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eBook Readers may have reached a level where they are genuinely useful. As more become available, competition has lowered the ridiculously high prices and it’s now possible to buy a workaday variety for the price of dinner for four in a reasonable restaurant. This one, at £189, is more expensive but I think justifiably so. It’s taken me a year since I first tried one to buy one and that has been after wondering whether such a thing has a real use or if there are other machines that can do the same thing as well. Unlike some other e-readers this one does not support wifi or 3G to download its files so you are required to use a device that supports a browser to do that. And of course any device that supports a browser can adequately display ebooks given the right software such as the free Adobe Digital Editions. So why a dedicated reader? It’s in the display. CRTs or TFT screens draw a lot of power, are usually highly reflective and can become invisible in bright sunlight. I’ve tried to read books on my phone (nice 3.8 inch screen) and on my Netbook (nice 10 inch screen) and it doesn’t really work in normal daylight. It’s also tiring on the eyes. The “e-paper” system that deposits a static greyscale image on a non-backlit screen works very well, can be read in very bright light and requires no electricity other than to create the image on each “page turn”. The price you pay for this is having the whole screen flash black every time a new page is generated. You do get used to it and the Story generates new pages quickly. The display is 8 levels of greyscale (other e-readers, notably the latest Amazon Kindle, support 16 levels but there is not much difference) and the presentation is quite gentle; in terms of contrast it’s similar to but less contrasty than the Penguin books from the 1960s. Actually very comfortable to read.

The Story itself is the same size as novels were before they grew to 400 pages and had to be made taller and wider. That is 8 inches high by 5 inches wide  and just under three-eighths of an inch deep in nicely sculpted creamy plastic. The screen is 6 inches in diagonal measurement which is quite a good size and you can set the text to be in portrait or landscape aspect (portrait is better). Below the screen is a qwerty keyboard that’s quite easy to use and also contains all the controls necessary to operate it. There is a standard 2 gigabytes of flash memory and a slot for a SD or SDHC card up to 32 gigabytes. That’s a lot of storage. You won’t need it all.

Before I go any further I should say that when my Story arrived (late January 2010) it had firmware 1.02 and appeared to be a little, um, “unfinished”. Looking at the iriver website and clicking International and then Support and then Download took me to a list of firmware updates in which was version 1.50 for the Story. Following download (44 megabytes or so) I extracted a file “ebook.hex” to the root folder of my SDHC card and having turned the Story off then inserted the SD card, turned the Story on and it updated the firmware to version 1.61. Now it’s not everyone that would know to do that and particularly not everyone buying a gizmo to read books with. And there were no instructions on how to actually update the firmware. With this new firmware things have improved dramatically. One can now resize text, reflow it, zoom reflowed text, use Windows fonts for user-generated text and all sorts of things that should have been in the original product. But this is audio-visual land where products are like this; at least iriver does update its firmware – I threw my Archos 605 in the bin as it never did work properly.

So, provided you have firmware 1.50 or whatever the latest is, you have a very competent e-reader that does rely on a computer for its e-books. The Story supports epub, pdf, rtf, doc and text files as well as being able to display xls spreadsheets and (supposedly) Powerpoint files. It will display jpeg, gif and bmp images (but don’t try large ones) and can play music files of the wma, mp3 and ogg varieties. In fact it is rather a good music player. You can also use it as a voice recorder (but the one in your phone if you have one is better) and there is a diary that doesn’t synchronise with anything and is therefore pretty useless.

There are some things that are not that wonderful. While it’s very easy to transfer ebooks to the Story using Adobe Digital Editions (it’s just drag ‘n drop) they end up in the Story with the spaces in the title converted to underscores which is ugly. The indexing of book titles ignores (probably quite correctly) the words A and The which irritates me. While the music player will read all WMA files perfectly it has problems with some MP3 ones. Its battery charges by being plugged into the computer using the supplied USB cable in “charging” mode so if you don’t have a USB port handy you could be stuffed for charging the battery unless you have a power supply that outputs 5v 1000 mA (cheap enough to buy but not supplied). I think basically that the criticism is that here is a piece of non-geek kit that needs a bit of geek mentality to live with it.

What it is good for is storing books to take to read on holiday or when travelling or even when the book is 600 pages and too heavy to hold for long. The Story doesn’t weigh much, it’s easy to use, the battery will last probably at least a week without a recharge. I’ve enjoyed reading with it and I’m sure it will pay for itself one way or another.

