Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Photokina is happening right now in Germany and a lot of new cameras and lenses are being introduced. Here’s my personal take on stuff…

The most practical tool seems to be the Nikon D600, already available for a price of $2100. That sounds costly, but the image quality should be much higher than the $3500 Canon 5D Mark III (my review). The D600 shares the 14+ f-stop dynamic range of the D800 but without the $3000 and the excessive-for-many-folks 36 MP resolution. See the D600 sensor test from DxO.

The Sony NEX mirrorless system has gotten a big vote of confidence from Hasselblad, which will sell you a $1000 Sony NEX-7 in a fancy case for $6500 (consumers are not impressed). The new Sony NEX-6 is my favorite camera in the line. It doesn’t run Android and therefore lacks full photo-sharing capabilities, but it does have Wi-Fi and can push photos to smartphones and/or to at least one Internet service (Facebook). It has some tricks in the sensor that are supposed to make autofocus work better. Given that the NEX-6 screen folds out, this should be a better videography tool than most DSLRs. Sony also introduced some interesting new lenses, e.g., a super wide zoom (10-18mm; 15-27mm equivalent) and a fast prime image-stabilized normal lens (35/1.8). Bizarrely, Sony also introduced a point-and-shoot camera with a 24x36mm sensor (“full frame” or the same as 35mm film) and a fixed 35/2 lens. This thing costs $2800. Ever since Sony acquired the Minolta line in 2006, I have been expecting Sony to make a serious effort at unseating Nikon or Canon in the DSLR market by coming out with a full professional range of lenses. Instead, the company seems to be putting out one random product after another.

The Nikon S800c compact camera should be the wave of the future. It runs the Android operating system so, in addition to being able to capture photos, it is capable of doing the stuff with photos that people want to do. Samsung supposedly is coming out with a “Galaxy Camera” that will be even better, e.g., with the true Android 4.1 religion installed and a 4G modem.

Panasonic DMC-GH3 seems as though it might be the most interesting four-thirds camera. It can record 1080p high-def video at a frame rate of 60 frames per second (60p). I wonder for whom this will be a significant difference. Sports?

I’ve been a Canon EOS user since 1994, but this year has been enough to challenge one’s faith in the company. Canon introduced a cheap full-frame camera, the EOS 6D, that costs $2100 and does basically everything that the 5D Mark III does. This will be another reason for 5D Mark III buyers to feel stupid, but it does not sound as though they have made any headway in terms of competing with Nikon on image quality. Canon has not introduced any new lenses, though some of their offerings are rather tired (e.g., the 50/1.8 with no USM; no 50mm lens with image stabilization; the 50 macro lens with no USM or IS; the 35/2 lens with no USM). If Sony can put image stabilization into its new prime lenses for the NEX, why can’t Canon do something similar for EF lenses?

For Californians who aren’t satisfied at having spent $327 million on a Web site, Leica offers a camera (the “M”) with the same specs (full frame sensor, 24 MP resolution) as the $2100 Canons and Nikons … for $7000. Leica is also selling  a new version of their 30x45mm sensor camera with 37 megapixels (same as a Nikon D800) for $22,000 (don’t ask about lens prices!). Hasselblad has a vaguely similar H5D system with up to 60 MP of resolution from a 37x49mm sensor). The big ‘Blad and Leica cameras are intended primarily for studio use.

Here’s a question for the techies reading this blog… why can’t the latest cameras capture 4K video? The 4K format requires only about 8 MP of resolution, so the sensors in any of the latest cameras put out enough pixels (at least if you’re willing to accept some interpolation of color data). Yet the only camera that I’ve heard of being able to record 4K is the Canon EOS-1D C (announced but not shipping). Is the problem one of CPU power for compressing data at those rates?

 

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If the European economy is not doing well, we can’t blame the Massachusetts State Police. They came to a helicopter fly-in at the Plymouth airport (KPYM) yesterday with their new $10 million Eurocopter EC145 (the base helicopter is about $6 million but this one was loaded with options). This complements their existing fleet of Eurocopters, which also includes the AS355 and the AS350.

