USB: the right direction

USB plugs are annoying, because it's hard to see how to plug them in, and you have only a 50% chance of getting it right on the first try. But I recently noticed what seems to be a little-known feature that increases your odds. There is a little USB logo on one side of nearly all plugs. It seems that manufacturers mount their ports in such a way that the logo should face upwards.

I haven't figured out the case of side-facing ports yet, but maybe there is a pattern there as well. If your computer has such ports, let me know in the comments which way the logo should face on those!

Verified by Visa – verily?

Today I ran into an excellent example of false security – with horrible usability to boot. I was helping my landlady to purchase a laptop online using a Visa card. At the checkout step, a screen appeared that we did not understand. It came from Visa itself and asked for the password associated with the credit card.

The password form was in an IFRAME, so the address bar did not light up green. I did not bother to check the security certificate by hand, or else I might not have dared to continue at all.

But we did read the FAQ that was linked to. As it turned out, this “optional” ‘Verified by Visa’ system makes online purchases more secure. It did not seem at all optional. Well, only more secure then. Right?

Wrong. How exactly does one get a Verified by Visa password? Let's click the “forgot your password” button and find out. To reset the password, you need to specify:

• the 3-digit card validation code
• your name, as written on the card
• the card expiry date
• the year and month of your birth

The first three of these four pieces of information are written on your credit card, and also submitted in any web form that involves a credit card purchase. By assumption, an attacker already has this information, or else the extra password protection wouldn't serve any purpose. So the only extra piece of information that is asked for is your birth year and month. Not exactly information that is hard to find, or even to brute-force if you put your mind to it. They might as well have skipped the password and asked for your birth date instead.

But well, it doesn't make you any less secure, so we continued to set up a password. First attempt failed: “use letters and numbers only”. Because, you know, secure passwords do not involve special characters at all. Second attempt: “please use both letters and numbers”. If you're going to use stupid limitations, at least tell me beforehand. Third attempt: “please use between 8 and 12 characters”. By now it seemed more like a CAPTCHA to me.

Then, finally, the password was accepted and we could proceed… to the next error message. Turns out that NoScript blocked the transaction, even with Javascript turned on. If NoScript does that to you, it probably means that you're doing something very, very wrong. But finally, after convincing NoScript that it was okay, the payment got through.

Stupidity can, in rare cases, be forgiven. But not if you're the largest credit card issuer in the world.

Add three inches in a week!

For over a year, I've been the happy owner of a Dell 2407WFP 24" widescreen monitor:

But as of late, there has been a little problem with it:

It's as if there is a strip loose between the backlight and the LCD. Not a big problem, but slightly annoying.

So last Monday I mailed Dell customer support. I got a prompt response, recommending me to try resetting the monitor by holding down the power button for 20 seconds. Tried that; didn't help; mailed back. Tuesday, I got the reply: they were sending a replacement through UPS, to be arriving the next day. Wednesday morning: phone call from UPS. From Lithuania, of all places. Telling me in fairly decent English that the replacement was not in stock, and that I should contact Dell for an alternative, so I mailed them again. On Thursday I got a call from Germany. Broken English, not entirely clear on the purpose of the call, but apparently verifying my address. Oh well.

Now this Friday morning, I woke up to the sound of the doorbell. A man from UPS with a replacement monitor. I was surprised, since I hadn't heard anything from Dell in the meantime. Being careful, I wanted to see the replacement in action before the UPS guy left with my old one. Unpacked the monitor.

First thing I noticed: brushed metal, not black like my old one. Checked the model number on the back: 2707WFP. — Wait… 27?! And indeed, holding my old panel up against it, the new one was three inches larger. It worked right out of the box and had no dead pixels or other artifacts, so I let the UPS guy take my old screen away (sniff). He didn't even want the booklets or cables or cd-rom, which was lucky for me since I'd have a hell of a time finding all that stuff again.

Thinking that this replacement was too good to be true, I e-mailed Dell once more to verify that it was indeed correct and intended to be permanent. Got a confirmation within the hour.

Now that is what I call Customer Care.

JVC Everio GZ-MG575 review

Last week, I bought another camera: the JVC Everio GZ-MG575. It set me back € 995. I'll be returning it today, and I do not have time to write a full review like I did with the Panasonic NV-GS320. But I can give you an impression. Short story: Do not buy this camera. Ever.

