Camera Owners of the Bay Area

The June 2005 meeting of the Camera Owners of the Bay Area (COBA) user group will be held on Wednesday, June 8, 2005 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) from 7:30-10:30 pm.

ReadyNAS 600 Deal from Infrant

The ReadyNAS 600 deal from Infrant goes from now until June 30. We have secured special pricing for the Infrant ReadyNAS 600 — the world’s smallest RAID 5 Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliance — in the following configurations:

- $100 Off for Driveless Configuration (you supply your own SATA drives)
- $200 Off for 1TB Configuration (4×250GB WD RAID Edition Drives)

The 1TB drive configuration normally retails for $1395 and the driveless configuration is normally $695. We need at least 8 more people to sign up and take advantage of this promotional pricing. If you are looking for a storage solution for your gigabytes of photos, videos, or files, look no further!

Remember, the deal with Infrant ends on June 30, so please let me know via email or at the meeting if you are interested.

Tripod and Tripod Heads

We ran out of time last month, so we are kicking off the June meeting with Tripods and Tripod Heads. A number of people have been eager to see what other COBA members are using to steady their cameras. It’s user participation time, so bring your tripods and heads to the meeting!

Uploading Photos to the Web

You’ve taken your photos, now how do you get them up on the web or delivered to your friends and family? We’ll take a look at a number of options, including:

• smugmug
• pbase
• Flickr
• Microsoft Sharepoint
• and more!

If you use a online gallery system that you would like to demonstrate to the group, please let me know so I can add you to the agenda. We’re currently looking for demonstrators who use pbase, Flickr, and other gallery sites.

As we mentioned in last month’s presentation, we have a great deal for COBA members. We have secured special pricing for the Infrant ReadyNAS 600 — the world’s smallest RAID 5 Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliance — in the following configurations:

• $200 off the 1TB ReadyNAS with 4×250GB drives. You can specify WD, Hitachi, or Seagate brand drives
• $100 off the ReadyNAS without any drives. You supply your own SATA drives for the box
• $1895 for 1.6 TB ReadyNAS with 4×400GB drives.

If you are looking for a storage solution for your gigabytes of photos, videos, or files, you may want to consider the ReadyNAS. There’s a new review of the system on ExtremeTech. Check it out!

The 1TB drive configuration normally retails for $1395 and the driveless ReadyNAS 600 is $695 (if you can find it). We need at least 10 people to sign up to take advantage of this promotional pricing. If you are looking for a storage solution for your gigabytes of photos, videos, or files, look no further!

Infrant Advantages

The ReadyNAS has been compared to the $999 BuffaloTech Terastation on sale at local Fry’s. Here are some points of differentiation between the two products.

Performance - By incorporating a 4 Channel SATA Controller and a Hardware RAID accelerator directly on the CPU, the ReadyNAS is up to 59% faster on writes and 102% faster on Reads. In comparison, the Terastation relies on IDE drives and Software RAID.

Serviceability - Not only do the Serial ATA drives offer better performance, but the availability of such drives in the next 5 years should facilitate replacement. IDE is an older technology, and many computer manufacturers have already started to migrate away from them. The ReadyNAS Chassis was designed to ease HDD installation and replacement; the Terastation was not (requires removal of 46 screws to replace one drive). Also, by storing the OS Image on compact flash, we enable replacement of the entire drive array at once. The Terastation OS resides on the HDD and does not allow all four drives to be replaced at once.

Interoperability - ReadyNAS offers NFS support for Linux and UNIX. HTTP support is also included allowing for easy and safe file sharing over the Internet as well as allowing you to easily set up an Intranet site out of a share.

Data Integrity - Infrant’s engineers come from an Enterprise NAS background and emphasize data integrity in all situations. User selectable options such as disabiling the HDD write cache, employing a FULL Data Journaling file system, and requiring hardware RAID, are all designed to eliminate potential RAID stripe issues and keep your data safe.

More information can be found here:

• Infrant Website
• Initial Thoughts
• ReadyNas 600 at COBA
• Luminous Landscape Review

Signing Up

If you are interested in participating, please send me an email or come to the next meeting. We’ll take your name and let you know when we have gotten enough people to qualify for the deal. Ten people need to sign up, and we can mix and match configurations (i.e. 2 1TB and 8 barebones configuration or 5 1TB and 5 barebones) to qualify. The promotion ends on June 30.

The May 2005 meeting of the Camera Owners of the Bay Area (COBA) user group will be held on Wednesday, May 11, 2005 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) from 7:30-10:30 pm.

ReadyNAS 600 Deal from Infrant

Hot off the heels of last month’s successful Noise Ninja promotion, we have another great deal for COBA members. We have secured special pricing for the Infrant ReadyNAS 600 — the world’s smallest RAID 5 Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliance — in the following configurations:

• $599: No Drives. You supply your own SATA drives
• $1199: 4×250GB Western Digital RAID Edition drives

The 1TB drive configuration normally retails for $1595 and you cannot purchase the driveless ReadyNAS 600 anywhere! We need at least 10 people to sign up to take advantage of this promotional pricing. If you are looking for a storage solution for your gigabytes of photos, videos, or files, look no further!

Sam Feng, Marketing Manager at Infrant, will be available to discuss the deal and answer any questions you may have about the product. If you are interested in the deal, please email me and/or come to the meeting!

• http://infrant.com/products_ReadyNAS600.htm
• http://www.tow.com/2005/04/04/readynas-600/
• http://www.tow.com/2005/04/14/smugmug-and-readynas-600/
• http://luminous-landscape.com/reviews/accessories/readynas600.shtml

Raw Shooter Essentials and Photoshop CS2

Uwe Steinmueller of Digital Outback Photo (http://www.outbackphoto.com) will be on-hand to demonstrate Pixmantec’s Raw Shooter essentials (RSE) and Adobe Photoshop CS2. Steinmueller calls RSE the “RAW converter to beat if it comes to image quality and workflow.”

There are many new features in Photoshop CS2 that make your life as a digital photographer much easier, including:

• High Dynamic Range (HDR): Merge multiple exposures of a scene to create a an image with incredible dynamic range.
• Lens correction: Don’t have a tilt-shift lens? Want to correct pincushioning or barrel distortion in your images? This filter will become your best friend!
• Spot healing brush: Automatically chooses the sampling area, making it a snap to remove dust spots and blemishes.

More information can be found here:

• http://pixmantec.com/
• http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/

An Annotated Image Library

77,000 images later, I have completed annotating my image library. I will demonstrate the hardware, software, and services that I use to capture, annotate, and catalog my images. Furthermore, I will demonstrate the innovative things one can do when every image has been tagged with metadata such as:

• Location
• City, State, Country
• Event
• People
• Keywords
• And More!

Tripods and Heads

User participation time! Bring your tripods and tripod heads to the meeting. A number of people have been eager to see what other COBA members are using to steady their cameras. After the last presentation, we’ll set up the tripods for a show-and-tell session.