Given the level of photographic interest here, I thought for sure I'd have seen a post about Aperture in the past couple of weeks. But nada.

Anyone else have a good look through the press/presentations and think it just seems to do quite a lot in a very tight and focused application? It surprised me that Apple would have gone this route, but it sure is an application that's been lacking. Perhaps professionals already have a decent workflow I don't know about, but I can see myself not ever using Photoshop for standard digital photography chores. It's still one of the king for detailed effect manipulation and compositing, but the non-destructive nature of Aperture and its integrated management are sure to be a big hit.

After viewing the online video demonstrations I'm still curious to see more of its management side. I already know a number of the strengths that come with software like iView Multimedia Pro (Mac and Windows) and Photools' iMatch (Windows only - and cannot be "matched" for price by anyone else). Lately we've seen players like ACDSystems integrating more and more features into what used to be quite streamlined applications (in their case, ACDSee). But often what consumers end up with is a solution that's more muddy than desired if not downright horrible - possibly losing the charms the software once had and making a previous workflow tedious or confusing. Adobe for instance has been both here and there with their line-up. Still in need of some major revisions across the board and better consistency between applications.

And in other news, it looks like Nikon is about to unwrap their long-awaited, much rumoured, D200. A camera I've been waiting to see since about 5 minutes after they announced their D100 in 2001. Thanks to a number of web-based slip-ups by Nikon offices around the world, a number of details have come out which corroborate some rumours and completely dash others. With a street price of $1600 it's looking pretty attractive and could end up being my long-awaited SLR (I've been "planning" on and off to get a Nikon SLR since the bloody F90x (n90x in the US)). My ideal would be all the features of the D2X in a body the size of the Pentax *ist for under $2000US. Since I can't have that, let's see what D200 finally brings to the table.

Bruno

I watched all of the Aperture tour videos as soon as they were posted, and If I was a pro photographer I'd be plopping down the cash for a quad G5 and Aperture right now. As it stands I'm using iView Media Pro to manage my fairly large photo collection, and it works well, but is a bit rough around the edges. I'd love to drop Aperture on my Powerbook and see how it runs, especially since I don't have any RAW images and a majority of my shots are under 3 MP old stuff and scans. I bet it'd work well. The editing features of iView are really lacking, but the management side is decent and flexible. And give me anything but iPhoto... wrech. I had a play with Photo Booth today... what a waste of 15 minutes that was. It's one of those ooh ahh apps that people will use once then forget about it.

For a 1.0 product... Aperture looks really mature. Does anyone know if it was written from scratch or did they buy up someone's starter code?

Aperture looks very cool -- it has always irked me that "Photo"shop is not very well designed for photographers. Hopefully some mainstream competition will nudge them into improving the beast a little more quickly.

As for the Nikon D200, looks great -- if I didn't already have so much good Canon glass here, I'd probably get one.

Cheers

Aperture is very attractive to me, although I've been using a combination of Photoshop CS (for raw conversion and touch-up) and Google Picasa (for bulk adjustments, management, previewing) that gets me 99% of the way there, and doesn't require exotic hardware support. I'm very curious whether Nikon will add extra juice to the next rev of Photoshop to compete.

The Nikon D200, at least what we've seen of it, is very cool but I'm not entirely certain if I want it. The decision for me comes down to (a) how good its autofocus system is and (b) how good its high-ISO performance is. The extra resolution is largely irrelevant. We know it has an 11-segment autofocus system, but we have no idea how well it works in low light or whether it tracks action as well as the D2h/D2x autofocus. Likewise, we know absolutely nothing yet about the high-ISO performance of the sensor. So, until the proper DPReview comes out, I'll be holding back on that particular decision.

I'd imagine all that horsepower is needed if you want to wang around lots of RAW images, but if you are doing 4 MP or less JPGs... I bet a Powerbook would handle it. Won't know 'til we try...

