Canon 5D Mark II – One Year On

A year living with the EOS 5D Mark II Camera

It’s just over a  year since the arrival of my Canon 5D mark II, which for me was an upgrade from my original mark-I. Since then I’ve taken just over 12,000 frames in locations varying from a very cold minus 13 degrees Celsius in Glencoe, to a very hot and blowy 52 degrees Celsius in Death Valley, California.  I don’t intend to present a review of the camera here as there are far better qualified people than I whom have already published their findings online. I will however, tell you how I’ve got on with the Canon 5D mark-II, my thoughts and opinions and the problems and idiosyncrasies I’ve encountered.

First and foremost, the 5D MII is a very good camera indeed and in the right hands is capable of producing top notch photographs. If you have used a Canon 5D (mark-I) you’ll feel instantly at home with the mark-II. My 5D mark-II has performed well and I have encountered no major problems over the year. It feels much better built than the mark-I and with the improved weather sealing I’ve been perhaps a little more adventurous, taking it out in some inclement weather, where perhaps I wouldn’t have risked the mark-I.

 

Resolution

When I upgraded I must admit one of the most desirable features was the greatly increased resolution, which at 21mp is a huge step up from 12.8mp of the original 5D. Although it’s almost considered bad form to desire more pixels these days, the additional size lends much more scope to crop your pictures and still be able to generate a good size print. I regularly print A3-plus, and here the 5D MII does not disappoint.I have even had some 24 x 30-inch prints made and they absolutely stunning and tack sharp even at nose distance. The increased resolution has also allowed me to make larger wildlife prints where shots are often heavily cropped. Cropped shots that were only good enough for the computer screen with the 5D mark-I, I can now make reasonable sized prints. Compositions that were only good enough for A4 prints with a 5D,  are now good enough for A3 prints if taken with the mark-II. The step up in resolution is a huge benefit to my photography.

There has been one drawback however. I use a Canon EF 100-400mm F4.5-5.6 L IS lens for my wildlife photography and had always been amazed at how sharp this lens appeared using my 5D mark-I. Shots taken with this lens on the 5D mark-II however, did not appear as sharp at 1:1 (100%) as they did on the mark-I. At first I was a bit miffed and began to think I’d got a bad camera, but my other lenses were tack sharp. I did quite a few test shots and there definitely was, a albeit very slight, an apparent loss in sharpness. I had my focusing re-calibrated but the results were the same. Then I realised why this lens never received great review from owners of 1Ds III’s or any camera with 21mp resolution or above; 21 mp is simply above the resolving power of this lens. Now I hear rumours that this lens is to be withdrawn and perhaps replaced. So if you go for a high resolution sensor, bear in mind your current lenses and their ability to perform.

 

Live View

I didn’t buy the camera for live-view, nor did I think i would have any use for it. Boy have I changed my mind. What a brilliant tool. Yes it does run your battery down quicker...just buy another battery. For someone like me who wears specs and not in possession of the greatest eyesight, manual focusing was always a bit of a nightmare. In fact it was so hit and miss with me that I generally never bothered and just had to rely getting a focus point on something of contrast no matter what the light or else. But sometimes not even that works. Using live view however, makes focusing so simple. You can zoom up to x10 anywhere in your frame to check for sharpness, and you can open up your aperture or adjust compensation to check even the darkest areas, and simply stop back down to take your shot. It’s great too for checking your hyper-focal focusing.

 

QUICK CONTROL Screen

Pressing the joy-stick (Multi-Selector) button on the back of the camera brings up the Quick Control Screen. However I found that if you don’t  quite press this straight down it doesn’t work and sometimes takes a few presses. This may be my poor (and sloppy) technique but I find it irritating and wish Canon had a dedicated menu button instead. You can change the SET button in the centre of the Quick Control Dial to activate the Quick Control Screen via a Custom Control Function, but this effects other operations and so I have gone down this route.

The Quick Control Screen allows the user to adjust just about any of the cameras settings and is navigated by using the Multi-selector. Now I find I rarely use the buttons on the top of the camera next to the LCD status panel, in fact I rarely  ever look at the LCD panel now at all.

Setting bracketed exposure is so much easier now too. You just select the exposure screen from the Quick Control Screen and use the thumbwheels to set the Auto Exposure Bracketing (AEB) amount and Compensation.

