It’s that time of year once again! Today kicks off the Apple World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco. As usual, it’s anyone’s guess as to what Apple will actually introduce today. Here are the latest rumors and possibilities:
More powerful MacBook Air (4GB RAM, integrated 3G wireless) to compete with netbooks
MacBook updates with 3G wireless capabilities
iPhone Movie/Videos direct downloads
As usual, this is only speculation/wishful thinking and nothing is definite until it actually happens. The keynote kicks off at 1PM ET. Popcorn in hand, let’s see what’s what?
Being a gadget guy I’m expected to know all about the latest high tech toys. If you’ve followed this blog over the last couple of years, you’ll know that when it comes to a cellphone, the iPhone is my phone of choice. I’ve pretty much ignored everything else that has come out since, because there was nothing compelling enough for me to look at. At least not until today! Today is bitter sweet for me. The reason is that prior to the iPhone I was a Palm guy! My Palm Treo 650 was my trusted device and although Palm came out with newer models, they were based upon the Windows Mobile platform, in which I had no interest. Sure there were newer Palm OS devices, but nothing significant enough for me to upgrade. As a matter of fact, I remember standing in line at the 2008 Macworld Expo Keynote saying that “if the iPhone is not announced today, I’ll be heading over to the store to get a new Palm Treo.” Well they did introduce the iPhone and I haven’t looked back…
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The Palm Pre looks great!
I’m certainly not here to knock the Pre. I have no reason to. From everything I’ve read and seen so far, it looks like a GREAT device. Palm certainly did their homework by looking out at the market leaders and seeing what features they were missing and making sure that their new device had them. There’s no question in my mind that the Pre has the things that the iPhone has been lacking.
Palm looked at the iPhone and said Ah-Ha, the iPhone doesn’t have Cut, Copy & Paste, MMS, multitasking, etc. so let’s make a phone that has all the things that the iPhone doesn’t have and we’ll win people over to our phone. There’s no doubt that people wanted Copy & Paste, MMS, etc. for sure, but they wanted those features on their iPhone. Those features are not new or revolutionary by any means. Even my Palm Treo 650 had them years ago. That’s what Palm and other competitors are clueless about. There are probably very few iPhone users out there, if any just waiting to jump ship when someone else comes out with a touch screen phone that has those missing things. Most iPhone users ARE frustrated by the lack of MMS messaging for sure, but they’re willing to live without it to have all the other benefits that the iPhone offers.
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Competition is GOOD!
One thing that I’m elated about is the fact that the Palm Pre and others have kept Apple on their toes. Many of the advantages that the Pre had over the current iPhone such as Cut, Copy & Paste, MMS, Turn-by-Turn directions, System Wide Search, etc. all go away in about 48 hours with the expected release of the iPhone OS 3.0 update. Let’s face it, many of these features should have been on the iPhone since day one! We may have never seen them if there wasn’t any competition. So I definitely welcome the Pre and any other competitor that’s going to keep Apple and Blackberry on their toes. It makes it good for all of us.
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The iPod factor
Any Palm user or other smart phone user will argue that their phones can play music and video. The new Pre is even said to (unofficially, via a hack) sync with iTunes. However, no matter how slick the built-in player is, it’s not an iPod. While it can play MP3’s and AAC files, it will not have support for your iTunes purchased content that has Fairplay copy protection. While you could argue that most of your music was ripped from your CDs and recent iTunes music purchased (or upgraded to iTunes Plus) is copy protection free, chances are you still have some music and videos/movies that won’t play on the device. So now you’d have to pick and choose what you could take with you and what you couldn’t.
One of the main reasons that the iPhone was so successful was that Apple had already done a fantastic job of getting iPods into just about everyone’s pockets. Therefore, people were already used to the experience and already able to play ALL of their content. So when the iPhone came out, people would finally be able to combine two devices that they were already carrying into one: their cellphone and their iPod. Don’t believe me? Let’s look at this way then: just about every phone sold today can play music, so why do most cellphone owners also have an iPod?
