Friday, July 17, 2009

Identifying "new" version of Canon 100-400mm f4.5-5.6L IS USM

There is no new version officially, but people noticed rather significant improvement for this lens recently. Basically, you will want one which has a date code later than UV04xx and better yet UV06xx. And there is also another more subtle signature of the newer version:



As you can see, older version of this lens has "0" and "1" as the label for the stablizer, and the new version has "on" and "off". However, given the above two signs for new version, the date code is more consistent and more reliable.

Someone suggested that the so-called new version is just tighter quality control, and actually, older version can perform as great as this so-called newer version, provided that you are lucky enough to get a good copy.

The major improvement of the new version is that, it works nearly as great (someone suggested at least 90%) as a Canon 400mm f5.6L at its 400mm end!

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Inside a MP3 player

I broke another stuff again, this time is an MP3 player:



Sunday, July 5, 2009

Canon 450D video



There is no need to modify the camera, and I believe the principle behind this software is just to encode and write the live view stream to the hard drive. Since the camera does not have any audio input device, sound would be lacking. And for the camera will need to rely on the computer for the video capturing work, it would be nice if this software could be enhanced to take the audio stream from the computer.

This is just a testing video to see the effect of depth of field by using a cheap but fast camera lens. With that in mind, one should not say DV is superior for video capturing. And I always believe that most people would do video capturing in form of short video clips rather than continuous recording for very long.

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Migration to OpenOffice.org

The migration work could be hard if you are actively exchanging your documents with other parties, however, there are some work in which you do not have to share with other people. Those work were the best candidate to get the migration started.

As a personal user, your personal documents would be the great starting point. For example, if you are a (full time or part time) student, you can start with your homework. Most teachers would not love DOC format for they could generate shifting here and there due to different versions of the software. PDF should be much better in this case, and OpenOffice.org could provide PDF without problem.