What about pilots? It seems that one must have 1000 helicopter hours in order to be pilot in command of this $10 million new toy. Civilian flight schools pay approximately $8 per hour, with no pension or health care benefits, for a pilot with 1000 flying hours of experience. The maximum practical amount of commercial flying is about 1200 hours per year, so the annual cost is about $10,000 per year per pilot. The Massachusetts State Police? Approximately $300,000 per year per pilot, including pension, overtime, and health care costs. How about training? In the civilian world, pilots pay for their own training, typically in Robinson helicopters that cost about $170 per hour to operate. The Massachusetts State Police do their training in-house. Do they own any Robinsons? No. It seems that the primary training is done in the AStar 350 (AS350), a jet-powered 6-seater that can land on top of Mt. Everest. It costs about $1000 per hour to run (that’s after incurring the multi-million dollar purchase price).

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Mitt Romney’s chartered airplane (a ragged-out DC-9 derivative, a tribute to America’s engineering prowess in the early 1960s). It is kind of surprising that nobody has gotten hold of a can of spray paint and written in “but invest in Asia” underneath the “Believe in America”. A tribute to airport security nationwide!

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I was chatting with a friend who is a professor at UC Berkeley [not in the CS department and not Barsky] and he mentioned that the state government, though claiming to be too poor to pay for academics within the University of California system, had recently spent over $450 million on a football stadium renovation. I searched and found this Wall Street Journal article. It turns out that the total cost is $474 million. To make the numbers seem less alarming, the university is pretending that the “training facility” is separate, but in fact it is “nestled right up against the stadium” according to my friend and he added “Originally, the training facility/gym/tutoring center was only intended to serve the football team.  The rules were later relaxed to allow in the basketball team, and perhaps a few high visiblity sports.  Certainly, normal students are not allowed anywhere near the place.”

The WSJ says that the school has raised just $31 million in donations for the project (unclear how much of that money might have been given to UC Berkeley regardless). My mole at the school says that the football program has never made money (WSJ confirms that the university had to kick in $88.4 million in taxpayer funds from 2003 through 2011) and that certainly the $474 million will be paid for by tuition and tax dollars. Wikipedia says that the cost of making the historic stadium, pre-renovation, earthquake-safe, would have been $14 million (shortly after this post was published, someone edited the Wikipedia article to add a zero to this figure, making it appear that the 1998 study (actually from 1997) estimated earthquake-proofing the stadium at $140 million).

The best thing that one can say about the $474 million stadium renovation is that it makes the state’s $327 million web site seem like a bargain.

[Note: even the Chinese, smart enough to keep their public schools open (unlike Chicago!), can’t figure out how not to lose a lot of money on sports stadiums. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing_National_Stadium says that the Beijing Olympic Stadium cost $457 million in 2012 dollars and is mostly a white elephant at this point (though profitable on a operating basis due to people coming and paying to see its unique architecture).]

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Buried in http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/15/health/policy/california-tries-to-lead-way-on-health-law.html is the cost of building the Web site where some currently uninsured Californians will shop for health insurance: “Most of the money is committed to consultants, including Accenture, which has a $327 million contract to build and support the initial operation of the enrollment portal.”

One of the amazing things about Obamacare is that it preserves the state-by-state restrictions on competition among insurance companies. So instead of the government building a single $327 million web site that all Americans can use, each of the 50 state governments gets to build its own $327 million web site (though of course, from a technical point of view, there is no reason that a single web site could not offer 50 different views of the same database, each view customized to show options available in a particular state).

[Compare to the Google search engine company, built by two Stanford graduate students in their spare time. Google’s expansion was funded by $100,000 in August 1998 and $25 million in June 1999 (Wikipedia). Amazon.com was funded by Jeff Bezos’s parents and then with a $1 million second round (source).]

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Folks:

Looking at the cost of custom framing and the cost of flat-screen televisions, it occurs to me that it will be cheaper and obviously more flexible to mount an HDTV on the wall and use it to show photos than to print photos and frame them with non-glare glass. It also will be a lot more useful for business discussions because one can use the wall space for showing a document.

“Photo quality” is generally defined as 200 pixels per inch. That means, unfortunately, that an HDTV will be lower resolution than a print as soon as it exceeds about 10 inches in width. However, the quality in some ways might be better due to the backlit nature of the TV. (I’m aware that televisions complying with the new 4K standard would have much more resolution but they don’t seem to be available at a consumer price yet.)