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The App Store is the killer app
Lastly the Apple App Store is the iPhone’s Killer App. Although Palm has enjoyed 3rd party development for years, it hasn’t seen anything close that resembles the run away success of the App Store. In 10 months time the App Store went from 1,000 apps to over 40,000 apps and over one billion downloads. The iPod touch is the secret weapon. There are lots of people out there that for many reasons just won’t buy an iPhone. Mostly I hear it’s the AT&T thing. No arguments there. However, Apple makes another device that gives you the same experience of the iPhone without the phone and it’s called an iPod touch. So this means that developers can write an app and have a much larger market to sell that app to if they make it compatible with the iPod touch and most 3rd party apps are compatible. Developers have a finite set of resources and time. This means that they are going to develop apps for the “platform” that has the most potential users (seats). Today, that’s the iPhone hands down.
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What about price?
11 people lined up outside my local Sprint store at 10AM to buy the PreHundreds of people lined up to buy an iPhone 3g at every store
Price is certainly important, but price alone is not enough. There have always been cheaper MP3 players than the iPod. There are certainly cheaper phones than the iPhone. When the iPhone first came out, hundreds of thousands of people lined up Friday, June 29th 2007 to pay $499-$599 and sign a 2 year contract with AT&T. They sold out by Monday morning. The first iPod had a 5GB hard drive and was introduced in 2001 at $399. Do I really need to go on? Yes, price matters, but it’s not the only factor and obviously for many it’s not the main factor.
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The Pre is for Business Users and the Productivity Minded
I remember all the press that the iPhone got about how no business user in their right mind would use an iPhone. After all, there’s no physical keyboard. Balmer outright laughed at the iPhone and thought both the touch screen and price were ridiculous. Now EVERY phone manufacture has come out with a touch screen phone and is either in the process of launching an app store or has launched one.
The Palm Pre on the other hand has both a touch screen AND a nifty keyboard that slides out. The Blackberry has maintained models with a physical keyboard too. Blackberry conceded and came out with a touch screen that “clicks”, WOW! That’s innovation! No one would argue that the Pre’s keyboard is a nice implementation and probably faster to type on. However, having an onscreen only keyboard doesn’t seem to be a show stopper for most.
Even with all the naysayers, somehow the millions of individual and business iPhone users (like me) seem to be doing just fine without a physical keyboard. So maybe you can do real work with an iPhone? I seem to see business users using them every time I travel. I do corporate work on my iPhone everyday and my fingers are huge. 🙂
When it comes to productivity it’s about Contacts, Calendaring, Email, Making Calls, Taking Notes, etc. It remains to be seen how well the NEW Palm Pre will do in these areas. Certainly productivity is one of Palm’s strengths. However, it’s also a strength of Blackberry and with the multitude of 3rd party apps on the iPhone, I’m not hearing much complaining in this department. The iPhone’s calendar could definitely use some improvements, but even if the Pre’s calendar is the best calendar on the planet, it won’t be enough. Why? Because the calendars on all the other phones out there are “good enough” for all but the die hard power users. So even if the Pre gets this area PERFECT, it won’t be enough simply because their aren’t enough people that care enough to switch.
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The Bottom Line
Like I said, I have no doubts that the Palm Pre is a great device! I’m sure that Palm spent a lot of time getting this device right. However, Palm missed the opportunity, rested way too long on its laurels and doesn’t have the money to overtake the iPhone or the Blackberry. Palm never made any significant updates to their OS. They never really made a phone hardwarewise that was kick ass! They could be where Blackberry is today, but they fumbled time after time. While the Pre has features that the iPhone doesn’t have (multi-tasking, removable battery, etc.), it’s not just about features! Look at the Zune, any Microsoft user would tell you that it out features the iPod. Yet, I’ve NEVER seen ANYONE using a Zune in person, nor do I know a single person that owns one. This is from a company that has way more money than Apple.
