My Quiet Life

Actually, this post has me thinking: what typically kills a DSLR? That is, beyond dropping it from 4 feet (which will kill a DSLR. trust me on this one. RIP D30), what are the things that will typically break in a DSLR first that will make it prohibitively expensive to repair versus the cost of a new replacement? It’s sortof like a car. As long as the engine and a few other critical components don’t die, you can keep repairing it, barring a money pit situation. So, what is the “engine” of a DSLR?

The shutter?

I think I’m okay here. I have shot around 15,000 frames, and before that I’d guess the previous owner did a third of that, but I don’t know. This thread indicates an average lifetime of 50k frames with a typical consumer EOS body shutter. So not a problem. And even if it did break, apparently it’s not a difficult repair to send in and have done — a few hundred bucks. (Though, with the plummetting cost of DSLRs, a “few hundred” quickly gets into viable replacement territory, depending on how many “few” we’re talking.)

The sensor

I am curious about this, and I have my suspicions that this will actually begin to be the thing that causes me to replace it. I don’t think that it will ever just completely die, but I already have a scary number of dead pixels (as I learned when I started doing lightning photography with long-exposure noise reduction turned off). There’s also a weird pock-mark I can visibly see on the sensor, which yields a little circle sometimes that I have to clone out. I have a feeling the sensor might eventually get beatup enough that it’s unusable?

CF card slot

I don’t know what the possibility of this dying is, but I’ve read about people having problems. And I don’t know a lot about embedded electronics, but I’m guessing the CF reader is incorporated into the main board itself, and this is likely prohibitively expensive to replace/repair. I really have no idea though.

What else? What will kill a DSLR?

So, I had an idea yesterday that I have always wanted a radio scanner — for emergencies and also just for following fire/police bands for goings-on. I impulse-bought one from Radio Shack — the PRO-94 scanner.

I wish when I had impulse-bought that I had realized that Nashville’s public safety services use APCO 25, which is all digital. The cheapest scanner that can pick that up I found was Radio Shack’s PRO-96, which is $500. So much for that idea.

I thought I’d write up my workflow for mucking around with HDR and Tonemapping in Linux. Actually, come to think of it, though, most of this software would probably work fine in Windows (pfstools being the toughest, but I bet it works fine in cygwin). But first, a point of clarification in definitions: most people associate HDR with tonemapping, but they aren’t the same thing:

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range, and it’s a process by which you can combine multiple exposures into one image that contains more dynamic range than one exposure would normally contain. These images need to be displayed on equipment that can display the range, or they need to be .. tone-mapped:

Tone-mapping is a process by which the high dynamic range is converted to a standard low-dynamic range image. There are many algorithms to accomplish this, and they all have different effects — some realistic, and some not. (Some prefer to call it hyperreal or surreal. Whatever.)

I was loathe to write this up, since I haven’t really produced anything that phenomenal, but I do have some tricks up my sleeves that other people with more photographic skill might find useful:

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