Marco Jardim

He didn’t mention the NEX 7 in his alternative camera choices, nor did I compare the two. I honestly have no idea where you picked up the NEX7 from.

Personally I don’t care much for the NEX system until the lens selection improves. As soon as I realized the discrepancy between the NEX and M4/3 lenses the choice obvious to me.

I’m sorry but you are completely wrong.

While there may be an individual aspect about any of the cameras you mentioned that might make them attractive to some people, be it the lens-selection, the price or some functionality that might be better, compared to the X-Pro1, none of them perform equivalently to the X-Pro1.

If you did compare the images, all around, on DPreview, and you couldn’t realize that the X-Pro1 was significantly better than most of the examples you mentioned, then it definitely isn’t the camera for you, and I’m quite sure you’d be content with any of the options you mentioned.

It is superb, you won’t find any reviews that contest that. It’s other things that drag the camera down. Mainly the auto-focus and the comparatively-expensive lens system.

If you had ever used one you’d see that that is not the case but please keep holding on to that myth. Even the iPhone 4S can get a decent DOF nowadays, you’re talking about photography technology as if it remained stagnant for many years, and that couldn’t be further from the truth.

I’m not saying that by any means you don’t make any compromises when you pick a camera with a smaller sensor, but DOF with the lens available to M4/3 users is not an issue.

What happened to it?

I pre-ordered the silver model, which is still out-of-stock in Europe, but I have to say my twitchy fingers are feeling tempted to pickup the black one… the wait is almost unbearable.

I also have the Panasonic Lumix 20mm f1.7 behind me… which together with the E-M5 should make a, pardon the term, pretty eyegasmic shooting experience.

I think that what will happen is that we’ll get a new maps application, Siri will probably see some improvements, and most other features will be small tweaks.

That along with the new design for the phone, if there is one, will be the main features I think.

…and a small team of lawyers went home happy that day. The end.

I think this is the first Android device I’ve ever seen that made me give an uncontested “wow”. It looks really really nice, without having to chop off other devices’ design. If I were to pick an Android device today in Japan (or whenever they go on sale), I think it most certainly would be that one.

I just hope that Mojang’s story doesn’t end up in some variation of “Where are they now?” in the upcoming years as I feel there is a feeling behind their work that shows that they are genuinely trying to help drive the industry forward, and try things that others wouldn’t be financially comfortable in doing.

Seems quite nice. I wasn’t aware of that option, nor had I ever heard of it. Reminds me of the first edition Playstation rush, to try to get hands-on with a great audiophile CD player.

I don’t know how the 5N performs in terms of video-recording, but the NEX 7 has been well-touted as one of the best compact bodies available for video. That may or not be true, I’m not certain because I’m not familiar with what types of functions you need for video-recording, so I’m merely echoing what I’ve heard.

Fuji’s X10 and X100 and some of the Canon higher-end point-and-shoots are the obvious choices.

If you want something that will be a better long-term investment, you should look into the Sony NEX cameras or the Micro 4/3rds ones. Right now there are a lot of great deals on M4/3rds cameras, and plenty of lenses available, and Sony’s cameras provide excellent video recording, and the lens selection, while not amazing, has enough variety to suit your needs.

Like someone before me mentioned, they’re very different cameras. Which one you should choose, depends on what you intend to do with it. If you want to have a high-quality viewfinder camera that is portable but gives you decent control over your photos, the X100 is a nice choice.

If you want to build a system around a camera, the X100 is a terrible choice. What you get when you open the box, is pretty much all it will ever be. With the NEX you have the option of buying many different lenses for different purposes, making it a multi-purpose device, whose body you can upgrade every few years to get more image quality, while maintaining the rest of your equipment. That, along with it’s image quality, are the main appeals of the NEX 5N.

Personally, I wouldn’t build a system around the NEX e-mount system, unless I intended on shooting video more often, because the NEX cameras are quite good at video recording. I would instead go Micro 4/3rds (in fact, I did).

But if you want a high-quality portable camera without interchangeable lenses, the X100 is pretty much uncontested in it’s price-range.

I have a pretty humble setup…

An Nvidia 9600gt,
1.6ghz Core 2 Duo processor,
4GB RAM (Dual-Channel)
a 1TB Samsung HDD

I plan on doing a major upgrade, but only after the next console cycle comes along.

Yes, I was referring to the Carl Zeiss 1.8, I wouldn’t really touch Sony’s 50mm unless my budget didn’t allow me to pick the CZ one.

I know they did. But if they acquired a lot of experience in building high-quality glass, they have yet to show it with their e-mount lenses.

I apologize for the horrible english above. It’s not my mother language, but I obviously need to drink something highly caffeinated.

There’s about as much flexibility in terms of lenses between Micro 4/3 systems and full-frame DSLRs. The main differences are size speed, and depending on what camera you pick, you might get better low-light performance (if you pick certain Nikons), and better performance on fast-moving objects.

Unless you shoot high-speed sports, you won’t compromise a lot if you go Micro 4/3rds unless you’re willing to invest over $3000 on a camera body. But for $3000 you can have a really really nice system built around an M4/3 camera.

As for the NEX lenses, the main issue with them is that most of them have built-in lens stabilization in each lens. With the price of that small engine in consideration, and Sony’s comparatively lack of experience in building high-quality glass, you get a combination that simply isn’t doesn’t stand out in any relevant way.

