News from Here & There

Marshall 5" V-LCD50-HDMI
If you're thinking of getting a monitor for your HDSLR, but have been put off by the high cost of Marshall's 8" monitors, then their new 5" monitor, the V-LCD50-HDMI, might be just the thing. It's small, light, runs on four "AA" batteries and costs $600!

Jared Abrams at Cinema5D took a tour around their factory and has a video up, which is interesting; though I think the music is a little bit over the top; it's a factory tour, not the final battle scene in "Lord of the Rings"!
Cinema5D: Marshall Electronics Factory Tour. New 5″ HDMI Monitor



Sony NEX-5 sample videos
DPReview.com has write-ups about the coming Sony cameras. They also have a sample video on YouTube taken using a full production NEX-5 and you can download the movie exported as a high quality H.264 Quicktime MOV video from iMovie (it's 300MB).
[UPDATE] Having looked at the video, my initial reaction was surprise at how wobbly the video was...I guess it was a windy day: there was a lot of wind noise on the mic! The lens it was shot with, the 18-55mm lens, is supposed to have internal optical stabilization (the camera body itself does not have stabilization, but some lenses have it built in) but it was hard to tell!
DPReview: Sony NEX-5 video



More on Canon 5D Mark II Firmware update 2.0.4 troubles
I noted back in early April reports of a problem in the the 2.0.4 firmware that caused the aperture of some lenses to change as focus was changed.  The 5D Mark II Team continues to update their report on this, and sent along the following:
We have updated the Report of the malfunction found on Firmware 2.0.4, including more video tests that clearly show the problem.

- It can be found here: Malfunction in Firmware 2.0.4 UPDATE

- We also elaborated and published a List of Lenses Affected by this iris issue.

There IS a clear issue on Firmware 2.0.4, very easy to reproduce, that will be fixed by Canon in the near future.

Some comments posted in the past at CanonRumors.com arguing this iris behavior is normal, are completely wrong. Some people didn't take enough time to read and watch the reports and videos carefully, so they misunderstood the problem. In fact the "iris jitter" does also affect some non-Macro lenses too, as shown on the updated report.

We hope Canon not only fixes this issue, but also includes some additional features in the next firmware update.

We encourage all users who experience this issue to report it to Canon and also request the most important improvements they need for the 5D Mark II.

Feel free to post your experiences in our blog too.



Is Apple stifling innovation?
Jack Nack of Adobe, in his blog post Absolute Power vs. the Pirate Flag raises the question; does Apple have too much power with it's ability to reject apps, and frames it differently; how much innovation is being stifled? How many companies think about developing a super image processing or video editing app, but decide not to because they worry that Apple will reject it...

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