Introduction:

I purchased the 226BW from Newegg for $278 after rebate as a replacement for an 8 year old Optiquest V95 19 inch CRT. I was reluctant to change to an LCD panel after doing a bit of research as many felt LCDs were inferior to CRTs. Time marches on and whether to change or not wasn’t a realistic option as CRTs are getting quite difficult to find. So I chose a medium priced panel in a wide format based on a recommendation from another user and online reviews.

Samsung 226BW TN panel

Specs:

Monitor Size: 22in.

Viewable Size (inches): 22.0

Horizontal Viewing Angle (degrees): 160

Vertical Viewing Angle (degrees): 160

Maximum Resolution: 1680 x 1050 75Hz

Brightness/Luminance: (cd/m2)300

Contrast Ratio: 3000:1

Response Time: 2ms

Energy Star Compliant

16.7 million display colors

Horizontal Frequency Range: 30kHZ – 81kHZ

Vertical Frequency Range: 56Hz – 75Hz

15-pin mini d-sub VGA connector

DVI-D (DVI Digital) connector

Case Color: Black

Weight (lbs): 10.8

Width (inches): 20.3

Height (inches): 16.6

Depth (inches): 8.6

Power Consumption: 55W

DVI(HDCP)

Contents: Monitor & Simple Stand, Quick Setup Guide, Warranty Card, User’s Guide, Monitor Driver, Power cord, D-sub Cable, DVI Cable

Parts Warranty: 3 years

Labor Warranty: 3 years

Setup:

The 226BW was a breeze to set up. I was happy to discover that my package came with both the DVI and d-sub VGA connectors. I chose the DVI to connect to an ATI graphics card in a PC running Windows XP Pro. I powered the computer down, switched monitors and rebooted. When prompted I loaded the cdrom and installed just the 226BW driver. At the desktop I navigated to the properties window and changed the screen resolution to 1680×1050 pixels, 32 bit. I never installed the included software, Natural Color and Magic Tune, as I felt they wouldn’t be needed in an image processing environment.

Pros:

• The onscreen Menu is easily accessible from buttons located at the bottom of the display.

• The 226BW is easily profiled. I used an inexpensive ColorVision Spyder 2 with the contrast set to 50 and the brightness set to 89. With the Spyder 2 one has to set the contrast and brightness manually and I was confused as to what settings to start with as the default settings of 75 and 100 seemed a bit extreme. The settings I used came as recommendations from the this website. Using the LCD tests found here, I discovered I achieved very good results with those settings.

• Using the Ilford profile for Ilford Galerie Classic Paper I found that my screen image and print have a very close match.

• I liked the quality of the colors and the deepness of the blacks.

• No dead pixels.

• The horizontal viewing angle for image editing is quite acceptable in my opinion.

• The 226BW takes up far less desk space than my 19” CRT while offering the same visual height (11 ¾”) and a wide view with a true width of 18 3/4”.

Cons:

• The height of the monitor cannot be adjusted. One can only tilt it up or down or swivel from right to left. Being tall, I found this to be a small problem at my work desk. I solved it by building a small wooden base 6 inches in height. This places the middle of the screen at eye level while sitting comfortably and keeps the screen face at a 90 degree angle to my line of sight.

• The 226BW is a TN type panel and because of this, the vertical viewing angle is very small, much smaller than advertised in my opinion. I get an area one third the height of the screen in the middle with a gamma of 2.2. The top third is darker and the bottom third brighter. This means if you view an image spanning the full height of the screen you will get a variance in contrast and brightness across the image. Because of this I try to minimize the effect by doing a final check of an image at a reduced scale (around 25% in CS2) before I send it to the printer. I’ve read that S-IPS or S-PVA panels have wider vertical viewing angles though I’ve never compared them to know how big the improvement is. The small vertical viewing angle was the biggest disappointment.

• There is a very small amount of backlight bleed along the edges. I haven’t found this to be much of a problem though some complained about it when viewing DVDs.

What the Duck - copyright Aaron Johnson, 2008

Does the above scene look familiar? It probably does for most amateur digital photographers who don’t have a back-up file system in place. In this article I hope to convince those who are not currently backing up their camera files to begin to do so.

