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This is indeed a lot of money for a fairly small lens. You would expect it to be physically much smaller than a 500/4. After all, the f/4 lens needs to collect twice as much light so (to a first approximation) the f/5.6 should be half the size. Nikon can be pretty damn silly when it comes to...

This is really weird. In fact, it brings out the paranoid conspiracy theorist in me. I can't find any rational explanation for it. Over the last month or so, Youtube has started throwing up right-wing extremist and similar sites in my feed. All the time. Along with my normal Youtube stuff -...

By the way, if I happened to have a spare Windows 8 licence (I probably don't, but just suppose I did), would that take any less space? Not that I'd waste a perfectly good Win 8 licence on this machine, just asking out of curiosity.)

Dave, Dave, Dave ... why am I not srprised? Chewy, as I wrote above "Sadly, and much against my better nature, I have opted not to return it for refund. Instead, I bought a 64GB micro-SD card (another $40) which makes it OK for someone with my skills (but not, repeat not, a typical user with...

My budget was rock bottom, Lunar. I need this unit (or something like it) for a trip to Sri Lanka shortly, but it is unlikely to get much use and entirely possible that I'll never use it again. I prefer to do all my traveling in my own car, where I can take as much stuff as I like (within...

You'd think so Lunar. No you'd catch me running a Snoopbook though.

I wanted something small to take with me traveling, essentially just to upload photographs with. (I'm not taking my good Thinkpad: too large, too heavy, too valuable, too hard on batteries for this trip. Thought about my old 14 inch T-Series Thinkpad, which would be fine except it has USB 2...

Hmmm ... some girls I have known change out of recognition, sometimes twice in five minutes. :)

Forstory, I can't comment on your particular relationship, of course, but you are saying and apparently thinking positive things. I like that. Those things you didn't see eye to eye on, have you both changed in regard to them? Are they things you can negotiate your way through together? (No...

Pay no attention to the negative, arrogant views above, Forstory. Staying friends with an ex is normal, healthy behaviour. Most civilised people do this. If you liked someone enough to want to go out with them in the first place, if you had enough in common to have a worthwhile relationship to...

I think I'll resort to the charger. It's coming up to 10AM Saturday, which will be 8 days since charging, and I have 37% left. I had another half-hour of talk time yesterday, plus a similar amount of time mucking about on the Internet. (Mostly trying to connect to a customer's wi-fi to debug it...

Up to 6.3 days (6 days, 8 hours) now. I've used another 30 or 40 minutes of talk time. Battery says it has 50% remaining. So it's going to do a week easily. I haven't done anything heroic, turned off and uninstalled a few useless things, plus switched off the GPS (I don't need GPS to know that I...

And what day did we last charge it?

Thanks Tea. Did you remember to mention the day of the week?

But it's not as if our good friend Lunar has ever used it in the past, why start now? :)

Went down to The Good Guys (probably the best Aussie electrical retailer, now sadly taken over by JB Hifi and about to be gutted) to ask (a) What sort of SIM I needed for the horrible ultra-cheap little Samsung toy smartphone I already have. (I bought it a year or so ago ONLY for checking...

When the aspect ratio exceeds 16:12.

Interesting that you mention the Motorola G5S Stereodude. My own research has identified it as perhaps the second-best smartphone around. (For a given value of "best" - in my case that means things like long battery life and sensible price. I can think of lots of things to do with $900, and none...

I meant sound quality using the phone normally. Don't care about speakerphone, I never use it. My guess is that most phones are perfectly OK for both local and remote user, but in the end, the reason I'm getting rid of my existing phone is because of poor sound quality. (Not that there ever used...

Perhaps I'm a little slow here, but what is the difference?

My ancient dumb phone is getting tired. For reasons unknown, sound quality is getting slowly worse and people often have trouble hearing me. I need to replace it. Now I could get another dumb phone, but I am open to the idea of venturing into the current century. Maybe. Key requirements: *...

It makes zero sense to compare a little f/5.6 lens to an f/4 unit. It's like saying that the new Ford family car is going to be cheaper than a Kenworth prime mover. Well duh. And what is the point of a 400/5.6 DO anyway? It's not as if you can't hold a 400/5.6 comfortably in one hand already...

Not a snowball's chance in hell that these new DO lenses from Nikon will be cheap. There is no such thing as a cheap DO lens. Maybe there will be one day. Don't hold your breath.

Three comments: (a) This is the return of the undead. Seagate were building 2HP drives back in ... oh ... must have been the mid 1990s. (b) But what is the point? It's not as if you don't use SSDs when performance matters. (c) The Tom's article looked quite interesting, but the website was so...

Cheers lads. :)

Things are different in Australia. For one thing, in an emergency we dial 000. If you ask the average Ozzie what "911" is they won't know whether it's a brand of perfume or a sort of sports car. And we don't drink Coors or Budweiser, let alone that Fosters stuff. (Well, granted, Fosters is...

