HDR Photos and Facetime on the new iPad with iOS 4.2

Transscript and interpretation of the Apple Special Event, Sep. 1. 2010

Steve Jobs has disclosed - willing or unwillingly - an interesting new feature on future iPads:
HDR Photos on the iPad with iOS 4.2 due in November.

HDR [High dynamic range] photos has been demonstrated as a new feature of  iOS4.1.
The iPhone  and the newly released iPod Touch 4th generation with Cameras (both front and back) can take multiple exposures of a scene and auto-correct using HDR blending.
Effectively HDR is a method of dealing with the "low dynamic range" problem of displays, printers and paper.
Again Apple is setting a trend that everybody will follow: Expect Auto-HDR processing soon in consumer-cameras all over the place.

Steve Jobs has againg delivered one of  his legendary high profile product presentations in San Francisco, however he seemed a bit unconcentrated this time. He made several small errors (like calling shuffle a nano), so it is speculation, if it was an unwanted error or rather an inadvertent disclosure of future iPad product specs when he said the following during the iOS 4.2 Sneak Peak Demo:
--- Beginning of quote
"I have got a little surprise for you today: It´s a sneak peak at the next iOS release 4.2. 4.2 is coming a little later this year and it is all about iPad. It is bringing everything to iPad. All from iOS 4.1 with it´s multitasking, it´s folders, game center, HDR photos, everything you saw here, everything to iPad. Wireless printing, we are adding wireless printing to iOS and we are adding something really cool which is called "Airplay"....]
----End of quote

Now how can "HDR Photos" live, exist, function on an iPad. Well, once taken and processed an HDR Photo is just a photo. There is only one way this statement makes any sense:
The new iPad is going to have camera lenses built in! It will likely be available together with the iOS 4.2 release release in November.
Speculating further, it is extremely likely that the iPad has a front facing camera as well. This will make it a Facetime device, which is critical as Facetime is still a proprietary "on-Net" feature. If you happen to own an iPhone4 you will have noticed that there are just not enough iPhone4 users out there yet to really take advantage of Facetime. This will and has to change.
Facetime will continue to be an "Apple - World" network-feature, perfectly designed to work as a viral marketing scheme. It works between iMacs, Iphone4s (NOW ipod Touches) and SOON iPADs. That will be it.

This way Apple positions itself again successfully at the forefront of consumer electronics innovation. This very week (beginning of September) the IFA Consumer Electronics Show in Berlin [practically the german equivalent of the CES] demonstrates a massive lineup of  "iPad Killers" or rather "wanna-be´s". Android is a challenge, no doubt - and Samsung is most aggressive with tabled PC offerings.
However if you look closer at hybrid TV´s, internet connected TVs, different Tivo-like STB concepts and compare that to the clear statements that Steve Jobs has made regarding what they learned from a 4 year mediocre Apple-TV performance and acceptence you will find that Apple is again just one major step further ahead:
The new Apple TV includes a major paradigm shift: Is has no more local storage, it is no longer a syncing device, it does no longer support purchasing content on the TV.
At 99$, I predict, it will be a big hit this time and Steve will no longer call it a "hobby" next year.While the majority of players at the IFA believes in TVs and STBs with large hard disks [the "TIVO concept"], Apple now believes in a pure streaming concept for the living room.
However, Apple believes (and I agree) that People don´t want another computer in the living room, they don´t want to manage media on yet another device.
The way this streaming is made to work, the extreme ease of use and integration with other products of the familiy is again making all the difference.
Watching a show on the iPad or iPod touch, and the continuing this on the big screen TV has never been so easy and straight forward. Touching the loudness button offers a "stream this on Apple TV" option. Hitting it will instantly continue to play the media on the big screen. As simple as that.
None of any of the displayed products at IFA 2010 come anywhere close.

This is the reason why I have again upgraded the price target for Apple stock on the TREFIS DCF model:



It is now set on 327$ as a price target, which is still rather conservative.
Optimistically Apple is going to be a 500$ company within the next 36 months.
That means the best way to finance your next Apple product is simply to buy some stock. I.e. if you buy only 50 shares of Apple stock, an increase of of only 10$ USD buys you an iPad. It is that simple!.

