.Inside the Box

One of my favorite times of the year is Christmas Eve starting about 8 p.m. It’s the time after dinner when everyone is relaxed, doesn’t have much to do, and is off doing their own thing. That means I can do the same. This year, we hadn’t yet taken our annual Christmas portrait in front of the tree. While the wife was off watching It’s a Wonderful Life (for the 80^th time) on TV, I had some time to set up ours. And, in what most of you all would call a “duh moment,” I realized that using the ThinkPad W700 could be a real help this year.

Christmas portraits have always been a challenge for me. In order to get the lit tree to show up properly, a long exposure is necessary. Even with a long exposure to properly expose for the tree, people’s faces are shrouded in darkness and look awful. (That is, if they show up at all from the shadows.) If you use a flash to light the people, suddenly the whole room is unnaturally lit, and the flash overpowers the lights on the tree. Add digital noise, and let’s just say I’ve not yet taken a Christmas portrait that I’ve been happy with. I was determined that this year would be different.

Here’s the setup I used.

I moved around the room and played around with different angles and focal lengths on the camera until I got a composition I liked. Any project is ten times more interesting when you get to move furniture, so that’s the first thing I did in order to get as much room as possible to move around. After setting up the tripod, I killed all of the room lights and determined the basic ambient exposure in order to get the tree properly exposed. (1 sec @ f/5.6 @ ISO400 if I remember correctly) The star on the top of the tree was blowing out the highlights, picking up horrible color reflecting from the wall behind it, and overpowering the rest of the picture, so I cheated and unplugged it.

Having determined the basic exposure, I needed a primary front light, so I used what’s known as a shoot-through umbrella in which the flash gets diffused by the umbrella and makes a wide, soft light source which is much more flattering for people’s faces. I was having some problem with the light crawling up the walls and the ceiling, so I tried to minimize that by zooming in the flash plus using a rubber band + paper around the flash head in order to make a “gobo” which blocked most (but not all) of the light spilling upward.

I then needed a fill light from the other side, so I set up a second flash on the coffee table which again had some paper affixed by a rubber band to make a snoot in order to keep the light from spilling up.

Having gotten the basic setup in place, I had to determine the best flash exposure. I believe in histograms, but nothing beats seeing your image on screen so that you can see if you like what you’ve shot. However, I’ve learned that what looks okay on the small screen on my camera is very often not okay once I look at it on anything bigger. So I attached a USB cable to my camera (shown with an arrow above) and attached it directly to the W700. This way, as soon as I took the shot, I could look at it on a color-calibrated, big, bright display and make adjustments accordingly.

I was a little dismayed that Windows would not read my EXIF data on my vertical picture in order to properly rotate my image onscreen (Are you listening Microsoft? Windows should know how to do this!), so I compensated by turning the laptop on its side. I then took a series of pictures in which I would use myself as a subject, set the flashes, and then look at the resulting picture on my W700. I repeated this until I was happy with the flash exposure.

Now it was time to bring the wife down and start taking photos. She’s very picky about how she looks, and for this reason, the big screen was both a blessing and a curse. Now she could instantly see whether she liked the shot or not. She didn’t like most of them, saying things like “my hands look big in that one” (?!) or, “you weren’t smiling right.” Finally she got the bright idea that if we could look at ourselves in a mirror (lower right of the setup picture), we could get instant feedback. Brilliant! I’ll make a photo assistant out of her yet.

My last problem to solve was how to get the autofocus to work in the dim light. I solved that with a little LED flashlight which gave just enough light to let the camera do its thing. It also solved the “I blinked” problem by constricting eye pupils before the shot. I did make sure to turn the W700 away from us in between each exposure so that its bright display (J) would not affect the exposure.

The result is as you see here. Is it perfect? No. I don’t like the shadows behind the stockings on the mantel, and I need to crop a bit more off the bottom in order to get the carpet corner out of the picture. I would have liked to change the lighting ratio between the flashes a bit, but after 70 exposures of “my hair doesn’t look right,” she and I were both ready to call it a year as far as Christmas pictures go. That said, I’m very happy with it.

Whatever holiday you celebrate at this time of year, I hope that it was a joyful one for you and your families and that you have a great new year. As a present to my faithful readers, I’ve taken the liberty of pre populating the first comment below this blog post with popular canned responses. For your comment posting pleasure, please feel free to respond with A, B, C, or D.

Other than being a very expensive HDD data duplicator (see the previous post if you’re not sure what I’m talking about), the ThinkPad W700 was actually designed to get some real computing work done. Given its pedigree as a (no so) lean, mean photo machine, I thought it would be great to take it and use it for some real photo editing to see what it could do.

