Windows 10...more worries so listen...

I note amusing pic in the last post,....but PLEASE avoid EU/political references here as the mods will have no choice but to delete the whole topic and there is some very valuable stuff here that should rightfully be recorded.

I removed the photie so we're ok now.

Sorry about that

Mmm!! I would think long and hard before I poisoned a Mac with microsoft in any way.

Those who have escaped and climbed over "Win's Dyke" rarely wish think they should climb back over it.

Ok, loaded W10 on my laptop yesterday as an experiment. Aside from some bloatware and the need to select custom install and turn off everything unwanted, a painless process.

Neil

Life got very difficult for the likes of IBM as computer technology advanced. I once went to a customer presentation where a big company told us why we should buy their stuff.

• First on were the Microcomputer group. They explained that micros were the future and that minicomputers and mainframes were far too expensive and inflexible.
• Second on were the Minicomputer team. Their sales position was that the microcomputer was a puny joke incapable of real work and that the mainframe was a hideously expensive behemoth only good for old fashioned batch processing.
• Third on were the Mainframe boys. They explained that microcomputer and minicomputers were a fashion that wouldn't last. A mainframe apparently could "tuck everything they could do into a corner" without noticing.
• Last to speak was the parallel computing team. They explained that they were developing a multiprocessor machine that would outperform the company's most expensive mainframe by a factor of 20 for about half the cost.

Then as now technology companies have as much trouble seeing into the future as everyone else. In consequence this big computer firm was competing with itself, which cannot be good. And they weren't the only one!

Another way people get it wrong. Having spent a lot of money on producing profitable old lines it is all too tempting to stick with them. Kodak, for example, did a lot of original R&D on digital photography but walked away afterthe board sold all their digital patents to competitors after deciding that their huge investment in film, conventional cameras and processing was "safe". After all film images were of much higher quality!. Unfortunately film was about as good as could get, whereas digital has massive untapped potential. Alas for Kodak, film sales all but collapsed whilst digital boomed.

Digital is no sinecure. The rise of good cheap cameras in phones has seriously damaged the market for compacts , whilst bridge cameras are busy undermining the profitability of SLRs.

If I could predict the future I'd be rich!

Cheers,

Dave

Edited By SillyOldDuffer on 02/06/2016 12:34:26

The next big thing is probably the short film clips instead of photos that my daughter showed me yesterday (OK on an i-phone). More like the living images in Harry Potter, she had taken pics of her walking group and a waterfall and they were quite effective. As memory keeps getting cheaper, no doubt this sort of thing will become popular as it has much of the immediacy of still images. No doubt decent 3D is next, you only need a phone with a lens at each end.

Neil,...it's being suggested among serious and commercial stills photographers that short video clips will replace much still work in the next few years and this has already started with product launch work and the like....So, phone with lenses is right, plus holographic projection lens(es)

.

Henri Cartier Bresson will be turning in his grave !!

... But I suppose most of us would need to use a short video clip to do justice to that image.

MichaelG.

I got a 110 quid samsung phone for my work. Tried the "camera" video and it's amazing.

Full HD video, with sound, you can record one or two hours worth(or more, I can't remember) on a 32GB card and the whole package slips into a shirt pocket.

But will we be able to view that video clip in 50 years time? We can still appreciate Henri's efforts today just by opening a book.

My wife has just returned from Jessops with 800 odd 6x4 prints wittled down from the several thousand we took on our New Zealand jaunt (mine were mostly blurry pictures of birds tails). She will stick these photos, in both vertical and horizontal formats, in a traditional album and add annotations so that in the future we will know who, what and where we are looking at. Actually, we'd love to find an electronic version of this but, as far as I can tell, there is nothing available that has the flexibilty and cross platform functionality. She's on album 56 at present and we are running out of houseroom.

Rod

I just wiggled a mouse and pressed a few buttons and could enjoy hundreds of his images...

As for my 'holiday snaps' thanks to digital they and many of my old transparencies have been a valuable resource that has helped my career and hobbies in ways that my dog-eared old prints never could. I still have transparencies from a fortnight hillwalking in Scotland with one of my brothers taken nearly thirty years ago that I have never projected and only looked through once or twice. I must scan them, there's a whole series on Ben Eighe and the Grey Carls on a misty day for a start IIRC.