The Quick Control Panel is a huge leap forward in usability but I still find it a tad clumsy to use. It’s good, but I still feel this could be refined. I’m not sure how, but scrolling around the page could be improved I’m sure. I’m also not a fan of digital controls and still would like to see more analogue style controls on the camera. We have thumbwheels to adjust the aperture and shutter speed, so why can’t we have another for ISO? These are so much easier and quicker to use.

 

No Mirror Lock-up Button

There’s still no dedicated Mirror Lock-up button, despite the zillion and one requests on the internet. None has appeared on any other Canon camera that has appeared since the release of Canon 5D Mark-II, so it seems canon will never pay attention to the general public no matter how vociferous the strength of opinion. You can however, add this function to a user menu, so at least it’s not so hidden as before, but it still makes it a pain to set and unset.

 

No Tactile Buttons

One of my major gripes with the original Canon 5D was that the buttons are all the same. Sure this makes for smart ergonomics and neat looks but when you are fumbling around in the night or low light it would be great if they felt different, making then easily distinguishable from one another and not all identical. I guess the Quick Control Screen goes somewhat  to overcoming the problem. but I’d still like to see (or should that be feel?) buttons that are different.

 

Expanded and Auto ISO

The expanded ISO range is great, but to put it simply, ISO 800 is the same as ISO 400 in the original 5D. You have about one stop extra. Photographs at ISO 800 are perfectly usable, beyond that it depends on the light and the subject matter.

Canon have also implemented an Auto-ISO mode, which allows the camera to adjust the ISO speed if necessary. A great idea you may think, but this a very poor implementation of this function by Canon, and in effect making it practicably unusable. You can select Auto-ISO in Automatic, Program, Aperture priority or Shutter priority mode, but the camera then sets ISO values ranging from 100 up to 3200 ISO. Canon may think 1600 or 3200 ISO are fine but I can guarantee most decent photographers won’t go there. Canon need to take a leaf out of the Pentax book where on their cameras the user can specify the upper and lower ISO range, say 100-800 ISO, which would be usable. I’m sure this could be implement by a simple firmware fix, so this has to go down as a blunder by Canon. A case of lets get the function in, but with little thought of how the user would want it implemented. 

 

Camera User Settings

Listed in the pre-release press for the 5D Mark-II, one the new functions that really appealed to me was the ability to have 3 Camera User Settings. These can be selected by choosing either C1, C2 or C3 on the Mode Dial. Great I thought, I can one have with all the settings for my wildlife photography, one for landscapes and one for portraits. Err..nope, I found out that they are totally useless. I can not understand Canon’s implementation of these buttons and how they work, it’s completely backwards.  These only work if you take every photograph on exactly the same settings and I don’t think there is a photographer in the world who does that?

Let me explain, say I set C3 to my wildlife settings. I use my 100-400mm, so I’ll have my aperture set to f/5.6, ISO to 200, spot metering, and only the centre focus point selected and the camera in aperture priority mode. When I’m ready to shoot some wildlife, I simply rotate the Mode Selector dial to C3 and I’m ready to shoot.  I take several frames but then find some animals in the shade and I need to bump up the ISO to 800, I adjust the ISO take a few frames then move on to another subject. I raise my camera to shoot, thinking it’s still at ISO 800, shoot and my picture is strangely underexposed, but wait, my ISO has been set back to ISO 200! Every time your camera auto-powers off (remember the Canon default is after 1 minute) your settings are re-set back to their starting point. This is absolutely infuriating and can not be avoided unless you disable the auto power off feature and that of course will run your batteries down super quick.

Canon have really got this one backwards. The user settings should be your starting point and should never reset when the camera powers down, but only when you the user chooses to do so. The way Camera User Settings operate should be set using a custom function. Come on Canon this ones a no-brainer surely!

 

Battery Compartment

Still plastic, still not weather sealed and rather flimsy and cheap compared to the rest of the camera. Again, frequently mentioned on the web and still never altered by Canon.

 

Eyecup

The eyecup is a little like the battery compartment door, it’s plastic, rather cheap and flimsy and seems out of place on camera of this quality. However they are  pretty much the same design and quality on all Canon cameras and are very much in need of a serious redesign. These are probably fine if you never have to remove them and leave the original one on your camera for all it’s life. However if you use the Angle Finder eyepiece and even just occasionally swap between that and the standard Eb eyecup, you soon find the original one becomes loose and won’t stay on very well, and sooner or later you find it’s gone! I’ve gone through 3 or 4 of these. They gradually become so loose that just taking them out of your camera bag can cause them to come off and it’s generally too late when you notice it’s gone.