Several weeks ago I filled up several memory cards with RAW format photos of the very scenic town of Edinburgh. If you’ve ever been there, you’ll know how easy that is to do. Since we’ve entered into a partnership with Microsoft to promote digital photography with their products and the W700, I had the opportunity to try out two products I would have ordinarily avoided in favor of my usual Adobe Lightroom/Photoshop combination. Those two products are Expression Media and Capture One Pro. I’m not here to write a review comparing Adobe vs. Microsoft, but instead to talk about the W700 as a photo editing platform.

I first loaded my memory cards full of files onto the W700, simultaneously copying them to the primary SSD drive and to the included secondary 320GB spinning drive. That way I knew I had an instant backup and a way to revert in case I deleted something I later wanted.

Expression Media is designed more than anything else to be a cataloging (or cataloguing if you prefer) tool designed to help you sort through all types of media you have on your system. These can be photos, videos, or music files. It easily took my raw Nikon .nef files and used the embedded JPEG previews so as to quickly display on screen. At this point, I could view the RAW metadata, apply the ubiquitous 5 star rating system, tag, and drag and drop into folders. There was also a “light table” view which enlarged the photo on a black background. The program looks especially nice in Vista with transparent borders and translucent dialog boxes and that made it more useful when I wanted to select a different image which was hidden behind an open dialog box. The program also appears to support color calibration and editing, but neither was an option for me. Color calibration is not available on RAW data files and I found it especially ironic that the tool wanted to install QuickTime if I clicked the option to edit. I’m not a big fan of QuickTime, so I decided I’d leave the actual editing alone for now. I used Expression Media to quickly get rid of the worst of the shots and narrow them down for editing. The program itself is very fast and I’m sure that even if I didn’t have a high end Core 2 system with an SSD and 4GB of RAM that it would still perform very well.

I was much more interested in Capture One Pro as the tool is definitely a professional level program and one I would not ordinarily have spent money on. Now that I had narrowed down my files to those worthy of spending some time editing, I wanted to see how well the program could handle editing them.

But first, and most important, I calibrated my display. Since the W700 has a built in color calibrator, I had no excuse not to. Ninety seconds later I was finished and could definitely see a difference between the calibrated and non calibrated screen. The only way I could see this process being any easier is if there was a “calibrate on boot” option in which our system would automatically fully boot up and calibrate with the lid closed.

Capture One works very similarly to my “other” usual program, so I was comfortable with how the concept works. Even the dark gray color scheme is familiar. However, since I’ve grown used to a different layout and location of toolsets, I found myself spending a lot of time getting used to finding commands and settings that I KNEW were in there somewhere. The help file is a .pdf and while it offers search and click capabilities, I have grown used to HTML based help and found it took some getting used to. On the up side, for those of you who like printed copy to refer to, this format lends itself quite nicely to print-it-yourself manuals.

For those of you who are not familiar with the concept of programs like Phase One, Aperture, and Lightroom, these are unlike any programs you have ever used before. Most people know that Photoshop and a whole host of other image editing programs will allow you to edit photos – crop, change colors, remove spots, add and remove objects – you get the drift. The issue with these programs is that once you change something and save it, the changes are permanent. Unless you have saved an original copy, you cannot undo your work later; you have to start from scratch.

Phase One is part of a different breed of program. You can do many of the things that most people do in the traditional image editors – change colors, contrast, brightness, shadow/highlight detail, crop, straighten, change perspective, and the like. The key difference is that you NEVER ALTER YOUR ORIGINAL IMAGE. You merely alter how it gets displayed on screen and you can decide at any time to go back to the original image, try variants of the same image, and thousands of other possibilities. Once you understand the concept, the possibilities and control are mind blowing.

I liked that I could pre define cropping to ratios like 4×5 and that the dimensions of the picture would show up on screen as you can see in this picture here. Another function is straightening a photo for those times when your horizon is off kilter or your vertical lines seem to be converging. While straightening isn’t a true substitute for perspective correction, it can serve as an easy way to make things look better when you’re in a hurry. The W700’s integrated Wacom digitizer made it easy to define the vertical lines I wanted to make straight.

I must admit that I haven’t used a digitizer much in my photo editing before and I had to get used to it being different than a touch pad. With a touch pad, if you reach the end of the pad, you can pick your finger up and keep moving the cursor from where you left off. I had this digitizer mapped 1:1 with the screen. If I picked up the stylus and moved it to a different place, the cursor obliged and moved to the correct place. It is a much better way to work, but you have to consciously think whether you’re using a touch pad or a digitizer pad and adjust accordingly.

