Month: December 2009

7 days review of Kindle DX

A few weeks ago the stupid side of me left the Kindle 2 in the seat pocket on the flight back from Atlanta to LaGuardia. Leah bought me the Kindle DX as a birthday/X’mas present to replace the Kindle 2. After using the DX for 7 days, here is what I’ve found so far.

Good:

  • Larger e-ink screen, longer reading between page flip
  • PDF reading — printing web pages into PDF allows me to read longer articles on web sites while working out in the gym.
  • Auto rotation — allowing to operate the Next/Prev Page buttons with either hand
  • Not as large as it looks in pictures
  • Amazon case for DX with magnetic clasp
  • Keyboard feels better to type on — pill-shape, raise keys are so much nicer than the round keys on the Kindle 2

Bad:

  • Larger and heavier — still manageable with backpack but not coat pocket-able.
  • Not as many choices in cases

And the Ugly:

  • Doesn’t come with case, despite increased probabilities of damaging the huge e-ink screen
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Fun with digital photography

Recently I’ve been diving into High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography. Initially I used Bracketeer to combine three photos that had been taken with different exposure (-2, 0, +2 stops). But very quickly I became unsatisfied with the output from Bracketeer. After a little research, it turns out Bracketeer only fuse photos with different exposures. Whereas other HDR software also perform tone mapping. After listening to a TWiP podcast about HDR and read through the HDR tutorial by Trey Ratcliff, I decided to try Photomatix Pro last week to see what different result I would get.

To demostrate the difference between Bracketeer and Photomatix, here are two identical photos processed by each software with the original exposure on the left:

Original
Bracketeer
Photomatix

As you can see, the result from Photomatix is so much more natural looking (though it can also produce extremely psychadelic version) than Bracketeer. And more importantly, I get to this very good photo very easily, whereas the options in Bracketeer are extremely technical and confusing.

Both are commercial software with Bracketeer a little bit less expensive than Photomatix. But judging from the output quality, I would thoroughly recommend going straight to Photomatix if you want to experiment with HDR.

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