 

Minor Improvements and Changes

You can now see the ISO speed in the readout in your view finder; something I really missed in the original 5D.  The rear 3-inch screen is a lot better, and displays more detail, but I still find I need to see pictures on a monitor before I can tell whether they are any good or not. It’s still hard to see in bright sun light but they are all like that. The screen zoom still functions oddly and there is still no way of telling when you are at 100%. It would be nice to have a percentage zoom readout on the display at least, but what we really need is a 100% zoom button. I’d also like to have a way of overlaying the histogram (in RGB too) on top of the picture rather than by it’s side, where the picture is so small it’s of no use. An old Minolta bridge camera I once possessed could do this and I found it very useful.

 

Summary

I don’t want to appear too negative here although reading some of my comments you’d think I don’t like the camera. You’re wrong, I do. It is a very capable camera, it’s just that I think Canon missed the boat a little with some of the features and have failed to address the wishes of a large part of their customer base. It could have been so much better and still be improved with some simple firmware updates.

I’ve not mentioned the movie capability. I didn’t buy it for that and I haven’t really used the movie feature that much. It’s obviously very capable at producing high quality video footage, but I doubt whether 1 in 10,000 have bought the camera for that feature alone. It’s nice to have but hardly a vote winner. At the end of the day the Canon 5D mark-II is a fine full-frame camera but still has the same old Canon quirks that they may never address no matter what is said. That aside I can easily live with it. I probably couldn’t live without it.

 

Full Reviews & More Details

If you are in need of a full technical review of the Canon EOS 5D Mark-II or more information then try these links below:

DP Review: In-depth Review of 5D Mark II, February 2009
The Digital Picture: EOS 5D Mark II Review
Luminous Landscape: Canon 5D MKII Field Review
Imaging Resource: Canon 5D Mark II Overview
Northlight Images: The EOS 5D Mark II

Shooting the Antelope

Photographic Location

Despite the title this article has nothing to do with wildlife; quite the contrary in fact for this is about my visit to Upper Antelope Canyon, the beautiful, atmospheric and most famous slot canyon, situated near Page in Northern Arizona.

Antelope Canyon (Upper Antelope Canyon especially) is one of those classic photographic locations that has become extremely popular over the last 15 to 20 years or so, and to some almost a bit of a photo cliché, but there’s no denying that it produces some wonderful photographic opportunities. It’s also one of those rare locations for photographers where the best light is around the middle of the day and it doesn’t require a pre-dawn wake up call or a anxious wait for sunset. It’s perhaps most famous for the ghostly beams of sun light shining down on the canyon floor produced as the sun passes overhead around midday.
For those of you who don’t know, a slot canyon is rather like a meandering cave, with flat sandy base, and tapering walls that narrow upwards and reach the surface as a thin slot. They are formed by rapid erosion during flash floods, where water and sand rush through cracks in the rock and gradually, through time, excavate a sub-surface canyon. From the surface these may appear just as a narrow winding slot, but below often lies something truly amazing. What makes this region unique is that the slot canyons are formed in Navajo Sandstone, a distinctive pinkish to reddish, Aeolian (wind formed) sandstone, formed when this region was part of a huge sandy desert. The distinctive reddish colour comes from a coating of iron oxide on the sand grains which formed slowly after the sand had been deposited. The sandstone is also known for it’s visible cross-bedding which appear as banding and ripples within the sandstone, formed as the dunes moved with the wind. The darker the band, the higher the iron content and the harder the rock, which result in some quite amazing erosional patterns. Erosion still takes place today, especially during the summer monsoon season where flash floods are common. They can happen very quickly at immense pace and be be quite catastrophic. In August 1997 a party of 12 trekkers were photographing Lower Antelope Canyon when they were caught by a flash flood. Only one survived and Antelope Canyon suddenly became world news. Serious flooding still occurs often closing the canyon for several months.