Neil

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This one, for instance

MichaelG.

.

P.S. [in case it wasn't obvious]

my earlier comment was meant as humble praise for H.C-B

Edited By Michael Gilligan on 02/06/2016 18:07:45

At risk of starting another hare, I fear the next big thing will be Climate Change. At least we will be able to photograph it.

Dave

Rod

Are all your photos on film? (if so you will need a scanner) but the most useful photo programme in my view is Adobe Lightroom - versions are available for both pc & mac. It is basically a way of storing and viewing digital images - it is in fact a database.( It can also make significant edits if required) Images are loaded into an "album" and tagged with date and any keywords that you chose to add and this info can be used to select ( for example) all those which you tagged "New Zealand" or, if you added a tag of "birds" it would extract all your pics of birds. ( tag "birds, New Zealand" it will extract all pics of birds taken in New Zealand) It has a built in slide show which can run sequences that you select. Any edits ( exposure, cropping, sharpness, colour correction etc) can be made easily and are non - destructive - i.e. they can be undone. Your original file always remains unaltered and the adjustments are added at the output - either to screen or file.

The programme is available for your desktop or, indeed, for your iPad, iPhone or Android.

Look it up on line - there are also many tutorials available.

The programme does interact seamlessly with Photoshop where more extreme ( and non - reversable) edits may be applied.

I could write a book about it (but several folk, far more knowledgeable than I, have already done so!) Have a look at:- www.adobe.com/Lightroom

Compared to the cost of printing 800+ 6x4 I think it will be a bargain.

Norman

Yes, I like LightRoom as well Norman. It's one of Adobes few progs you can buy rather than rent these days.

And that's the problem, the constant format change. JPEG was developed to minimise storage size, something which even now isn't an issue so the compromises of compression will no longer be necessary. I'm thinking of the issues I've had with video: Standard 8 to VHS to SVHS to Digital tape to whatever is contained in an AVI on SD cards. I can forsee a situation where "moving snaps" have their own format and in 50 years it will be "what have you got there grandad?, haven't seen one of these for 20 years". Still there are some advantages - presumably all those selfies won't survive the death of the phone they were taken on. Oh dear, I sound like a luddite - I'm really not, honest (though I did get a bit irritated trying to avoid the yard long selfie sticks in York last week)

Norman,

We've been digital since I decided that a 2 megapixel camera for £200 was the way forward. We edit with Photoshop Elements 10 which seems to do all we need. I see that one can get a free trial of Lightroom - I'll give it a go to see if it does what we want - it's the captioning that seems to be the major issue.

Cheers,

Rod

Lightroom is able to export to Photoshop elements to carry out manipulation then going to "save" from PSE will return the adjusted image to Lightroom where it will be filed alongside the original file. Unless you want to make dramatic changes in Ps I will bet that, after a while, you'll not go there!

If you like to show your images to others there is a Slideshow module included. you can drop any images from your catalogue there, adjust timings, fades, pan, zoom etc to produce a show.

Yes get the free trial and play with it - once you get the hang of the basics you will fly away I' m sure. Just remember Lightroom is wholly NON DESTRUCTIVE, - any changes you make can be undone and the original file is retained at all times.

Good luck!

Norman

You can convert jpegs to pdf documents if you want to, the format is pretty permanent now

Edited By Ady1 on 03/06/2016 00:54:22

G'day. Yesterday I inspected a friend's P.C. (he is not tech savvy).

Not only did it self-upgrade to Win 10 but the complaint was that Google Chrome (which he is comfortable with) has stopped working.

When I ran diagnostics, it was reported as an ' Incompatible Application'

A little further digging today discovered this: **LINK**

I suspect that this is deliberate so that M.S. can be paid for the 'clicks' in ads rather than Google.

Very naughty!

* Danny M *

They know if they get people onto the new software distribution model they've got customers (and revenue stream) for life.

Additionally some things which were in with Windows no longer are, Media Centre, DVD Player, probably other stuff, you either have to find something to do the job which W10 will run or visit the Windows app store and buy (Rent?) something to regain the functionality you had prior to "Upgrading"

- Nick