Pen selection is also convenient for other tasks like moving adjustment sliders like are found in the left hand side of this screen shot…

Or, for choosing and eliminating color casts on this color wheel. In this case, I really liked the color wheel concept of removing color casts (or adding them). I could simply use my stylus on the digitizer pad on a point on the wheel and the results would instantly be reflected in my on-screen image. This color wheel concept is more intuitive for those times when you think “it looks too green” and you can see easily which way on the wheel would fix things.

I proceeded to edit my remaining photos and when I was finished, it was time to export the images with the edits applied. This is where the raw horsepower of the W700 really came into play. I’m sure running a 64 bit version of Vista didn’t hurt either. Each exported image takes a few seconds to process, convert and export. This is not a big deal for one or two images, but I had over 100 I wanted to “fix,” to use an old darkroom term. As it churned through the export process, the fan kicked in and I know the processor really got a workout. In less than 3 minutes, the whole task was done and I had a folder of one hundred 5 MB JPGs for my trouble.

My last step was to make another backup copy to the second hard drive. I thought about burning another copy to a dual layer Blu-ray disc on the W700’s Blu-ray drive–just because I could–but Blu-ray disks are still so darn expensive. I opted for a plain vanilla CD instead. It’s not at the bleeding edge of technology, but much more sensible for only 500MB of data.

All in all, I was extremely impressed with both the W700 as a photo editing platform and also the Phase One Pro/Expression Media software combo. And yes, I even liked using Vista. It was quite convenient to be able to sit on my couch and edit photos vs. just sitting at my desk workstation like I normally do. I could get used to this.

For more information on the ThinkPad W700 designed for photographers, head on over to photolaptop.com.

Admittedly the title of this blog post is a misnomer as the correct term is “Solid State Drives,” but old habits die hard. Just ask the old IBMers who still call them “hard files.” These are the same folk who tell you to send your presentation “foils” from the meeting and mean that they want your deck of PowerPoint slides. But I digress…

I’ve written about my experiences with SSD drives at length on this blog. Try here, here, and here if you need to go back and refresh your memory. I am a huge fan of SSD drives, and I was excited to finally get a chance to try the new Intel SSD we’ve just started selling. As background, I’ve been using a Samsung 64GB SLC drive since June. I’ve been more than pleased with its performance, but like all things, what once was “WOW,” soon becomes normal and accepted. Intel has been touting the performance benefits of its new drives and I wanted to see if and how the new drive would compare in real world testing on my own system. My results aren’t scientific, but are definitely real as I was able to duplicate the same environment for both my current drive as well as the Intel drive on my own system with my own working preload.

I obtained an Intel 80GB X18-M drive. Right away, the drive gets bonus points for having more capacity than the 64GB I was living with on the Samsung drive. The drive itself uses a newer SATA 300 interface which proved problematic for migration purposes on my T61. While it would show up and operate fine in an Ultrabay drive adapter once Windows was booted, my migration tool of choice, Acronis Migrate Easy, did not want to talk to it when it rebooted into its migration environment.

After much fussing, it finally occurred to me that our ThinkPad W700 would make a perfect migration platform as it has support for dual internal drives plus the required CD drive for booting the software. To make the drive fit, I used a 1.8″ to 2.5″ adapter and had no problems. Also, I did defrag before and after migration to maximize the number of contiguous free blocks on the drive. (As a side note, you absolutely should defrag your SSD on a regular basis. If I need to expound on that in a future post, then let me know in the comments)

After migration, I slid my drive into my T61. It booted up without problem. My goal was to do my normal work routine and also do some basic performance testing to see what the drives were capable of. And, should it matter to some readers, my operating system is Windows XP 32 bit, and yes, I have the latest Intel Storage Matrix driver loaded onto my system. I timed cold boot to a fully loaded Windows desktop with all of my startup programs loaded, opened Lotus Notes, a large PowerPoint file, and then did some copy/paste functions with a large single file plus about 1.7 GB of small files.

The results are pretty straightforward. The Intel clearly has a performance advantage over my current Samsung drive.

Technically adept readers are probably yelling at their screens saying that this isn’t a fair test. I’m clearly pulling a spark plug wire on a 5.0L Mercedes and then taking it to a drag race. For those that have no idea of what I’m talking about, my T61 has an older SATA 150 interface. The Intel drive is capable of newer SATA 300 speeds. In my T61, I’m not giving the drive enough bandwidth to truly give it a workout.

In order to give the drive a chance to show what it was capable of, I next installed it and the Samsung in turn as a second drive on my W700 and performed some testing again. In this case, my OS on that machine is Windows Vista 64 bit.

There’s no question that my T61 was keeping the drive from operating at its optimal speed. I saw small performance gains yet again. However, in my initial testing, the Samsung drive seemed to be performing better than the Intel drive, which did not make sense at all given Intel’s marketing claims and my own experience in my T61.

