And privacy coins come with the appended issue that software issues could hide an inflation bug, which isn't provable at that moment. Is Bitcoin anonymous? Nope, but with some diligence, you can be quite protected.
I don't see an advantage in holding Bitcoin over say, stocks, other than speculation, if for every transaction you have to choice to either identify yourself or produce tainted Bitcoin.
I had similar experiences with DT.
When taking RAW+JPG I always struggled to create an edit of the RAW in DT that is more satisfying than the out of camera JPG - and I watched quite a few videos and read a few guides, also trying to work with scene-referred workflow introduced in DT4.
I'm currently giving Capture One a shot (Express version is free for Sony users) and I'm really pleased how accessible the UI is. Applying default adjustments already gives a great starting point for further tweaking (similar or better than the OOC JPG). Recovering highlights also works way better than in DT. It just felt like the algorithms in DT are sometimes not quite on the same level.
I did a lot of side-by-side comparisons between C1 & DT on my raw files and I could not get DT to make anything that looked like C1's automatic adjustments.
The best I could determine is that the out-of-the-box adjustments made by C1 were somewhat complex (e.g., it wasn't a 'simple' transformation of rgb values).
Obviously, it's preferable to know what's happening under the hood instead of relying on black-magic, but I just didn't have the time to invest in trying to figure that out.
C1 is really nice. I also compared it to Lightroom and I didn't like those results as much as C1.
edit: Although C1's masking features are excellent, I wish they had more parametric masking features. That's the one thing I miss from DT.
uh, canon DSLRs have been around for 20 years. I was rocking my entry level 400D until earlier this year. I got it as a high school graduation present in 2007. It's been to 10+ different countries, been dropped off a camel, stolen by a monkey, rained on, covered in mud, doused with beer, and so much more. And this was the cheapest DSLR they made, and it has no weather sealing and has a plastic body, while most of the higher end stuff is (was?) magnesium and sealed everywhere.
Canon makes REALLY fucking good cameras.
Edit: only reason I replaced it; I got a smaller, lighter camera (also a Canon). the 400D still works fine.
Well, I didn't mean that Canon products are particularly bad in quality.
I own a perfectly functioning 40D from 2007 myself, which I replaced by a Sony A7III just recently, as I hate the fact, that Canon tries to force their customers to buy their own expensive RF lenses.
Of course cameras are impressive pieces of technology. Still I understand the sentiment of the above commenter.
My last comment was an overstatement, still there is a substantial chance of a hardware failure.
And Sony forces you to buy their own expensive E-Mount lenses?
To be honest, Canon EF mount lenses are probably the best buy if you are looking for compatibility: there's adapters for Sony E-Mount, Canon RF-mount, etc.
The reason RF, Z, and E mount exist is because you can make the camera body much slimmer in MILC.
It's much easier building adapters for lenses going from DSLR -> MILC. It might not be possible to go the other way around.
Nitpick: there are third party lenses for the RF mount but they are all manual focus. As you stated Canon has not opened up the spec and so third parties have been unable or unwilling to violate the patents that would allow them to make use of the RF electronics required for auto-focus.
I real shame as I would love to use some of Sigma glass on there without use of the EF adapter.
In fact, Canon is going after third party lens manufacturers that are blatantly violating its patent [0].
One of the problems Canon has faced recently is a flooding of the market with super cheap lenses (we're talking 50-200 dollars for total junk). The people that are buying them are justifiably upset when the photos are crap because they incorrectly think its a camera problem. Hey, a lens is a lens, right?
Anyhow, there's wide speculation that Canon will license to the quality quality third-party makers at some point [1][2].
Bad products is not a reason close specs. Unless you are heavily vested into Canon’s lense ecosystem, or have no issues with money, it makes no sense to go with them; if we’re considering full frames. Glass prices are overly marked up by the body creators and quality is subjective when there’s Sigma.
Do you have a link to the patents in question? Articles I've seen about this are not clear about what is patented and I'm suspicious about whether it would pass a novelty/obviousness test.
A third-party, Viltrox did release autofocus lenses for RF mount. Canon threatened legal action. A quick web search did not find exactly what is patented.
Just buying some old Canon FD mount stuff off of eBay lately. You aren't kidding! That vintage glass really has some beautiful character, it's worth shooting all manual to me.
Agree! My favorite lens, not that it is used as an everyday walk around lens, is 300 f 4.5 manual focus Nikkor. Marvelous mechanical precision, incredible picture quality and works perfectly fine as a 900 mm equivalent with a 2x TC on a DX body.
Vintage glass is great, if you get it good condition.
Yeah, my Canon micro four thirds camera went through 8 years of canyoneering, caving, rock climbing, kayaking, falling out of my car, etc. By the end the screen was so scratched you could barely see it and the body so dented you had to pry the battery out but it was still trucking along - only replaced when I upgraded to something newer.
My previous DSLR was a Pentax K30. It started to malfunction (about 5 years into ownership).
