Elvesbane

Been a while, hasn’t it? Well, I’ve been busy… with my new camera. Since the day before day before yesterday, I’ve been the proud owner of an Olumpus EVOLT E-500 D-SLR camera.

http://www.olympusamerica.com/cpg_section/product.asp?product=1192

It’s an entry-level D-SLR, meaning, it’s the physically smaller and feature-wise stripped version of the big chunks of metal you see professionals carrying around. As far as mua, the amateur, is concerned, this thingy is pretty feature packed. As you can divine from my previous posts, I wasn’t even considering this camera as an option since other ‘better’ brands took precedence… at first anyway. Then I saw THIS thing at Carrefour and it was priced the same as the Nikon D50 and the Canon EOS-350D (both one lens kit) which this came with a two lens kit plus a free 1gig xD (yuk, actually I got a 512×2 since they didn’t have 1gig xD in stock, double yuk) card.

Moral of the story: If anyone wants a (or two) 512MB xD picture card, call me.

Not really, but do so anyway. I’ve been clicking away with the camera for the past few days and it’s just faaaaabulous. Ergonomics is spot-on, shot to shot speeds are excellent and I can shoot as fast as I can get the focus confirmation which, in good light, takes next to no time. Since the camera doesn’t have a dedicated AF-assist lamp (boo!), it can use the flash strobe to capture focus, which, while it works well, is very distracting for the subject (assuming the subject is living). On the second day with the camera, I got myself a 1Gig Sandisk Extreme III Compactflash card which is tons faster than the xD. Burst shooting has improved one heck of a lot and RAW shooting is much more comfortable. I haven’t yet tried the Olympus Master software that comes with the camera, but I expect it’s good from the reviews I’ve read of it.

http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/olympus/e500-review/

Hmm… enough camera talk, even I’m getting tired of it. Actually there’s a bit more about electronics. Yesterday evening, me, mum and dad went out to Lulu again. At the electronics branch, we bought the Nokia 6630 (for Sreekanth) and the Nikon Coolpix P2 (for Sreekanth’s Uncle. It’s a wifi enabled camera). The Nikon is actually pretty fast on the operations front. It’s defenitely the fastest point and shoot I’ve seen. But then I haven’t really seen (worked with) any of the newer p&s, except perhaps my bro’s cam, which was more of a lifestyle product anyway. The Nokia 6630 is… well… somethin’ like my bro’s 6681. The shape is a bit different, and it feels pretty much the same. The interface is almost a ditto, and it’s about as sluggish. Xyris (Sreekanth) raves about it though, so I’m guessing it’s pretty good. It’s got a 1.3MP camera which shoots photos which look (again) the same as my bro’s 6681. I haven’t seen em’ full res, so I can’t be sure.

Time in the evening is being spent either walking around malls, supermarkets, bazaars and the like, mostly buying the small stuff that mum likes fussing over. She should read this. We’ll be back from Dubai the day after tomorrow, so I guess I’ll write more then. Ta ta.

The fourth day was even MORE interesting. There isn’t much interesting to be said about the morning and the afternoon, except perhaps about me n’ mum’s trip (walk) to the Karama Center. We parambulated around the place and bought a few ladies watches, mum for her friends and me one… well, just in case.

In the evening, all of us set off to The Mall of the Emirates, which Dad pointed out, was pretty new, pretty big, and pretty impressive. They’ve got all the big brands here and a new H&M outlet (sponsored by Madonna, it seems) was starting up right as we entered the mall. Quite understandably, there was quite a croud around that place. Moving on to the more juicy bits (as far as I’m concerned), I got to handle (and snap off a few pics) an Olympus E-500. It’s an 8 MP D-SLR and frankly, it wasn’t on my wish-list until yesterday.

The thing is, this mall sports a Carrefour (a gigatazoid shopping mall chain) and the Carrefour’s got a good electronics section. The E-500 in question was being promoted, and it’s selling for the same price as the Nikon D50 and the Canon Rebel XT, BUT with a free 40-150mm lens AND a 1GB xD (yuk) card. This is along with the standard 14-45mm kit lens. As far as I’m concerned this means that I won’t need to buy new lenses, which by the way are usually the same (if not MUCH more) pricey than the camera body itself. The E-500 isn’t a perfect camera. It’s got some problems like, the smallest viewfinder of the entry-level D-SLRs, only three focus points, and average continuous shooting with the xD picture card. There is however a seperate eye-cup (buyable from who-knows-where) which will magnify the viewfinder by 1.2x. So that problem is solvable. The rest is really nitpicking, since almost anyone can LIVE with three focus points and the speed problem with the xD can be fixed by buying a fast Compact-Flash card, which the E-500, quite generously supports.