It’s going to take LOTS of money! When you watch TV, not a day goes by that you don’t see an ad for an iPhone, iPod or Blackberry. In order to compete for the mindset of their intended market, it’s going to cost a LOT of money, which Palm just doesn’t have. The biggest and most telling sign for me that the Pre won’t be the next big thing is that I have some pretty techie friends and outside of Larry “The Palm Guy” Becker, not a single person has even mentioned the Pre to me, let alone said they were going to buy one. Then who’s going to buy the Pre? The Pre will definitely sell to existing Palm users! No question about that. It will also appeal to those users who are all about the features and nothing else. Those are typically the ones telling you about how much better their ______ is over what you have, even though what you have is the number one seller. Anti Microsoft and anti Apple folks will be interested too. It should also sell to the people that are moving up from lesser phones and of course Sprint customers that don’t want to move to another carrier. Other than these select groups of people, Palm is going to have a major uphill battle. Luckily for them, it’s either do or die. When you have everything at stake, you usually try really really really hard to succeed or you disappear. There is definitely hope for Palm when you see folks like this woman who was very excited to get one! 🙂
Palm may make it to the number 3 spot, but this is a stretch (and only if they do everything right and have an absolutely KILLER DEVICE). Also Nokia, Apple, RIM, Google, etc. aren’t just going to sit still and wait. However, at the end of the day it always comes down to a two horse race, Coke & Pepsi, McDonalds & Burger King, Hertz & Avis, Nikon & Canon, iPod & er um, Zune???, Mac OS & Windows, and iPhone & Blackberry.
Engadget's Poll Says it All!
You can check out the Palm Pre here. It goes for $199 (you pay $299 and get a $100 rebate) and is initially only available on Sprint. Verizon users, screwed again 🙂
Here’s a nice video walkthrough
Also check out Larry’s blog as I’m sure he will cover the Pre in great detail.
I would guess that most of the folks reading this blog have some type of membership card either in their wallet/purse or on their keychains or worse, you have them in both places. My keychain was starting to look like the shoppers section in the Sunday paper.
Sometimes having these little tags do actaully help you out at check out time with discounts that appear right on your bill for that transaction. Krogers is good for this. Others add up your rebates and actually send you coupons that are as good as cash. Staples is good this. So using the cards do help you save cash. The one thing that always bugged me was having to have a different card for every single merchant. Why couldn’t their be ONE card that you get when you go to any merchant and it would have YOUR number on it? When you go to a different merchant, they just add YOUR number to their system. This way each person only has to have ONE card. Oh well, that’l probably never happen. The CardStar app offers the next closest thing!
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CardStar can store all of your membership cards in one app
When I first saw CardStar I couldn’t download it fast enough! I was main interested in it because it looked like it would eliminate all those little tags on my keychain. The concept is simple. You choose your Merchant from the list of over 130 merchants and then add your customer/membership number from your little tag.
CardStar creates a barcode for that merchant just like the one on the tag. I was skeptical that this would work. However, I had to try it immediately. Since one of my errands would take me right next to a CVS store. I walked in and bought something just to try it out. The cashier was a little surprised when I whipped out my iPhone with the CVS logo on screen, but she held up the little wand and “beep”, it worked! I paid for my item and was on my way.
Next stop, Staples. I bought one item that I was kinda low on anyway and “beep”! It worked there too. That’s two for two. Now of course Y.M.M.V. It may not work at all merchants with all scanners. However, even if it didn’t scan the barcode, the number is displayed so that it could be keyed in manually in the worse case scenario. You might also run into a merchant that insists upon seeing your actual card. Your Gym may require this! However for the most part for me it’s goodbye little tags on my keychain!
What about your other membership cards?
I was totally content just eliminating the key chain tags from my life. However, after digging a little deeper in this app, I saw the Travel category. I saw airlines, hotel chains, etc. in the list. So I started entering those too. Now most of these type of entries won’t produce a bar code. For example, when I check in at a Marriott, they don’t scan my card. They do ask for my Marriott Rewards number though! I know the light just went on for some of you. Yep that’s right, you can enter all your other membership numbers too even if you don’t use a bar code with those places. When you need to know your AAA, Hilton, Blockbuster, etc. numbers you can just look them up quickly in CardStar.