Guess where? The physical aperture actuator. They're supposed to work for hundreds of thousands of uses, but this one got maybe 20,000 before it began to stick.
I don't worry about the mirrorless camera electronics so much, and even most digital SLRs are quite reliable (even the replacement Pentax K3-II has been flawless). This was a pretty remarkable failure because it stands in contrast to the typical reliability of digital SLRs.
My anecdata (owned 8-9 dSLRs) suggests they're pretty robust. I haven't had a dSLR fail on me yet. The oldest camera I have is 21 years old (no longer used, but still works). The oldest cameras I still occasionally use are 12-13 years old. My current main cameras are about 2-3 years old. And they are not being babied. I've dropped cameras several times, I regularly use them in pissing rain, and in the winter they are occasionally subject to arctic temperatures (record is a bit below -30C).
My main one, a D700 on "extended loan" from my dad, was used in Iceland in winter (multiple times), in pouring rain, near the Atlantic shore during storms, in the Sahara during dust storms and 45 degrees C, used professionally for event documentation... And that's just from top of my head. Still shoots 10ish fps with the battery grip, has no sensor issues, is still weather sealed and just works.
Same for the old F4 sitting in a shelf, or the D750 that replaced the D700 for my dad. I have no reason to doubt Canon is any different (during a lot of those trips other people used Canon, and those held up just fine as well), nor do i have doubt the new mirrorless cameras will be any different. Unless you dump them for prolonged periods in salt water after having them run over by a truck and store them in a warm and humid environment without drying.
This. These things tend to be incredibly well built. Not indestructible (Unless you get say, a 7D), but people rely on them for their livelihood and they're built as such.
I've recently bought a nikon from 2005 to convert it to infrared and everything worked flawlessly
Anyways, we can't really live with fully mechanical cameras in this day and age, unless you want to shoot film in which case Leica has still three cameras that will work without electronics
I gave Darktable a try (never used Lightroom), and as an amateur, it is still kind of hard for me to achieve something better than the "out of camera" JPGs when post-processing RAW photos from my rather old Canon DSLR camera.
I don't want to do elaborate stuff like working with masks / applying filters to sections of the photo only.
Only thing I usually do is increase saturation, and, rarely, brightness/aperture. Saturation is maxed in OOC-JPGs anyways leading to clipping if it's increased more for the overall image.
And what I almost forgot, lense correction and rotating towards drawable vertical or horizontal lines are great features.
So what it does for me is basically barely noticably adjusting the saturation/contrast values, fixing the horizon and applying lense correction.
Keep in mind that darktable really insists on doing things from the ground up, and pretty much requires you to understand the underlying pipeline and what you want to achieve. If you are just experimenting with random sliders, you aren't likely to get good results.
It mostly sticks to standard industrial and scientific definitions instead of marketable names, and contains very little "magic" that is common to commercial photography software (such as saturation intentionally not being actual saturation, hidden curves, and so on). So you can use any good book on photography/videography and color science, and directly apply it to most of the stuff it has.
Additionally, the developers spend a lot of their time explaining their reasoning and writing about the theory in general, for example:
I occasionally try to come back to DarkTable, RawTherapee etc, but similarly for my requirements they feel like overkill, and require much more time than I have to properly understand the underlying theories.
For a simpler interface that gets me (a naive user) half-way decent results pretty quickly, I'll drop back to LightZone. Whole bunch of ready-made presets that combine primitives (sharpness, contrast, saturation, curves etc), and easy to save new presets once you find a combination you like.
It's over hyped. Yeah, it's cool and all but anything else would do the same thing. The only thing that I actually found is better in Lightroom is the AI detection features. Same can go with Photoshop and paint.net (or gimp if you're into that kinda thing.)
> I don't want to do elaborate stuff like working with masks / applying filters to sections of the photo only. Only thing I usually do is increase saturation, and, rarely, brightness/aperture.
You can't change the aperture after the image has been captured. I don't think you're the intended audience for darktable. Give https://filmulator.org/ a try!
Even with perfect hardware you will still have to reboot due to software instability. Lots of software isn't even tested to run for weeks/months/years.
That is just the Microsoft effect. Before Microsoft, anything that didn't run through the entire warranty period was returned to the vendor for your money back. And, you got it.
I'm also speaking of e.g. the junkware running on automotive headunits.
These systems are expected to be shut down at least once a day, so overall focus on (not only long-term) stability is really low.
Those came in post-Microsoft. Peak Microsoft was the US Navy ship dead in the water, towed back to port, because they had stupidly put MSWindows in charge of it.
The Therac-25 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25) didn't have a complex GUI. However, I hope that those affected by that bug did get their money back (and then some). Not that money can really help you if you get exposed to fatal levels of radiation, but...
GUIs do nothing more complex than many things that have to work right, so do. It is only tolerance for crappy software that allows it to be foisted on us.