Back in September 2009 I wrote an article on the merits of the E-P1, the first micro 4/3rds camera from Olympus. I liked it for its attractive styling, the fact that it produces excellent jpeg pictures and has in-body image stabilisation. But now it’s going for the reason that it has failed the usability test with manual focus lenses and after attempts to persuade myself that I can do without a viewfinder and a built-in flash I really can’t. So I have bought a Panasonic GF1.

I already had the first micro 4/3 camera, the Panasonic G1, when I was tempted to buy the E-P1. The G1 is an immensely usable little camera and I am entirely happy with the twin lens kit of 14-45 and 45-200 mm for travel. The G1 has the only really good electronic viewfinder I have experienced and the articulated LCD is a real bonus. As I think I’ve remarked elsewhere, the G1 is what the Panasonic FZ-50 should have been and it’s a fine holiday companion.

Like many photographers I’ve seen the micro 4/3 system as an opportunity to use good small prime lenses on a slim and pocketable body. As a collector of mechanical cameras I have some “Leica screw” lenses and as my current film camera is a Voigtlander Bessa I have some of Cosina’s excellent lenses for use with that. Given that micro 4/3 has a sensor smaller than full-frame 35 mm the field of view of these lenses on 4/3 is half the nominal, so a 25 mm lens has a field of view of 50 mm and so on. Therefore my 15, 21, 25, 35, 50 and even 75 mm lenses for the Bessa will cover the focal range 30-150 mm on 4/3 when used with an adapter.

Here is the problem in using these lenses with the E-P1. The LCD is not high enough quality to focus a manual lens accurately so you have to get a magnified view. The E-P1 provides this. In order to do this you first have to set the E-P1 Live View screen to Zoom View. This can take up to 7 presses of the Info button but it’s possible to limit the number to 2 presses. There’s no shortcut to this. Then you can press the OK button in the middle of the multifunction dial to enter magnified view (and turn the secondary dial if you want to change the magnification level). Now focus. If you then want to reframe the shot you have to press the OK button again to zoom back out. Then you can press the shutter button to take the shot. This performance is not acceptable in the context of perhaps needing to focus quickly for a street shot. Of course it’s possible to set the lens to the approximate hyperfocal distance or use the distance scale on the lens to set depth of field but either way this may result in having to use a small aperture which in turn will require a slower shutter speed.

The Panasonic GF1, with the optional viewfinder, has an easy and intuitive method of focusing manual lenses. With the camera to the eye you press the rear dial, this instantly magnifies the viewfinder’s view so you can quickly focus and then half-press the shutter button (which exits magnified mode) to reframe the shot if necessary and then fully press the shutter button. The camera does not leave the eye during this rapid process. Also holding the camera to the eye provides more stability than holding it like a compact camera so the requirement for stabilisation is lessened. If you don’t have the viewfinder for the GF1 to focus manually using the LCD is quite acceptable.

I have found other irritations with the E-P1 that reviewers have mentioned. The green light when the camera is turned on is annoying but a piece of sticking-plaster can conceal it. The way the info screens are designed is counter-intuitive. It’s all too easy to rub the multifunction dial so that it creates a setting that’s not required. I quite often find that this has set the wrong white balance or something  like that. And not having a flash is really irritating; no wonder Olympus is giving one away with the E-P1 at present. It annoys me that my little semi-automatic flash that I use on my Bessa won’t work properly on the E-P1; it works fine on the GF1.

Apart from the shortcomings mentioned, The E-P1 is a fine camera if you think of it as an oversized compact for daylight use when quick focusing is not required. It does produce good shots. I’ve tried to get my wife to take it on but she won’t because she likes her Canon A570 that has a good lens with IS, an optical viewfinder, flash and works with 2 AA lithium batteries.

Announced just five days ago on 4 January 2010 (though we’ve been waiting for it long enough) the Samsung NX10 could be described as a remodelled Samsung GX20 with the optical viewfinder replaced by an electronic one or a micro 4/3 camera with a larger sensor. It seems to have been received with “that’s nothing very new” from several pundits. They are wrong. This is a breakthrough and a warning for the micro 4/3 consortium and those others about to launch “me too” m 4/3 clones.

