I’ll throw in my favorite lawyer story.

Seems that there is a long haul trucker that regularly passes through a small midwestern town. At the edge of town is a courthouse and the lawyers take their breaks bu walking along the road. The trucker always to brush them back by passsing very close at high speed. On this day, he sees a priest walking along the road. “ where are you headed?” He asks. “Other side of town, to the rectory.”, is the reply. Priest hops in, and the trucker gets up to speed. Ahead, the trucker sees a lawyer, and automatically veers to the side of the road. He hears a “Whump”, and in his rear view mirror sees the lawyer bowling across the field. He turn to the priest and says, “I was sure I missed him.” The priest replies, “That’s OK my son, I got him with the door.

I have a Keurig, and an Nespresso, but much prefer the coffee from my French press. I also use a burr grinder which I recently upgraded to from a small blade grinder. The burr grinder grinds the beans with much less “fines” and leaves less mud in the bottom of my cup. The Keurig makes OK coffee, the Nespresso does better, but the cartridges are too expensive. Part of the allure of the French press is the ritual, akin to a tea ceremony.

Look up Mercator Projection.

Old story...3 engineers on a business trip rent a small car to get to their destination. While cruising down the road, the engine quits and they coast to a stop at the edge of the road and discuss their options. The mechanical engineers says that it sounds like a valve problem. The electrical engineer says that it's more likely to be ignition. The computer engineer says, "Let's all get out and get back in again."

I tried a Jumbl slide copier, but quickly came to the conclusion that it would be a long process because I would be handling each slide individually. Then, I set up my old LaBelle projector and my Canon Rebel 4ti on a tripod and shot a few. The silver reflective screen texture showed up clearly. Next try was to get a piece of foamcore, which has a white paper surface with no texture. Thereults weren't too bad. Final (so far) try was to use the fixed aperture mode (f 11, the sharpest with my 18 -135 lens) with auto exposure and a ISO of 800 or so. I also got a wired remote shutter to make the process easier and went to work. The only downside to this method is that I have to go through a cartridge of 150 slides and capture the landscape mode slides first and then rotate the camera to get the portrait mode ones when I run the entire cartridge again. Since the foam core is 18x24 inches, I also had to rotate it to fit each mode.

I'm still up in the air over whether or not to purchase a dedicated slide copier. The main purpose of my copies is to preserve family history and give a set to each of my four kids. If a really good print is needed, I'll hang on to the slides.

Seems to me that the question of how large a crowd has to be before anyone has YOUR birthday is different than the one of how large the crowd has to be before any two people have the SAME birthday. The article answers the second question, not the first. If you assume that birthdays are truly random, then the probability of a specific birthday is 1 in 365. But, after the power outage in NYC some years ago there was a spike in the births some nine and a half months later.

Old story about three engineers that rented a small car in some foreign country. While driving down the road, the car stopped dead, and wouldn't start. The mechanical engineer said that it was probably valves. The electrical engineer said it was more likely to be ignition. The computer engineer said, "let's all get out and get back in again."

Three engineers on vacation rent a small car and while on the road it suddenly quits and coasts to a stop. The mechanical engineer says that it must be valves. The electrical engineer says that it's probably ignition. The computer engineer says, "lets all get out and get back in again."

What you are looking at are the incredible advances in large scale integrated circuits. At one time, the electronics were a major cost driver in cameras, computers, etc. As the integrated circuits became cheaper and more powerful, it became less expensive to design all the features you might need into the chip, and only activate (through software) only those features that you needed for the price point of the camera (or computer) you were selling. In many cases, the same chip would be used in an entire range of appliance you were selling, with features progressively added at each higher price point. By using the same chip for all levels, the design cost is amortized over a much larger volume and the per unit chip cost became less.

I'm new to this forum, but started taking pictures some 60 years ago. I started with an Exacta SLR with a handful of lenses, but got derailed by the kids saying "why does it take so long to take your pictures?" About 15 years ago, my grown kids gave me a 1Mpixel Canon, and I was hooked on digital photography. From there I progressed through the digital ELF series, but became disillusioned with the delay from the time you pressed the button until the picture was snapped. It's amazing how fast those grandkids move. One of my kids gave me a Canon Rebel 4Ti with a 18-135mm lens, and I am amazed with how flexible it is. Of course, that flexibility comes with a very thick manual.

From this group, I get the impression that a cropped sensor is inferior to a full frame camera. Since both cameras have the same number of pixels, the difference must be in the size of the pixels. Since the pixel size on a FF sensor is larger, the number of photons needed to get a signal is less. Does this result in a higher signal to noise ratio? Or to put it into different words, does it result in a better result at a given ISO setting?

Or, is the difference between a cropped and FF sensor camera really in other things, such as quality of construction, penta mirrors vs. penta prisms, or are there other differences?