The complete bottle vanish - and more mindboggling magic

Finally, a multi-month project has gone online: It´s called "Moo-Magic" and is effectively a magic shop.
That means it targets people who seriously aim to perform professional illusions in front of an audience, or simply just to amaze friends.
By definition a "Magic Shop" reveals trick secrets and as such contradicts the unspoken rule to "never reveal a magic trick secret". On the other hand if no trick would have been ever revealed or taught, professional magic skill would be extinct.
The problem really is the ubiquity of the intenet and more so the "everybody publishes everything" trend on Youtube - with freely available information of everything and about everything at your fingertips the world will never be same - in the small scale the awe of magic illusions will be diminished in the large scale countries with restrictive policies of what you are supposed to read or to know (like China, Iraq etc.) will fail in the long run.
Now enjoy one of my absolute favorite illusions and  DO NOT BUY the secret if you do not consider yourself to be a stage performing artist.



Watch the Magic Illusion on Youtube

Lightning Photography with hacked Canons

I just learned about CHDK projekt [modified Canon firmware] which apperently offers such things as motion detection triggered  lightning photography.
You ever has tried lightning photography knows how difficult that is. The most practical approach these days would be a HD-quality movie with subsequent still extraction.
 The Canon hacked firmware projects goes a different path: Motion as trigger event is supposedly fast enough to catch actual thunderstorm lightnings.
My Powershot Pro90 IS is unfortunately not on the list. If you have had any success with this or know some pictures taken this way, post a comment, please.

Donate your CPU Power !

Grid and cloud computing are the industries buzz words these days. But here is a practical, actionable opportunity for everybody to do something really useful:

Free Download  your desktop Grid software here.

Donate your (spare) CPU power of your PC (MAC, Windows, Linux, even PS3s ) for serious academic research.
You might support biochemical research for 3D structures of proteines (which might and will lead to a better understanding of the "mechanics" of life and thus the development of new medicine.
You might chose to support the search for extraterrestral life forms or their signals (SETI @ home), you might also chose a project for better weather forecasts with the benefit of earlier desater alerts and many more.
You can chose the project you like, and switch after some time to give some CPU power to somebody else.

All this is completely voluntary and "free" in the sense that only unused otherwise "wasted" CPU power is used. Modern PCs have a huge reserve in maximem CPU power which is fully used only in a fraction of the usage time.
"Screen savers" are typically purely cosmetic and otherwise useless programs to make some use of this untapped CPU time.
BOINC  http://boinc.berkeley.edu/ 
makes use of thousands  better millions of PCs running worlduwide. Download the 7MB academic screensaver and start making some "CPU time" donations today.

This image from a BOINC project display structures at the mars south pole.

Cruise ship safety - no risk no fun

Monster waves had been a long believed myth topic but they are a physical reality - sparse but real.
The recent hazard on the cypric cuise ship "Louis Majesty" is such a reminder.
2 people died as a short triple high wave phenomenon called the "3 sisters" hit deck 5 and burst windows.
The ship and most other passengers did not suffer any further damage and continued safely to Barcelona for repair and passenger swap for the next 14 day "unforgettable dream vacation".

                                Image is screencapture from Youtube movie
Unlike the cuise ship Voyager 5 years ago. Again the calm mediterranean sea, again in February/March - Voyager was bound to Barcelona from Tunisia. It came across the Winter storm Valentina when a monster wave crashed into the bridge (!) and cut off the electronics for engine control.
Loss of engine control then was the main problem as Voyager was helpless literally a bobbing cork on the water. (watch the full Youtube clip to relive and imagine this cruise ship experience for those 780 passengers).
Risk of capsizing is immanent when you cannot turn a ship "into the wind" facing the waves and riding the swell because the ship tends to turn sideways so that wind and swell increase the torsional moment.
Voyager experienced peak bank angles of up to 40-50 degrees far beyond the "comfort zone".
You may - or may not - remember that this horror cruise experience finally had a good ending as well - mechanics managed ultimately to repair the engine control at least partially.

