ink, 10% of the maintenance tank capacity, at least 14 cleaning cycles (including the 6 done in the auto check), 21 nozzle checks (probably more), 8 purge prints, 3 puddle soaks and nearly three days to bring it back to perfect nozzle checks.

One good piece of news is that by updating the firmware and drivers for the 4800 the actual amount of ink used per cleaning cycle was probably 25% less than before and I can see no evidence that the smaller ink volume makes the cycles less effective – a small, but helpful, comfort

So, no I don’t think that treating it rough by leaving it alone is the solution, but this was not much worse than I have experienced even when molly coddling the machine.

So what next?

Having wrestled with constant clogging and colour channel loss with my Epson 4800 for 6 months I must admit to being quite dispirited and disillusioned now, although a wave of euphoria usually accompanies a perfect nozzle check, especially after a saga like this.

I have pretty much tried everything that I and the Yahoo forum can think of to keep my printer healthy, but to no avail really. I have tried babying it, treating it rough (not literally, just not trying to use it every day).

I am a keen amateur photographer who wants to make large prints and a variety of smaller ones on demand – I bought a pro printer because I believed that it would produce prints of consistent quality without any fuss. For the first 18 months the 4800 did this with only occasional problems, but in October 2007 the yips really set in.

I have now come to dread trying to make prints and I find it is ruining my enjoyment of photography as a whole. The last episode found me checking on a Friday night what the condition of the printer was and of course finding that there were problems. By Sunday evening I had not managed to clear the problems and I had not managed to print one single photo, but used up hours of time, 96ml of ink and not a little good humour. I finally managed to clear it very early on Monday morning in time to go to my day job. How infuriating is that?

Surely a pro spec printer ought to be better than this – it ought not to rely on voodoo and magic to get it working. If I bought a pro spec camera I would not expect it to sulk if I did not use if for a few days; I expect my car to work if I go away on holiday for a couple of weeks; I expect my lawnmower to work after a Winter in the garage – and surprise, surprise they all do. In fact I can’t think of anything else I have that is so unreliable. Even Windows, for all its problems, works most of the time. I know that the inkjet is a marvel of technology, but so are all these other systems – is inkjet technology really so much on a knife edge?

If they can only really be used by pros who use them all day every day then I really wish Epson would make that clear and price their pro printers accordingly – if the 4800 had been £5,000 instead of £1,500 I definitely would not have bought it.

Do Epson engineers ever look at this sort of user reprot and wonder how they can improve our experience?

I’ll keep trying because I can’t afford not to and because I don’t believe that there is a more reliable solution from HP or Canon – pardon me if I’m cynical.

So the saga will continue…

Harvey Head Cleaner now works outside the USA

2008-04-13T12:05:00.004+01:00

In an earlier post about my historical problems with my Epson 4800 I said that I had tried Harvey Head Cleaner (HHC), but for some reason it did not work. I was contacted recently by HHC to say that they thought they had solved the problem - so I tried the new version and it does now work.

HHC is a utility program designed to reduce the frequency of clogged heads in inkjet printers.

The aim is to reduce the incidence of nozzles clogging by using a small amount of ink (in my case it seems to run a nozzle check) automatically at user defined intervals.

When I first tried to use the programme last October (2007) it simply would not work on my PC. I assumed that there was some sort of conflict on my machine, but the developers have found that there was a problem with the format for the way the USA and Europe (and much of the rest of the world) write dates (in the UK we use dd/mm/yyyy, whereas the USA uses mm/dd/yyyy) - having fixed it it now seems to work fine outside the USA.

Essentially you programme HHC to run a nozzle check at whatever intervals you wish - once a week, three times a day; whatever. It will run them if the printer has not printed anything recently (again you can change this setting if you want).

It also runs a nozzle check if you turn your computer on after the programmed time has elapsed to run the check.

It only works, however, if you leave your printer turned on - it obviously can not print a nozzle check if the printer is off.

Windex for cleaning printer heads?

2008-04-02T20:31:00.008+01:00

For some time there has been a bit of controversy over whether Windex® Cleaner should be used to clean clogged Epson printer head nozzles as many recommend; the active ingredient is usually said to be Ammonia. Since Windex is not available in the UK it has always seemed a bit academic to me, but I thought I would try to see what is actually in Windex to see if I could find an equivalent.

