Mirrorless Cameras (MILC) and Lenses

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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You're talking about telephoto ranges and I'm thinking about standard ranges. A lot of the Z series primes under 200mm are 1.8s at best.
 

LunarMist

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You're talking about telephoto ranges and I'm thinking about standard ranges. A lot of the Z series primes under 200mm are 1.8s at best.
I would be using S*ny if the subjects are close enough for wides, normals or short teles, e.g, humans and domestic species. There are so many similar fast E mount lenses under 135mm that it is nuts.
 

Mercutio

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This morning, an acquaintance asked me to look at his iphone 14 Pro Max. 1TB model. It was full, with 880GB of 20 - 25 second long video clips that had been recorded in 4k. I had many questions.

The clips are recordings of him demonstrating dance moves. They are very short because those are the longest videos that can reliably be shared via SMS, the only other thing he knows how to do with that phone besides work the video recorder. The man at the Verizon store told him he'd never run out of space on that phone. He and his $1600 phone were also on the 5GB iCloud plan, meaning his phone hasn't had a backup since about five minutes after he recorded his first videos.

I asked him if he was aware that there's literally thousands of hours of dance instructions on Youtube. He was not. This guy is only about 32. He's known smartphones for basically his entire life.

Everything about seeing this just hurt my brain.
 

ddrueding

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It does seem like the increased accessibility of basic technology has led to some regression on computer knowledge in general. The reason I learned how to build/configure computers is because if you didn't know how you could do nothing. The projects I'm working on these days are not cutting edge, but younger people are reacting to it as if it is magic. Quite sad.
 

Mercutio

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Apple very specifically doesn't want send users to deal with the concept of files, let alone worry their pretty little heads about concepts like bitrates or formats. It just works if you send it to another Apple thing!
 

Chewy509

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It does seem like the increased accessibility of basic technology has led to some regression on computer knowledge in general.
Oh, so much this. A lot of time it's assumed knowledge, since kids have grown up with tech. But the tech they've grown up is Android and iOS/iPadOS, where the desktop/file/workspace concepts are largely mute and ignored.
I know when my kids started doing tech subjects at school, things like file management (or data management) was largely ignored in the syllabus. That was something I had to teach them, in addition to using a word processor, etc. The syllabus included using a lot of Cloud applications or "App" like applications where file management is pushed to the side, as it where.
 

Mercutio

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My almost 23 year old domestic partner will say with absolutely no sense of irony, that she grew up poor and therefore only had Android devices until she was able to buy Apple once she started earning an income. Her high school used Google for Education and Chromebooks as well, and to her credit, she DOES have a better idea of what things like file sizes and bit rates mean. Android and ChromeOS both treat a Downloads directory like a garbage heap, but at least users quickly become aware that a lot of things end up there.

Weirdly, this really does tie in to posts about cameras, because so, so, so many people don't understand what they're doing, even with their phones. "It can't be that big. It's only 20 seconds long!" This is what we will increasingly encounter.
 

LunarMist

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I have no idea what is WizTree, but am pretty sure it is not necessary to take photos or store images. Maybe it is necessary for online submissions, but when the internet shuts down or changes to something else, all that will be gone. Archival prints will survive longer than all the digital nonsense.
 

ddrueding

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WizTree is a free program you can install on your computer. It provides an easy to understand visual representation of the relative size of folders and their contents. It can also be downloaded in "portable" form where it doesn't need to be installed and can run direct from a thumbdrive or other location. I've attached a screenshot of it's analysis of the drive in my gaming computer. You can see that the main consumers are games, and their relative size. The hibernation file also jumps out at you.

I referenced it in this thread as part of the conversation relating to young'uns and their ignorance of file systems.
 

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LunarMist

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The cheapie 180-600 Nikkor is shipping soon. I'm getting a 200-600 S*ny for July and hope to do some testing in the Augustus timeframe. I'm not expecting the edges and corners of such a cheap Nikkor lens to be very good. We'll see if it passses the giraffe tests.
 

Mercutio

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WizTree is a free program you can install on your computer. It provides an easy to understand visual representation of the relative size of folders and their contents.

My go-to for this purpose is SpaceSniffer. Wiztree works faster, but I like that Space sniffer displays everything in the context of a single window representing the source drive or folder.

Also: Seeing the sizes of games on dd's PC makes me glad I'm not a gamer.
 

LunarMist

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The RAW files must be on another drive. All I noticed was video games???
 

LunarMist

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I only have about 147,485 RAW files currently in the computer with those and many more on the NAds.
According to the Wiztrees, there are 89.5% CR3, 4.0% CR2, 2.7% TIF, 0.9% or less of others. Those are just WIP though and will vary massively as they are deleted and replaced with others. I only have the two 12TB SSD arrays, but may expand with another 16TB SATA later.

Is there some way to export the file percentages? The export CSV is not doing anything useful.

GHC
 

ddrueding

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I haven't tried any of the data export stuff. Usually I just look at it once a month or so to make sure there isn't anything crazy going on.
 

ddrueding

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The last crazy thing I had happen was Dropbox suddenly decide to change from "online mode" to "sync everything locally" on my laptop. Didn't notice until my free space was gone. This is a really useful type of tool to identify such things quickly.
 