Congratulations to the Firefox development team. This is exactly the right move to make, and looks set to complete the ambitious task they began four or five years ago. In just a few more years will be able to look back and admire their rapid, efficient, and effective campaign to achieve the...

AMD does not and never has made motherboards.

Belinda and I are getting rather lost. We both want head torches. (Known as "headlamps" in the America. In English-speaking countries, "headlamps" are the things on the front of cars for driving at night with.) Mine is for camping. (a) general camp tasks - preparing meals, putting up tents...

I see mirrorless gradually eating away at the low-end SLR market, replacing the X00D ("Rebel" in the US) range over time, or at least supplementing it. But I also see mirrorless as a genuine alternative to pro and particularly semi-pro models, just the way rangefinders used to be a genuine...

I'd be happy with an EVF for some purposes, not for others. For landscapes at moderate focal lengths where you have time to think about things and set up the shot just so, and EVF would work for me. All I really need to see is the framing. (Have I excluded that power pole? Is my horizon...

Yes, and the same sentiments were also made about 101 different wannabe technologies which have disappeared without trace and no-one even remembers them anymore. The difference here is that digital brought wonderful new capabilities to the table, and (over time) could do things that film simply...

It will be half the price and half the quality. Just from the lens name we can tell that it's going for the cheap, slow end of the market - f/6.3 is pretty much a red flag that says "we are not really serious about this product". There is some excuse when your product is really long (e.g., a...

It's the mantra, isn't it. "Mirrorless is the future". But then, they said the same about Yahoo, Netware, and Myspace. Call me when a mirrorless camera can do what an SLR can do as well as an SLR does. Actually, don't call me, call my grandchildren 'coz I'll have been pushing up daisies long...

Thanks Clocker. I'll read that with interest.

Here in sunny Australia, EVs are a complete rubbish idea at present. What is the point of driving an electric vehicle when this amounts, essentially, to powering it with coal? You might as well just burn petrol directly and save a lot of messing about. (We are transitioning to solar and wind...

^ Perhaps they can figure that out after they solve the problem of figuring out how to make petrol or oil drivers to pay their share of hospital and medical expenses for the millions of extra cancer, bronchitis and emphysema cases caused by internal combustion engines. After that they can figure...

I doubt that Nikon or indeed anyone else could make a better lens than the 100-400 II. In fact it's not really a lens, it's a bleedin' miracle. Maybe in five years. The 100-400 II is as far ahead of anything else in its class today as the Nikkor 14-24/2.8 was in ultra-wide world a decade ago...

All this instead of just making a decent 80-400?

Cheers Snowhiker. The Canon 16-35/4 is generally regarded as an outstanding lens, at the time of its release clearly the best full frame UWA zoom. The Mark III 16-35/2.8 came along a bit later and apparently matches it for quality. (But doesn't have IS, is vastly more expensive, and is a lot...

As Tea says, I thought long and hard about ultra-wides. On the menu were: Canon 16-35/4. For: superb optics, IS, small and light, takes standard 77mm filters (can be shared with the 100-400, 70-300, and 24-105, plus (via step-up-ring) the 100 macro and 35/1.4), very reasonable price. Against...

It would be very roughly around $1000 I reckon, assuming that Lens Rentals did as they say and repaired it in-house in three hours, and allowing for the cost of the parts. More at most places. As for the dork who was specifically warned about the danger, told what not to do, and did it anyway...

The difficulty will be the ability of the battery to deliver sufficient amperage. Whether Nikon do the scumbag DRM thing, I couldn't say. In Canonland, there are two identical-looking batteries to suit most semi-pro models: one can deliver more amperage and is required for the highest possible...

A $370 battery charger? Strikes me as pretty good value. (Just to check, you do get a trip for two to Hawaii and a free super model with it, yes?)

One other thing I am considering is a pocket camera. I don't carry a smart phone and prefer real cameras anyway, but there are two circumstances where a shirt-pocket size camera would be of real benefit: #1 Where I take a big, heavy birding lens on a long walk somewhere which is either familiar...

I've got myself into a bit of a pickle, Dave. I normally run four bodies. #1 - primary birding camera, attached to the best birding lens #2 - dual-purpose wildlife and landscapes, attached to the 100-400 (I may have a 70-300L arriving by way of a swap for my old mark 1 100-400). #3 - primary...

^ And Sandisk is owned by the Web of Satan.

Nope. Never been to the States at all: On the list of countries I'd like to go to, it's around 125th. Giiven that I average roughly one new country a decade, it might be a little while yet. Hottest I have experienced was a mere 47 in the Western Australian Wheatbelt, followed by a couple of...

Cheers Snowhiker. In a word, they are poxy damn fiddly things that are way too small to be practical, and get dropped and lost too easily. Who wants to have to handle them in the dark, when it's cold, or wearing gloves? Certainly not me. Compare with CF cards which are a size you can handle and...

47! Hoolie Doolie that's hot!