Most of you are probably storing your camera jpegs or RAW captures on your computer’s “C” drive. Hopefully you are making a copy of those files somewhere else because if your “C” drive crashes, most if not all of that data will be lost. One can pay upwards of a $1000 for a professional service to try and recover your camera files in case of a hard drive failure though there is no guarantee that anything will be saved. Ah, the dirty little secret about digital no one told you.

Film was so easy. You could store your slides or negatives in archival sleeves, box them, store them in a relatively cool and dry place and expect them to last for a generation or longer with little care. There was no real need for duplicate copies of the originals unless you needed “working” copies that would be handled excessively.

Digital camera files need to be backed up for protection against storage hardware failures. The most viable back-up medium options are cdrom, DVD or another hard disk. I would recommend a second hard disk as writable cdroms and DVDs will become unreadable after a relatively short period of time due to decay. Some cdroms and DVDs are better than others though I would still not trust the medium. Plus there have been cases where cdroms and DVDs burnt on one drive are not readable on other drives. And the average life span of a cdrom/dvd drive is probably about five years. Will a new one read those disks you burnt with the old one? Do you want to take that chance?

In my opinion at the present time, a second hard drive is your best choice. Either have a second drive in your computer dedicated to back-ups or purchase one of those nifty hard drives in a case that connect to a USB hub. The chance of two hard drives failing at the same time is extremely remote.

I have a hard drive in my main frame that is for back-ups only and the machine is running 24/7. I adhere to the school of thought that starting up and spinning down a hard disk does more wear and tear than the heat generated by a continuously spinning hard disk. My last set of drives lasted ten years using this method and they were replaced due to failure prevention rather than having one actually fail.

I usually do a back-up immediately after uploading my RAW camera images to my hard drive. The back-up software I use is SyncBack and is freely available. The interface is straightforward, easy to set up and for the price it can’t be beat. There is also a version with more features, SyncBackSE, for a modest fee.

So if you value those family pictures of the children or grandma and grandpa, set up a back-up system. For the small cost and little effort you will be forever thankful you did if that camera memory card or hard disk with your master files ever fails.

My father and I were not close, at least in the sense that we did not share many experiences together when I was a child. The main reason for this was that he was away from home quite a bit. He was employed as a Chicago Firefighter and in between his 24 hour shifts he worked a second job that resulted in at least one seven day work week a month while the rest were six day work weeks. He provided and he did that quite well as I always felt loved, taken care of and safe.

I grew up in a bilingual household along with my two brothers as my father’s parents were immigrants from Italy. Many occasions after Sunday mass I remember visiting my grandparents as they lived close to the church I attended. Later my father would usually join us and there would be lively conversations in a mixture of Italian and English where I only vaguely understood what was being said in Italian. I remember those conversations as being quite magical. On some occasions there would be heated discussions as grandma and grandpa sometimes argued though they always ended with a slight pause and then laughter, usually with my grandmother giving me a wink.

Dad and I after his "big catch"; © Copyright Reserved, Lovison family archive, 2008

My father had a fondness for northern Wisconsin and as a family we spent every summer during my childhood vacationing at a resort owned by his close friend. Eventually, my parents bought a summer home in the same area. That love of the “woods” must have passed in the DNA as I have the same love for the wilderness.

These days I usually think of my father when I hear the roar of a passing fire engine on its way to a call. I wonder if my dad was ever placed in harm’s way while on duty or whether we ever came close to losing him – his work at the fire station was seldom brought up in conversation. I can recall one of those rare moments when my mother explained to me that my father was tired and sore and needed to be left alone for a bit after fighting a grain elevator fire in the middle of January. A shocking picture of him coated in ice from head to toe while standing in freezing water up to his calves was painted in my mind.

I miss my father and I wish that we could have shared more of who we were later in our lives though that never came to pass. I’ll be forever grateful for the quality of life he provided as we had far more opportunities and life enriching experiences than many of the children in the neighborhood I grew up in.

Happy Father’s Day Dad or maybe more appropriately, felice giorno del padre. . . rest well.

Yellow Iris 1; © Copyright Reserved, Richard Lovison, 2008

My neighbor had a few yellow irises growing in her front yard that caught my attention this afternoon. It’s amazing their beauty withstood the 90+ degree temperatures the last few days.

Yellow Iris 2; © Copyright Reserved, Richard Lovison, 2008

“Nobody sees a flower – really – it is so small it takes time – we haven’t time – and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.”

Georgia O’Keeffe