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Nikon D700 Hands-on

This past Saturday, I spent about an hour and a half with a borrowed D700. Gaby’s mom swapped with me for my D90 at Diego’s seventh birthday party.

I shot it with my 50mm f/1.4 AF-S G and she kept her 28-105 AF thing.

After twenty minutes, my neck hurt. Okay, there’s a strap for that.

Why is this thing so darned big? To make it a good fit with larger lenses, I expect. I’d love a full-frame DSLR the size of an F100, but Nikon doesn’t make one for some reason.

I basically hated it. Until I got it dialed in, then it was time to go. So who knows.

The photo preview took forever to display after pushing {Play}. Weird. I think it was her Kingston 133X card just sucking, or perhaps it needed to be formatted. Dunno. Same thing most times I pushed {Menu}. Occasionally the menu would appear instantly.

Finally found Auto ISO, pretty much too late.

A few comments for my future self:

  • No rush now. But I still want something FX.
  • Maybe FX isn’t a silver bullet.
  • I need to sit down and A/B this with my D90 to really see how much better it is.
  • The 50mm had a much better field of view — it wasn’t as restrictive as it is on my D90 — I only had to step back to take a group shot, not for any other shots. I usually have a lot of attention on my position when shooting 50mm on my D90. Though I don’t know if I’ve ever shot a birthday part with my 50mm.

I’ll probably get a D800 or a D800E. For the phenomenal detail.

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E-Flite Blade MCP X Review

Over Thanksgiving, I broke the tail boom on my new MCP X heli, so I hardly got to fly it. I never got to take it to an open space, a requirement due to my novice skill level. It’s all fixed up now and we took i to the park yesterday (Sunday).

At first, it was pretty difficult. Not sure why, but at one point I found that the vertical swashplate guide was out of its groove. Perhaps it had been that way all day.

Anyway, I really got the hang of it and totally love it.

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Kindle Fire

Bought the wife a Kindle Fire (pre-order) the day they went up for sale, 8 September 2011. It arrived yesterday.

I played with it a bit at night after work.

First big complaint: The Kindle Fire doesn’t get loud enough. I was watching Ip Man via Amazon Prime on it and I couldn’t get the volume high enough. Same was true watching a couple YouTube videos about RC helicopters, which are plenty loud enough on my MacBook Air and iPad 2. This is a big problem. I didn’t point it out to my wife.

Also, I really miss having a physical home button.

I also miss having physical volume buttons. How the hell do you change the volume while playing Angry Birds? (My wife was playing, I don’t find Angry Birds very interesting to play for more than about a minute a month.) This volume thing sucks.

Web browsing is okay. Even my wife remarked that page loads are disappointingly slow. I’d seen a video comparing iPad to Fire page loading yesterday and the Kindle loaded pages in 14 seconds that the iPad 2 loaded in 4, so I was prepared for slow page loads. Hopefully this is just a DNS thing and I’ll be able to change the Fire over to using Google DNS without screwing with any of the Silk browser’s cloud-based web browsing acceleration magic. We’ll see.

The list of huge (pretty) icons of the last-used apps and such is annoying in that you can’t delete items from first position — you have to push them down in the deck by running other apps. I opened the pre-installed Pulse app to see what it was. I don’t remember what it was now, the morning after, but I do remember that I wanted that stupid thing out of my face.

Address Book: What does this sync to? I want to sync my address book to my wife’s Google Contacts so they in sync with her Blackberry. How do I do this? Is this possible at all with the Kindle Fire?

What’s Good

The price. $200 makes up for a lot of disappointment.

The Kindle Fire’s size is nice for one-handed holding. Nice for watching a movie while holding our five week old daughter. I like that. Though I couldn’t hear the videos I wanted to watch, which was a shame.

28 November 2011 update: Fire still sucks. But wife wants to keep it, even though she agrees that it’s pretty bad.