I want that D2X. I have the D2H and considering trading in for the X. I especially like the 2X cropped format on the X at 8 FPS for wildlife and sports shooting. Makes a 400F2.8 into an 800F2.8 (except for the DOF).

As to the 200. If it's what it looks like, it will be nice.

Ken Rockwell D200 link

I'm certainly looking forward to trying out Aperture. It seems like an amazing tool for anyone seriously interested in digital photography. The nondestructive editing and versioning is amazing, and if it's half as usable as it seems from the demos it'll be a great product.

As to the specs, as Loren says, as long as you aren't working with 10+ megapixel raw files, you probably won't need all that horsepower. While microsoft claims XP runs on a 233mhz PII with 64MB of Ram, they're in the bussiness of selling software. Apple, on the other hand is in the bussiness of selling hardware - Aperture is most likely a loss leader mainly put out to get people to buy power macs.

Matthew

I understood that ... it is the 8 fps I want with the 2X. I do understand the shuttling around of the bits and that is all the camera can handle and the reason for the 2X. It is essentially 2X (let's say digital zoom) but I like the idea. Best of both worlds. When I shoot for speed, I am using the telephotos (either the 300 f2.8 or the 400 f2.8) . The 600 max aperture of f4 is a killer for me with the greater DOF and loss of low light flexibility especially shooting night high speed sporting events. The 6.8 mps are fine for me especially with good glass.

I've shot the D2X (a friend of mines) and it is flexible. The cropped "image" shows up in the viewfinder and is great for sports since you can see out of frame action which helps anticipate the shot better. The 8 fps virtually assures the best frame possible (soccer excepted due to the speed of the ball).

We have Aperture at work right now. I'll see if anyone in the lab has installed it on a PowerBook yet.

And as far as it being a loss-leader... at $500 and with the sales it will probably make, I don't think Apple will be losing any money with it.

Okay, the D200 is now absolutely official:

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0511/05110104nikond200.asp

Still no sample pictures anywhere, but it looks very attractive, indeed. The only painful part is that raw files are now 15+MB (versus 5MB on the D70). That means I'd have to go out and buy a much larger memory card (versus my current 1GB that holds 178 pictures).

Perhaps even more impressive is the new 18-200 lens, which claims its vibration reduction damps four stops worth of camera shake. So, if I can normally hand-hold 1/30 of a second, then I should, in theory now, be able to hand-hold 1/2 a second. If that really works, its amazing.

What that would mean: all the dancing / jazz music work I do indoors, at night, has required either a tripod or a flash. (I like longer exposures so I can get some motion blur from the subjects of my pictures.) Now, I can theoretically ditch the tripod and still have way more depth of field than I could otherwise get by using a bright prime lens. Hmm....

(Check out my pictures from Sunday night to get an idea of what I'm talking about.)

http://www.cs.rice.edu/~dwallach/photo/ruffins-hsds2005/pages/DSC_7244.html

awesome.

My wife shoots with the D70 and it is so convenient, I use it for fun shots. The 18-200 DX is my next lens. I can sell my 17-35 (nonDX) and my 28-70 (nonDX). I bought the 200-400 F4 VR but I was a little disappointed in it for my application. I was hoping I could sub it for the 400 F2.8 (just to reduce the bulk and weight) but it is just too slow on the shutter speed to freeze the action under most stadium lights.

I wish I could use the Mac OS. I bouth one of those miniMac and have just never gotten into it. It just sits there now.

One of these days, maybe when my daughter is old enough to be playing sports, I'll find some kind of remote justification for purchasing an exotic telephoto lens. Perhaps more likely, I'll rent one for a weekend here and there.

Quote:
I'll find some kind of remote justification for purchasing an exotic telephoto lens

You won't have to. In the long run, the optics and resolution will advance to the point where you never have to change lenses. Check out the CoolPix 8800. Moore's law applied to cameras. They seem to be pretty close now with component pieces. Shrink the sensor while increasing the resolution while holding the noise down. Then SLRs will be obsolete. No more worries about dust on the sensor, completely water proof to 100m and 8 fps all for $500.