Does this now constitute a warning to "avoid" cruise ship tours alltogether?  How great is the real risk?

The clear - yet totally personal and subjective - answer is no. Apart from unsolved Bermuda triangle mysteries there are no major mass catastrophies yet accountable to monster waves. "Kafrenzmänner" as monster waves are called in German seamen circles are a physical fact but are extremely seldom phenomena.
"At sea and at court you are in God´s hands"
The luxury of contemporary cruise ships should never obscure the fact that we are placing ourselves at sea in the domain of physical forces of extreme power that we cannot fully control.
There is no prediction mechanism or algorithm in sight that could "pre-warn" ships from monster waves - and they can occor in otherwise calm environments, so even enourmous progress in weather forecasting, radar, GPS etc. is no total insurence.
What remains is the simple insight that the beauty and marvellous experience of a cruise ship extravanganza is never without risk - with notable emphasis on the fact that the most risky parts of a cruise ship tour are the flight transfer to the departing port and even more - believe it or not - the car transfer to the airport!

Bigger is always better

Big screen TV has reached new dimensions - ready for the HD-launch in Germany.

Finally - starting with the Vancouver Winter Games - ARD and ZDF the primary federal German free TV channels start their HD broadcast. on Feb. 12th.
No more showcases, instead a 24/7 regular HD-broadcast, however only in 720p and from the beginning not fully charged with true HD-content. A lot will be upscaled material in the beginning.

The Epson TW2900 used here to produce an 110" image has been tested very favorably by the leading ct magazine based in Hannover. I thought about plasma, but finally stayed with a beamer only upgrading the older SD-model with the full-HD Epson. 

Now, this makes for 5 total free HD stations in Germany in February;

 ARD-HD, ZDF-HD, arte-HD, Anixe-HD and a less relevant austrian channel called "ServusTV".

It will be interesting to what extent private channels will succeed with their attempt to enter digital addressability and even more important a pay-TV status by means of their HD+ engagemement.

Skeptics predict that only a few hundred thousand  users will watch the encrypted HD+ channels by end of 2010! Instead quotas of public channels may go up due to free access to HD.

.

It must be mentioned however, that all this public channel generositiy for free HD comes at a price - "GEZ" is basically state-regulated mandatory pay-TV - the true reason why Premiere and Sky have not succeeded to reach a customer base anywhere close to the penetration that is possible in the UK or Italy.

Is your RED better than my RED - How much red ist red enough?

Theory and practice of color management - and why we should switch our cameras to produce more and better colors.

I want to share my recent insights here on the need of monitor calibration and the end of the dominant ruling of the "sRGB" color space.
sRGB has ever since been the primary "least common denominator" for camera-produced JPGs and regular monitors, at the same time it is one of the most limited color spaces which means that proactive limitation to this space cuts away all of the possible quality that a raw image could and most middle class cameras contain. Quality printers have long shown a wider color space in green and blue shades than sRGB and more recently high color WCG (Wide color Gamut) monitors are becoming affordable.

Try out for yourself what I am talking about:

This red square  [1] is 100% red with RGB values of 255 - 0 - 0

It is the "reddest" red that can be coded within a JPG file without any reference to a specific color space. In practice this is invariably be interpreted as "sRGB" -  ONLY sRGB-Red , which is the reddest red within the very limited sRGB color space. It is by far not the reddest red that a human can perceive and experience.
Adobe Lightroom takes care of this fact by transforming this 100% sRGB red into its own much wider ProPhoto color space and treats this color internally as 75% Red, 34% Green(!) and 13,7% Blue (!).
When this very picture is then being exported as an AdobeRGB JPG file, it is encoded with values 218 - 0 - 0 which reflects the fact that Adobe RGB can display and encode a much redder red than sRGB and consequently sRGB-red cannot occupy the "100%" coding value of 255 in this scale.
.
The red square below [2]  is again 100% sRGB-red in an Adobe RGB JPG file encoded as 218 - 0 -0

Now two interesting effects take place.