The breakthrough is that this new Samsung is only a tiny bit larger than the Panasonic G1 but has the same sensor as the GX20 which is a 14 megapixel APS-C size – one and a half times the size of a micro 4/3 sensor. The NX10 has been introduced “SLR shaped” much as the G1 was by Panasonic and for the same reason (to establish it in traditional markets) but it looks capable of being released in the future in a format close to the Panasonic GF1 and the Olympus E-P2. The key to this is the new lens mount. The sensor’s diagonal measurement is 6.7 mm greater than a 4/3 sensor so the throat of the mount has to accommodate that increase but Samsung have been able to create a mount with a flange-back measurement of only 25.5 mm. This does mean new lenses. The NX10 is being launched with three: a 30 mm pancake, an 18-55 mm short telephoto and a 50-200 telephoto. More will, I think follow fairly rapidly and Samsung has confirmed that it will make available a Pentax K mount adapter and a Leica M mount adapter. As soon as the usual people make adapters for other lens mounts it will be possible to use very many earlier lenses with this new lens mount.

The launch price in the UK of the NX10 with the 18-55 mm lens is expected to be £599 though I guess that it will actually be a bit less. The Panasonic G1, announced 15 months ago now, can be had with the 14-45 mm lens for about £465 and although it has a nice articulated screen it does not have video, which the NX10 does, and has two fewer megapixels. The NX10 will be priced similarly to the Panasonic GF1 and the Olympus E-P1 but of course it has an electronic viewfinder whereas in their basic configurations the other two do not. And an upgrade to a viewfinder is expensive.

So here we have a new camera from a major electronics manufacturer that competes with (and probably will out-perform) the latest micro 4/3 cameras. I don’t think I’ll be getting one because I am quite happy with the micro 4/3 offering as it is at present and I already have an APS-C size sensor in my new Canon 7D. But think: It looks as though the micro 4/3 consortium needs a new sensor if its members are to compete with more pixels for increased definition plus lower noise for better large prints. I’m sure it will get one. But look at the Canon 7D and suppose that something close to approaching its sensor and processors were in the next generation of the NX range. That’s where the breakthrough could lead to.

You could say that I am a fan of FujiFilm cameras and films. I think most people who have used them are, or should be. In digital cameras I have and use the F31fd and the S5 Pro. In my collection of older cameras I have the S2 Pro, STX-1,  Fujicarex II, Fujica GER, AZ-1, ST605, ST701, ST901, several Fujinon lenses and I still use Fuji Superia, Astia and Velvia film. Now I have just acquired a FujiFilm F70EXR compact digital. This is a small and slim pocket camera with a good quality lens (35 mm equivalent) of 27-270 mm a development of the EXR sensor and several innovative picture modes that are inherited from the more expensive  F200EXR that was launched in February 2009. With its wide zoom range and excellent image quality the F70EXR is set to compete with established class leaders such as the Panasonic TZ6 but at a lower price point. In fact I have given my TZ6 to my son as he wanted a camera that would make its own decisions with him just pressing the button. After allowing for FujiFilm’s cashback offer on the F70EXR my cost is an astoundingly modest £139.

Let’s look quickly as what it does that other compact cameras do, before looking at its special qualities. It has a simple movie mode, VGA 640 x 480 with mono sound but you can zoom during the movie clip. It has the usual fully automatic mode where you just point and it shoots. It has a sensor-shift anti-shake device that it combines with using a higher ISO speed to ensure that user-induced blur is kept to a minimum. It handles face-detection rather better than its competitors do. You get standard scene modes of Portrait (normal and enhanced), Landscape, Sport, Night shots (hand-held and tripod), Fireworks, Sunset, Snow, Beach, Party, Text and several flash modes. You can choose 4:3, 3:2 and 16:9 aspect ratios and Fuji’s Provia, Astia or Velvia film colour modes as well as monochrome and sepia. Metering is standard multi-segment, spot or average and focus is multi, centre or continuous (but no spot focus). The flash is well controlled in a range of 1 ft to nearly 14 ft at wide-angle and 3 ft to 8 ft at telephoto. The Macro mode is from 2 inches. It has minimal shutter-lag, can take 3 consecutive shots in just over a second and the battery will take an average of 230 pictures before it is exchausted. It doesn’t have any automatic bracketing functions, nor can you shoot in Raw mode. This is all standard stuff that nearly every compact digital camera should have. But the reason to buy the F70EXR is for the additional shooting modes and what you can do with them.