Canyon Location

Antelope Canyon comprises two canyons, the more popular Upper Antelope Canyon (for the light beams) and Lower Antelope Canyon. The parking lots can be found either side of highway 98 just over 4 miles from downtown Page. To get there head out on highway 98 toward Kaibeto where you find the Upper Antelope Canyon turnout. For Lower Antelope Canyon travel another 1/4 mile, then turn left on Navajo Route N22B (Antelope Point Road) for about 1/4 mile where the entrance sign is on the left. Both canyons are on Navajo land and are only accessible by permit. Four families have concessions to provide organised tours and this is the most popular way to visit. You can however, just turn up at the parking lots and purchase permits and guided tours there, but this may be hit or miss during the peak tourist season. Lower Antelope Canyon is much closer to the highway, and the entrance just a short walk from the parking lot, but is narrower, deeper and longer, and does have some steep ladders and so is a more strenuous tour. Upper Antelope Canyon is the more popular and tours can get quite busy, so booking ahead is advised. It’s also farther from the main parking lot just off the highway, so the tours drive a further 3 miles down a sandy flood plain in huge 4x4’s to reach the canyon entrance.

View Upper Antelope Canyon in a larger map

Photographic Tours

If like me, your only opportunity to visit a location like this is restricted to school summer holidays, then you are going to be arriving in peak tourist season. Antelope Canyon is now a huge attraction and gets very busy during this period. The good news is that July and August are best for the light beams as the sun is directly overhead. The Navajo tour companies offer hour long scenic trips throughout the day and also offer specialist, longer trips for photographers. I had read mixed reports on the tours but after a little research decided to try Chief Tosie Photo Tours. I called about a week before hand and booked a place on the 10:30 am tour. All the tours commence from in-town locations so the advertised length includes travel time there and back. The pickup location was not far from our hotel, so easily reached, and easily identified by the huge 4x4’s parked outside. These have jacked-up suspension and large wheels necessary to negotiate the sandy flood plane should conditions get wet.  The photo tours are generally restricted to 12 photographers so I was surprised to see quite a mixed bunch on my tour, even more surprised to find only 2 others had brought along tripods, and that many possessed only point & shoot cameras. Having a tripod proved to be a distinct advantage. Our guide was a young Navajo chap named Mylo, who turned out to be just perfect. I’d heard some photo-guides weren’t too knowledgeable but Mylo proved quite the contrary and not only a master at  having you in the right place at precisely the right moment , but a wizard at seemingly everyone's camera, no matter of make and type. He was also a large-format camera enthusiast and an acquaintance of the renowned landscape photographer Michael Fatali.
The tour was quite chaotic in parts as there were many other tours visiting at the same time. In fact judging from the number of vehicles parked outside there were probably in excess of 300 people in the canyon. However Mylo’s intimate knowledge of where and when the light beams occur, his great skill at organising our party, and keeping other tour members out of our frames, more than made up for the $50 tour fee. The more serious photographers, typically those with in possession of a tripod, were generally placed in the forefront of each location and thus gained the best opportunity to take the best shots. However, what impressed me about Mylo was that he made a point of coming around each member and taking a look at their composition suggesting how to get a better shot or a more interesting variation, plus for those only with point & shoot cameras he advised and in many cases set up their cameras with the correct settings to get the best exposures. In this respect I was most impressed and there shouldn’t have been anyone from our particular party who didn’t leave without some good shots on their memory cards.
From taking my very first frame till my last was just over 1 hour 40 minutes and it seemed to go pretty quick, but was thoroughly enjoyable. I left feeling I’d bagged some good shots and later viewing them on my laptop I was not disappointed. Mylo really made the trip however, and apart from being a really pleasant guy his expert knowledge proved invaluable. I’d certainly recommend asking for him if you book.

