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.

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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.
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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!
       

Hubble dwarfes mankind (again)

Hubble´s - so far - deepest ever look into the universe reveals myriads of unseen galaxies.
More of those fantastic astronomical pictures can be found at Space Telescope Sciene Institute´s Website

These very early galaxies - about only 600 Mio. years after big bang - represent the deepest view and oldest items in the universe ever seen by mankind.

In photographic terms exposure time was 48hours - (taken in late August 2009). Camera Model WFC3/IIR

(Wide Field Camera 3 - near Infrared). Image dimension is 144 arc seconds which is equivalent of 50.134 mm focal lenght hyper zoom (SLR FX 35mm sensor).

This means essentially - "don´t try this at home"  and underlines the sensational character of these images.

Color is actually a digital artefact created by assigning specific colors to overlays of multiple filtered (grayscale) images representing different frequency ranges in the infrared spectrum.

More recent photo examples from Hubble

Said and done - the trees are gone!

After a full week of unshadowed operation is has becoome clear that solar energy is not always as "green" as everybody thinks. Shadow of any kind - even a tiny patch reduces the efficiency so dramatically that every effort to get the panel surface shadow-free is justified.

The reason for that effect is the serialization of cells within a module and the serialization of modules to form a "string" with sufficient input voltage for the inverter. A single solar P-N-element (the "cell") features typically only 0,5 Volts. It takes 60 or so cells to form a "module" creating a typical open-circuit voltage of 30 volts. 12-15 serially connected modules then create a string with 360 to 450 volts input at the inverter. Shadowing only one module or even only one cell within "pulls down" the whole string unless the current is lead through the bypass diodes, which means that the bypassed module is "cut out" effectively for the moment.

In that sense "trees" can be the natural enemy of  the solar entrepreneur.
In my case 4 massive 12-15m pine trees had to be victimized.

The German 9/11

Is it coincidence? This history laden date when an iconic building burst to pieces and nothing was like it was before thereafter. - Im am NOT writing about the Twin Towers - instead the 9th of November in German date format 9.11. is the much celebrated 20. anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Even Google joins the celebrations all about with this Doodle Graphic

Everybody is being asked these days "Where have you been on that day"? and "Do you remember what you did on the 9th of November 1989.
Here is my story:
I worked for AMD at the time in the north German sales office near Hannover - a rather remote outpost on the global perspective of the CPU business. Two weeks before the 11/9 date I made up a visit to see customers in Berlin - not with the faintest idea on what was about to happen.  This meant to fly with one of allowed airlines of the former allied forces, that is you had to fly PanAm or BA through a special air corridor over the East German Communist territory.
So when the breaking news spread on the late evening of the 9th of November, quickly all travel slots to Berlin the next day filled within seconds. I was lucky to hold a valid reservation by pure coincidence on that very next day for Berlin.
So I took my video camera and made a record documenting the day - the 10th of November knowing that history was happening. The mood in Berlin was amazing - the whole City in "festival mode" people celebrating and cheering all about. At the same time it was unreal in a sense, a fairy tale atmosphere, where people felt like "give us a knock - we must be dreaming, it´s just too unbelievable to be true".
In retrospect, I should have brought my still camera as well and I could have taken some really historic pictures in high quality- what I do have is only a shaky VHS video but nevertheless it is a document of the rare luck of being at the right spot the right time.
As I think about it, I might edit out a 3min version and put it on YouTube...

Only logged data is good data

Another upgrade to my new solar panels: A data logger for worldwide live access

A - relatively sunny day in November - 6kg saved carbon oxide!

Check it out at

Live View - Solar Panels "PV - Nienhagen"

For all who really like to know what this graphic really means:

The yellow area shows electric power (Watt produced) over time. At 10h the system has been switched on the first time otherwise it would start at 7h30 am with a nice slope. The "ideal" graph on a really sunny day looks like a gaussian bell curve. The green and red line are the contributions of the two identical module fields, so it is expected that the lines stay always together at about 50% of the total power. At about 12am they divert heavily - this is shadowing. One module field is exposed to a tree shadow which dramatically reduces the production of the whole string. Approx. two hours later the two line begin to merge again, this is when the shadow reaches the second field as well reducing the overall effectiveness.

Now all of this is not new - I knew it would happen and the consequences are quite clear -

The trees must go!

The first million is always the hardest...

The solar panels have successfully been connected to the grid! On their first full day of operation they have produced ca. 6 kWh or 21.6 million watt seconds (or Joule).

It was a rainy day and shadowing trees are not yet removed.

These are the basic parameters

•  Solar inverter SMA 5000TL Bluetooth
• 24x Trina Solar poly 220 Watt peak
• 5.28kWp in Total
• Expected annual production: ca. 4600kWh