So it seems I probably will be sticking with the brand that I’ve been carrying around for the past… oh who knows… maybe three years. The old Olympus has served me well (not so, in the past few months, but then who can blame it for breaking down after such rough use), and this one looks like a really good, sturdy, hefty, and balanced camera. In short, me LIKEY!

After all that walking around, we noticed that the time had sped away without giving notice. So we walked into a restaurant (Indian Pavillion), and ordered some of the largest meals I’ve ever seen. I ordered a Tandoori Platter, mum a Paneer Tikka platter, and Dad… well… some Arabian-fish-thingy platter. I don’t remember it’s name, but he said he wanted to try it since he’d heard of it and never had (fishy sentence, pun intended :)). What I got was two tandoori Chicken legs plus a rice cake, plus salad, plus french-fries-like-thingies. There was a LOT of it. None of us were able to finish the meal… it was just that big. After such a big one, there was only one thing to do, and that was to take a taxi home, and fall down on the bed. Comatose, even. I still woke up at seven today though. I wonder why (even mum wondered why). That doesn’t happen too often (as I’ve said before). Anyway, me n’ mum have got a trip to Lulu scheduled for today, so I guess, that’s it for now. Talk to you guys tomorrow. Bye.

Happy Onam everyone!

Soooo… let’s get down to it… yesterday, that is. A whole bunch of very nice (:D) things happened yesterday. Read day b4 yesterday’s account of the beginning two-thirds of the day to get a sense to the mundane. The evening however was much more interesting. All of us went to the Al Ain Center yesterday, and it’s one of those malls where there’s an electronic gadget everywhere you look. Oooooh, I was in gadget heaven! We’d taken the system that I’d brought from home and we had it assembled there, after buying a new case and a new Seagate 160gig HDD for it.

That’s the system I’m currently working on by the way, no thanks to the idiots who assembled it. The dolts there don’t seem to know why dual channel memory is call DUAL channel! They stuck the memory modules in all the wrong slots and I spent an hour today morning wondering why the damned monitor was stuck in standby mode with the computer seemingly working fine (this motherboard doesn’t have those handy four status led-s). Anyway I finally figured it out and as you can see, is working quite nicely.

Anyway, back to what happened at Al Ain Center. I actually got myself a new computer! Wheee! Or should I say, PARTS of a new computer. I still lack the DDR2 memory for the Core 2 Duo E6300 (1.86Ghz) and the Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3. The video card is at home, a 7900GT and the final combination should be quite potent. <insert evil laughter here> All that without the massive overclocking that I have planned for this system. Retail E6300s have been taken to a MASSIVE 3.62 Ghz on stock cooling with only increase in voltages. When you consider the fact that the X6800 is clocked at 2.93Ghz and goes up to only 3.2 with the best cooling available, the E6300 makes a frickin LOT of sense. It’s a 100% overclock (almost), for heaven’s sake! If you’re planning to buy a core 2 duo system right now, the Gigabyte’s GA-965P-DS3 seems to be the ’sensible’ option. For those who have deeper pockets and plan to do more extreme overclocking, the DQ6 from the same company or the Asus P5B Deluxe would perhaps suffice.

Enough of computers. I also got to actually FEEL the Nikon D50 and the Fuji S9000. The S9000 was a bit of a dissapoinment. The plasticky body is a total turn-off when compared to the heftier (and sturdier) Nikon D50. We ARE comparing a fixed lens to a D-SLR, so it is a bit unfair, but then the S9000 is the TOP-end fixed lens fuji offers while the nikon d50 is the CHEAPEST D-SLR that nikon offers. The Nikon is priced around Dhs 3000 (<38k Rs) while the S9000 is priced around Dhs 2300 (Rs 29k approx). [The following is an update] I also saw the Rebel XT, but I’m not really considering it, since its plastic body and the tiny hand-grips don’t look the least bit attractive to me. After all that browsing around and shopping, we carried the whole load of stuff (dad’s computer) back home, had dinner and went straight to sleep. We had quite a run yesterday, in short. Catcha guys later.

