SLSing - techies on the prowl

In the early years of photography people where just trying their best to capture (as clear as possible) images so that they do not need to stand in front of the painter for their portaits. Like paintings, photos has also become something for keeps, a snap of the shutter and it is done~!. Isn’t that all easy. Thus, for the longest time, photography was not exactly considered an art form. You can proably Google and read up ont he this but hre is a start : Photography As An Art Form . It is now considered an art form and with advance in technology, phtography just became easier and more affordable. So who IS an artist?… you decide.

Blame on the human anatomy, our eyes just IS able to see “more”. The human eye have the ability of seeing a much wider view compared to what a camera can capture. And many a times only with several pictures can you truly let the viewer understand the magnitude of what you had seen~!. And with Digital photography, things just more funky~! For photography, no matter how good or extensive your equipment you will not always have the same output. There is something that all GOOD photographers  must HAVE and that is the “EYE”~!

Check out Kaleidoscopy.com and you will know what I mean.

Kaleidoscopy.com aka giantcanopy is a forum member of clubsnap and we just love his work~! Check out this thread in clubsnap on his trip to Hokkaido - Memories of Hokkaido ~!!!. He did all his work either FREEHAND or with a tripod.

Doesn’t this last pic look like the cover for the next anime for Hayao Miyazaki - Ghibli Studio !?!?

OR he could have used these…Check out the the equipment

NOTE: Kaleidoscopy.com did not use these equipment, but if ever a person would WANT to do what he does with less effort this is what is required …!!!

All pics from:

- Watch Impress

- Kaleidoscopy.com

The news has been out for some time and it is only until now that the deals has been official (in short ” Done Deal”). You (Hitachi GST) DO know how Truly Asia Malaysia can be right???!?!? The Hitachi Group is fairly big and they DO have factories already in Malaysia (e.g Hitachi Cable (Johor) Sdn Bhd located in JB). Let’s see how LowYat (the KL’s version of SLS)

LAKE FOREST, Calif. - July 1, 2009 - Western Digital Corp. (NYSE:WDC) today announced it has completed the previously announced sale of the assets of its media substrate manufacturing facility in Sarawak, Malaysia, to a subsidiary of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, the hard drive manufacturing unit of Hitachi, Ltd. WD manufactured aluminum substrates for hard drive magnetic media at the facility and has consolidated its substrate manufacturing and development operations into its Johor, Malaysia, facility. WD employees at the Sarawak facility have become employees of the purchaser. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

$$$  

WD Press Centre

Apparently, another mishap in Dell’s webstore-  in Taiwan this time. Their currency is so playful, with numerous zeroes and a pretty unique exchange rate to most G7 currencies. I did not notice until I was in Taiwan for the first time some 5~6 years back. Their IT mall have promotional flyers with prices indication like this ??? TWD$8XX0.00 It did not really strike me until I did some maths…sorry i suck @ mental calculation … anyway according to Engadget…

It’s not exactly all that uncommon for Dell to misprice an item on its website and, if you’re lucky, it might even honor it. But it looks like the stakes have just been raised considerably in Taiwan, where the company recently listed a 19-inch monitor for NT$500 (or about $15US) and promptly received more than 26,000 orders for close to 140,000 of the monitors. Now, ordinarily, Dell would simply send out a polite email explaining their mistake and call it a day, but Taiwanese regulators have now stepped in and ordered Dell to honor the misprice after receiving a couple of hundred complaints. For its part, Dell simply says that it plans to “compensate the buyers for the mistake,” although it’s not clear if that means it’ll actually be sending out the monitors — which, incidentally, would add up to more than $20 million at their full list price.

via engadget.com

When I first heard that HTC was launching an Android™ phone, I was pretty excited. Most of HTC’s product have been plagued by Microsoft Mobile, not to mention HTC seems to not put their hardware into their full-iest potential compared to the other WMV6 smartphones. (-ever wonder why other WMV6 phones seems to be faster?)

And implementing the Android™, it just make perfect sense~! With Android™ it just frees up a lot of possibilities. The HTC “Hero” is powered by the Qualcomm® MSM7200A™ (528 MHz Processor), 5MP camera and comes with RAM: 288 MB with a MicroSD card slot to increase its storage capacity. Not to mention they have implemented the famous trackball(that we all love so much) similiar to the ones found on the Blackberry. The other specifications are all just above impressive~!Happy? Wallets Ready? well here are the show stoppers. …

- it does not have a keypad so get ready to use (iphone version2) the screen input.

- there is no secondary camera to facilitates proper Video calls

- and the flash is missing

- nice implementation of the trackball, but at that location portrait usage will be pretty funky -_-”

There is a sinister saying locally that if the person who is hero “being brave” dies first. Thus, it is rather funny when I heard HTC will be naming it “HERO”. Will this HERO survive?… be brave~!

When we talk about Leica, I am sure we all go ga ga over their lens and camera….M8~!!!. For me, first impression of Leica is actually their survey equipments that is under the Leica GeoSystems, because I did my IA (industrial attachment) @ Leica Singapore during my polytechnic days. The core of the business is still their lens. Leica cameras are considered a “Boutique” brand. The word “Boutique” seems to fit in nicely here where form meets factor with THE price to match. Being mechanically trained and electronically savvy, I do appreciate the Leica Digital Cameras. Let us have a look at their current series…….