Upon consultation with some technical folks from Intel, they determined that my drive was still only operating at SATA 150 speeds. I’m still trying to figure out what’s going on here, but in fairness, I am not going to post Intel vs. Samsung specs in this W700 configuration until I get this sorted out. I’m sure it’s a BIOS or driver issue somewhere.

Conclusion

For giggles, I also tried some performance testing in a ThinkStation S10 workstation. It was faster than my desktop sized 3.5″ 7200 rpm HDD! I don’t care if I make Seagate, Maxtor and all of the rest unhappy with this next statement, but the hard disk is dead. Long live the hard disk! There’s a new sheriff in town – SSD. They’re fast, and boy oh boy do they make computing a much nicer experience. If you care about performance at all, buy your next desktop or laptop with an SSD drive. Put your programs and operating system on that drive. Then buy a second spinning HDD to act as a large storage tank for your photos, videos, and music. Back up everything regularly. (You should be doing that anyway.)

As a future experiment, I’d love to try Intel’s enterprise/workstation lineup of X25-E drives in my ThinkStation. If Intel’s “standard” drive shows performance gains over my current ThinkStation drives, I can only wonder what their “enterprise” line will show with its faster write speeds. This drive plus some serious photo editing should be something to behold.

Oh, and one more thing. I ran across this blog post today about how some call center employees are suing their employers for the time it takes to boot up their machines. They claim that it can take 10 – 15 minutes or more to login, load all of their programs, process their updates, etc. At night they have to do the same thing in reverse. During that time they don’t get paid for their work. 10 minutes per day x 5 days per week is an hour per week of their time that they are not getting paid for.

Believe their claims. I’ve worked in a call center before. Call center employees don’t exactly get the newest PCs. There is encryption, malware protection, VM type programs, login scripts, patching, services etc. that all decide to take their sweet time getting started. The machine I used ran OS/2 (which was supposed to be fast) without virus protection or any special configuration and it took 7 minutes to reboot while the hard disk was thrashing within an inch of its life.

Can I suggest to these employers that they buy some SSDs? They’re cheaper than a lawsuit.

Lenovo has quietly launched Lenovo System ToolBox, though most of the world has no idea that it even exists.  You probably have not heard of it, but if you’ve ever used one of our desktops or our laptops, I guarantee that you had its precursor installed (or if you’re in a corporate environment, HAD it installed until your IT department did its thing).  That program was PC Doctor Diagnostics.

We’ve been stuck on version 5 of PC Doctor for quite a while.  I remember joining the company some years ago and we were shipping version 5 then.  Many of our systems shipping today still have it sitting right there on the Start menu.  Assuming you are like me, you probably launched it once, just to kick the tires, and then promptly forgot about it or uninstalled it to reclaim some disk space.

If you’ve had to call our tech support team about a hardware issue, perhaps they’ve had you run one of the diagnostic tools included in the package.  The test for a failed hard disk was partciuarly onerous.  It could take an hour or more to run, and as drives became bigger, the test took increasingly longer to complete its test run.

After a long time, Lenovo has introduced the follow on product, Lenovo System ToolBox.  This is not PC Doctor, version 6.  This is a completely new and integrated toolset that includes diagnostic utilities, system health indicators, and a variety of reports and status dashboards to make demystifying what’s wrong with your system very easy, while providing a powerful set of utilities for the more technically adept.  It’s also a lot faster than the old PC Doctor ever was.

I had the opportunity to sit down with Jeff Dadich, Lenovo Product Manager for System ToolBox and Paul Fallon of PC Doctor who developed the tool for us.  Mark Hopkins of Lenovo Connections fame was Director of this video production.  Though he does not appear on camera, we’re indebted to him for helping us.  The following video is about 5 minutes in length.  There is a brief introduction from me.  Following that, Jeff speaks about why we updated this tool.  Finally, Paul takes us on a very brief tour of the new interface, highlighting just a few of the new features while showing actual screen shots.  Whether you’re a newbie or a hardcore geek, there’s something in this new tool for you.

There are many more parts to System ToolBox than we had time to highlight in the video.  For example, System ToolBox will tell you precisely how many days are left until your warranty expires and the type of warranty support you’re entitled to.  In my opinion, that feature alone makes it worth installing.

If you have a Lenovo system, you’re entitled to download and run this tool at no charge.  This includes ThinkCentre, ThinkPad, ThinkStation, and Lenovo 3000 systems running XP or Vista and released after January 2004.  If in doubt, go ahead and download it.  It will tell you if you’re not elegible.  Then give it a go and let us know what you think.

Download Lenovo System ToolBox

If you are the proud owner of a ThinkPad R500, T500 or an X200 with a media slice, you will have no doubt noticed a new port on your system. It looks like a USB port, but if you tried to plug a USB device into it, you found out that it would not fit. That port is a DisplayPort, and it is a next generation video interface for notebooks and desktops.

