Peter's Blog

Tried using my mum's Kodak Photodock to print some photo's, thus avoiding the hassle of ordering prints online: if I only want one picture I don't have to pay £1.50 postage. Tried changing the ink cartridge and the printer refused to release it. Tried unscrewing and fiddling but it still wouldn't come out. Went online and kodak's troubleshooting faq said that with these symptoms it should be sent back to Kodak for repair.

So I bought a Canon CP510, a basic 6x4 inch photo printer in Jessops. The reviews I had read told me that the print quality was very good and apparently the prints will last for 100 years. I hate inkjet printers, cheap and nasty things and the ink cartridges always need replacing and cheap clone cartridges always have at least one blocked jet. Yuk. Hence this 'dye sublimation' thing. I also like Canon, my canon scanner and laser printer have served me well.

The CP510 is a basic model, it doesn't have an LCD display or memory card slots, it is designed to print either from a pc or directly from a camera (it has a retractable usb cable). The more expensive models have more features for printing without a pc but I am unlikely to use these.

When I got it out the box I was perturbed to see that it was obviously the same technology and mechanism as the kodak. Looking through the troubleshooting faq it didn't mention the problem I had with the kodak so hopefully they have fixed it.

I printed some photo's out and was disappointed with the results. The resolution was fine but the pictures were muddy, the colours dull. I fiddled with the settings a bit, increasing brightness, contrast and saturation but I didn't get results that were anywhere near as good as prints I get from photobox. The paper has two tear-off stubs at either end and when you hold the finished print you can feel the perforations and it is irrationally annoying.

On the whole I must say I am disappointed with it. It is ok for knocking out quick prints but for populating photo albums I would prefer to use photobox.

I never mentioned this but I bought a Canon LBP 1120 laser printer a couple of months ago because I had a lot of printing to do and they were going half price.

I had found with an inkjet printer that I used it only rarely and when I did the ink had invariably dried up and I would end up buying more cartridges for $$$. Whenever I tried cheap clone cartridges the results would be poor, with one of the colors not working.

Discussing this at work someone mentioned how much better laser printers were: they work out quite economical to run as a toner cartridge can print 2500 pages and doesn't dry out.

Hence I bought the Canon and it works very well. The print quality is very good albeit only black and white. It works fine with some old paper I have had for over 10 years. For printing photo's I would rather use photobox as the prints work out cheaper and are much better quality and don't start to fade after a year.

The printer was probably cheap because it was an old model and I ought to grab a spare toner cartridge while they are still available.

It is very nice having a printer available. I no longer have to memorise google maps.

Picasa can import pictures from cameras. It can hook into the windows XP WIA stuff (see here). In fact, as well as my Canon Powershot S1 it can also handle the K750i phone. There is only one problem I found with the way it imports: I could not see how to get it to delete the pictures from the camera once it had imported them. This is actually a bit of a pain as I have to delete them either through the camera (Canon) or file manager/salamander (K750i). Paintshop Photo Album has a nice checkbox for me to tick during the import process. Also PSPA automatically dumps the files in a directory named after the import date. Picasa prompts you for a name. I'm happy to file them by import date and organise them with labels.

Speaking of Paintshop Photo Album, they have bought out a new version but are charging for the upgrade. I don't think I'll bother to upgrade it, I'll wait paitently for picasa to evolve.

Sony Ericsson K750i has come so here is a potted review:

• Nice, small, light. A tad wider and thicker than my old nokia 6610i but it's no brick.
• Big screen, maybe twice the size of the nokia.
• Camera is ok, not great. Here is a picture of my settee:
  
  This is at 'normal' compression rather than 'fine' and to my eye it's not as good as my Canon Powershot S1 which blows it away in most respects apart from small size. The picture it takes are fairly wide angle, I'd have trouble fitting the whole settee in the frame of my S1. You need to be pretty close to what you are taking photo's of or be prepared to use the digital zoom at the expense of resolution. The camera is still better than the one in the Nokia 6610i which can only be described as crap.
• MP3 player is, well, an mp3 player. Good quality, even through speaker it makes a decent sound.
• It plays mp3 ring tones. I've already set it up as I planned long go. Despite what the manual says there is no restriction on mp3 ringtones, it Just Worked.
• USB cable is cool: the memory stick in the camera appears as a USB disk, you just copy files backwards and forwards. Didn't need any special software. I can use Salamander I think it can charge from the USB cable, it doesn't say in the manual but the battery icon gains the charging lightning strike which may be a clue.
• I haven't played bluetooth yet, I suppose it works but I'd rather use the USB cable. I'm not a big fan of bluetooth, the Windows bluetooth stacks all seem overly complicated. I have to plug in a bluetooth dongle to use bluetooth, might as well plug a USB cable in and get something 20x faster and more reliable. Can still use phone with wife's jabra headset.
• Looking through the tools I found something called 'light'. Wondered what it did and it turned on two bright white LED's intended as a replacement for flash. It's not going to floodlight a room but it could be useful in a nocturnal crisis.
• It is heavily branded with vodafone. Press the wrong thing in the menu and you're into Vodafone Live and running up your GPRS bills.
• The radio is ok, even through the speaker. It's auto-search could only find two stations but others were around. It is supposed to have RDS but it wasn't showing me any station names.
• It can take video's but I haven't tried that yet. It has got video editing software built in (!).
• Haven't tried email client yet. It cannot be any worse than the Nokia 6600 I tried at work which had no option to download headers only.
• It has a voice recorder, voice activated dialling, voice activated answer, you can swear at it and it says sorry.
• Under the bluetooth stuff I haven't installed is something to remotely control your powerpoint presentations from the phone.
• Have I forgotten anything? Oh yes, you can make phone calls with it.