Although CardStar boasts about 130 merchants, there are going to be merchants that you use that aren’t in the list. For me that was Olga’s Kitchen here in Michigan. No problem, there is a “Custom” entry option that allows you to put in any merchant you want. You won’t have the fancy logo, but you will be able to have the number and the generated bar code for any merchant you want.
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The Bottom Line
CardStar is a brillant app that solves a practical problem. They are already promising updates with even more features like coupon support and of course more merchants. CardStar is available for FREE (Limited time before the price kicks in at 99¢) at the App Store here. So get it while the getting is good!
We all get those emails that look legit, but aren’t! It could come from a bank or your credit card company. Usually there’s a “problem with your account” and they need you to log in and give them some information or reset your password. My favorite is when they claim that through a computer mishap that they lost all my information, yet miracously they still have my email address. Also another dead giveaway is the first line that says “Dear Valued Customer.” If I was really your valued customer, wouldn’t you know my name and address me directly.
Even though the signs are clear in some cases, people get tricked into clicking the links, winding up on an fake site and divulging tons of private information.
Here’s a tip for Apple Mail users
If you’re an Apple Mail user (the mail app built-in to Mac OS X), then you’ve got a way of quickly verifying where a link goes without actually clicking on it. Take this “Bank of America” email that I got yesterday. Although I wasn’t even remotely tempted to click on the link, I was curious as to where it led to. So I simply hovered my mouse over the link to reveal a popup display that actually shows the REAL URL that you’d go to if you clicked on it. Needless to say, it wasn’t bankofamerica.com.
Although I didn’t click the link, I’m sure if I had it would have taken me to a website that looks just like bankofamerica.com.
This tip also works in Mail on the iPhone
As I wrote in my iPhone Book 2nd edition. You can do this same tip by holding down your finger on a link in the Mail app on the iPhone/iPod touch to see where the link is actually going to take you.
What if you don’t use Mail or are on a PC?
Even if you aren’t an Apple Mail app user, there’s a simple tip for you. DON’T CLICK ON LINKS IN EMAILS! If I thought that this email was legit, the safer thing to do would be to fire up my browser manually and key in the URL myself or use a bookmark. That way I’d know for sure what site I was headed to. Even if you are a Mail user a clever programmer can create a link that spoofs the original site. So bottom line, don’t click the links. Chances are if you get an email requesting that you go to a website, login and give them information, it’s an attempt to gain access to your information, passwords, user names, etc.
It’s not unusal for me to go a couple of years without upgrading my main notebook, the MacBook Pro. As a matter of fact before getting the latest 15″ unibody, I had skipped the last two revs. The updates just weren’t significant enough for me to go through the hassle of upgrading. This time I timed it right and I love my “Late 2008 15″ MacBook Pro.” Granted there’s the Glossy Display debate, but I’ve gotten used to it and have no problem with it. Seeing how I will probably be using this computer for at least another 18 months (unless some major breakthroughs happen), I wanted to max it out. When I got it, it came with 4GB of RAM and a 320GB 7200 RPM drive. Although I knew that I would eventually want more hard drive space, I wanted to wait until the 500GB hard drives came in a 7200 RPM model instead of 5400 RPMs. Well that day is today!
Seagate 500GB 7200 RPM 2.5″ Drive and MORE RAM!
I checked with my good friends over at OWC and the NEW Seagate 500GB 7200 RPM 2.5″ Momentus drives were readily available. I thought the price was reasonable enough, so I ordered one. Since I was already going to be under the hood, I also wanted to take this opportunity to upgrade the RAM. Although Apple originally sold this MacBook Pro with a max of 4GB of RAM, it can actually address 6GB of RAM (the 17″ and the early 2009 models can do 8GB of RAM). I originally had two 2GB DIMMs installed, so this would mean replacing one of them with a 4GB DIMM to get to 6GB of RAM, which again is the max that this MacBook Pro will address. So I orded the 4GB DIMM also.