Ah, shoot some wildlife. Telephoto is a must have. Renting every now and then works for a while, but rent too much, and you might as well have bought the thing in the first place. I rented a wide-angle lens for a trip to Costa Rica -- well worth the money, though I didn't get as much use of it as I'd have liked.

The last D-SLR with a Foveon chip was the Sigma SD10, announced two years ago. The previous SD9 was announced a year earlier (late 2002). I don't know what's slowing down the release of a successor, but maybe Foveon is having trouble fabbing their chips. I'd imagine it's far easier to fabricate the Bayer-pattern sensors. So long as the resulting image is beautiful, do you really care how it got that way?

Sigma got some kind of exclusive deal with Foveon. If and when Sigma announces a newer body using a standard CCD or CMOS sensor, that will tell you pretty everything you need to know about Foveon's future.

Here's an interesting review.

Yeah, I've given up hope on the Foveon getting anywhere. It's sad, really, because the technology is, IMHO, far superior -- or, rather, it could be, if it was allocated the same amount of development dollars that are pouring into CMOS and CCD development.

Quote:
So long as the resulting image is beautiful, do you really care how it got that way?

No, I suppose not. It's just that the geek in me is disturbed by the way CCD and CMOS have to do the sampling to get the final image -- I could be getting even more beautiful pictures.

I played with Aperture yesterday afternoon on a 1.4GHz iBook. I didn't have the time to install the OS update required for Aperture on a PowerBook. I meant to give the G5 a whirl but didn't get to it. Maybe tomorrow.

It was somewhat usable, but I found a number of oddities that caused the cursor to perform in an erratic manner. It was the first time I'd touched that particular machine, so it may have had a dodge touch pad or I may have just been seeing problems/bugs in Aperture. I did get it to produce a couple of error dialogs with an options to report the bug - it didn't crash/hang though.

Something a bit faster than the iBook would be nice. I don't know how much performance will increase with better graphics (such as in a PowerBook), so I'll eventually have to give that a whirl as well. The biggest sore spot with the test iBook was resolution. 1024x768 is NOT (not anywhere close) enough resolution to run the Aperture interface. Unfortunately I don't think the 1280x854 resolution of PowerBooks previous to the current generation will be high enough either.

All of Apple's lovely screen shots and demos were created with the application presented on a 30" Cinema HD. You're not likely to find a better monitor to run this program to tell you the truth. It has a good balance of screen real-estate while still producing a pixel-pitch large enough to render the text at a readable size (Apple has yet to allow resolution-independent GUI rendering to be controlled by the end-user - though the foundation for such technology was introduced with the first Tiger release).

I also didn't have manual handy and while perhaps not as complicated as Photoshop, it was a bit of a shock jumping into it. I've been using Photoshop for so long that I just find it second nature, so jumping into Aperture I know what PS newbs feel like. Anyone familiar with Apple's other Pro tools will have an easier time navigating the interface.

I miss not having some type of status bar that immediately tells me what my pointer is hovering over. Not all their icons are as descriptive as the could/should be - and pop-up tooltips seemed to be hit or miss (sometimes coming up, other times not, sometimes having to wait too long to see them).

I couldn't figure out how to get the light table view while in full screen and I couldn't get the Book layout thing to work at all (just gave me a BEEP and wouldn't show the layouts).

I don't know the date of the version we've got in the office but it must not be the final yet. Looks very promising though and it will definitely replace Photoshop for some parts of a user's workflow. Perhaps all parts for some people.

Bruno

Were did you get the size for the RAW images? You did notice that it support both uncompressed AND compressed RAW, right?

But if you're going to look for larger capacity cards anywway, take a look at the Ridata cards (http://www.powerinnumbers.com.au) - I've bought from those guys 3 times in the past and they used tohave the best prices around for what were (are) arguably the best CF cards on the market.