LunarMist

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I think I remember that virus a few years ago. I try to keep mainly offline with an important computer.
I suppose you have a relatively small number of image files, under 50 TB?
 

LunarMist

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I thought about those, but decided it is too small and too slow. Maybe if there were multiple ports and link aggravation.
For now I'm upgrading some of the internal SSDs from 24.5 to 41GB. Maybe in 2025 I will build with 64 internally and then NAS will be a different flow.
 

LunarMist

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How much does the network interface slow down the output compared to the CPU? Will the IOpops performance be worse than a single NVMe?
 

LunarMist

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SSDs should be good for five years or are you assuming that hard drives last longer based on historical data?
I assumed that the Heliums are better than ambient atmospheric drives, but there still can be mechanical problems from being idled for years.
 

ddrueding

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Just be aware of the data retention limits of whatever flash memory you use. Unlike magnetic media, flash will lose data integrity over a much shorter time frame.
I'm not sure this is a practical limitation for NAS-like applications these days. Probably hasn't been for a couple years. And my tech habit will have me upgrading again within 5 years anyway.
 

LunarMist

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Capacity in any 5-year period will increase substantially. Unfortunately we may be stuck with the stupid M.2 for a long while in client systems.
 

ddrueding

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I don't have any issues with M.2 as a form factor. The form factor beats 2.5 or 3.5" SSDs in every measurable way. Higher density, easier to manage interface, easy to cool, could be easy to install/remove depending on the housing. Using PCIe lanes as the protocol makes a lot of sense, and the speeds available are plenty.
Sure, I'd like enterprise-grade units at larger capacities and lower prices and it would also be nice to have a hot-swappable chassis for some applications, but that seems to just be an OEM thing?
 

LunarMist

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The M.2 capacity sucks and the fact that 4 PCIe lanes are needed per M.SSD limits quantity use to devices with lots of lanes. Otherwise switching or bifrucation is used and then performance is weak. It's a huge problem in the MAC land too.
 

Mercutio

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The M.2 capacity sucks and the fact that 4 PCIe lanes are needed per M.SSD limits quantity use to devices with lots of lanes. Otherwise switching or bifrucation is used and then performance is weak. It's a huge problem in the MAC land too.

You can absolutely move to U.2/U.3s HBA to get a high endurance/high capacity disk interface if you feel the need. The reasons for doing so now are very similar to the reasons SCSI was an option 25 years ago. Such HBAs do not require bifurcation support, and there's nothing wrong with using plain old software RAID to handle volume management if you want it.
 

LunarMist

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Sure that is a good analogy, but it shouldn't be that difficult in the 2020s. I can plug a 20TB HDD into practically any mainboard.
 

Mercutio

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It's not that difficult? The addin board runs $3 - 500 and unless they update the u.3 spec again, it's portable to whatever PC you need it to be in. It's acceptable to get access to the 16TB Enterprise SSDs that aren't being made with quality NAND in consumer space.
 

Mercutio

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Basically the same thing. I don't actually want the HBA doing RAID calculations. I'm perfectly happy to let software do all the RAID calculations and use something that's well understood and portable to other hardware without needing an extra $900 controller. Plus it gives a couple of the 48 cores in my CPU something useful to do.
 

LunarMist

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What software does RAID 6 in Windows? Don't you need the Server for that and then the Server doesn't support normal stuff.
 

Mercutio

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You use Storage Spaces using ReFS, something that's available with Windows Server. You can create a double-parity volume using a pool of seven drives minimum (plus a cache tier if you want faster drives for that). Storage spaces are kind of weird because there are fewer tunable parameters than you'd see with ZFS, but you can also do goofy things like set up quadruple parity if that's something you really feel like doing. It's also much easier to grow the size of a Storage pool than a RAIDZ array, but at the same time, a lot of Storage Spaces operations can only be done with Powershell and a lot of things aren't as well documented as most other aspects of Windows. I suspect that's companies that rely on that tech figure out a recipe that works for their specific need and don't really communicate that outside their organization.

Windows Server works fine as a desktop OS and I've been doing that for decades. There's no Windows Store, so for example the Phone Link app doesn't work. It doesn't support bluetooth out of the box nor a lot of consumer-grade NICs or graphics hardware (Intel for example doesn't provide a functional Iris graphics driver; the generic video driver Microsoft offers will make a panel do 1080p but not accelerate video playback). You can either edit the .INF files to install drivers for Windows 10 or 11 if you want to use common hardware or buy a nicer NIC and GPU and go from there. Bluetooth is trivial to get working as well.
 

LunarMist

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At my level the RAID card would be cheaper. For now, I'm making an extra array.

Meanwhile I have an A7RV and 200-600. The files are large (~80MB ARW or 344MB TIFF), but the camera is slow. DXO is the only decent software I have for it. BreezeBrowser doesn't show a full-sized jpeg; it's something about the format.
 

LunarMist

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That's too shady for the OS. I'm not doing anything more now anyway. The next deadline is about two years on Windows 10.
There are too many uncertainties in the cameras, software and opportunities. Who knows, I may buy a MAC by then.
 
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