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My installation procedure
I have 2-3 utilities that I rely on when it comes to upgrading to a new hard drive. If I’m upgrading to a faster drive of the same capacity or larger capacity, but not partioned I use CopyCatX. CopyCatX “duplicates” the drive to the new drive sector by sector. This is much faster than traditional cloning and creates an EXACT duplicate of the drive. The app has the technology to expand the duplicate to take into account the space available on a larger drive. However, if the original drive is partitioned AND the new drive is larger, you’ll end up with the difference in space as an unusable partition. So in my case since I have a BootCamp (Windows XP) partition AND I was going to a larger drive, using CopyCatX was out of the question.
I installed the new drive and the RAM
I took the cover off the bottom of my MacBook Pro and there it was! The battery and the hard drive are right there in plain sight. Asside from the original MacBook, this has got to be the most drive accessible notebook that Apple has ever created. All my previous drive upgrades were a pain in the neck. I was able to easily figure out how to take the drive out. It was actually only one very small phillips screw holding the bracket in place. I then had to remove the 4 pins from the drive itself that Apple uses to hold the drive in securely. These require a very small torx screw driver. Luckily, I had the necessary tools.
What I didn’t see was the RAM! Apple usually does it the other way around. Usually the RAM is in plain sight and the hard drive is buried. However, this time the RAM was no where to be found. Rather than guess at the location, I remembered seeing installation videos on the OWC site. So I went to another computer and watched the short clip to discover the the RAM was under the main cover which was held in place by 8 screws. The only thing I wasn’t sure about was did it matter if the new 4GB DIMM was in the lower slot or the upper slot. I didn’t think it would matter, so I put the 4GB DIMM in place of the 2GB DIMM that was in the upper slot. I then put it all back together.
SuperDuper! was next
I took the original 320GB drive and put it in an external OWC Mercury On-The-Go Firewire 800 case and connected it. I also had my bootable backup drive. I decided that it would be cleaner to boot from the backup drive and clone the original drive to the new one. Since the 15″ MacBook Pro only has one Firewire 800 port, I had to daisy chain the two externa drives. Just to be on the safe side I plugged the OWC drive into the AC outlet to make sure there was enough power to run both external drives. I then ran Disk Utility from the backup drive to format the new internal drive. Next it was time to clone over the Mac partition onto the new drive. I fired up SuperDuper! and cloned over my Mac partition on my original 320GB drive (the drive I just took out) onto the new drive. This clone took about 3.5 hours for close to 240GB of data. I then booted from the New drive and everything was working so far.
Time to run the BootCamp Assistant and Winclone
Now that I was booted from the new drive it was time to partition it again for BootCamp. I fired up the BootCamp Assistant and partitioned the drive slightly larger than the old partition I had (64GBs for the new one). Now in order to get my old Windows XP partiton over to the new partition I had to make an image of it first using Winclone. Winclone is a Mac app that lets you backup and restore a Windows partition. Since I had plenty of room on my new internal drive, I fired up Winclone and imaged my old partition (from the now external 320GB drive). The compressed image was only 24.51 GBs. I’ll move it another drive when I’m done as a backup. Once the image was completed, I click right over to the restore tab and restored it to the NEW BootCamp partition that I had created earlier.
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The Bottom Line
You can never have too much RAM and too much storage. If you’re going to use your existing computer for a while, then having more room and the capacity to run more/larger apps is always welcomed. Also since we’re going to see more and more 64 bit apps coming in the future, going beyond 4GB of RAM is going to be worth it. I use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 every day and it’s already 64 bit enabled. All I had to do was do a Get Info on it and turn off the “Open in 32bit mode” checkbox. I feel that this upgrade was worth the time and money.
If you need an external drive case to put your old drive in, this is the Firewire 800 one I used. I already had it, so I didn’t have to buy it for this job. It’s $79.99. If you don’t care about Firewire 800, they make both Firewire 400 ($49.99) and USB 2.0 ($27.95) cases that cost less. They also sell the drive and cases as bundles. So you might save a few bucks buying them together.