I was actually hoping the D200 would support both CF and SD at the same time and spill over from one carrd to the other. Perhaps allowing you to choose your primary card. Large and fast SD cards are quite affordable now.

Bruno

Quote:
Because the sensors are so much smaller on the non-DSLRs the noise is always going to much higher that a DSLR of the same generation.

So are you saying sensor development and/or noise reduction is completely evolved to the theoretical limit? I honestly don't know but my point was "in the long run" and not trying to suggest the 8800 was the "long run" arrived today.

What if Nikon was to package a stripped down D2X body (including the D2X sensor) with the 18-200 VR DX? With the 1.5 sensor factor, the 18-200 is "like" a 27-300 (35mm). Now with the D2X cropping feature of 2X, you have a self-contained camera capable of 600mm (35mm equivalent) f5.6. Obviously, that's not going to cost $500 but you get the idea. Package it with built-in wireless and a 2 gb internal flash memory and it could be completely sealed up. Did I miss something?

The new 18-200 VR DX lens already takes into account the 1.5 crop factor. It's a DX lens.

What you describe won't happen any time soon. Just look at digital camera development, deployment and marketing over the past 10 years. The camera you describe isn't something widely required/desired by the mass-market anyway. And for a Pro, buying a D2X at current prices is a no brainer already.

Likely more important, look at glass/lens development and marketing over the past 10-20 years. Nikon is in the business of making money, not giving away freebies. Good glass has not dropped through the floor in price.

And yes, the lenses on Nikon's compact 8000 series (such as the E5700 I have) are phenomenal for their size. But they're no 17-55 2.8.

Moore's law has already slowed in CPUs, and I don't think it's generally applied to Digital cameras anyway - not in terms of MP count anyway. Consumers are generally looking for larger sensors, both for both better light distribution and to take better advantage of existing lenses. When it all boils down you still have to get light to the sensor. Bigger lens = more light. You're not going to see a micro-lens on a cell phone rival a a super-high-quality f1.2 135 format any time soon. It's likely you'll never see any such thing. At least not made of glass.

Anyway, if I were Nikon I'd be worrying about margins. The consumer, amateur and pro product model seems like a good one to keep moving forward. The models available to consumers today are a lot better than the film cameras available to the same segment in the past 20 years.

If they could squeeze better quality into a much smaller package they'd be doing it. They'd also be squeezing higher quality into today's larger models. But it's expensive to make the high quality sensors and the technology just isn't there. Smaller = hotter = less available light = noisier. Smaller diameter lens equals less light as well, which also reduces your focal distance unless you want an ultra-slow lens. Compensate with the smaller sensor and you're stuck again with noise/crappy images.

The 8800 is a decent balance, but it's still using the same ultra-garbage Sony 8MP sensor its predecessor used, isn't it? The 8700 was atrocious as was every other 8MP compact body using the same sensor (Sony, Canon, Minolta, etc..) None of them were worth giving up the E5700 for. The 8800 was "close" but I could hear the call of the SLR. You see, I for one would prefer an SLR to an SLRish compact. That wasn't the case when I originally picked up the 5700, but now a D200 with a pocket-size Canon SD550 would be an ideal match. You don't have to limit yourself to one camera. I only know one person who wears the same clothes for example, Steve Jobs, but even he agrees there should be more than one model/form factor of Mac.

Bruno

Quote:
The new 18-200 VR DX lens already takes into account the 1.5 crop factor. It's a DX lens.

The 18-200 VRDX like all DX lenses do not factor in the 1.5 factor. DX simply (not really simple) means the lens cannot fill full frame sensors (as in film cameras in Nikon's case). From Nikon's site

Quote:
"Offers broad 18 - 200mm focal range for use in a variety of situations (equivalent to a 27-300 lens in 35mm format) ".