FujiFilm’s compact cameras are renowned for excellent control of digital noise. The F30 and F31 set the standard for clean pictures with their 6 megapixel sensor. The F70EXR has a 10 megapixel sensor that enables larger prints to be made at a high pixel density. Whereas the sensor on the F31 had a pixel density of 14 megapixels per square centimeter the density on the F70’s sensor is more than double at 33. This in principle means that the F70 will be noisier than the F31 and this is true but only to a small extent. In full 10 megapixel mode the F70EXR is good up to ISO 800 and acceptable at ISO 1600. To my eyes the F31 is as good at ISO 1600 as the F70 is at ISO 800 and this is a real achievement by the F70 given the 66% increase in pixels.

Like the F200EXR, the F70EXR can combine the data from adjacent pixels to produce smaller 5 megapixel files which when combined with multiple exposures will create pictures of great dynamic range or very low noise. There are four EXR modes. The first is High Resolution and uses the full 10  megapixels to create the most detail in the shot. The second is “D-Range” where the camera will increase the dynamic range of the shot so that there is more detail in shadows and no “blown” highlights. The user can determine the range from 100% to 800% or automatic. This produces a 5 megapixel medium resolution file. The third option is High Sensitivity/Low Noise where the resultant medium resolution file will produce less noise than a standard shot. Here I reckon that ISO-for-ISO the F70 beats the F31 but to be honest I think that the standard 10 megapixel shots are quite good enough. Finally EXR Auto Mode lets the camera choose which EXR mode to apply and whether to use any special Scene modes in addition. I’ve found that in this mode the camera may choose exactly the mode that I do not want, so I avoid it.

Apart from the EXR modes and the Auto mode, the F70 offers two Natural Light modes, three user-intervention modes and two special effect modes. The Natural Light modes are one where the flash is inhibited and the camera automatically selects an exposure biased for natural lighting and the “with flash” mode where the camera takes a picture using the natural lighting mode and one with fill-flash and saves both. This latter mode is very useful.

The three user-intervention modes are:

• Program where the camera chooses the aperture and the shutter speed and the user can alter the metering and white balance etc.
• Aperture priority mode where the user can choose one of two aperture settings which are approximately two stops apart. These settings will depend on the zoom setting and the lower one will be displayed initially. If the user chooses the higher aperture setting the camera will automatically alter the shutter speed so that the shot is properly metered. The “aperture” is actually altered by the camera choosing to apply or remove a 2-stop neutral density filter!
• Manual mode allows the choice of the aperture setting as above plus the choice of a shutter speed. A meter shows the relationship between under- and over-exposure but this is not reflected in the display on the LCD which is rather unnerving

Finally there are two “Pro” modes that are innovative and useful.

• Pro Focus mode transforms the shot into one in which the foreground interest (usually a person or group I would imagine) is in focus but the background is defocused as would be the case with a Single Lens Reflex camera using a wide-angle lens at a wide aperture . It’s achieved by taking three simultaneous images and merging them and beware that it does not work all the time as the composition has to be one where there is a clear foreground interest that is the focused part.
• Pro Low-Light mode takes four high ISO images and merges them to decrease noise levels. It does automatically what you can do manually with noise-management software by merging the de-noised image with the original detailed by noisy image. It works well but post-processing a standard image to remove noise can give a better result.

The combination of the excellent lens and the new sensor produces very detailed images in good light and the choice of the Fuji “film modes” can add saturation or “punch” or soften the image. Many other compact cameras offer some of the facilities that the F70EXR provides but at the time of writing no one camera provides such flexibility. And look at the price! Since I got it, and over the holiday and New Year celebrations I’ve been very pleased with the results.

Although available now for  a fortnight, the availability of this free upgrade has gone almost unnoticed in the photographic press and I wonder why because this together with earlier upgrades from Panasonic is illustrating a new trend. Panasonic is increasing the market life of its premium products by improving their capability. Currently this applies to the LX3 and the “G” range of micro 4/3rds cameras.

Most (but not all) camera manufacturers build the ability to update the firmware in their cameras into the camera’s firmware. (Firmware is software stored in non-volatile memory chips). Mostly this is used to fix deficiencies in the original software, though some manufacturers (Canon and Ricoh to my knowledge) have used it to implement additional functionality.

This upgrade improves auto-focus when shooting movies, improves the automatic white balance (which is actually addressing a deficiency), improves jpeg picture quality at ISO 3200 and improves the rendition of six scene modes. Best of all, for me at least, when a manual focus lens is mounted it now takes only one press of the control dial to enter magnified focus mode. This is a real blessing when using the optional electronic viewfinder as it is now much faster to focus manually.