I frequent a lot of websites and blogs on the continuous quest for information and technology snippets. I truly do learn something new every single day! Although I visit a lot of websites in a week’s time, there are some that I visit almost every day. They are the blogs of my friends, colleagues and industry experts. So I thought I would share them with you! Actually I’ve been sharing them with you all along, but you may not have noticed. So I’m going to call them out today!
Actually if you just scroll down this very page near the bottom left, you’ll not only find the links to my favorite blogs, but also my favorite websites too. By the way, be sure to check out my buddy Larry Becker’s New Blog. He and I talk tech all the time and I’ve gaind several insights from him throughout the years. Most of these folks also have Twitter accounts, so I invite you to follow them on Twitter too for more up to the minute thoughts and discoveries.
If you’re into video editing you should check out the latest enhancements in Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 4.1. One of the main things that I love about Premiere Pro CS4 (PR) is that it can edit the AVCHD footage from my Canon VIXIA HF10 camcorder natively! That’s right! No transcoding (converting to another format first). As far as I can tell, Premiere Pro CS4 is the only native AVCHD editor on the Mac and one of only a couple on Windows. The whole advantage of going tapeless with your camera is so that you can have immediate access to the footage. Well if you have to convert the footage first (sometimes taking longer than real-time) then you’ve lost the advantage of the tapeless workflow. Now not only can you edit all the most popular video formats out there, you can even edit footage right off a video DVD with the new .VOB file support! If you’re a Final Cut Pro or AVID user, no worries. You can bring your projects right into Premiere Pro CS4. –
A good thing just got better
Adobe just released updates to Premiere Pro CS4 4.1 (Mac | Win), After Effects CS4 9.0.2 (Mac | Win)and the Adobe Media Encoder CS4 4.1 (the direct update link wasn’t available yet, but this update should install via your Adobe Updater app):
Additional support for REDCODE (please visit RED support for additional details).
Performance improvements to project load time.
Improvements to AVCHD support.
Performance enhancements for DV/HDV playback.
Support for Avid captured DV or IMX footage. (Please see www.adobe.com/go/kb409079 for additional information).
Export media to a still format now bypasses the AME render queue.
Enabled .VOB extension support. (yes this means editing the footage right off a Video DVD!)
Third-party support
The New Adobe Media Encoder CS4 4.1 – once you’re done editing your master piece, you’ll be happy to know that the update to the Adobe Media Encoder renders out your final video about twice as fast (in my testing) than the 4.0.2 version did. Also there are new presets for YouTube HD Widescreen for sharing your video on social networking sites.
See it Live! If you’re in Michigan, see me demo the new enhancements to the Adobe Production Premium CS4 suite at the next MIVA meeting on June 3rd.
Can’t make it to my demo? If you’re not going to be in the Michigan area on June 3rd, my buddy Dave Helmly recorded an extensive video showing the new features off. You can view it here now or you can grab it from my Adobe Creative Suite Video Podcast to view it later:
[flv:http://media.libsyn.com/media/cspodcast/podcast-PR-Premiere4.1.mp4 625 353]
Last week I put out a request for an app that I thought would be great to have. My idea was to have an app called “Meet me halfway”. The app would figure out where you are and then let you choose a contact from your list and figure out the midpoint between you both and propose a restaurant, bar, park, etc. to meet at. Just as suspected, one reader of this blog came through again! Blog reader “Brian” pointed me towards “Midway.”
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Just what I was looking for
Midway does just what I was looking for and even takes it up a notch. You can either turn on the Location Services feature to figure out where you are or simply use the Contacts in your list. Once you choose two Contacts or your location and a Contact, you then choose what type of place you want to meet at. Your choices are Restaurant, Bar, Hotel, or Cinema. There is an Add.. feature that lets you key in your own category.
Since the feature uses the built-in Google Maps app for the results, chances are you can have a broad list of categories. I added “Park” and it worked fine.
Midway takes it up a notch by doing one thing that I hadn’t even considered. It lets you choose multiple contacts. This way if you and a few of your friends were meeting up, you can pick a place that’s in the middle of all of you. This way you can all travel as equal of a distance as possible to make it fair. Once you pick a spot you can get directions to that spot for yourself and you can share that location with everyone else via email. Perfect!