Anyone who knows PCs knows the venerable VGA port. It’s usually colored blue, and is sort of “D” shaped. You use it to connect an external display or projector to your laptop or desktop. Inevitably, you always try to insert the video cable upside down and have to kink a very thick and awkward cord in order to fit it correctly into the socket. Then and only then, you get to deal with two fixed screws molded into the VGA cord in order to lock it into place. While these usually twist easily into place, woe to that person who has tried to unscrew them after some overzealous nut has cranked them down like life support equipment on the space shuttle. Assuming you don’t need a torque wrench to get them unstuck from your video card, you’re practically guaranteed to remove the metal screw holders from the back of that video card. Then it’s up to you to decide what to do next as you hold these two impossibly small and hexagonal shaped screws in your hand. Usability wise, it’s a terrible system that should never have been approved as an industry standard.

Aside from its physical indignities, it’s an analog system in a digital world. Your video card converts its digital signals into an analog signal which is fed over the wires to the electron guns in your CRT. If you happen to be using a projector or an LCD display, the signal is converted BACK into a digital signal and then continues along its way. The signal bandwidth is limited, and therefore the resolution possibilities. It’s an outdated technology. However, considering it IS a standard, it will be with us for a long time.

The next iteration was DVI, which you may know as a rectangular white connector. This had the advantage of providing digital output for higher resolution displays with higher quality. There are several versions, including DVI-D, DVI-A, DVI-I, and dual link. I’m not going to go into those variations here except to say that DVI was definitely an improvement all around for display quality and versatility. However, one major drawback is that the DVI port is physically huge. This limited its use on laptops as it not only required extra circuitry to implement, but it also meant giving up several other ports in order to make room for it. Thus, most vendors included it only as part of external port replicators or docks.

DisplayPort is the evolution of digital video technology, and has been badly needed for a long time. It has significant cost advantages over both VGA and DVI as it requires less pins and wires for the same display resolutions. Logically it is the same as PCI Express, so it is very easy to integrate for “free” into chipsets. An easy way to think about how it works is to think of it as sending “packetized” video much like TCP/IP. This allows for some pretty cool things to happen. One, it can carry more than just video. The specification allows for audio transmission over the same cable. It has a high speed back end channel that can carry non-video data like USB data. This way displays with a built in USB hub would not need a second USB cable to enable that hub.

What is even cooler is that this packetized video technology allows for future enhancements like daisy chained monitors. Today if you want quad display support, you need four video out ports on your video card for each display you want to connect. With the next generation of DisplayPort, you could run one cable from your video card to your first display. Your first display could then directly connect to your second display which connects to your third, and so on. There is much less cable clutter this way. Plus, the spec allows cable runs up to 15 meters, and there are no screws in order to connect the DisplayPort to the system.

Now of course, backwards compatibility is very important for any standard to succeed. DisplayPort can use an adapter to convert its signal to DVI and, with the right converter, can convert to VGA signals as well. It also easily converts to HDMI. In fact, the two are so similar that many have asked, “Why are you using DisplayPort instead of HDMI on your ThinkPad notebooks?”

To put it simply, HDMI is a consumer standard whereas DisplayPort is a commercial standard. Despite some technical details which I’ll explain in just a moment, the reason they coexist is due more to plain old greed than anything else. DisplayPort is royalty free while HDMI is a paid, licensed standard. In other words, every time an HDMI port is put on a system or device, that manufacturer has to pay a few cents back to the HDMI consortium in order to be able to use that port. It very quickly adds up to real money once you’re talking about millions of systems. Thus, the DisplayPort consortium was formed. In addition to Lenovo, other members of this consortium include our rival PC companies as well as Intel and Microsoft.

Other than that, technically there are very good arguments for using DisplayPort instead of HDMI for commercial systems. As I mentioned earlier, DisplayPort is easily implementable in chipsets while HDMI requires extra logic circuits in order to make it work. Also, DisplayPort uses more wires to achieve higher resolutions while HDMI uses higher clock rates for higher resolutions. A VGA resolution display requires one DisplayPort lane or ¼ the number of wires as it would on HDMI. HD video 1920 x 1080 requires only two lanes, or ½ the number of wires as HDMI would need. Fewer wires equals less manufacturing cost and complexity.

Since DisplayPort uses packetized video, it allows for future extensions like daisy chaining. HDMI is a 1:1 connection which means that every device needs a physical connection back to the source to work. And, since an adapter can easily convert between HDMI and DisplayPort, it can coexist in a digital home theater world.