Digital SLRs all suffer from one major problem which is exposure to the atmosphere of the sensor. This is not insignificant. Low noise sensors do you very little good when on a windy day in the field, you need to change lenses and you get dust on the sensor. You download your pics for review and you have big dust blobs in the sky. Then it's back to Nikon for a cleaning.

As to Nikon's margins, who cares except Nikon? I think someone will make this camera (the aperture/sensor size will have to be thought out as pros will not accept less than F2.8) because there will be a demand for it simply due to price and more importantly size. Lug around a 400 f2.8 and you will see what I mean.

The D3X is purported to be out next September with total speculation of a retention of the sensor size (obviously) and 16 MP. With more MP available, the photographer can afford to carry smaller cameras as they have more to play with when they crop.

Hmmm.... This got me to thinking. Build a 50 MP camera and just shoot everything with a 18-100 DXVR and make Photoshop your telephoto.

This got me thinking even more, I ought to sell my D2H, 400 F2.8, 300 f2.8 and 200-400 F4 and just buy the D2X with a 70-200 F2.8 VR. Comments?

Here's where the "market" goes: http://www.dpreview.com/news/0511/05110201sharp10mp.asp

Smaller and noisier.

Sorry, I must have had a brain freeze with regards to the 18-200 DX. For a second I thought you were implying that it was an 18-200 in 135 format and the DX sensor would treat it as 27-300. DX lenses, unlike other (including older) Nikkors, are already labeled for the DX sensor.

You let me know how things go trying to retrofit a PhaseOne back onto that D2H.

Bruno

You have to think that the last thing Sharp wants, in terms of publicity, is DPReview saying:

Quote:
We always kind of hope that the next compact sensor announcement will have some real innovation like higher sensitivity and lower noise but it appears as though market forces just want 'more megapixels'.

Certainly, for 4x6 prints, the Nikon 5900 I got for my wife (5 megapixels) is more than sufficient. That's a great little camera for an entirely reasonable price. Now, if they did one that went happily to ISO3200 and could focus in candlelight, that would be a real upgrade that I'd pay for.

I'm a little out of my depth here, but unless I misunderstand you, I think you're ignoring the fact that if they have better tech to put into an SLR-lite package, that tech exists to be put into a real SLR as well. And people aren't paying several times as much for SLRs now just because they have too many hundred dollar bills to fit in their wallets.

Also, in regard to the sensor being exposed, there's no reason a future SLR body couldn't have a shield that comes down when changing the lens.

Fixed-lens digital cameras have several interesting advantages over interchangeable lens cameras. For starters, there's no particular constraint on the size of the sensor. Smaller sensors can use smaller lenses, and thus the whole package gets smaller and lighter. Furthermore, because the whole system is sealed, dust is just never an issue. And, on top of all that, when you're willing to go with an electronic viewfinder or a rangefinder system (i.e., get rid of the single-lens-reflex mirror and pentaprism), you can go with different styles of lens designs than allow the rear objective of the lens to be closer to the sensor (*).

All of that said, there are still fundamental advantages to interchangeable lenses. No all-in-one zoom lens can ever offer all of the qualities that can be found in more specialized (and expensive) lenses. And, for that reason alone, interchangeable lenses will be here to stay for a long time. An interesting question is what happens when the high-end integrated-lens cameras intersect in price with the low-end D-SLRs. I'll argue that D-SLRs win, not because they're necessarily any better at taking pictures, but because it's easier to sell somebody on future expandability (of which they may never take any advantage). Also, at least today, the D-SLRs just go faster, addressing probably the biggest complaint with other digital cameras.

(*) However, where film is pretty must just as sensitive to light coming in at an angle versus straight up-and-down, digital sensors are more particular about the angle of incidence. This is a real problem with the Epson R-D1 (basically, a Leica M-body compatible digital camera using the Sony 6MP sensor that's used in many D-SLRs). Because rangefinder lenses mount closer to the film plane, the angle of incidence at the corners is higher and, as a direct result, the R-D1 has problems with darker corners when using some wider-angle lenses.