The camera itself, the body is great. The lens selection isn’t great, and even with the leaked lens-release schedule that is online, that situation won’t change drastically any time soon.

You have some options for lenses in Micro 4/3 that you can’t get in Sony’s entire lens lineup, regardless of how much you want to pay. And Micro 4/3rds best lenses can easily equal or top Sony’s best lenses, and they cost less, significantly less.

The advantages you have with a Sony NEX compared to most Micro 4/3rds are: better video recording options (useful if you’re going to anything above amateur recordings), better low-light sensitivity (at least with the NEX 5N, which is awesome in that regard).

However, given that most of the Sony lenses are slow ones, there’s only one below f2.0, if they didn’t perform better in low light they’d be pretty shitty cameras, considering how slow most of their lenses are when compared to other company’s offerings.

Another small “negative” about the NEX cameras, is that despite having really small bodies, most of the lenses are big. Almost as big as the offerings of the more traditional DSLRs so it’s a bit idiosyncratic in that regard. Part of that is because of the sensor size, which is bigger than Micro 4/3 sensors, but also another part of it is that some lenses have built-in stabilizers, because the bodies don’t have them. On the other hand, some Micro 4/3 cameras have stabilizers in the body of the camera, so you have lighter and cheaper lenses than on Sony’s system.

1. What is your Minecraft player name?
whitehawk

2. Why do you want to join Vergecraft?
I’m looking to join a higher-populated server, as previously I only played multiplayer with half a dozen friends
3. What servers have you played on in the past?
Only a couple of small private servers with friends/acquaintances

4. What do you want to work on / build in Vergecraft?
I usually find myself building things around the elements available in the world. If there are mountains, or ridges, or valleys, what I build is usually revolved around them.

5. Anything else you’d like us to know.
I just hope we can have some fun and I hope I can interact a bit more with one of the better online communities right now

I wouldn’t say buying used lenses is better , but it can be considerably more affordable. I do recommend however, for anyone considering buying used-lenses to try to do the trade in person.

Personally, I’d rather spend a bit more and have a perfectly capable piece of glass, than spending a little less and ending up with a perfectly useless one.

With the amount of money you have available, I think the Sony NEX 5N is the best value-for-money you can get. However, right now the selection of lenses available for the NEX system is a bit underwhelming.

There is one, really great, crisp and considerably fast lens, which is the Carl Zeiss 50mm 1.8, that takes astonishing pictures. If I was going to get into the NEX system, I would not do so without putting money aside for one. But given how forbidding its price is (over $1000), I’m not sure if it’s a good option for you.

My recommendation for you, if you want to move into something better than a Point-and-shoot, and looking at compact cameras with interchangeable lenses, is to look into the Micro 4/3rds system.

You have a lot of great camera bodies to choose from, there is a significantly bigger number of lenses to choose from, and among them, there are some really great, but affordable lenses, like for example the Olympus M. Zuiko Digital ED 45mm f/1.8, which takes amazing portrait shots, or the Panasonic LUMIX G 20mm f/1.7 Aspherical Pancake Lens which has an incredibly slim profile, is really fast and takes really crisp pictures.

To me, right now, the Micro 4/3rds system hits the sweet spot between affordability, quality and choice, which is why I’ve made my next camera the Olympus OM-D E-M5, and sold my Canon 450D (the Rebel Xsi if I’m not mistaken).

Within your $800 budgetI would get the Olympus EP-3 with the 14-42mm zoom lens, or an Olympus EP-2 body, and the Panasonic Pancake lens I mentioned above.

I didn’t say it was thick, that’s why I put the ". It has an unconventional form-factor, just like Nokia’s old smartphones did. They were wider, taller and thicker than most phones in the market, yet they sold immensely well in Europe because people wanted the new features. They preferred better features over a slimmer profile in the high-end market.

I haven’t seen many, if any, phones fail because of thickness.

If the hardware is solid and the features are attractive people will buy it. Just look at the Galaxy Note, I think that’s the “thick phone” of our days, and yet, it still sold quite well.

You’ve obviously never owned or seen a pre-iPhone Nokia smartphone. Some of them were thicker than two dvd boxes piled on top of each other, and I can guarantee you they were immensely successful.

I think Growl, or mainly the Growl developer has been sitting on his ass for much too long. Over the years, Growl saw very little improvements, and I’d argue the program actually regressed with it’s latest version. I didn’t mind paying for the latest version because I find a notification system immensely useful, and I got a lot of usage out of it.

But Growl, as a program, has evolved very little . It had very little, if any, competition over the years and within the development cycle of one OSX iteration Apple is going to one-up it in almost every regard. You can group up notifications, you can check a large amount of notifications in a dedicated space that is non-intrusive and easy to access.

You can argue that, to some extent Growl does the same, but it does so in a much less elegant manner.

I still use Growl, and it works fine, for what it does, but I don’t think I’ll go back to it after my favorite apps start supporting the new notification center. I’m sure there are people that will continue to like Growl because it offers customization, and right now it’s compatible with almost every app you use.

Growl was never an original app, it took an UI idea that started on Windows XP, brought it to Mac, tried to make it standardized among OSX apps and succeeded. And then it stayed there, and did very little with that idea. Our phones can tell us better what data we missed or received than our desktop computers can and I’m not saying Growl is single-handedly guilty of that, Apple is more to blame for that than the Growl team is, but Growl hardly did any innovation of it’s own accord.