I think the point of adding video capability to a still camera is manifold:

1) You get two types of cameras in one system... One set of lenses and accessories serve both purposes.

2) Because of the electronics used, the low marginal cost to do this just makes sense. At some point, it becomes absurd to make — or own — separate devices for different purposes.

3) The rise of the Internet has given most people full access to multimedia technologies only available to a chosen few, just a few decades ago. Hybrid cameras help creative professionals make both great stills AND great video, during the same session.

4) Hybrid (still + video) cameras make hybrid workflows much easier. There is only one set of controls to learn, one bag of gear to work from, one memory card to load, or one network source to connect.

5) TV advertisers will grab these cameras quickly! Many TV spots are multi-image combinations of still images, video, graphics, titles, music, sound effects, and voiceovers. With a hybrid camera, all you need to add is a computer and software and talent.

6) The ability to pull a usable still from a video clip is only one tiny feature of these cameras. Most people will not work that way intentionally, as it is inefficient. However, when necessary, it's there.

One thing many folks here have pointed out is that you "can't hang video on the wall". That is patently false! I hung a 55-inch Samsung on the wall above the fireplace last month. We have iPhone slide and video shows on it all the time!

We live in a world where most people keep most of their images online, in the cloud. FaceBook, Snapfish, Shutterfly, Vimeo, YouTube, Flickr, Instagram, Vine, and dozens of other sharing sites exist for the sole purpose of putting modern still and video image collections in the cloud, for all with permission to share.

Printing is not the rage it once was. The decline of printing started with the mass production and sale of digital cameras just over a decade ago. Digicams killed the 4x6 print. Drugstore labs that used to run two shifts a day now run one shift, once or twice a week. Small, local pro labs are getting hard to find! There's even been a lot of national consolidation among school portrait finishers, department store finishers, and other professional labs.

The rise of screens of all sizes, from smart phones to the big sets in our dens and living rooms, has made the creation of hybrid devices important! Those who communicate with multiple media have it better than at any time in history. ENJOY IT.

Have you seen actual 4K video? Hollywood crews have been shooting "movies" in 4K for quite a while, now!

I'll buck the trend here.

As a former radio announcer and multi-image AV producer who also produced video for training purposes, I give equal time to writing, photography, video, and audio.

My favorite tool in life is an iPhone, because it contains all of the "convergence technologies" in one place. My next camera system will be based around the Panasonic Lumix GH4, which records 16MP still photos and 4K and 1080P video.

Why? — because this is a training content developer's dream device! It takes excellent stills, records pro-quality video, takes up one forth the space of an equivalent dSLR outfit, and weighs about a third of that same dSLR kit, too. So it's ideal for travel and for being discreet. It looks like a still camera, so people don't realize they're on video. It allows a pro to look like an amateur, when necessary.

I don't think a 6K video camera is necessary. The 4K GH4 takes 8MP stills now, and that's the same resolution as recent iPhones and the early generation of Canons that many of us used to make millions of school portraits in the early 2000s. But 4K allows capture of video that can be downsampled to 1080P and yet any frame from that original 4K can also be saved as a very usable still photo.

While I realize that most "photographers" are *stills* photographers, because that's the world they know and grew up in, I also know that future visual communicators will be taught to use a hybrid mix of media.

In the professional field, employers will demand that visual communicators be able to multi-task, working in their native tongues in text and on camera as writers and talent, recording both still and video images, and posting stories with text, video, audio, and stills on the web.

Major newspapers are already doing this. The Chicago Sun-Times recently gave its reporters iPhones and cursory photography lessons, and fired its team of award-winning photographers! In the short run, they look cruel and photo quality suffers. In the longer run, newspapers will die and be reborn as web sites, anyway. Extensive use of multiple media will be required on the Web.

That sounds daunting, if you haven't done it, but to those who have, it is second nature. Still photography isn't dead, and won't die, but will be integrated into hybrid media in many forms...

I agree with your assessment. I get this sort of garbage daily. It does slow down the network! And it's indicative of the degree of mal-intentioned traffic on the web.

There is a darker minefield of deviant crap coming in via my email box on a daily basis, though. Some of it is benign enough to survive all the filters, but if I were to click the links... OUCH.

NOTHING can protect users from themselves, except their own vigilance.

Macs are NOT virus-*proof.* They just don't get them. There's a difference, as Oknoder points out.

Macs run OS X, iOS runs on iPhones, iPads, iPod Touch, and Apple TV. Both iOS and OS X are based on BSD UNIX. Most LINUX code can be recompiled to run on a Mac, as UNIX and LINUX are functionally compatible in most respects.