What I think I will miss most from Nokia:

• cannot set a time for profiles to end: will have to remember to manually switch from silent to normal when I finish work (especially with umbungo ringtone).
• every nokia seems to work with every nokia charger. Very useful when you leave your charger at home, wherever you go people have nokias. But then again, if I can charge through the USB cable I am fairly well served wherever there is a pc.

Conclusion: nice phone.

Superlative camera makes. Oh, and their scanners are ok.

My Canon Powershot S1 IS has a panoramic picture mode that allows you to take a series of photos and then use a piece of software on PC to glue them together. I had my first go with it today and I am really impressed.

This is a picture from my mum's balcony, taken round a 180 degree sweep:

The camera has a special mode to support this: when taking the photos you see half the previous photo in the viewfinder which makes it easier to take the next photo. The PC software does all the stitching automatically, no manual tweeking or aligning things to the nearest pixel. You can see half a car and a bent line in the road and that's useful to bear in mind when deciding what to photo.

For the first time ever I had to send a personal FAX so I had to think about how to go about it.

I had a form to print, sign and Fax off to 123-Reg. I can print, sign and scan the form back in using my Canon CanoScan Lide 20 Scanner so that was not a problem. I had a large graphic file to send.

I'd decommisioned my fax/modem when I went broadband and I didn't want to fiddle around setting it up again. I looked around the internet for faxing services but these seem to be mainly commercial or email < - > Fax gateways, no services for one off graphic Faxing.

Then I realised that my Dell Inspiron 500m laptop has a built in modem. I searched the internet for fax software then, on a hunch, looked to see if Windows XP itself supports it and it does.

These are the steps to install it:

• Go into Control Panel/Add or Remove Programs
• Click on 'Add or Remove Windows Components'
• Click on 'Fax Services' and 'Next'.
• Go into Control Panel/Printers and Faxes
• Add a new Fax. This will take you through a Wizard where you put in your name, address etc.

The Fax device now acts like a printer: I opened my scanned form in Paint Shop Pro and just printed it to the Fax device. This triggerred another wizard that took the Fax number and allowed me to set up a cover sheet. Then it sent the Fax. Easy.

Lets hope someone is working at 123-reg on a Saturday and will read it.

Subscribed to flickr, todays 5 minute wonder. Added new block on the right with random baby picture.

I tried to subscribe to Flickr yesterday but they were having severe problems, I got a fatal error when I tried to subscribe and they seemed to be having bad loading problems. They seem to be victims of their success. If flickr delays my page loads then the photo goes.

I take photos every day with the Canon Powershot S1 IS, I've learnt how to get it to autofocus most of the time and the new Uniross 2000mA/h batteries have been in it a week now without a recharge, no problems there, well worth £8.

Still taking plenty of photo's with new camera. At first I was concerned about battery life but the batterys seem to have settled down to lasting a good day and 30-40 photo's, predominantly flash with lots of attempts to autofocus.

I was looking through a catalogue for some new NiMH AA rechargable batteries for it and suddenly became aware of the fact that these come in various capacities: the ones I had been using are 1300mA/hours but they can be anything up to 2300mA/hours. I went out and bought a set of 2000mA/hours for £8 and am looking forward to 50% longer battery life. This demonstrates one of the coolest features of the camera: it uses batteries you can buy anywhere.

Regarding the autofocus, I think my problem is that I want to use 10x zoom all the time to take pictures of my daughter where her face fills the frame. The problem is that at 10x zoom the camera seems to be reluctant to focus to less than 1m: even selecting manual focus, it won't let me set the focus any closer unless I reduce the zoom a bit. Taking photo's like this the pictures look ok on the camera with it's tiny LCD but when copied to pc they are embarrasingly out of focus.

When the pictures are in focus they are very nice:

I've decided I don't want to use the Canon PC software if I can avoid it. Both the camera and Jasc Paintshop Photo Album support WIA, a windows thing to handle scanners and cameras. When the Canon software was installed it made itself the default handler when the camera connected. I found that this could be changed as follows:

• connect camera to computer via USB
• Go to conrol panel/Scanners and Cameras. Open Scanners and Cameras itself by double-clicking on it, don't open the camera.
• right click on the camera in the Scanners and Cameras list and select 'Properties' (Note: the camera will not be listed if it is not connected).
• select the 'Events' tab and configure the 'Camera Connected' event to launch Paintshop Photo Album (or whatever you want to download)
• press ok.

Unfortunately this seems to bypass whatever it is that automatically rotates portrait mode photo's to the correct orientation, when copied to the pc they are on their sides. The Canon Powershot S1 IS does have an orientation sensor and all photo's are displayed the right way up on the viewfinder and when the camera is connected to a TV. I think I'm happy to deal with the chore of rotatng photos than use the Canon software.

I am starting to rely on Paintshop Photo Album to organise my 750M of photos. It handles them easily and it uses real directories on the PC, it does not try to hide nasty technicalities like the file system from me.