A white camera with this build just blows you away…

…and i was waiting when they will be doing those limited eiditons and here it comes. The M8-II Military Green/Olive

…and a follow up with the D-LUX 4 in the same Military Green/Olive

But after looking at giantcanopy’s work over at clubsnap. I just told myself its not only the equipment, you need to have the well trained “eye”….. I am inspired to improvement myself before such indulgence

Leica Camera Home
| pics via watch impress

Elecom is still one of my fav brand when it comes to accessories. Simple designs and great build. At times the price is a bit on the high side when it comes to such but you basically pay for what you get. Elecom just launched their new Memory Card Holder for SD/MicroSD cards. And it comes in great colors as well~!

via elecom.co.jp

OCZ launches its enthusiast keyboard - SABRE~! It is an extended keyboard that is loaded with macro keys. Using OLED, for its special macro keys similiar to Art Lebedev Studio’s OLED Keyboard “Optimus”. Of-course, with only 9 special keys with the OLED display (the Optimus is full OLED keys) cost will be much cheaper

OCZ Sabre URL
via watch impress

Other then SSDs with their insane speed but storage also emphasizes on Capacity. And the current King of the Hill is the 2TB SATA drives. WD market its Hard Drive with the GreenPower for Low Power Consumption and the Caviar Black for performance. If you have been to Japan, you will know promotional flyers usually comes in form of a packet of tissue. The promotional details are the labels on these packets of tissues. Thus, you see people keeping these “flyers” rather then having them end up in the next empty trash bins.

According to Watch Impress, these drives are not on the shelves yet but will be in soon. I am not sure how soon is that but their promotional tissue + towel + fan is a big call sign to all buying Hard Drive to hold on for a bit while the good stuff arrives… That sure is a good way to hustle the compeititors

Do Note: the 2TB Black Caviar 64mb cache is still not listed in the WD URL when i am posting this article

All the hype now is about SSD, with it’s insane seek time and raw performance. But slowly but surely the Hard Drive is making progress as well. Seagate, the leader for SCSI, SAS and SATA Hard Drives brings you SAS2.0 10k RPM Hard Drives. SAS 2.0 brings the bandwidth bench to 6Gbps. But in real application a single 10k RPM Hard Drive cannot hit such bandwidth now. Current SATA(SSD) interface with RAID is already pushing Hard Drive performance over the 6Gbps mark~! So why the need for SAS2.0? SAS 2.0 is not just a bandwidth upgrade, there are a lot more that you can probably read up on (for a short explaination click here). Storage Drive interfaces (SATA/SCSI/SAS) will ultimately be common as we see the cross breed of IDE’s SATA and SCSI’s SAS.

A lot of pple will swear by the performance of SSD, so what is left of Hard Drives? One thing is for sure, the robustness of Server Class Hard Drives are still TOPs when comes to reliability and compatibility. The controllers for Hard Drives are still better established compared to SSD. I believe Hard Drives have a bit more room to cover before it can be totally replaced by SSDs.

…. drool time..

via watch impress

DDR3 SODIMM’s default voltage is now 1.5V by lowering it to 1.35v, we will be able to stretching the battery life of Notebooks and Mobile devices. Micron started shipping their DDR3-1333MHz 1.35v SODIMM 2gb module now~! 4GB modules will be available 3Q of this year. At this speed and capacity, performance meets efficiency~!

Micron Brings High-Performance, Low-Power DDR3 Memory to Notebook Computers Boise, Idaho , Thursday, June 18, 2009 – Notebooks can now take advantage of optimized battery life and portability with a new line of low-voltage, high-bandwidth DDR3 memory modules introduced today by Micron Technology, Inc. Offering an unparalleled combination of performance and efficiency for notebook computers, Micron’s new modules are available in densities up to 2-gigabytes (GB) now, with 4GB samples coming this fall. Sustaining battery life and delivering desktop-equivalent performance are two critical criteria when developing notebook computer designs, and Micron’s new modules provide an ideal combination of performance and power efficiency. The modules are designed using the industry’s lowest 1.35-volt 1-gigabit (Gb) DDR3 components, allowing for even greater power savings compared to standard 1.5-volt DDR3. More importantly, this low-power is achieved without compromise to memory performance - the modules provide an optimum bandwidth of 1,333 megabits per second. “Across the board, we are making our DRAM more efficient – from both a power and performance perspective – which ultimately empowers users to be more productive,” said Robert Feurle, vice president of DRAM marketing at Micron. “Our new DDR3 notebook modules offer approximately a 20 percent reduction in power usage compared to standard 1.5-volt modules while maintaining DDR3’s high performance advantage, enabling a desktop-class computing experience for portable computers.” “Our notebook graphics processing units deliver industry-leading performance and visual fidelity,” said Barry Wagner, director of technical marketing at NVIDIA. “Micron has been a valued partner in defining the performance and power parameters necessary for portable computing applications. We look forward to working with Micron to validate their new modules with our notebook processing solutions.” For additional information on Micron’s new notebook modules, please visit www.micron.com/peakperformance.

Press Release HERE