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The Bottom Line
This is a great app! If you need to pick meeting locations for friend get togethers or eBay/Craig’s List transaction completions, this is your app. Speaking of eBay/Craig’s List. My only feature request (which I’ve already contacted the developer about) would be to have a feature that lets you also key in an address manually. I love being able to use the addresses in my Contacts, but I would also like to key in an address for the person that I’m only going to meet that one time or if I’m meeting a friend/relative and they aren’t coming from home/work. Otherwise, this app rocks! Midway is $1.99 and you can download it here from the App Store. Thanks Brian for the great find!
As many of you know, when I’m in the studio I’m almost always shooting tethered to my laptop right into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Although I’ve got it down to a science, there is still a lag of a few seconds (doesn’t sound like a long time I know, but wait until you’re the one waiting) from the time I press the shutter until the RAW file is transferred via USB 2 to a folder (via Nikon’s Camera Control Pro 2) and then imported into Lightroom and rendered on screen at nice large size. It’s actually pretty amazing that all that happens in just a few seconds.
However, nothing is faster than plugging your camera up to a TV monitor and shooting. You see the shots instantly! You see them nice and big because chances are the TV screen is going to be much larger than your laptop screen (unless you’re using a desktop computer and larger display).
I’ve always wanted to start using an HDTV instead, especially since both my Nikon D300 and Nikon D700 DSLR cameras have HDMI outputs built right in. However, the question has always been “WHICH HDTV DO I BUY?” I’ve experimented with some smaller models and the problem has always been, what I see on the HDTV doesn’t match closely enough to the actual image. In some cases the color can be way off. In other cases the image on screen is much crisper than the actual photo. All of this can lure you into a false sense of security that your final image will look like this, good or bad. That’s why shooting into Lightroom has always been where I’ve been most comfortable because I know what I see in Lightroom is what I actually shot. After all, it’s in the computer and being shown on the display that I’ll be using from that point on to review, adjust and retouch the photos.
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JVC introduces a New HDTV targeted specifically at photographers
The New 42″ XIVIEW LCD TV is a 1080p set that has one thing that most HDTV’s don’t have and that is the Adobe RGB color gamut. It also has 52 manual picture quality adjustments, which means that you stand a much better chance at getting an image on screen that looks like the image that will ultimately wind up on your computer display. Here’s what JVC has to say about it:
But here’s what truly distinguishes the LT-42WX70: Its color gamut is capable of encompassing 100% of the sRGB color space and offers a coverage rate of 96% for Adobe RGB, making it possible to faithfully reproduce, as an industry first, the striking colors, subtle nuances and unique ambience of D-SLR photographs on a 42″ Class screen. The monitor also offers a selection from one of the six preset modes that are most suitable for the source such as Photo PRO and Theater.
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OK, now what?
Sounds great! However, here are a couple of things that keep from running out and getting one today. First of all the list price on this baby is $2,399.95. That’s a sizable investment for a guy who only does this as a hobby. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a gearhead and I have no problem spending on the gear that will make a difference, but ouch, that’s a lot of coin to shave “seconds” off my workflow. Yeah, I know that the seconds add up, but again this is a hobby. The second thing is that I would want the option of rotating this display in either a portrait or landscape orientation. That means that I either need to find a special mount or build it myself. Ideally I’d want this on a table or cart that can be wheeled around. I could wall mount it, but that would be just too limiting. So I would need to find or make the right setup for it first.
The Bottom Line: This is a huge step in the right direction! I’d like to see some smaller options too. I actually don’t need a 42″ display. Ideally a 32″ or even a 22″ would be fine. Will this display be near the top of my wishlist? Absolutely! Now that JVC has created the HDTV photographers want, will someone step up and finish it by creating the stands, tables, wallmounts, etc. that rotate and have cable management. While we’re at it and while I’m assigning a list of things to do (manufacturer/invent), how about some wireless tethered shooting methods that are fast enough to handle RAW files and are built-in or easily added to DSLRs? I can only dream…
