Press "Enter" to skip to content

Author: Ross Rubin

Kodak’s promising picture short a few pixels

I’ve long asserted that the charge around Kodak’s “blowing” the digital transition has been far exaggerated. It’s one thing if you’re a financial analyst grumpy about replacing film revenue. But in terns of the digital still camera market, Kodak has done about as well as could be expected. It’s a consistent market share leader, and it has carried forward its everyman legacy. Meanwhile, Konica, Minolta and Pentax’s camera lines were all absorbed by other companies, and Olympus has been struggling.

In any case, I’d never argue that Kodak or any company should rest on its laurels or not seek to expand its market base. But how? The thin thing has been done, we don’t need more megapixels, and DSLRs will be hard-pressed to move past the enthusiast base of their analog predecessors.

Continue ReadingKodak’s promising picture short a few pixels

Images and Video

The Mac with two brains

John Rizzo, former MacUser editor and publisher of the excellent Web site MacWindows has written an informative piece at MacCentral regarding some of the options for running Windows programs on a Mac. After writing a book in the early ’90s about Mac telecom that included a chapter on working with PCs, I actually started a more reference-oriented cross-platform site back in the mid-’90s with the domain xplat.com. I probably could have fetched something decent for that goofy domain name at an auction. Easy come…

In his article, unlike on his site, John doesn’t discuss Win32 API products such as CodeWeavers’ CrossOver. These don’t run Windows on a Mac, but do what most users would probably prefer, which is to run Windows programs on a Mac. However, he does mention an interesting option that will be offered with the VMWare technology for the Mac that will enable “appliances” — preinstalled Windows apps ready to run at nearly native speeds on Mac OS.

Apple has accurately juxtaposed the tradeoff among Boot Camp, virtualization products, and API-compatibility products as one that progressively sacrifice compatibility for convenience. It continues to stick with the most compatible approach in Boot Camp and must tread carefully in terms of supporting its native developers. However, I still think that, for most Mac users, virtualization technology is a better tradeoff than Boot Camp, and Apple would benefit by selling Macs with more RAM to accommodate two simultaneous operating systems.

Regardless, I don’t agree with the point that, “at some point in the not-too-distant future, most Macs—especially those in business and educational environments —will be running multiple operating systems.” Many? Sure. But not most unless Microsoft offers some aggressive pricing to Mac users

Apps and SoftwarePlatforms and Standards

MP3 is not home audio’s enemy

I just accepted an invitation to attend a session at CES about high-performance or, as the invitation puts it, “HD” audio. The invitation notes:

While MP3s offer convenience, the quality of the audio experience is greatly diminished. High-resolution audio — or HD Audio — heightens that experience and demonstrates that consumers need not sacrifice quality for convenience.

And so continues the home audio crowd’s self-defeating crusade against MP3. Instead of embracing this popular format that can produce very good audio at high bitrates and expanding its market, the high-end continues to cling to the compact disc and lament the failure of SACD and DVD-Audio.

Lossy audio compression is here for the foreseeable future; it’s part of the ATSC broadcast specification and it sounds fantastic. I’ve seen only one company that truly is combining “no compromise” digital audio with most of the flexibility of media-independence; Unfortunately, I doubt that more than five percent of consumers woud appreciate the quality advantage that uncompressed audio has over, say, WMA encoded at 256 KBit/sec.

Can you imagine if video vendors acted like this? “Oh, sure, MPEG-2 lets us put a whole movie on a DVD, but you don’t want the compromise of compressed video, do you?” To the contrary, DVD manufacturers are embracing new codecs like DiVX and Windows Media, while the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD camps are moving to even more efficient encoding schemes such as VC-1 and MPEG-4.

This strikes at the heart of a theme that I have turned to again and again in the past year — the need for consumer technology providers to strike a better balance between quality improvements that have traditionally driven industry growth and flexibility. Show me the benefit of these marginal (in terms of customer perception) quality improvements achieved with the same level of convenience that especially unprotected MP3 offers.

Content

How Zune can be doomed

In ComputerWorld, my message board sparring partner of Windows Magazine days Mike Elgan argues that Zune can kill the iPod by being the anti-iPod, much like Windows is (or was during its rise) the anti-Mac. I wrote last year that Microsoft wasn’t going to succeed with a Windows-like strategy in reference to Playsforsure, which was a more Windows-like strategy than Microsoft will ever be able to execute with Zune.

About the only points I agree with Mike on are that the initial execution of Zune has significant flaws and limitations, that Apple nevertheless has good reason to be concerned, and that cell phones from Apple and Microsoft would change the dynamics of the market. Beyond that, I can’t conceive how a hackable MP3 player would ever seriously challenge the iPod, much less lead the market. In fact, such a product has been on the market for years and hasn’t seen much market penetration. These are consumer electronics products; as simple as the iPod is for the functionality it offers, it’s still incredibly complex compared to, say, a portable cassette or CD player. Mike exhorts:

Let people transform the Zune into an Xbox game controller, a TV remote control, a portable presentation device, a wireless PC hard drive or a Vista gadget emulator. Give me a wireless keyboard and a Zune version of Pocket Outlook, and I’ll never buy another iPod. Build ClearType into Zune and make it the ultimate eBook reader (and sell eBooks on Zune Marketplace).