Mac market share is increasing. Last fiscal quarter, the broader PC market grew by negative .5 percent, while Apple's sales increased 17%. This was the back-to-school quarter, when college students buy Macs to run all the Mac and Windows software their professors require them to use.

We are raising a generation of elite Mac and iOS device users. IBM is about to launch a wave of iOS Apps in the enterprise environment. Apple is the most successful computer company on the planet, and it will continue to grow and innovate.

That said, Microsoft is changing nicely, now that Steve Ballmer is gone. Under fierce competition from Apple and Google, we should see some real innovation over the next few years, from all three companies.

SSD drives improve boot time, shutdown time, reboot time, file save time, file read time, and other file-intensive actions. An SSD is not a substitute for a fast processor, a 64-bit bus, a fast graphics adapter, or lots of RAM.

That said, if you run I/O intensive apps or processes, they can make quite a difference! But the rest of the system should be as fast as you can make it, too. Balance is important. An SSD is irrelevant if the rest of the workflow is slower.

My experience with massive databases and high volume image rendering in a photo lab environment includes lots of both of those I/O intensive environments. Speed limits in the lab were #1 — network speed and saturation level, #2 — server speed and saturation level, #3 — client processor speeds, #4 — RAM, #5 — application design (i.e.; does it have to waste time rendering to the monitor, like Photoshop in batch mode, or can it just save each file as it renders, like Kodak DP2).

SSDs could help reduce local machine image rendering times, and database response time from the network server. But there are many situations they won't help. We never had a printer that could outrun our 2003-era dual processor Dells, for instance... We could always render images faster than the minilabs could print them. So there was never a need to upgrade those machines unless they died.

http://www.usa.canon.com/cusa/support/professional

From here, you can find your camera and download the latest updates to DPP, the latest PDF of the manuals, etc.

Read on a computer, tablet, or smartphone to save trees.

Um, paranoid?

I once watched an IT manager connect a virgin XP PC to the Internet, outside of his corporate firewall, with no anti-virus or other protection. It was hacked with three known viruses within 30 seconds!

This is known as "setting out a honeypot". IT folks use it to find out who is attempting to compromise their Internet domains.

As for whatever OS having the "possibility" of being hacked, that is not too relevant. Probability is more important. I've been using and supporting Macs for almost three Decades. Last virus I saw "in the wild" was in 1998. There have been "proofs of concept" shown by hackers, but few known viruses. Trojan horses (that users let in by unwittingly clicking links and approving software installations) are another matter. I stay behind a firewall, but only run virus protection on our Windows PCs.

I just checked my *home router's* log and found this little crapfest:


10/28/2014 05:39:11 Ping Of Death from 178.213.206.173 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/28/2014 06:53:35 Ping Of Death from 203.178.148.19 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/28/2014 07:52:49 Ping Of Death from 195.251.255.69 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/28/2014 08:36:36 Ping Of Death from 198.20.99.130 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/28/2014 10:12:16 Ping Of Death from 203.178.148.19 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/28/2014 10:16:10 Ping Of Death from 129.82.138.44 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/28/2014 11:25:05 Ping Of Death from 4.69.158.66 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/28/2014 11:26:50 Ping Of Death from 128.9.168.98 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/28/2014 14:10:22 Ping Of Death from 190.7.215.194 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/28/2014 14:27:31 Syn flood From IP 78.24.50.221 port 58594 to IP [My IP Address] port 888 dropped
10/28/2014 14:27:31 Syn flood From IP 78.24.50.221 port 39891 to IP [My IP Address] port 83 dropped
10/28/2014 14:27:31 Syn flood From IP 78.24.50.221 port 44486 to IP [My IP Address] port 8080 dropped
10/28/2014 14:27:31 Syn flood From IP 78.24.50.221 port 47347 to IP [My IP Address] port 88 dropped
10/28/2014 14:27:31 Syn flood From IP 78.24.50.221 port 47523 to IP [My IP Address] port 1000 dropped
10/28/2014 14:27:34 Syn flood From IP 78.24.50.221 port 44486 to IP [My IP Address] port 8080 dropped
10/28/2014 14:27:34 Syn flood From IP 78.24.50.221 port 58594 to IP [My IP Address] port 888 dropped
10/28/2014 14:27:34 Syn flood From IP 78.24.50.221 port 39891 to IP [My IP Address] port 83 dropped
10/28/2014 14:27:40 Syn flood From IP 78.24.50.221 port 47930 to IP [My IP Address] port 80 dropped
10/28/2014 14:27:40 Syn flood From IP 78.24.50.221 port 39891 to IP [My IP Address] port 83 dropped
10/28/2014 14:27:40 Syn flood From IP 78.24.50.221 port 47347 to IP [My IP Address] port 88 dropped
10/28/2014 14:27:40 Syn flood From IP 78.24.50.221 port 47523 to IP [My IP Address] port 1000 dropped
10/28/2014 14:27:40 Syn flood From IP 78.24.50.221 port 41532 to IP [My IP Address] port 82 dropped
10/28/2014 16:48:15 Ping Of Death from 203.178.148.19 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/28/2014 18:31:47 Ping Of Death from 128.1.6.40 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/28/2014 18:52:55 Ping Of Death from 37.187.229.144 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/28/2014 19:47:52 Ping Of Death from 195.251.255.69 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/28/2014 23:33:27 Ping Of Death from 203.178.148.19 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/29/2014 01:46:42 Ping Of Death from 61.153.70.226 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/29/2014 04:40:50 Ping Of Death from 128.9.168.98 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/29/2014 05:09:10 Ping Of Death from 129.82.138.44 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/29/2014 06:21:17 Ping Of Death from 203.178.148.19 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/29/2014 07:50:59 Ping Of Death from 198.20.99.130 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/29/2014 07:58:25 Ping Of Death from 192.99.101.227 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/29/2014 08:01:31 Ping Of Death from 192.99.101.227 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/29/2014 11:23:21 Ping Of Death from 223.207.211.87 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/29/2014 11:23:22 Ping Of Death from 223.207.211.87 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/29/2014 11:31:46 Ping Of Death from 91.121.148.209 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/29/2014 11:35:56 Ping Of Death from 203.178.148.19 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/29/2014 12:56:50 Ping Of Death from 194.27.41.183 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/29/2014 13:29:26 Ping Of Death from 109.227.109.215 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/29/2014 14:18:49 Ping Of Death from 195.251.255.69 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/29/2014 14:31:54 Ping Of Death from 220.175.137.201 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/29/2014 18:05:52 Ping Of Death from 203.178.148.19 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/29/2014 19:45:29 Ping Of Death from 206.217.140.34 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/29/2014 23:00:50 Ping Of Death from 128.9.168.98 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/29/2014 23:40:13 Ping Of Death from 129.82.138.44 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/30/2014 00:48:46 Ping Of Death from 203.178.148.19 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/30/2014 04:13:53 Ping Of Death from 198.20.99.130 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/30/2014 07:19:31 Ping Of Death from 203.178.148.19 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/30/2014 09:11:09 Ping Of Death from 91.121.148.209 to [My IP Address] dropped
10/30/2014 10:17:24 Ping Of Death from 183.69.215.18 to [My IP Address] dropped

Scary, eh? And it's not Halloween yet!

Avoiding color casts under gel-filtered stage lighting is a bit of an oxymoronical concept! That said, it helps to know what's in the lighting instruments.

If they are 3200K quartz-halogen stage lamps, set the camera to incandescent white balance. That will provide an accurate rendition **of the gels,** or a reasonably accurate color balance, period, if no gels are used.

If the lamps are HMI (halogen-metal iodide), dial in the white balance to about 5000K. That will provide an accurate rendition **of the gels,* or a reasonably accurate color balance, period, if no gels are used.

If you can talk to the lighting designer, you can learn what type of lamp is in use. You might also be able to do a pre-concert CUSTOM white balancing and metering of just white light, using a reference target (Delta-1 Gray Card, Whi-Bal, Expo-Disc, or One Shot Digital Calibration Target, etc.) placed at the subject's location.

I would argue that the lighting color is part of the ambience, so the aim is merely to capture it as the lighting designer intended it to appear. White balancing for the light source is the best way to do that, at least initially.

Shooting RAW + JPEG will give you the reference JPEG file you need to see what the correct (intended) white balance is. Then you can adjust the RAW file any way you like.

Well, if you're on a Mac, you can always use Apple Disk Utility to do a low-level formatting (35-Pass Erase) of the drive, and that will zap everything. It sets EVERY bit on the drive to zero. However, it takes Quite a while.

Shooting the drive with a Colt .45 and smashing it with a sledgehammer is faster... but then you need a new drive! Not that that's a BAD thing. New drives are potentially faster and more reliable.

A low-level formatting is harder to do on regular PCs, for some arcane reason, but can still be done if you know how.

Alas, electronics are not built like industrial capital equipment from the 1950s. Half the art of surviving in the computing world is knowing when to upgrade, when to buy new, and when to sit on what you have.

You can bet that most businesses depreciate their PC systems in three years or so, because that's about the half life of them in intense usage environments. In three years, a new PC will be about four times faster, at the same price or less. That old one will be full of dust, bogged down by newer software upgrades, and a load of garbage software unwitting users let in the back door (via the Internet and thumb drives!).