Woke up at 7 yesterday. Odd. That doesn’t happen too often. Maybe it’s because of the time difference, who knows. The morning was a recap of all the ‘other’ mornings I’ve had in Dubai. Sloooow, to begin with. I ate nuked Strawberry Pie with Strawberry juice (non-nuked, since I like my milk cold) and I think I read Mr. M.P. Nair’s copy of ‘A Brief History of Time’ for a while. It got boring though, and I might have slept through a few paragraphs. A bit after lunch, Dad got back from work. Then HE had lunch and we all went to sleep. We’re encountering a lot of ’sleep’ here, aren’t we? Well, fret not, ‘cuz there’s even more to come.

At about 6, I woke up, dressed, and went out with everyone to thing abso-big mall called Hyper-Panda. The streets of Dubai are absolutely CLOGGED with traffic at this time of the day, and the drive, which usually takes less than ten minutes took about half an hour. It’s not all that bad though, considering the fact that the taxi I was travelling in was a Mercedes and it’s PRETTY roomy in the back-seat.

Hyper-Panda has got to be the most EMPTY ‘giant’ mall I’ve ever seen. It seems the tourists-watever of Dubai have yet to discover this place, as at many times, me, mum and dad seemed to be the only human entities in sight. The place was a frickin grave-yard… full of nice desirable junk, that is. Oh yeah, I saw a lot of goodies, especially at ‘Plugins’. Plugins is this really big electronic chain store that’s all over Dubai, and it seems Hyper-Panda isn’t without one either. I got to see real-life versions of the Nikon D50, the Canon EOS350D Rebel XT, the FujiFilm S9000, and the Panasonic FZ30 there. All of ‘em looked smaller than I’d imagined. They were pretty frickin costly though. The Nikon and the EOS350 were priced at AED 3000 (Rs 38k or $820 approx) and the other two fixed lenses weren’t much better. Dad’s actually interested in the DSLR, thankfully, so much the better for me. Yipee! I think I might actually get one in me hands either today or tomorrow. The D50 looked mighty tasty!

http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/nikon/d50-review/

http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/canon/digital_rebel_xt-review/

http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/panasonic/dmc_fz30-review/

http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/fuji/finepix_s9000-review/

I’ve also got to decide which mobo I’m gonna get for my new compy. That calls for more research. Went out with mum today morning to a local supermarket called ‘Day to Day’, to buy odds-and-ends sorta stuff. It’s 11:20 AM now and I’ve got stuff to do (read) before today evening. So catcha guys l8r. ta ta.

The landing was pretty cool… as usual. I love it when the plane shudders as the wheels make contact, as though shaking everyone into realizing that they’re the journey has well and truly come to an end. Hmm… not that I’d consider three hours in a cramped postion as much of a journey. Well, at least the food was better than usual.

Yesterday was… well, yesterday. Forgive me for a lack of more flowery words, but that that WAS yesterday. There was this looong walk from where we (Me n’ Mum) exited the plane to where we picked up baggage. Thankfully we were aided by these horizontal moving walkway thingies… sort of like escalators… but without the escalation). Dad was there with a friend of his and we got a ride home on his ‘Prado’. Me thinks it’s a 2005 model, and it’s quite impressive. The acceleration is superb and the there’s almost zero road feedback for passengers. Dunno about how it is for the driver, but I figure it’s fun, since this is a pretty high-qual SUV.

I slept like a brick (Mum tells me she did the same) till about 6, and then went out with everyone to Lulu. It’s much the same as before, and bought a whole load of muchies making sure that I didn’t buy two of the same. Skipped on the Lays bit, having learnt from past experience that Indians are somehow much better at THAT, surprisingly enough. Ate a dinner with Mum n’ Dad and went straight to sleep. Dunno what we’re going to do today, but it’s probably more (wandering around in the malls + shopping). Not that I have anything against it. In fact, I forgot to take my camera when I came here, and I’ve been wanting this.. ahem.. new digi for quite some time now. So I gots-to broach that idea to dad. The climate is pretty mild. Mild, as in 40 degrees in the shade. Standing in the sun for any period of time will probably drive a person mad. There’s no sweating though (whee). The super-dry air makes sure of that.

I saw a few cool bikes. Couldn’t make out the specific models though. One or two Kawasaki-s and a Honda. Not much more to talk about. See ya guys later.