EBooks, eh? By this logic, Palm has built a real iPod-killer.

ContentMobile Devices

The CD is not dead yet

One of the sad things about format changes is that there is inevitably music left behind. Ripping provided an escape clause for the current generation of music. However, if DVD and its successors  as well as the various DRM schemes are any indication, , it will be a lot harder to do format-shifting should any future sanctioned music format come to dominate, particularly given current legislation.

Incredibly enough, though, we are still seeing albums re-released as CDs. During a brief liaison with country music in junior high school, a friend introduced me to a Canadian group called The Irish Rovers; their career has spanned 40 years. Most of their fare is Irish folk music, but they did put out a self-titled album with a more pop country sound and song choice. Probably the most popular song from it was the track, “Wasn’t That a Party?,” a funny piece about a soiree that gets far enough out of control to include a drag race.

in any case, after not being satisfied with the results of various attempts to digitally record a copy of the LP bought off eBay, I was shocked to find out a few months ago that it had finally been reissued on CD some 30 years later. Even so, the new CD was backordered for a month. I’m pleased to share that I received an email from a Canadian store today and it is on its way! This CD thing could really catch on!

ContentPlatforms and Standards

Ears of war

Last year, the Xbox 360 had the limelight all to itself as the first “next-generation” console to hit the market. This year, though, the console has fought to stay in the zeitgeist, crammed between the novelty of play driven by the Wii and the hard-to-find horsepower of the PlayStation 3.

Microsoft’s promise that it had a lot of tricks up its sleeve for this holiday season held true enough. Most of the news out of the Xbox group this fall has been aimed more directly at competing with Sony — the graphically rich grit of Gears of War, the enhanced network play of the wireless headset, the downloading of movies via Xbox Live. support of 1080p, and the availability of the external HD-DVD drive And yet, the whole doesn’t seem more than the sum of its parts.

Microsoft may simply be falling victim to the attention around the PlayStation shortages, a phenomenon that it experienced firsthand last holiday season. Such shortages drive a lot of PR in the short term, but hurt a brand if they go on too long. In contrast, while there has been some scarcity associated with the Wii, most of the attention on the product itself and even the launch titles has been positive. It seems like anyone who wants a Wii by a tree will be able to get one without resorting to desperate measures.

One way the Xbox group could steal a little bit of thunder back would be to release a hard drive upgrade for the 360. Of course, this wouldn’t do much for gaming, but it would enable Microsoft to position the 360 as both a hub and a great Media Center extender client.

Video Games

The best of both widget worlds

DashboardSince my post last week on the new breed of widget appliances and some hands-on time with the RTM edition of Windows Vista, I’ve been thinking a bit more about the tradeoffs between Microsoft’s and Apple’s implementations of functionality at your fingertips.. Both approaches make assumptions about how users will — or won’t — interact with these applets.

Vista’s gadgets are kept in a vertical sidebar that can be docked to either side of the screen. They can also be dragged onto the desktop. One of the best features of gadgets is that they can also exist off the screen — as in the case of Vista’s SideShow feature — or even outside of the PC itself, also via SideShow.

Mac OS X Tiger’s widgets appear in a separate layer that appears at the touch of a keystroke. There’s more planned for widgets in Mac OS X Leopard, but the fundamental tradeoff is that Vista’s gadgets are always in view, making them handier for tracking information at a glance, whereas Tiger’s implementation enables access to more of them at a time by utilizing the entire screen.

Overall, I prefer Apple’s implementation, which places fewer constraints on the design of these programs, but there’s merit to the “Sidebar” approach for organization that I’d like to see Apple adopt. Instead of having all widgets in a layer, Apple could support a Sidebar that could, with a hotkey or control, expand to overlay the entire screen.

Apps and Software

Zune zigs, Zen zags

z600.jpgNo sooner does the Zune promise to marginalize Creative’s Zen Vision: M than the company finally appears to bring together some of its core assets from audio processing to its Cambridge Soundworks speaker group to support its flagship hard drive-based player.

The piano-black speakers on the X-Fi Sound System Z600 remind me a bit of the Z-10s that were recently released by Logitech, but the $400 system includes a subwoofer and the Creative’s X-Fi “sound restoration” technology that has been favorably reviewed. The system may be a bit pricey, and the most successful iPod docks from Bose, Apple, Altec Lansing and Logitech  have all had integrated speakers, but accessory support will go much further toward helping the Zen Vision than disparaging Microsoft would.

From Fareastgizmos via Engadget

Content

Resistance: FallofMP3.com

It looks like the clock is ticking on what many have said is digital music sales done right (wherein “right” is music for ten cents on the dollar and no DRM) — Russian Web site allofmp3.com and its client-side software allTunes. Apparently, MasterCard has joined Visa in blocking payment to ChronoPay, the intermediary that handled credit card transactions for the controversial site.

So, unless would-be customers can get their hands on a Diners Club card right quick, the loophole site will have much of its revenue base cut off. Then again, it might be able to survive just on Russian revenue. Without reimbursing labels or artists, one might call its overhead low.

Kevin Maney nails it by noting that it looks like Visa and MasterCard are deciding copyright law.

Uncategorized