You’ll notice that we haven’t eschewed HDMI completely. Our ThinkPad SL series includes HDMI ports instead of DisplayPorts on purpose. Since our SL lineup is designed for small business and is more likely to be connected to a home theater system than a non-SL ThinkPad, the right choice was HDMI for that lineup. Though readers of this blog are just as likely to connect their ThinkPad notebooks to their HD TVs as to high end digital displays, the vast majority of ThinkPad notebooks will never be used this way. They will, however, be connected to external displays. Since PC desktops will be using DisplayPorts as well, it makes it much easier to coexist. International Data Corporation (IDC) is very bullish on DisplayPort adoption over the next few years in the commercial space. You’ll very quickly see it take the PC world by storm.

Most people know about the ThinkPads X200s and X200 Tablet that we are formally announcing on Tuesday.  More significantly for me, the formal announcement means that I finally get to talk about them.

I’ve been doing more internally with video lately and thought that I might try a video approach with a blog entry describing these two new products.  Take a look if you’re interested and please let me know what you think of the idea by voting in the poll immediately below the video.

I’m somewhere over India right now on my way to a tour of Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, and Jakarta over the next ten days. While there I’ll be conducting training sessions for all types of Lenovo sellers, attending a blogger meeting, and also participating in a few press interviews. It’s an aggressive schedule, but it suits me just fine. I brought along my Flipcam and SLR camera and I’ll see if I can find any interesting items to share with you all. Today’s post consists of unrelated thoughts each not long enough to justify its own blog entry.

SPILLS

What got me thinking about a blog entry in the first place was that a Singapore Airlines flight attendant uncharacteristically spilled hot soup on me and my ThinkPad. Admittedly the spill wasn’t much in volume – more of a big hot splash than anything. However a feature unique to ThinkPads saved me a lot of frustration – the pop-off keys on the keyboard. Cleaning out the remnants of the sticky liquid was much easier when I could remove and replace individual key caps.

UPDATED BLOG ENTRIES

I updated two previous blog entries before I left on Saturday – the W700 and Switchable Graphics posts. The W700 has now achieved a Vista Experience Score of 5.9 for every performance subcategory. There is no way for it to score higher as Microsoft’s current rating system maxes out at 5.9. The W700 is FAST, but you already knew that.

The second update was to correct an error on my part. nVIDIA does in fact have switchable graphics technology.

If you want more details on either of these, check out the previous posts. They’ve been annotated at the bottom to reflect the changes.

INTEL SOLID STATE DRIVES

The new solid state HDD drives from Intel seem like they’re going to perform quite nicely. Based on what I’ve read on the web, a lot of Intel’s messaging seems to be around performance per watt. In other words, the drive should wake up, hit the throttle, and then slam the brakes to reenter low power mode as fast as possible.

Is this a real benefit or marketing fluff? An SSD’s power draw is already so low that saying something new is “20 percent more power efficient” (I made that number up) really isn’t saying much. And will the proposed faster performance just make my processor seem that much more slow? I’m already waiting for my processor with my current generation Samsung drive. If I switched to a new Intel drive would I just be putting a 5.0L engine into a Honda Civic?

DRIVER UPDATES

One of the things I did before leaving was to run ThinkPad System Update and update my drivers. Most of the stuff that updated didn’t really need updating inasmuch as I wasn’t experiencing any problems. So I accepted the default recommendations. BIOS. Fine, what the heck. UltraNav driver. Might as well. And so on.

Access Connections is now @ version 5.0, and I don’t really notice any difference on my XP system. Sadly, most of the updated functionality we provided in version 5 will only work on Vista. (If you’re running Vista, it’s a must have upgrade.) I was upset with the Presentation Director update as it deleted some of my carefully constructed schemes and renamed others. What a mess. Along these same lines, Access Connections also added a Verizon Wireless scheme when I already had one. I wish there was a user selectable “Stupid mode” and “Expert mode” for these utility updates.

ThinkPad Power Manager also gets a major face lift and functionality upgrade – if you’re running Vista. But even if you’re running XP, there’s a cool new feature called Dynamic Brightness Control. It saves power by decreasing screen brightness in situations where it doesn’t matter, such as boot/shutdown, when your screen saver is running, or when you’ve locked your system. What most people will not stop to consider is the energy saving implications when running on AC power. To badly mangle a famous quote: A million watts here and a million watts there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money. I don’t see any downside in using this feature. Just go get it and start using it.

WIDESCREEN DISPLAYS

Judging from continuing forum traffic, screen aspect ratios are still a pervasive issue. There are still a vocal minority of people who have not accepted widescreen displays. Longtime readers of this blog already know that I’ve lamented the demise of the 4:3 aspect ratio panel. We live in a vertical computing world where content is best digested top to bottom, and thus on a taller and narrower display, i.e 4:3.

