People are still reacting to the genius that went into the smartphone as conceived by Apple's team. It disrupted many, many markets, and gave us questionable habits and superpowers we didn't know we needed.

I'm grateful not to use a VHS camera with separate recorder. But I use my mirrorless camera for serious video. I'm grateful for the demise of the portable cassette and CD players. But I still use a portable radio from 1980 in my copy stand room.

Many apps on my phone get daily, weekly, or monthly usage. Many of them also work on my Mac, so they're part of my routine. Either way, it's nice to be able to use a couple devices for many different tasks, rather than having to rely on all sorts of clunky, dedicated hardware.

Look at the Lumix S5 II (or S5 IIX if you want more video features). You can use Leica, Sigma, Panasonic, and other L-Mount lenses on it. The S5 II/IIX got phenomenal reviews on YouTube. It's the best of three worlds.

Leica makes cameras as art objects. Panasonic makes cameras that are easy to use and have remarkably useful features. Truth be known, Panny probably makes most of the guts of Leica's L-mount series. They collaborate a LOT on technology. (the L-Squared Alliance, they call it.) But glass is what makes the character of an image. With a Lumix, Sigma, or Leica body, you get plenty of lens options from all of them and several other sources. Sigma's L-Mount offerings are excellent. Leica's L-mount lenses are priced in the stratosphere, but create amazing images.

Chris and his band played here in High Point at the John Coltrane Jazz and Blues Festival in 2022. My wife and I were there... He was incredible! We're headed back this Labor Day weekend... third year in a row. Not sure of the line-up yet, but it'll be good.

No DVR. It interrupts my lawn mowing schedule. But I’ll watch anyway.

Nice! Reminds me of Tom Scott, Chris Botti, and others who play smooth jazz.

That hilarious little book is so 1940s or early '50s. It's such an easy era to mock, from today's perspective.

Somewhere, I still have the Boy Scout Photography Merit Badge book from the 1960s. It was thoroughly ridiculous, written in 1956 or so, and still in use when my Dad bought it for me in '66.

I like it. I do that all the time, especially when formatting output for smart phones and TVs.

The first thing I do with a new image is play with aspect ratios and correct horizon line tilt. Lightroom Classic is great for that. I'm usually able to get a pleasing result with a standard ratio — square, 3:2, 4:3, 5:4, 7:5, or 16:9. But if an image needs it, I'll go custom with the crop.

Ink jet technology has been better than silver halide for both color gamut and print stability for over 20 years. Back then, it was five times more expensive, and slow to operate, but for some applications, it was worth it. In 2003, I attended a PMAI show, visited the Epson booth with our VP, and we put an Epson 9600 Ultrachrome printer in the lab two months later. It uses pigment ink that can last over 200 years in dark storage, or 80-100 years under glass. Kodak Portra Endura prints we made in 2003 have already faded noticeably. Inkjet prints made on the 9600 look like the images displayed on my calibrated monitor!

Our primary goal for that printer was to produce 60" by 40" composites of senior classes, fraternities, bands, and other large groups. When we saw the very first prints from it, our plans changed! That $5000 Epson 9600 replaced 11 specialty low-volume optical printers that were a pain to keep in control. Those old printers had been in use since the mid-1950s, and one of them (a military-grade 10x10 enlarger) pre-dated World War II. We saved nearly $100,000 in labor, paper waste, and chemistry during the first year the Epson was in service.

Inkjet photos require photo quality media and photo quality inks. The technology got a bum rap from consumers who bought early office printers and watched as their prints faded in weeks. They were using cheap dye inks and plain paper most of the time. A real inkjet photo paper print made with pigment inks will look better, longer, than any silver halide chromogenic (color) print.

Inkjet's tarnished reputation is why early high-end print service bureaus used the French word, 'giclée' to describe photo- and art-grade inkjet prints. For at least a decade, such shops refused to mention that they were making inkjet prints.

We actually had to "dumb down" the color of the Epson 9600 and later Epsons to the color gamut of our Noritsu mini-labs that used chromogenic paper and chemistry. Prints from all our silver halide chromogenic devices looked dull and lifeless next to the Epson prints. My reaction to complainers was, "The Epson output costs five times per square foot what the Noritsu output does, and takes five times longer to produce. You get what you pay for." The school portrait business was high volume. Our lab cranked out up to a quarter million packages of prints per week in peak season, from 40 digital mini-labs. The Epson output was about .005% of that.

He's new here... 222 posts. I'll give him a pass for inexperience.

All obsolete equipment is worth next to nothing when demand for what it does evaporates.

I worked for a school portrait photofinisher. We had an electronics lab and machine shop, and we built our own high speed portrait package printers. We had over 30 of them that cost about $120,000 each to build in the 1970s and early '80s. About two million dollars' worth of modifications were done to them in the '90s.

When we migrated to digital mini-lab printing in the early 2000s, we had to PAY to have them disassembled so the parts could be recycled. The same was true of our hundreds of film camera systems that cost $8000 to $15,000 each when new. We paid to recycle them, and bought hundreds of Canon dSLRs.

Of course, that whole business is fading away now, because there is little demand for school portraits in an age of the Internet, social media sharing sites, and cell phones with decent cameras in them. The company I worked for sold its school portrait division to Lifetouch in 2011, and Lifetouch sold out to Shutterfly in 2018.

Nothing lasts forever.

Devolution. "We are Devo!" A certain rock band of the '80s predicted it.

Nice! Try a 16:9 crop.

White balance and ICC color management are the complementary keys to getting the results you want from your lab or home printer. One without the other is a wasteful game.

Indeed. Most commercial printing has been eliminated by web sites and PDF documents. My wife is a marketing manager. Back in the 1980s, her company had a 60,000 square foot warehouse full of trade show booth junk and hundreds of racks of printed brochures and fliers. Now they still attend shows, but all the literature is virtual. Potential clients download it at will. No inventory.