In most cases you (the reader) will have an sRGB monitor and this red field [2] and the one above [1] should look totally identical. If they don´t and [2] looks even a bit "darker" than the first it means that your browser does not interpret the color space of the file and does not transform it correctly into your monitor sRGB space.  [Firefox should do, IE, Opera and Google Chrome don´t as of now]
You may download the two files (right-click->save as) and try to open them in differnent picture viewers or graphics programs. You may and will find that some programs show the files with identical looks (correct) and others like Windows Paint don´t. Some picture viewers behave differently depending on window or full screen mode.
They should always look identical - if they don´t its your software that is imperfect.

If you are in the lucky position to possess a High Color Monitor .e. one of the recent WCG [Wide Color Gamut] models like
            DELL UltraSharp 2709W or U2410
            EIZO FlexScan S2433W
            HP 2475w or LP2480
            LG Flatron W2220 or W2420
you should still see the above red fields also as identical but you will principally be able to see a  truely much redder red if an Adobe RGB file ist encoded with it´s maximum values of 255 - 0 - 0.  Such a color outside of the sRGB space is "out of range" for most of us which means that photos may lose a bit of detail as the color shades are "clipped" to the closest match for all regular sRGB viewers.
The following three examples can therefore ONLY be appreciated by high color WCG monitor viewers. All others will not notice any difference.

This red sqare above [3]  is an EXTREME RED with 95% red, 7.1% green and 5% blue in the large ProPhoto space. It is exported with reference to "ProPhoto" and coded with 240 - 15 - 13 RGB values, which means that relative to the very large ProPhoto space this red is still not the absolute maximum reddest red ever possible, but it is close!

The next example below [4] shows this same EXTREME RED (95% ProPhoto -Red) exported as Adobe RGB JPG.
Adobe RGB does actually not contain this level of red so it is clipped to 254 - 0- 0 in Adobe RGB.

In other words the field above is "100% Adobe RGB red" the reddest red achievable in the Adobe RGB space. On a monitor cabable of Adobe RGB this should be obvious by the fact that this field [4] are much redder that the sRGB ones at the top of this post.[1] and [2]. If the monitor can even go beyond Adobe RGB then [3] will visibly be even redder than [4].

Finally this extremely burning red (95% ProPhoto-Red) is being exported within an sRGB-JPG file [5].

The coding is again 254 - 0 - 0 [actually a JPG compression artefact, it should be 255 instead of 254] which means that the relatively faint sRGB-red is used as a "best effort" attempt to mimic the true burning red that the picture originally contained. This ist what reguarly happens within every camera which uses the default setting of "sRGB" for JPG production.
On a wide color monitor you will see and notice what you lost as [5] is downconverted to match again the extremely limited sRGB space.
Everybody else will notice no difference between [1] [4] and [5] and may even perceive [2] and [3] as somewhat more "faint" than the others although [2] is actually regular sRGB red (like [1]) and [3] is actually the reddest most glowing red field in this whole posting.

What is now the final conclusion of this confusing scenario:

• More color is always better!
• High color monitors will become affordable and will spread widely within the coming years.
• Consequently WE ALL should stop to limit ourselves to the least common denominator and overcome the dictate of the "sRGB paradigm".
• We must begin to fill our photo archives with high color quality content.

At least WE (the (Semi) Pro´s ) should SWITCH our cameras to at least Adobe RGB and/or export our Raw-Images in no less than Adobe-RGB from now on.
We should be the front-line of quality producers and accept and ignore the fact that laggard sRGB viewers with erratic software setups may even critizise our photos as "faint".
It´s a chicken/egg problem - content drives the industry to improve - similar to the video/broadcast industry - everybody is now producing in HD - although the majority of viewers is still using SD-equipment.
So finally, if you are still not convinced - then switch to raw photography now or (concurrent raw/jpg) and KEEP your RAWS. Storage has become cheap and your RAWS have the capability to be exported to higher color space JPGs with minimal effort once my prediction has become an obvious reality.

PS: Bookmark this article and use it in a store if you want to buy a new monitor - it will open your eyes!