Contents of the package

Apart from the camera, the most important part is the dock, which connects to the through a single connection at the bottom. There is the mandatory remote control (including battery). The Dutch manual is translated quite badly and there was no English version in my package. There's an USB cable, an A/V cable, a power adaptor and a shoulder strap.

Picture quality

The picture quality is reasonable, but not outstanding. Widescreen is fake, simply chopping off the top and bottom of the picture. Instead of making the view angle wider, it is actually made less tall.

The picture looks a bit greenish, and there's no setting to correct for this. It is not a matter of white balance.

The (digital) image stabilizer only works if your picture is already nearly still, and even then results in a motion that feels choppy. Once you've worked with an optical, physical stabilization system, you realize how much better that works.

Autofocus is very slow. It focuses solely on the centre, and does not pay attention to other factors, so apart from slow it is also stupid. As is to be expected without an optical viewfinder and a lens ring, manual focus sucks. Your only option is to point where you want to focus, wait for autofocus to kick in, then switch to manual focus to lock the focus.

Auto white balance detection is reasonable, but… it is not smooth. When walking from inside to outside, for example, it will instantly switch the white balance from indoors to outdoors. Something you definitely do not want.

Low-light performance

I haven't tested the low-light performance, but I expect that it does a pretty good job here, judging from the large lens opening.

Photographs

In a well-lit room, with big windows and a lot of outside light, setting the aperture to F3.5, the camera tried to use a shutter speed of… 1/5 second. In case you're not into photography: it will be impossible to get a sharp picture at that speed, and even cheap and crappy compact cameras like mine do a lot better. I did not bother trying to take any more photos after this insanity.

Audio

I haven't tested the internal microphone thoroughly. If it turns out to be crap, you at least have the option to plug in an external microphone.

Recording medium

The camera records to a hard disk. Compressed like a dvd. Even on the maximum quality setting. You're probably going to export to dvd sooner or later anyway, so it may not be a big problem, but I like to start with the highest possible quality of material.

There's also an SD card slot that I haven't tested. Apparently you can record photos as well as video to this card.

LCD

The LCD has a pretty limited view angle, especially in the vertical direction. I haven't tested it in direct sunlight, but if it fails there's no viewfinder to fall back on.

Usability

The user interface is downright horrible. Let me give you an example. When set to manual mode, with the little wheel at the top, you can switch to manual focus by pressing the joystick downwards. Now switch to, say, S mode where you can set the shutter speed. Manual focus is retained. But you set the shutter speed—you guessed it—by pressing the joystick up and down: you can no longer turn off manual focus!

The menu wraps around like a cilinder, so you don't know when you've seen all options. All menus are animated, and rather slow and annoying too.

All buttons seem to be in just the wrong places, and there's no way you can control this camera with one hand. Many buttons have different functions depending on the mode. All of it just fails to make sense.

There's a “drop detection” that will shut down the camera when it detects a falling motion, to protect the hard disk. It also shuts down if you simply lower it a bit too quickly. So I turned the feature off; the best way of keeping your hard drive intact is still simply not dropping it. But at startup, the camera keeps warning me that drop detection is off, and an annoying blue icon keeps flashing on the screen all the time.

Battery life

I'm not sure how this compares to other hard disk cameras, but in itself, I found the life of the accompanying battery quite limited. Apparently there's a good reason that the box (that you see even before you buy the thing) already states: “Don't Forget A Back Up Battery!”

Capturing and editing

Here's a point where I do like this camera. It comes with a dock, to which you can connect a power supply, USB, FireWire, S-Video and AV. A welcome change from having to plug in two or three cables each time.

The camera shows itself to Windows as the hard disk it contains. You can simply copy off the .mod files. These are, according to the manual, a “proprietary format”, but actually they are simply .vob files like on a dvd. After renaming, Premiere has no problem importing them. No external software is needed.

I had expected editing to go less smooth with compressed material, but I haven't noticed anything of the kind. It all works just as well as with raw DV videos, as far as my (admittedly quick and short) editing session could tell.

Conclusion

Horrible usability, and the picture quality does not make up for it. Do not buy. Definitely not worth your money. I'll be going back to my good old Panasonic, external microphone input or no.

