Nikon Issues Small Recall for a 16-Year-Old Film Camera(petapixel.com) |
Nikon Issues Small Recall for a 16-Year-Old Film Camera(petapixel.com) |
-- Hotel apologizes in advance for a brief 1 minute planned disruption of in-room internet at 4am https://www.google.com/search?q=japanese+hotel+internet+apol...
-- Japanese train company issues apology for train leaving 20 seconds early https://www.google.com/search?q=tokyo+rail+apologizes+train+...
(I realize 20 seconds early isn't that bad, but still, leaving early by any amount of time is a lot worse than leaving late)
It's not a 40 minute thing, this isn't Caltrain, but it's still annoying.
Unless you have a tight next connection, in which case leaving late often means arriving late too, and thus missing that one.
This likely only happened as quickly as it did because it's a Hazardous substance issue and not an overall quality issue.
16 years is "quick?"
They were late, but they did the right thing, eventually.
It looks nice but the reasons for its existence isn’t nice.
https://imaging.nikon.com/lineup/filmcamera/slr/f6/
(I’d love to see the sales numbers for the F6. I can’t even guess the order of magnitude of global sales per year. 1? 10? 100?)
I'm not sure this is something the company could ignore without potential consequences.
It might simply be a supplier found thing happened, they notified the other companies and so on.
There’s so many used and seemingly indestructible film cameras floating around. I guess there’s some market for a factory-warranty film SLR, but I’m not sure what said market is. If I was going to shoot film, I’d find a Nikon F5, which would also double as a medieval flail for self-defense.
(Or I’d pull my 1983 Pentax off the shelf.)
https://petapixel.com/2019/12/10/you-can-still-buy-a-brand-n...
"Taking a look at the serial number of my camera which is 35955 and comparing it to an F6 sold new in 2015 bearing the number 34875 I’d conclude that least 1080 units have been sold since then (approximately 270 cameras per year)."
"In fact, only 152 units are impacted… so few that Nikon actually lists every affected serial number in the recall notice:
0035842, ..., 0035955, ..."
Maybe 100 on the low end.
edit: from a sister comment the number is approximately 270 per year globally.
And 270 film SLRs per year sounds perfectly reasonable.
http://forum.mflenses.com/re-cementing-doublet-elements-with...
Call Trans could issue an apology and it wouldn't help. Because they would just have a daily apology log filled to the brim.
How confident are you that your clock wasn't 20 seconds slow?
https://www.electro-tech-online.com/threads/cell-phone-clock...
> I have a company where everyone has a phone that used the same calender program, same service, same type of phone, etc. At 8:50 and again at 9:00 every phone will ding to announce 9:00 meeting. There is no 0.01 second syncing of the phones. The time might be exactly the same but the "dings" happens over 30 seconds. Then one phone might be a good minute or more off. (usually mine) There are many times where the dings are within 5 seconds.
My phone is within a second.
a) you're in some weird bus terminal and 60 minutes before the flight the bus is starting to board to take passengers to the plane which is not close b) you're a 15 minute walk and 15 minutes security line away from that cluster of restaurants you decided not to stop at
Most people don’t need it but it’s certainly unique. If you do need it, there is no substitute.
Nikon actually has a history of doing that as well. The Nikonos series underwater cameras were really the only thing in their class, with unique water-contact optics that avoided rainbow diffraction from the port by putting the optics right against the water. They also made unique 180-degree orthographic lenses for atmospheric surveying - measure cloud cover/etc by photographing the sky every day and get the full horizon to horizon in one frame. etc etc. They really are a fascinating company.
Check out the 1001 Nights of Nikkor, a fascinating series of stories about all that stuff.
Medium and large format can get more because it's more film area, albeit not as much as you think in practice. It takes specific equipment and good technique, and often you are limited by the shallower depth of field or diffraction. IMO however it is much easier to achieve "reasonable" results comparable with modern full frame digital on MF/LF, because you don't need everything to be insanely high-resolution and perfectly aligned, the larger film area means that you can get good resolution out of "basic" equipment that is doing 2000-3000 dpi compared to the 4000 dpi of a drum scan that is necessary to max out 35mm.
Film also has very different technical characteristics from digital. It has an exponential "shoulder" to the exposure curve that tends to make it resistant to over-exposure, where with digital if it's overexposed it's just gone, clipped to white. It also has very different aesthetics, it just looks different (because each film stock has different exposure characteristics).
Also, some film stocks have unique frequency response curves - the astrophotography community is mourning the loss of Technical Pan film because it was perfect for photographing the hydrogen-alpha emissions of stars. It turns out that this film was developed for the National Reconnaissance Office for satellite surveillance and since they've moved to digital it's no longer being produced.
Wait; how does that work ? Where is the camera writing the info and how do you retrieve it ?
Personally I think that's a little clunky and it would be better to go with a little transflash card, but the F6 was designed in 2004 and I guess at that point it would have been a SD card and maybe even compactflash and they didn't want the size.
This approach is probably still preferable to direct USB connection though, because presumably that would require utility software that would now be incredibly out of date and tied to like Windows XP or something. If nobody bothered to write an open-source utility then that function would be unusable for modern PCs.