Looking on the Windex web site I found the Materials Safety Data Sheet for Windex Original which is the Windex that I assume people are referring to. This is dated 19 Apr 2007 and only lists (as you can see in the extract below) Ethylene glycol n-hexyl ether, Isopropanol and Water as ingredients - no Ammonia, although the description of Windex says its key ingredient is Ammonia-D®.

Click on the images to see them full size
So is there ammonia in it or not? Surely not as I can not imagine that the data sheet would leave out such an important ingredient. What exactly is Ammonia-D®?

It does, however, describe Windex Original has having an "Ammonia-like" odour - see extract below.

The manufacturers may have had ammonia in it originally and had to remove it for health and safety reasons, but kept the smell for brand continuity...

It may well be the Isopropanol that is the active ingredient for cleaning nozzles as it is certainly a solvent and I think I have heard it mentioned in some nozzle cleaning posts somewhere...

If anyone can add anything or enlighten me with an equivalent UK product please leave a comment.

Epson 4800 / 4000 inkjet printer SSCL nozzle cleaning mode

2008-03-23T15:58:00.006Z

Recently on the Yahoo Epson 4000/4800/4880 Support Group forum a powerful nozzle cleaning mode was highlighted. This is the SSCL mode – Epson call this “Super Strong Cleaning” and others call it “Super Sonic Cleaning”. In any case it is an interesting additional cleaning mode.

The SSCL is mentioned in the Maintenance section of the Epson 4800 user guide – I have made screenshots of the instructions (pages 117 & 118 in my pdf version of the user guide) and amalgamated them into one image giving the instructions of how to run a SSCL cycle (they are the same for the 4000):

Click on the image to see it full sized

This Maintenance Mode is also called Maintenance Mode 1 in the field repair guides.

Epson describe the SSCL cycle as “Ultrasonic” head cleaning and is so powerful that Epson limit its use to 251 times in the life of the printer.

There seems to be some debate about how much ink this cleaning cycle uses, with some saying they have used it successfully and used no ink to others who say it uses about 100ml on ink for a complete cycle.

Personally, despite my continued problems with nozzle colour loss (I no longer think of it as nozzle clogging as it is not usually a few nozzles missing, but the complete colour – to me all the 180 nozzles per colour channel going missing at once points to a different mechanism than nozzle clogging caused by ink deposits on the nozzle, drying out etc, but that is another story) I have never used this cleaning cycle, nor in fact the Power Cleaning cycle.

Epson has a hierarchy of cleaning cycles to produce progressively more powerful cleaning effects; each one taking longer and using more ink. In Epson’s 4800 field repair guide they list the following cleaning cycle’s under Maintenance Mode 3 (the 4000 only has two Maintenance Modes listed in its field repair guide):

Std. KK0 (Weakest cleaning cycle (uses less ink))
Std. KK1 (Medium strength cleaning cycle)
Std. KK2 (Stronger cleaning cycle)
Std. KK3 (Strongest cleaning cycle)
Init. Fill (Forces a initial fill (prime))

Maintenance Mode 3 can be activated by the following routine:

Turn the printer off
Press and hold the Pause, Down, and Right buttons and turn on the Printer

In Epson’s 4800 user guide they say that to run a Power Cleaning cycle you have to have at least 50% full cartridges, implying it uses a lot of ink. I have seen some Forum postings say that the SSCL cycle uses less ink than the Power Clean…

Now it is my guess that the SSCL is either the KK3 cycle (in the 4000 field repair guide Epson only go as far as the KK2 cycle) or a stronger one still; but in any case I think it will use a lot of ink and is really only to be used as a truly last resort before calling in a technician if your print head has truly clogged nozzles – eg completely dried out, clogged with chemical deposits etc.

These cleaning functions can be found under Maintenance Mode 2 on the 4000 (the same works for the 4800), which can be activated by the following routine:

Turn printer off
Press and hold the Left, Down, and Up buttons and turn on the Printer

Turning off the 4000 Maintenance Tank counter
This routine also finds the 4800’s Maintenance Mode 2, but it has a different set of parameters to the 4000. Interestingly I note that it is possible to turn off the Maintenance Tank’s counter in Mode 2 on the 4000, but I can’t find it as an option anywhere for the 4800.

All-in-all well worth knowing about the SSCL, but if anyone knows more about it please let me know by leaving a comment on this posting.