The display panel industry has completely forced PC manufacturers’ collective hands and made us go widescreen on all of our product lines. Any 4:3 ratio displays you see today will quickly disappear not to be seen again.

The pain isn’t finished yet.

There is another shift on the horizon – the shift from 16:10 displays to a 16:9 ratio display. Manufacturers have less waste when they cut their big LCD glass sheets into certain shapes. Since they are also making glass for LCD televisions in a very low margin industry, it only makes sense from their points of view to make the aspect ratio consistent and push towards a 16:9 aspect ratio world. Unfortunately, what’s better for your television is not better for your notebook PC. This shift will again make display screens more rectangular, shorter, and squatter.

Thanks to Mark Hopkins for the prompting on this issue.

THINKPAD KEYBOARD CHANGES

And finally – the updated T series keyboards. Yes, there is quite a visible change when you pull the keyboards off of a ThinkPad T400 system and look underneath. However, I have seen some data from our ThinkPad Engineering team that shows that the keyboards still have the same strength as the previous generation. There is no reason for me to doubt these data points nor the veracity of those engineers. I’d like to see some of our naysayers participate in a double blind study to see if they really can feel a difference. Otherwise this is just a tempest in a teapot. Just because it seems horrible doesn’t mean it necessarily is. Maybe if we had proactively marketed the change as reducing weight without impacting strength we might have been able to promote this positively. There’s probably a corporate lesson here.

I thought I’d spend some time on a new Lenovo technology feature, one we call Switchable Graphics.

One of the fundamental choices facing a notebook buyer is what type of graphics subsystem to buy. While there are many different types, the choice can fundamentally be broken down to “Integrated” or “Discrete.”

Integrated graphics are the graphics capabilities that come built in the chipset.

• Advantages: Low cost. They are already built in for “free” as part of the rest of the package. Less power consumption (more on that later.)
• Disadvantages: “Shared” graphics memory, which means you lose some main system memory to graphics. Also, the graphics capabilities of integrated graphics chips decidedly lag those of discrete graphics chips.

Discrete graphics are graphics provided by an external graphics chip, usually by nVIDIA or ATI. These have their own dedicated graphics memory which frees up main system memory for other tasks.

• Advantages: Much faster performance. More capabilities for things like hardware accelerated high definition playback. (Yes I know Montevina integrated graphics supposedly has this capability, but Intel has yet to satisfactorily deliver on that promise)
• Disadvantages: More costly and much more power consumption, which results in less battery life.

On a desktop, the answer is usually simple. If you care about performance, choose a discrete graphics card and don’t worry about it any longer. On a mobile PC, the answer is not quite as cut and dried. The reason is that there are major tradeoffs in battery life with each choice.

Longtime readers of this blog will recall that I’ve always eschewed discrete graphics on my notebooks because they draw significant amounts of power. When you use a discrete graphics chip, you lose an hour or more of use per battery charge. To say this is a huge loss is severely understating the problem.

Most users don’t need this kind of power at all. The integrated graphics chip has more than enough oomph to run Windows, email, web browsing, etc. The rest is wasted as heat and lost productivity due to less system runtime.

That said, there are still a significant number of people that buy discrete graphics because of a single application, or “just in case.” They simply just suffer the gains with the losses.

Enter Switchable Graphics. A Switchable Graphics machine has BOTH an integrated and a discrete graphics chip built into the system. That way there is computing power when you need it and power savings when you don’t. The idea isn’t new. Sony introduced this technology several years ago on one of its ultraportables. However, that implementation had a major drawback. In order to change from integrated to discrete graphics mode, the user had to completely reboot the system – rendering it practically useless.

Lenovo’s implementation is different. We worked with ATI and Intel to develop a system where the user could dynamically swap over from one graphics subsystem to another without having to reboot his/her system. By simply clicking our battery gauge on ThinkPad Power Manager, a user can switch from integrated to discrete modes with 2 – 4 seconds. Though there is a warning that some applications fuss when going from graphics mode to graphics mode, in practical use, most of them behave just fine.

This is one of the primary reasons we switched from nVIDIA graphics back to ATI graphics on our ThinkPad Montevina products. nVIDIA just didn’t have this technology available.  (See below for edit notes)

Using switchable graphics allows a user to have the best of both worlds – power savings plus power when you need it. Many people who use this technology set it to run on discrete graphics when plugged into electricity and on integrated graphics while mobile.

The major drawback is that this technology uses architectural improvements in Windows Vista to do its magic and will not work with XP systems. There have been many requests to make this so, and the team is studying whether this would be feasible in a future release.

For those of you running XP, you still have a choice. In BIOS, there is a setting for the graphics subsystem that allows you to choose to run in either integrated or discrete mode. You would have to reboot and go into BIOS to change your preference, but could still switch on an occasional basis.

