I spend a fair amount of time on eBay looking for items to add to my collection and I’ve learned that there are just some things you can’t get in America. Sometimes products aren’t popular in the U.S., leading to fewer options and higher prices; other times they weren’t sold in the U.S. market at …
Tamron SP 35mm F1.4 USD Long Term Review
Remember when I owned a Nikon Z 24 - 70 f/2.8S for about a week last year? Also remember all that stuff I said about purchasing a used F mount lens instead of buying a native Z mount lens? Well I did it again, also a purchase from last year that I started drafting a …
Sigma 50mm F1.4 DG HSM Art Long Term Review
Last March I bought an F mount lens released in 2014. Why would I do that when I have a fancy Z mount camera, you ask? Well because it’s an Art lens with fantastic sharpness, great contrast, and only cost $365! This is a lens that still sells brand new, right now, for $950, and …
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Product Shots and Tulips
As is typical at this time of the year, I start getting the itch to photograph. By the end of the fall I’m usually exhausted from it and gravitate to video games and other indoor activities. After a few months I get the itch again. Sometimes the weather cooperates and allows me to go outside, …
Sirui Aurora 85mm f/1.4
In the SLR days (i.e the 80s and 90s) third party lenses were primarily focused on reducing cost. Lenses from Sigma, Tamron, Tokina, and others lowered the barrier to entry in exchange for a lower level of performance than Nikon, Canon, and Pentax. In recent years those Japanese third parties have significantly upped their game …
Net MD vs Classic MD – Which is Faster?
When it comes to MiniDisc devices you’ve often got to get something recorded on one before you can enjoy it. It’s true that there were some albums released natively in the format, but there weren’t many (and they're obnoxiously expensive), so recording to a blank disc is often necessary. You’d think that the USB-based NetMD …
What’s Been Happening in the Mac Museum
I have a growing collection of retrocomputing equipment – desktops, laptops, displays, disk drives, storage media, PDAs, music players, phones, tablets, CPUs, memory, books, marketing materials, magazines, and more. I go through phases of acquiring , phases of experiencing, and phases of sharing. I’ve been acquiring and experiencing recently, and now it's time for sharing. This …
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My MiniDisc Hardware Collection
I recently got into Sony MiniDiscs based on a couple of great videos about the format and its hardware by This Does Not Compute. I recall the MiniDisc as a competitor to the iPod during the MP3 era, but never knew much about it. It was always on the periphery as yet another “proprietary Sony …
Well That Was Fast
A couple months ago I posted about my 2013 Mac Pro serving dual purpose as a museum item and my cloud backup machine. It’s done that job extremely well but it’s already being replaced by another Mac mini, one with an M4 chip, in fact. It's like an Apple TV... but wider... and taller... and …
M4 MacBook Pro Max Benchmarks
A note about the image above: this image was generated using WordPress's AI features. It "read" my post and generated an image to go with it. I have to say I'm impressed. At a glance, it looks very much like my MacBook Pro. The shape of the hardware, the layout of the interface on the …
Relatively Ambitious 