Side note: during the entire time I'm writing this, the camera is erasing its hard disk. Although it says “formatting”, I hope it is actually overwriting all the bits seven times, because nothing else accounts for half an hour of formatting time…

Panasonic NV-GS320 review

Last Saturday I bought the NV-GS320 digital video camera from Panasonic. Since this camera is pretty new, I couldn't find many decent reviews on the web, so I decided to write one of my own. (The NV-GS320 seems to be the same camera as the PV-GS320 but with some different names for the features. The spelling of “colour” on the Panasonic web page suggests that the NV was made for the European market.)

This camera sells for 500–600 euros, which places it in the medium- to high-end consumer range. I bought mine at Media Markt for € 578 (prices as of April 2007).

The combination of 3CCD and MiniDV makes this camera almost unique in its price range. Most other 3CCD cameras start around € 1000. How did Panasonic do this? Probably a tape deck is cheaper than a hard disk or a dvd writer. But what else did they leave out? Let's find out.

Contents of the package

Apart from the camera itself and a battery, the package includes a remote control which, for a nice change, includes the required button cell battery. There is a manual (Dutch in my case, no English version included) which is comprehensive and relatively decent, though not excellent. Also included in the package are a USB connector cable (large to small mini A plug), an adaptor and the necessary cables, and an A/V cable to output to S-Video and three phono connectors. A MiniDV tape and a FireWire cable are not included.

Picture quality

The NV-GS320 is one of the few cameras in its price range sporting three CCD sensors (3CCD). This is supposed to give a clearer picture with more vibrant colours. The sensor allows for hardware widescreen (16:9) ratio, without losing quality compared to standard 4:3. The camera uses a Leica Dicomar lens with a maximum zoom factor of 10×.

My first impressions of the picture quality were excellent. The images are very sharp and colourful in daylight:
(Click to enlarge.)
In the enlarged version it looks a bit pixelized, but this is a result of the deinterlacing. Of course, I cannot compare the image quality to that of other cameras, but in the absolute sense these pictures are very good.

The camera can either be set to automatic or manual mode. When switching to manual, the current settings of the automatic mode appear to be retained, which is very handy.

The automatic white balancing can take a few seconds to kick in, but usually finds the right balance. The same holds for the aperture and shutter speed – sudden changes in lighting are not picked up immediately. Whether that is good or bad depends on the situation. Autofocus works just fine and I haven't noticed any unexpected hiccups. Filming through a dirty window, however, is not recommended.

In manual mode, you can configure the aperture, gain (only when the aperture is fully open), shutter speed, and white balance. I have not used the manual mode much, as automatic seemed to work just fine in all conditions.

There is an option called “backlight compensation” which brightens the input at the cost of saturating a light background. This works fairly well and can be very handy when shooting, e.g., a portrait against a bright sky.

Panasonic's O.I.S. (optical image stabilizer), done in hardware by wiggling the lens, promises excellent correction for shaking. Many other cameras do this in software, slightly degrading picture quality along the way. My finding is that the image stabilizer manages very well to correct for small vibrations; if you hold the camera properly, it is possible to compose a fairly stable shot at the full 10× zoom. Larger shaking is not compensated for, but even these motions seem a bit smoother than usual.

Low-light performance

One of the most important factors in a camera is how it performs under bad lighting conditions, like lamp light, candle-light or worse.

Performance under indoor lamp light seems alright:

The picture does tend to get a bit blurry when moving, so shooting from a tripod whenever possible is recommended. However, as you can see, the level of noise is very acceptable. The above picture was taken with the maximum aperture and gain settings (18 dB); apparently the black areas were too difficult even then.

Additionally, there is a feature called “Colour night view” for shooting really dark scenes. The catch is that the framerate drops; I've observed factors between 4 (which may be acceptable sometimes) and 18 (which isn't). The other catch is that anything that moves becomes a big blur. The third catch is that light areas bleed a lot into dark areas.

If you can live with all of that, the night shot is pretty impressive for what I've seen. Here's a shot in the dark, lit only by a TFT monitor:

Admittedly, I tried to hold the camera very still while taking this shot.

Of course, TFT light is a little extreme, so I took the camera out to film by street light:
Left: without colour night view — Right: with colour night view
This seems to be one of the few situations where the white balancing screws up, resulting in a very reddish picture. I could not correct this by setting it to lamp light manually – street light is a different beast altogether. Manual white balancing would probably have fixed it, but I forgot to bring something white along. Also, you can clearly see the light bleeding into the dark areas.