Photographic TECHNIQUE

It’s not difficult to photograph the canyon, but you don’t get that much time to photograph the light beams, as they move across the canyon floor over several minutes and the guides have to repeatedly throw up large scoops of sand which fall through the sun light and generate the ghostly beams on the images. Plus you’re going to have several other tours walking back and forth in between frames. I used a full frame Canon 5D Mark II, a 16-35mm wide angle lens, a sturdy tripod and remote cable. I took most photographs at ISO 100, using exposures of 20-30 seconds at apertures generally ranging from F22 to F16, the majority at F18. I found most of my shots were between 22mm to 35mm focal length, so for cameras with smaller size sensors something like a 10-20mm is going to be your best bet. I shot, as I nearly always do, in aperture priority mode and I found the camera auto exposure was just about right most of the time. There is a huge contrast difference however, between the light beam and dark canyon walls, so it’s best to keep an eye on your histogram for over exposure. Where the light beam hits the canyon floor will burn out for sure, you simply can’t avoid that, and if you did try to compensate everything else would be far to dark if not black. The canyon walls will be underexposed but that produces the lovely familiar deep red or orange glow, and the really dark areas can often take on a purple hue.
Things to watch out for are the width of the beam and how soon you take your picture after the sand is first thrown up. The wider the beam, the more brighter it’s going to appear, the greater the contrast and the greater the chance of over exposing and burning out part of the beam in your image. In a few cases I compensated by –1ev. Also the beams are brightest when they catch the most sand, which is right after the initial throw when all the heavy larger sand particles fall, after that the glow grows fainter as the finer solids fall slower. I initially preferred the latter effect, which seemed to look good on the LCD at the time, producing a more streaky, flowing appearance, but when I saw them on my laptop it didn’t appear quite as effective as I thought. With the long exposures you’re probably only going to get one shot per sand throw, so you haven’t that much chance to experiment. I also found several of my early images (ones taken immediately after the sand throw) to be burnt out too much out at the top of the beam. Unfortunately I didn’t notice this at the time;  an extra minus 1ev compensation (-2ev in total) would have probably been enough to reduce this and save the frame. Perhaps my best shots were taken a fraction after the initial sand throw.

Conversely some parts of the canyon are very dark and the beams very narrow and I found I needed to increase the exposure by around +1ev; this I had to do in Lightroom later as I found focusing very difficult in these dark regions. Shooting in RAW is a must.
Most areas of the canyon I found light enough to use autofocus. I simply selected a focus point on a near canyon wall and let the camera do it’s work. In some places I used live view and manually focussed making sure my hyperfocal depth of field was sufficient to get front to back sharpness.  However there are a few really dark areas in the canyon where I struggled a little and unfortunately ended up with a few soft images.

Post Processing

As I mentioned above I shot entirely in RAW. Jpegs just wouldn’t provide a hope of any worth while post capture processing. Most images didn’t required significant processing other than than minor exposure tweaks and standard sharpening. However, lightning some of the shadows in the canyon walls and adjusting the recovery slider to pull back the highlights in the beams significantly improved the images in my opinion.

Conclusion

I thoroughly enjoyed my trip to Upper Antelope Canyon and despite the commercialism and crowds found in it a very rewarding photographic experience. I took the family back there later that afternoon, when it was far less crowded and they found it absolutely amazing too. It’s not cheap when you have a family of four, but it’s a very unique natural wonder which you don’t see anywhere else and still in my book a far more interesting prospect than any attraction in Las Vegas! I also ended up with some of what I considered to be my best photographs, one in particular which I now have enlarged to 24x30 inches, framed and have on the wall at home. If you ask me if I’d go again, the answer would be a resounding yes, anytime I can.

Resources

Antelope Canyon Tours by Chief Tosie (ask for Mylo)
Antelope Canyon Tours by Roger Ekis
Antelope Canyon Photo Tours – Carol Bigthumb
Overland Canyon Tours
Navajo Parks & Recreation Service
Reservation Services for Canyon Tours

Nearby Photographic Locations

Don’t forget to visit Horseshoe Bend just south of Page and a short distance from highway 89. Here you can photograph the Colorado from an overlook some 1500 feet above the river where it makes a complete 180 degree bend. It’s a breathtaking view. Alstrom Point is a location that’s not easy to find as it requires almost 30 miles of dirt road to get there, however the overlook of Padre Bay on Lake Powell is a popular sunset shoot.  The Wave at Coyote Buttes (a permit is required in advance). This involves a 6 mile hike. There’s also another slot canyon called Canyon-X, only accessible via Overland Canyon Tours and 16 miles from Page, reputed to be much less crowded and limited to only 6 photographers per day.

Windows 7 – is it worth it?

Software Review

I don’t know about you but I have found Vista to be the most frustrating Windows system I’ve used to date, and I’ve used almost all Windows versions since 3.1. I’ve had more crashes, BSOD’s (blue screen of death) and system hang-up’s whilst using Vista than I’d care to shake a stick at and at times I’ve sworn I’ll never touch another dam Microsoft product ever again. There’s no two ways about it, Microsoft well and truly lost the plot with Vista and have alienated more users than anyone thought possible. If it wasn’t for the fact that I’d recently invested quite substantially in a quad-core 64-bit photo-system complete with 8gb ram and twin monitors early last year, and that my entire software library is Windows based, I would have turned to the dark side by now and bought a Mac. I think Steve Jobs said Vista was the best bit of advertising Apple had ever had and he wasn’t wrong.