I don't think the shield thing is really a complete answer in that the "body" must be exposed when changing the lenses mainly due to protrusion of the lens into the body. Once dust is in the body, it is disturbed by the mirror action, etc and the charges applied to the sensor attract the dust. High humidity can actually "weld" it to the sensor. There is in essence a shield (although incomplete) currently in place in the form of the mirror. If people are considering buying a digital SLR with interchangable lenses, do not ignore this as it can be enormously frustrating. if you get even minute dust "threads" or fibers on the sensor, it can require extensive work in Photoshop. One can minimize the effect by shooting with as large an aperture as possible which will not bring the dust into focus. I have cleaned sensors before and it is nerve-wracking (or is it nerve-racking). Actually with a Nikon, there is a clear protective shield on the top of the sensor but it still attracts dust. I take every precaution I can to keep it from happening short of never changing lenses (which would kind of defeat the purpose of the camera design).

I not trying to ignore that current "real" SLRs are better than SLR-lites at all. In fact, that is exactly why people pay more for them. However, if you accept an extension (and I don't think it is that big a step) of Moore's law since it largely involves the minaturization of electronics, tomorrow's SLR-lite (selfcontained) will be where today's real SLR (with interchangable lenses) is which will be moore (spelling pun intended) than acceptable for DWallach to shoot a picture of his daughter at night under stadium lights without renting or buying a $7000 lens.

I think the technology is there today if it was repackaged. Now taking Hybrid8's point of Nikon's margins and how such a camera would cut their own profit. He is correct that Nikon has no motivation. There is, however, no such restriction on say FujiFilm, which manufactures SLR bodies only (in the pro class) that use Nikon lenses, from duplicating in a selfcontained package what 98% of pros shoot in a interchangable lens system. Now if you are a professional photographer or advanced amateur, would you rather lug around 30 lbs of gear or 5 lbs?

All that being said, I got to thinking about noise levels at high ISOs. Try pushing ASA800 film to 1600 for low light applications and look at the "noise". Here is link about preceived noise levels in actual practice.

Moore's law has failed in the digital camera development/marketing cycle. Time and time again. Digital camera technology available to the consumer (therefore at "consumer" prices) has just not advanced as a whole at a rate equivalent to (for example) desktop hard drive size/deployment, desktop/mobile processor speeds, etc.

There's a lot more to a digital camera than a mere sensor. And in fact the whole ball of wax, even though it's becoming somewhat of a commodity market in a number of respects, is much more than a sum of the whole (whole bill of materials anyway). A lot can be done to improve all-in-one as well as DSLR cameras with technology that exists today. I can argue that a lot more could have been done each and every year over the past 6 beyond what WAS done. But, for one reason or other, it wasn't. Perhaps it was a matter of market acceptance/timing. Who knows.

To make a rather open statement such as "at some point in the not so distant future we'll be using compact cameras that rival more complex and expensive systems currently in use today" is rather useless. That's a simple economic fact that has been proven time and time again in countless industries. Now if you can pin-point an exact date and conceive of a specific solution, then you may have a chance to make quite a bit of money. There's always some under-serving going on in all markets.

I think the most important point I want to make is that there wil always be room for bigger and better. That means when you think you've got the killer all-in-one, someone else will have the super-WMD bad-ass discrete that's even better. The best technology is always going to be the bleeding edge. It's always going to be the new development that companies have yet to recoup their investments on. Such technology is going to appear first in higher end gear first, regardless of where the bar is to mark that high-end point.

So you show me the $500 camera that's as good or better than today's US$8000 Canon SLR and I'll show you a $5000 camera that's an order of magnitude (or a couple) better than that. Just let's not get anyone expecting to see that in the next two years because if past camera development and marketing efforts are any example, it's just not going to happen.

Hey, power to technology. I want one of those future small cameras. Of course I also want the big sh*t-kicker I can use to clobber any would-be burglars.

Bruno