Photographs

Like with many digital videocameras, the Panasonic NV-GS320 is capable of taking still photographs. The maximum resolution is 2048×1512.

Unfortunately, this resolution is quite pointless. Even in bright light, when the aperture can be nearly closed, the photos taken are not very sharp:

When looking at them up close, it even seems that software sharpening has taken place, judging from the halos:
I suspect the picture is taken at a lower resolution and then scaled up in software.

Audio

One of the biggest weaknesses of this camera is the lack of an input for an external microphone, as well as headphone output. If you don't like the sound of the internal stereo microphone, you're out of luck.

That being said, the internal mic is quite decent. Any noise, from the tape motor or otherwise, got drowned out by the environment noise in places where I filmed. Handling of buttons (especially zoom) goes nearly unnoticed as well.

There is a setting to “zoom” the microphone. This, however, means applying gain to the signal, not altering the area over which sound is picked up. The microphone also picks up a lot of sound from the environment, which can be a good or a bad thing depending on circumstance.

The camera includes a wind noise filter. It's hard for me to judge how good this works; when shooting straight against the wind, noise is certainly there, but this may be normal. During 15 minutes of shooting outside on a medium-windy day, wind noise occurred only a few times, so it's not too bad overall.

Recording medium

This camera is one of the few that still record to MiniDV tapes; most cameras nowadays record to either a hard disk or some mini-dvd format. MiniDV still has some advantages: its compression factor is less, supposedly resulting in better image quality, and the tapes are quite cheap and widely available. Its prime disadvantage is the linearity of a tape, and the limited capacity (just over one hour). But tapes can be swapped, while hard disks cannot.

Still photographs are recorded to an SD card up to 2 GB or an SDHC card up to 4 GB.

LCD and viewfinder

The NV-GS320, unlike many of its colleagues, still has a viewfinder. Many other cameras nowadays rely only on the LCD display. Not only does this drain your battery, but also the picture can be hard to see in bright light.

However, LCD technology has come a long way, and even in broad daylight with the sun right behind me, I could still see the picture on the LCD quite well. But if you don't look under just the right angle, the LCD tends to show clipped whites where they aren't, suggesting over-exposure that isn't there. Looking straight at the screen, the problem disappears, but this is something to keep in mind especially when fine-tuning in manual mode.

Usability

The controls of the camera take some getting used to, because nearly everything is controlled by a little 4-way joystick which also functions as a push button. Once you get the hang of it, it's really quite easy and intuitive. The joystick controls an on-screen pie menu with options relating to the current mode (filming, playback etc.). The joystick is also used in the configuration menu.

The pie menu contains a tiny help feature, explaining the meaning of the little icons. This is convenient, because the text labels of the options cannot be seen before you activate or deactivate them. On the other hand, toggling an option to find out what it does is faster than calling up the help menu.

My overall impression of the menu structure is okay, though not perfect. But the menu is not deep, and you'll quickly learn where to find every feature.

Manual focus has to be done with the joystick, which is not half as convenient as having a proper focus ring, and on a small LCD it's hard to see whether you have focused properly. The LCD does not zoom in to assist you, nor does it show to what distance the focus is currently set.

Another annoyance is that you cannot hold down the button to increment or decrement values in manual mode; you have to keep wiggling the joystick to make large adjustments.

Some of the buttons cannot be reached when filming with one hand, most notably the menu button and the auto/manual switch. But you won't use these buttons while recording anyway.

The camera comes with a remote control, which duplicates most of the buttons on the camera, allowing for nearly complete control. There are also dedicated buttons for playback mode. One feature that is only accessible through the remote is “audio dub”, allowing you to create a voiceover right there on the camera. If you recorded the audio in 12 bits instead of 16, you'll be able to record the voiceover on a separate track without losing the original audio of the filmed material.

Battery life and power supply

According to the manual, the packaged battery can be used for 30 minutes when actively using the camera. It requires 1 hour and 40 minutes to recharge. Batteries with an effective lifetime of up to 1 hour 45 can be bought separately. However, I found that 30 minutes is not as bad as it sounds: I've been out filming for over an hour and the battery was still nearly full. I shot about 15 minutes of film in this time.