So why you may ask did I plumb for Windows 7. Well to try and get me out of a hole. Normally I’d give any new Windows system a wide berth for at least a year and not until the first Service Pack had been issued. But I just couldn’t face another year of constant, almost daily problems with Vista-64. I just had to do something, it was driving me mad. I, like many others, have come to loath Vista with a vengeance. I had two options, revert to XP-64 Professional or risk Windows 7.

Windows 7 certainly seems to have been well received by the press, it’s generally had great reviews, is reputed to relatively stable, and promises a quick boot up and a more responsive system. Well, lets face it, it wouldn’t take much to be a more responsive than Vista, a system which couldn’t hold a lick of paint to it’s predecessor, Windows XP.

 
But which version to buy, Home, Professional or Ultimate? Well one look at the fine print and I realised the much cheaper Home edition is of no use to me. I need the 64 bit version and I need XP backwards compatibility (as some of my older industry related software only runs with XP), so I had to fork out just under £150 for Windows 7 Professional ... what a rip-off Microsoft!

The Installation

I had a stroke of luck here. I downloaded and ran the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor program from the MS website and in doing that I came across the Windows Easy Transfer program. I’d already backed up all my data and user files to external (and internal) drives, but decided to run this and give it ago. It took a long time however, over 3 1/2 hours to create a 32.8 gb MIG file on an internal HD. By the way, I’d been told by my PC manufacturer to go for a clean install, so I did NOT buy the Windows 7 upgrade version. Reading the feedback on Amazon had already made me wary of that. I placed my 64-bit version in the DVD drive and crossed my fingers and prepared for a long wait.

Rather surprisingly the installation went very quickly, certainly a lot faster than other installs I’ve done in the past (which are too numerous to mention), so I was quite surprised to be staring at a clean desktop just over an hour later. First impressions were good, opening, closing menus and moving windows certainly seemed a lot more responsive, and boot up time was much much quicker than Vista, but far from being fast.  I can’t say I liked the new large task bar which displays just Icons, but thankfully you can configure it to look like the far more sensible taskbar we’re all used (why do MS keep messing with things?). I also found many new drivers had been installed and my internet connect worked first time…things were looking promising. However, the new Nvidia control panel seemed to have rendered garish oversaturated colours to the desktop.

I then decided to try the Easy Transfer and double clicked my saved MIG file. I’d saved all my email, documents, pictures and UAC settings and it even allowed my to merge my previous user account with the new and different named account in Windows 7. Initial timings suggested this process was going to take forever, but that gradually decreased to somewhere in the region of 5 hours. I went to bed.

The next morning I was surprised to find my old desktop had been restored complete with icons (although some were empty), all my documents, pictures and music files were present and correct and even some software seemed to have been installed (VueScan). Other desktop folders were present too, my internet favourites and preferences for some other software reinstated too, even though the software hadn’t been re-installed.

I then had to go through the laborious procedure of re-installing all my software (in my case a hell of a lot), and I’m still doing that even now, a couple of days later.

 

First Impressions

To be honest it looks just like Vista. There appears to be very little difference. The taskbar as I mentioned is different, the notification area (those little icons at the bottom right) has had a makeover, and the start menu is pretty much the same. But gone are the quick launch icons to the right of the start button. I find this incredibly annoying. This is one of the features I used constantly in XP & Vista and now it’s gone. Well, actually it’s hidden and now almost impossible to find. Why Microsoft do this sort of thing is quite beyond belief. I had to search on the web to find out how to get the quick launch back and found good instructions here.

Items can now be pinned to the taskbar, but in reality is no different from the old quick launch menu which worked just fine. Gone also is the Show Desktop icon, it’s now a menu item when you right click the taskbar and also as a blank button at the far right of the taskbar after the time (which I found by accident). If you opt for items on the taskbar to display Icons and text you will now have the text ‘Quick Launch’ where before you had just icons. There is probably a way to get around this but I don’t want to waste another hour trawling the internet trying to find it. This is another retrograde step I’m afraid and just another reason why I hate Microsoft. It’s just SO annoying when you have got used to a process that works perfectly well and then the designers suddenly decide to do away with it for absolutely no good reason. It’s a sure fire way to piss-off your users. The very least Microsoft should do is have a one click button to gain access to your ‘classic’ interface.