So… who has tried this out? How does it look compared to a regular print that is behind glass?

Also, what is the best TV to use? Here are the criteria:

• must be programmable so that it comes on in “photo display” mode so that there is no need to monkey with a remote control after a power failure (or maybe default to photo display mode if a USB stick is plugged in); I have found the deep menus of modern HDTVs to be truly painful
• must be programmable to shut itself off at midnight, for example, and back on at 8 am (to save power)
• must be daylight-viewable (means LCD is better than plasma?)
• must have low power consumption (implies LED-lit)?

I would like to get these in sizes ranging from 50 to 60 inches.

Thanks in advance for suggestions.

[I asked a somewhat similar question a couple of years ago, but any model/brand suggestions would be out of date.]

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Coincidentally, at the same time that the Chicago teacher’s union was going out on strike, my own union job came to an end (official termination letter). In 2008, I accepted a job at Comair, a regional airline that is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Delta and that flies passengers as “Delta Connection”. My job included a membership in the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA), one of the most successful unions other than those representing government workers (see “Unions and Airlines” for why).

Comair’s union agreement was more favorable to workers than the contracts at regional airline competitors, to the point that it cost Delta less to pay independent regional airlines to fly Delta Connection flights than to use its own in-house regional airline. Most of the airplanes themselves are owned either by Delta or by a leasing company, so the assets of a regional airline are its FAA air carrier certificate and a group of employees.

Due to the fact that Comair had shrunk so much since the Collapse of 2008, coupled with union agreements that the newest workers be laid off first (I was furloughed in the fall of 2008) and that the newest workers be paid the least, Comair had a much higher than average cost workforce. The company was in the middle of contract negotiations with pilots when a decision was made to shut the whole thing down.

The effect of the shutdown is that pilots who had formerly been on 10-year pay at Comair, perhaps earning $40,000 per year, will now be applying for jobs at 1-year pay ($20,000 per year) at another regional airline. Unlike the Chicago teachers, Comair pilots were not entitled to a defined benefit pension and therefore the airline industry will not realize any pension savings by sending all of these folks to another carrier with their 401k plans intact. It would have been a lot less turmoil if the airline and pilots could have agreed that the pay scale could be revamped so that Comair’s labor costs were about the same as competitors, but psychologically it was apparently easier for all to pretend that somehow there was a defect in the Comair corporate shell and that the world would be a better place if everyone moved to work for a different corporation with a different FAA air carrier certificate. Unfortunately, this means that a lot of people will have to move from their northern Kentucky homes in order to find work (Comair headquarters is at the Cincinnati airport and no other airlines are based at CVG).

So I am bidding farewell to this job and my life as a union worker. I am grateful to the Comair dispatch and scheduling team. Pilots are expected to live as nomads but these folks reasonably expected to go to work every day in Comair’s glass corporate headquarters (“the Kremlin” and home to those with “ten pound heads” according to my “basic indoctrination” trainer, Mark Martin). It is not pleasant to get a phone call at 4:45 am in a Hilton Garden Inn near the Baltimore airport, but the schedulers did their best when asking me to adapt to the absurd lifestyle of a junior pilot. The dispatchers did a great job calculating our fuel requirements and keeping us informed regarding the weather. I’m also grateful to the Comair simulator training team and the check airmen that flew with me during my “initial operating experience” (IOE). It takes a lot of courage to watch someone who has previously flown slow four-seat airplanes and helicopters try to land, for the first time and with 50 passengers in back, a jet weighing 47,000 lbs. It did not help that the Canadair Regional Jets we flew had no leading-edge devices (“slats”) and therefore had to be pointed nose-down at the runway for a blistering final approach speed of 170 mph (substantially faster than a Boeing 737 for example). Finally, I am grateful to the flight attendants with whom I flew. The toughest job at the airline is definitely to be alone in the inadequately air conditioned back with 50 passengers complaining about their kids’ peanut allergies and wondering why we were parked on a taxiway for two or three hours at JFK or DCA.

