Bought a 'new' scanner, old Minolta Dimage Scan Dual, seems to be doing an admirable job for its age, older negs don't half attract dust mind!

Trip into town with the ESII Fuji Superia 200 from memory.

Wakey wakey



Down by the Wey side



I wouldn't like to be hanging off it!



Couple from earlier, kodak BW400C in my Spot F

The cathedral



old meter from work

Apple and Microsoft have very different philosphies to their customer base.

Microsoft try and keep backwards compatibility and IMHO this has crippled their machines, the file system in particular, they are also very open to user upgrades, this means you can build a PC with any array of components.

Apple don;t give a stuff to backwards compatibility and will happily say 'stuff you' to their customer base 'we are changine something and you need to buy a new machine' This means you need to upgrade a every 3 years or so or you are obviously being left behind. it does mean as technology moves they are not being held back.

Someone mentioned file system not being a big deal to the end user, if you want to work on large files then you will soon see the limitations of windows. I do a lot of audio recording on both a windows machine and mac, the mac just works the windows machine work if you religiously maintain its file system, re-format drives weekly or before new projects and defrag a couple of times a day. I would imagine video editing is a similar chore picture editing should not be much of an issue on either machine.

Macs are very nicely made (the case of my G5 sat next to me is a work of art) but and equivalent PC costs 1/2-2/3 of the money, is the cost a big issue to you?

If you want a laptop for photo editing PLEASE try and get a demo of the macbook pro with matte finished screen, it looks amazing. If I wanted a machine for photo editing and had very deep pockets that is probably what I would buy because of the general build quality and screen.

There is no real reason to go with either platform to be honest, I use both, mac G5 at work for general office duties, Mac G4 for image editing and web surfing at home, PC laptop with Win7 for general out and about use or sat on the sofa at home and an old desktop PC win XP for photoscanning. They all do the job required.

I have a decent spot f in silver (couple of marks on the base that is all) with case and manual. Run a couple of films through it and it all works fine, £40 posted if your interested.

Top one provisionally sold pending payment.

I have the SMC version now, that is why these are for sale optically there is really nothing in it IMHO its just the open aperture metering that is nice.

Fiver off each and postage included.

The pics were taken on a canon 20D these are 100% crops resized down a bit. I used the lenses to take the pics of each other apart from the 3rd pic of the good one showing the rubs which was taken using a canon EF28-105mm zoom.

Pics of the good one








Pics of the mint one:

Great prime lens, works perfectly on my spotmatic with super snappy aperture blades and also makes for a very good walkabout prime on a crop sensor digital with the correct adapter (I have been using it on my Canon 20D).

Excellent condition optically and the focus ring is super smooth with a lovely weight that your just don't get with modern lenses. Cosmetically its great apart from a couple of very small rubs to the aperture ring the are tiny though and the lens caps are not original pentax items but they are of decent quality.

£40

I have a second one of these the same but without the rub marks on the aperture ring. that one is good enough to be genuinely called mint IMHO.

£45

Pics will follow shortly.

Well numbers are easy to sell, but if you take a canon 5D II or 7D and take some piccies with a good lens chances are if you pixel peep then you will find 'errors' in the lens, distortion and chromatic abberations, IMHO that makes a sensor beyond the abilities of the lens. Especially with crop sensors where its even more difficult to make decent wide angle stuff. This is why Canon are chasing the video crowd IMHO, a 20Mp sensor will always be seen a 'better' than a 10Mp sensor, I'd be much more happy with 10Mp full frame than a 20Mp crop sensor all else being equal. I reckon sensor technology has begin to peak and we will start seeing more development sideways, video recording, more features for autofocus and facial recognition etc. How long before you camera has the tech to find all the faces in the image chose the correct aperture, shutter speed and ISO to get everyone in focus then wait until they are all smiling before it takes the shot, the technology for that is here, just not made it into a camera yet.

PhaseOne would probably be the people to speak to IIRC they have rights to the SciTex company that pioneered a lot for the ultra slim 'leaf' sensors (bought it off Kodak I believe). They don't seem interested in anything as small as 35mm FullFrame though, they have been doing meduim and large format digital backs for years.

The problem with this is its not a long term products IMHO, the people that want them will buy them fairly quickly then you will less no more. Current sensor tech is better than the lenses we have so I see no room for saleable upgrades. I'd like one but don't see it as commercially viable.

I might shoot PhaseOne an email in the morning see if they have any plans for anything 35mm.