You can now shake a Window title bar and it will close all other windows, drag it to the top of the screen and it will expand to full screen, features no doubt for the touch screen users in mind but only a minor cosmetic change for most.

After just a couple of days I’m still getting used to the new system but most things are familiar, however it definitely appears much more responsive. Copying files seems faster too, which is quite important for us digital photographers, although I’ve yet to do any timing tests. The dreaded UAC (user account control) has been toned down somewhat, so you are no longer pestered with so many confirmation dialogs when you want to copy or move files, although you still get them when installing software. 

 

Potential Problems so far

It took less than 24 hours for my first crash and I have a few more since. Internet explorer keeps locking up every once in a while, which I suspect may be due to one of the add-ins, probably my Adobe Acrobat 8 standard, which I’ve had problems activating. My photos and screen colours seem much more saturated. I’ve downloaded the latest driver for my Nvidia 8800 GT card and have calibrated both monitors with my X-rite ColorMunki but they still appear more saturated than before. I still haven’t got to the bottom of this one yet. My Logitech VX Nano laser mouse failed to work, but a download of the most recent driver seems to have done the trick. As I mentioned earlier some of my old software is XP only and won’t install. I can set XP compatibility mode for a program that has already been installed, so no problem there, but have yet to find out how (or if) I can install a program in XP mode. I'm having exactly the same problems with sleep mode as I did with Vista. When the PC wakes more often than not my mouse won't work and I'm forced to do a hard boot. However most annoying of all, is that Microsoft still haven't fixed the bug in Explorer if you display files in details mode. The column width still truncates long file names forcing the user to right click the column header and select Size All Columns to Fit. There must be a million posts on the web regarding this problem just in Vista alone never mind Windows 7, so for Microsoft to retain the same bug is just so staggeringly mind blowing it makes you wonder whether those programmers at MS ever actually use the software themselves! 

Missing Stuff and Downloads

There’s no Live Mail, no Instant Messenger, no Parental Controls, no Movie-Maker, and no photo Gallery included with Windows 7. Presumably victims of EC anticompetitive laws. You can however obtain these as free downloads from Microsoft where they have all had a makeover.  One new addition is Windows Live Writer (which I’m using now) which allows bloggers to compile their blogs offline and upload when complete. It even offers integration with the most popular blogging sites, but although my theme was successfully downloaded, it failed to recognise any of my previous posts.

SO Is it Worth it THEM?

On cost no way, it is vastly over-priced, and to be honest after the Vista debacle Microsoft should have been giving this away as a free upgrade. Vista didn’t do what it said on the tin, so to charge this much money for what is really a Vista fix is robbery. Lets face it, most of Windows 7 is Vista code anyway, so we, the hapless consumer are largely paying for the same stuff twice. On ease of use, so far so good, a vast improvement over Vista; I’ll keep you posted on that one. For me I really didn’t have much option to upgrade or not, rather I had too. I still hate Microsoft for all the re-installs and troubleshooting I had to do, and all the countless hours I’ve wasted trying to fix Vista. My initial impressions is that Windows 7 is very much a Vista Service Pack in disguise. For people frustrated with Vista Home, then at least Windows 7 Home is a relatively cheap option and my advice (although some what begrudgingly) would be to bite the bullet and upgrade. For Professional and Ultimate users it may calm your Vista frustrations but offers very poor value for money. If you’re a happy XP user and don’t feel the need for a fancy looking interface I’d stay stick with it for the foreseeable future.

A Personal Opinion

It seems to me that Microsoft have lost their way somewhat since XP, roughly about the time Bill Gates relinquished control. Love him or hate him I think they have floundered since. I used to admire MS but not anymore. They don't appear to listen to their customers, and imposed what they think we should have, rather than listen to what we actually want. They remove features and change interfaces we have used for years and replace them with new ones forcing the user to waste time re-learning our day-to-day software with no options to revert back to the interface we're used to. Who the hell wanted ribbons for instance, why remove or hide menus. It's completely bonkers. I’m aware of several major companies within my occupational industry who refuse to upgrade to Office 2007 because nobody likes the new interface and they don't want their employees to waste further time being retrained even to be able to perform just the basics tasks. Microsoft have managed to piss-off so many of their core customers over the last few years, people who have grown up using Windows and liked the way it functioned. Forgetting them as Microsoft has done is nothing short of appalling. I think the time is ripe for other companies to challenge the Microsoft dominance.

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