Microsoft knows the cycle, too — that businesses will tend to upgrade their PCs on about a three to five year cycle. That's why we get a new OS about that often. They support that OS for about a decade. By the end of that decade, most people have moved on. XP was the exception! It was too good, and MS took too long to perfect it.

Murphy's law of software development is that any OS or application that is perfected is... ABANDONED! Developers can't make money off of perfection, if everyone already owns it.

While I still have a 1999 Power Mac G4 that runs PageMaker 6.5 from the mid-1990s (!), I don't delude myself into thinking that it's more than a way for my wife to access old documents her company still needs from time to time. We have a modern Mac and a modern PC for daily use.

Brother never has had the resources to write new drivers for old printers when a new OS comes out. The assumption they, and most printer manufacturers make, is that the printer will last about three to five years or less, and that you'll buy a new one when you buy a new computer.

To their credit, Apple includes hundreds of printer drivers in its OS. They may support your old Brother printer with a CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System) driver... Ask at the Genius Bar of your nearest Apple Store.

Options:

Get a Mac. Once you go Mac-wards, you'll never go backwards.
OR
Move your files to an external drive. Then do a clean installation of Win7.
OR
Get a Mac with 8 or 16 GB RAM and at least 512 GB HD space. Install Parallels Desktop on the Mac. Import your XP PC to the Mac as an "archive", so you have a comfort blanket if you don't understand the Mac after a week. Then do a clean installation of Win7 on the PC...

XP was great about 2010... SP3 was finally stable and reasonably secure. It was faster and cleaner than Vista. It was more compatible than Win7. But now? It's just freakin' dangerous!

Whatever you do, make sure your XP machine has up-to-date third party virus protection on it, is behind a firewall of some sort, or is disconnected from the Internet.

You can start without the RIP, and add it later.

The primary reason for the RIP is to do production photo printing and/OR proofing for the graphic arts industry, which requires you to make and use custom profiles and print on whatever paper stock will eventually be printed on an offset press...

Photographers usually don't need that RIP, but there are other RIPS that may be useful for production photo printing. Consult a really good Epson dealer or VAR (value added reseller) for details.

Suffice it to say that EXCELLENT printing on Epson canvas and Epson photo paper can be done with Epson inks on Epson printers, using Epson's stock profiles. You can spend a lot of time, money, and effort, and make it all slightly better, with custom profiles you make for your EXACT batch of inks, paper, and a specific printer.

When you change the equation by using third party inks and papers, it all gets a little iffy. Sometimes, third-party downloadable profiles are fine, but it really helps to make your own in such cases.

iMac with 5K Retina Display is incredible. It's pricey, but there is nothing better at the moment. It's super fast, and can serve as a pro video editing station if need be. It can be purchased with super fast processors, lots of RAM, and SSD or Hybrid drive options.

Forget iPhoto and Aperture, as both are obsolete. Apple will replace both with Photos, soon.

Lightroom and Photoshop are both cross-platform file compatible, although the software is sold for a single platform per license. If you are a pro or advanced amateur, get Lightroom first and then Photoshop CC or Photoshop Elements.

Lightroom has become the first tool of choice for most professional photographers. Photoshop is the heavy duty pixel-level editor for masking, compositing, retouching, and color separations. Elements is less expensive and less capable, but may do most of what you need.

I've been a dual platform (Mac and PC) user since the mid-1980s. I'll say this about them: Both are necessary at some point. But if you buy a Mac, you only need one computer to run OS X *and* Windows.

Yes, the nod goes to the Mac for being able to run any popular operating system on the planet. Mac OS X is based on BSD UNIX, with the proprietary Mac face on it. Mac Hardware can run Windows from a separate boot partition if you install Apple's BootCamp software. Mac OS X itself can also run Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion, either of which can run LINUX or Windows (just about any flavor you own) on top of the Mac OS. The performance hit of emulation (10% to 15%) is negligible if you have enough RAM and graphics card memory.

That last ability is why many major colleges and universities install Macs with lots of RAM and big hard drives in their public computing labs. They then load up those hard drives with emulation software and all the Mac and Windows applications used on campus... That way, a student can use whatever software a professor requires for a particular course.

Photographers can do the same thing, hedging their bets against not being able to run a particular application because it only runs on one platform or the other.

The iPhone is a highly disruptive device! It led the way to destroying entire segments of the photo marketplace.

I love mine, but it (and the congruence of Internet technologies it uses) probably cost me my job.

Photography has become a near universal language of sorts, since most of us carry a decent smartphone camera with us all the time.