That's a problem on some hardware, I have a scanner where the only software that supports it is tied to Windows XP, or you can use third-party software (VueScan)_that talks to it directly and bypasses the official drivers. It is a scanner designed to do 4x5 film directly (not a flatbed) so replacements are thousands of dollars.
The F6 was the flagship 35mm SLR camera once production of new film cameras stopped at Nikon, and as such it's filled with all the features you'd expect of a flagship camera. It'll take a battery grip, it shoots at 8FPS with it, it'll take a separate data recorder to record exposure info, etc. etc.
Except that a lot of people using film today don't want that. The manual old-time simplicity and thoughtfulness is part of the selling point for a lot of those who still use film, and if they wanted to shoot at 8FPS or higher, DSLRs and mirrorless cameras are far better choices on any technical merit. I'd be surprised if the F6 ends up selling out easily.
I heard a couple of years back that Japanese police bought F6s for evidence photography.
There is also a market of camera users who just want the "best", newest thing, with the most features. Look at the difference in prices between the Nikon FE or FM and FM3A, when they are barely different for a photographer with even modest skills
/edit or the Nikon F6 and F100
(I'll let you think on that puzzle.)
The second reason is closer, but not exact. Caltrain has a variety of different types of trains, some stop at all the stops, some stop at only a few. Here's the scenario: there is a fast train then a slow train. Your normal schedule doesn't allow you to get to the station on time to take the fast train, so you normally take the slow train. If both trains are behind schedule, you might be able to make it to the fast train, and since it goes faster you might get to your destination earlier than normal.
Why don't they just build out BART between Millbrae and Santa Clara? Once the Silicon Valley Extension is finished, BART will be almost a loop around the Bay except for that gap.
Plus the fact that the citizens (through their representatives) voted against it decades ago, so it was removed from the original plan. Given the current fuss among the citizenry over similar problems with running the nascent high-speed rail up the Caltrain corridor, I’d guess a vote today on BART would have the same outcome.
Couldn't they build a tunnel? With a tunnel, the requirements for eminent domain would be relatively limited (portals, station entrances, maybe some ventilation/utility buildings)
Sydney, Australia's new metro system which is being built relies mostly on tunnels (plus some conversion of existing surface lines, and elevated rail in outer suburban areas where land is relatively cheap). Sydney's metro area (5.2 million) isn't hugely larger than the Bay Area's (4.7 million).
Or I can use live view on a 35mm digital camera and nail the focus and exposure exactly. Or if I’m really getting paid, I get a Fuji GFX 100, a 102MP medium-format camera, and get a ludicrous number of pixels.
The frustrating thing of course, is that even if the trains are severely delayed, they have (or had, depending on whether they go out of business soon) a policy of running the exact schedule for each train as if normal. So even if all the trains are piled up, delayed, they would make local stops, etc. even though everyone wanted just to get to the end by express.
Sad that this kind of issue was so common (1x per month at least) that I blame them for not having efficient accident backup plans.
Yes, yes, I realize that there's the problem of having trains go express when they're all stacked up.
And we are out of money / unwilling to pay for such projects. Australia is still relatively swimming in its natural resource boom and has funds to do that. And political willingness to invest in public transportation that's clean and efficient.
In California, public transport seems to be relegated to the status of a homeless mobility system / shelter, that most people reluctantly take and have to wonder why it's so badly operated. I don't think the idea will get far to tunnel under the rest of the peninsula. We can't even sort out the remaining 1 mile of Caltrain that was planned to connect to downtown SF and the Transbay center.
Aside from that, I believe there's a groundwater level problem under most of the places where such a line would go? I'm not an expert on that though.
On a per capita basis, the US is richer than Australia. According to 2019 IMF estimates, US's nominal GDP per capita is US$65,111 (ranked 7th), Australia's nominal GDP per capita is only US$53,825 (ranked 10th) [1]. Similarly, the US's PPP GDP per capita (2020 IMF estimates) is US$67,426 (ranked 10th), while Australia's is only US$54,799 (ranked 19th) [2].
The US is a richer country than Australia in both relative (per capita GDP) and absolute (overall GDP) terms (and both nominally and at PPP). If Australia can afford tunnels, why can't a richer country like the US afford them too? (Especially in the Bay Area Peninsula, which is one of the wealthiest areas in the whole of the US.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...
Australia's national debt is less than 1/2 of the US's in terms of % of GDP. (US has basically 100% of its annual GDP in debt). Australia has a lot more room to consider big projects as a result.
Putting that aside, a common trick used in countries like Australia and the UK is to keep big projects off the government's balance sheet through public-private partnerships – private corporations do most of the borrowing, not the government, and end up owning the infrastructure (often under some deal where it reverts to government ownership in 50 or 100 years time). But I get the impression that approach is far less common in the US. (Despite the fact that it is the more capitalist/free-market approach – allow private investors to own public infrastructure – and the US is generally thought of as a more capitalist/free-market country than the UK or Australia are.)
Public-private partnerships are often criticised as being inferior to government borrowing, due to higher private sector borrowing costs, and I agree with that criticism. But, even though I think it is best to build with government borrowing, if one has a government debt allergy preventing that, then building with private borrowing seems better than not building at all.