The accompanying adaptor can be used to power the camera directly, or to charge the battery while it's not in the camera, but not both at the same time. Unfortunately the FireWire and USB connections on the camera are located below the battery, so you'll have to switch to the adaptor while capturing to the computer, which means you can't recharge the battery at the same time. This could be problematic in some situations.

Capturing and editing

The camera can be connected to a computer using either USB 2.0 (cable included) or FireWire (cable not included). Adobe Premiere fans will like the FireWire, because Premiere Pro 2.0 is not really suitable for USB capturing. The accompanying software does a better job at USB capturing, because device control works. However, to use scene detection (place each captured clip into its own file), the software will rewind the tape a bit at every splitting point. I can't imagine that this is good for the tape nor the tape mechanism, and it's also completely unnecessary because Premiere has no problems capturing and splitting it all in one go.

Two editing programs are supplied: SweetMovieLife for basic editing and MotionDV STUDIO for (slightly) more advanced work. Because Premiere is my preferred piece of editing software, I only used MotionDV STUDIO for the USB capturing. First (and last) impression: have seen worse.

Conclusion

If image quality is your primary concern, this is the camera for you. In low light, too, it remains very usable. The picture stabilizer works pretty good. But don't buy this camera to take still photographs.

Audio quality is decent, but the mic picks up sound from all around the camera. The lack of a microphone input is a severe shortcoming.

The rest of the feature set is excellent, and the backlight compensation and night shot are nice additions. Remember to buy a FireWire cable if you intend to use anything but the accompanying software.

On the usability front, this camera is decent, but not excellent. If you're afraid of buttons and menus I'd recommend looking elsewhere, but anyone with a little bit of technical experience will have no problem controlling this camera.

Personally, I'll be returning this beast because I know I'll want to plug in an external microphone at some point. But if it weren't for that … I'd definitely go for it.

Getting better response to your e-mails

People don't read. This is especially true for e-mail. People often check their mail in between other activities and will not take the time to properly read what you've written — especially if you want something from them. So here are some little psychological tricks to make your e-mails more effective. (This applies to some other things, like forum posts, as well.) I'm not sure how much of this I figured out myself, but in my experience these techniques work.

First, and this may seem very obvious, be very clear on what you want. If I receive an e-mail that is vague about the precise answer or action expected from me, I'll happily ignore it — less work for me! Here's a real-life example:

I used to be able to access your website from my mobile phone. Now this no longer works. Have you changed anything?

My response:

Not that I know of, and I should know if anything had changed.

Does that make me a bastard for not helping him? Doesn't matter, the point is that you don't want to be the person on the other side of this conversation. He could have written instead:

I used to be able to access your website from my mobile phone. Now this no longer works. Do you have any idea what could cause this problem?

This would force me to think about this problem and come up with some possible causes and solutions. (Yes, I could also have answered that with a simple “yes” or “no”, but I'm not that big a bastard.)

You may know that the first and last sentences of a paragraph are the most important. In my experience, it mostly comes down to the last one, and the last sentence in your e-mail in particular. This is the sentence that keeps on ringing in people's heads after they read (or even skimmed!) your mail. So make sure the last sentence counts.

If you need a piece of information from someone, or you need someone to do something for you, start your e-mail in whatever way you wish. You'll probably want to explain what you need and why. People will refer back to this when answering your mail. But if you want to avoid that your e-mail ends up marked as ‘read’ and forgotten, remember to always finish the e-mail with a concrete question. For example, would you feel more inclided to respond to this:

You showed part of a movie on YouTube in your presentation, but I cannot find it. But your presentation was great! I really loved the very visual way in which you presented this matter.

or to this:

Your presentation was great! I really loved the very visual way in which you presented this matter. You also showed part of a YouTube movie, but I cannot find it. Could you please send me the URL?

If your mail is a reply in a thread where you've asked the question before, it can be a good idea to restate the question.

If you want to ask multiple things, you cannot all put them in the last sentence. Put multiple items into a list, either bulleted or (preferably) numbered. In this way, it becomes very hard for someone to (consciously or unconsciously) ignore one of the items. Not so long ago, I wrote something like:

You could send me a file containing a test case, saved from the program. […] I would also like to know from Ben what can be improved on the export function. […]

I never got a reply. This could better be formulated as:

[…]
1. Could you please save a file from the program and send it to me?
2. Could you please ask Ben what he thinks can be improved on the export function?

Observing these simple rules in the e-mails you send can make your life just a little bit easier.