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As measured by student test scores and adjusted for budget ($13,000 per student (source)), Chicago has some of the world’s least effective schools. The teachers earn an average of $76,000 per year, but with health care, retirement, and other benefits, the true cost is probably closer to $150,000 per year (more than $200,000 per year for a teacher working a standard full-year schedule rather than just for nine months).  A Teach for America graduate can be hired for as little as $25,500 per year (source) and will do at least as good a job (see this Stanford study). It would appear that Chicago thus has a golden opportunity to shed crushing pension and health care obligations by spinning off and decentralizing its public school system.

Chicago could simply create a non-profit organization for each school, give the administrative jobs within that school to existing administrators (presumably they are not on strike), fund those new non-profit organizations with $13,000 per student, and let the administrators hire whatever teachers they can find (including hiring from among the currently striking teachers) at market-clearing salaries and with a standard defined contribution retirement plan (rather than the defined benefit plan that has led to the Chicago Public School’s billion-dollar deficit). Now that Obamacare is available, give employees higher salaries and let them purchase health insurance from the Obamarkets.

For students in the Chicago schools, obviously the biggest problem is that they aren’t learning much. For childless taxpayers, however, the biggest problem is that an aging workforce is owed health care and pension benefits that could only be affordable in an economy with real per-capita GDP growth of 5 percent annually (instead of the 0-1 percent that we have). It would seem as though there is no better time to declare the experiment of a centralized school system run by the Chicago city government to be a failed one and, in doing so, spare the taxpayers from future ruin. A decentralized system of publicly-funded non-profit schools would provide at least as good an education, in the very same buildings, at a fraction of the current cost. After that it would be possible to try to do something for the kids, i.e., attempt to ensure that they are receiving an actual education.

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Harvest season is upon us in New England and with it the opportunity to buy organic locally farmed produce for 2-4X what Costco charges to drag the same vegetable or fruit up from Mexico and dump it into your minivan in Waltham.

A variety of analyses on whether or not locally produced food is truly good for the environment have been made, e.g., http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/11/14/the-inefficiency-of-local-food/

I wonder if a simpler analysis would not apply. Let’s assume that every dollar we spend does a relatively constant amount of damage to the earth. If I give a person or a business an extra dollar, a fraction of that will be spent to buy gasoline, buy new manufactured products and discard old ones, buy electricity that will result in fossil fuels being burned, etc. There are some minor variations in how much damage will be done depending on the person or business that I give the dollar to, but in nearly all cases the more money spent the more damage will be done to the planet.

Thus if I buy local food for 4X the cost of food produced in Mexico, I am paying for New Englanders to drive around in cars, heat their houses with oil, purchase new smart phones and tablet computers, etc. Had I instead bought the produce from Mexico, I would have supported Mexicans who walk to work, heat just one room of their house and only when necessary, and make do with devices that they already own.

This analysis seems simplistic, but I am not sure that it is wrong. What do readers think? Is someone who buys local food at high prices hastening the destruction of the earth?

[Obviously there are other reasons to buy local food, such as taste, but this posting is purely about environmental damage.]

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I had dinner last night with a 28-year-old Spanish computer science researcher who is visiting a lab here in Boston for two months. He said that the economic situation in Spain is terrible. I asked what the root of the problem was, in his opinion. “We are a country of 47 million people but we’re broken up into 17 states, each of which has its own parliament. So there are a total of 18 parliaments. There are a huge number of politicians and each politician has a large collection of advisers. When construction was booming there was enough tax revenue to support all of this government, but now construction is finished and there isn’t enough money. The government has raised the value-added tax on everything to 21 percent. Previously it had been anywhere from 5 to 18 percent. This has driven a large portion of the economy underground and people will accept only cash in order to escape the 21 percent tax. People with university degrees are leaving to take jobs in the U.K. and Germany, which is a huge loss to Spain because their education was massively subsidized. I paid only 600 euro per year for my university education. You can fly back to Spain from Germany once per month for 50 euro each way.”

I thought that the conversation was interesting because it highlights the fact that the European Community coupled with airline deregulation has made it much easier for skilled workers to move around. A country that got in trouble in the old days could count on the fact that most of its young educated people would stay around to help dig out of the mess. Today those young people can scatter very quickly, each one taking a $200,000+ state investment in education with him or her.

[http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2012/05/spain-very-different-fiscal-crisis.html has an interesting chart.]

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