For me, I’m going to set my next machine BIOS to “integrated” and just leave it there – regardless of what operating system I’m running.

You automatically get switchable graphics capabilities when you choose one of our Montevina systems with an ATI graphics chip. These include the ThinkPad T400, T500, R400, and W500. The one exception is the R500 with ATI graphics. Lenovo did not build this capability into that system.

EDITED BY MATT KOHUT ON 8/30/08

I owe nVIDIA an apology.  The strikethrough text at the top was what I thought was correct information, but I was wrong.  nVIDIA does have switchable graphics technology available which announced in July on a Sony laptop with more vendors to announce later.  Their name for this technology is “Hybrid Graphics.”  According to nVIDIA this is also a Vista only solution at this time.

Today Lenovo announces the ThinkPad W700 notebook. To me, this is the most exciting ThinkPad announcement all year. Not because it is our first 17″ ThinkPad notebook ever. Not because this is one of the powerful machines on the planet (Awe inspiring levels of powerful). No, what has me excited is that this machine was designed from the ground up for photographers.

I know many out there consider Apple to be the standard for photo work, but I think our company has shot a significant salvo across the proverbial Macintosh bow that challenges that dominance. Let me tell you a bit about the ThinkPad W700 and then you can let me know in the comments if you agree or not.

First – you’ll notice the new letter designation. A few weeks ago we announced our first W series, the ThinkPad W500 mobile workstation. Previously we used “p” to designate our mobile workstations. The workstation category of machines has grown significantly in the last few years – so much so that Lenovo decided it needed its own category. Now when you think “ThinkPad W Series” from Lenovo, we want you to associate “W” with “workstation.” A workstation has these attributes: top bin CPUs, ISV software certification, OpenGL graphics solutions, as well as gobs of memory and hard disk space.

Our solution doesn’t disappoint. It features next generation Intel Quad Core Extreme Edition processor choices. It has space for integrated dual HDDs, configurable in RAID 0 (data striping), or RAID 1 (data mirroring) setups. (Yes there are SSD options too). Main memory is expandable to 8GB and the nVIDIA graphics solutions have up to 1GB of graphics memory.

So there is definitely plenty of power. In fact, you can see that its Windows Vista experience score is nearly off the charts. Today, 5.9 is the absolute maximum score possible in any one category. We hit that and bump up against it in several other categories as well.

So it has brawn, but you can rightfully say at this point that I’ve mentioned absolutely nothing about what it offers for photographers. In other words, “So what’s the big deal?”

The big deal starts with a beautiful 17″ Widescreen 1920×1200 display with 400 nits of brightness. What’s more, this display displays 72% of the possible color gamut of the Adobe RGB color space. In comparison, most normal laptop displays only show 45% of the Adobe RGB color space, and for this photographer, are absolutely inadequate (read: SUCK). This means that this display is capable of showing more colors than most nearly every other display available – laptop or desktop. A 19″ 72% color gamut display for a desktop costs north of $700, so you aren’t likely to find it at your nearest Best Buy. High end displays like these are usually reserved for graphics professionals. In fact, many of these professionals are still using CRT tube displays because most LCD displays just aren’t good enough. This ThinkPad display is more than good enough.

(Now I know at this point many of you are going to bemoan our lack of IPS display options for your notebooks and will use this post as a catalyst to comment further. Think of this new announcement as adding a high quality display option which we haven’t had in a long time and a step in the right direction. For those of you who don’t know what I’m referring to, here’s my earlier post on the subject.)

Any photographers who are serious about getting their colors right will calibrate their displays so that the colors match what they expect. You want your reds or greens to look exactly as you envisioned them. Without color calibration, you are at the mercy of your lab to get it right. Sadly, most often, they get it wrong. To help these people, we are introducing, to my knowledge, the industry’s first integrated color calibration equipment on a notebook PC. This isn’t a “cheapest rules” color calibrator, but is Pantone’s X-Rite calibrator with HueyPRO software. These are well respected names in the industry. On this ThinkPad, calibration is very easy and is done with the lid closed. You also can see the before and after images so that you get visual confirmation that everything is correct. I have never done any photo editing on any laptop before precisely because of the lack of a wide color gamut or color calibration. This will now change.

The next goodie is an optional WACOM digitizer. WACOM is the same company that makes the digitizer for our ThinkPad X Series Tablet PCs and is again, a well respected industry leader in digitizer technology. The digitizer is especially useful in Photoshop for defining selections, creating masks, or any of about a thousand other tasks. You can map it 1:1 with the entire notebook display, or using a control applet, can map it to a selected area of your screen. It is really cool. I’ve never used a digitizer tablet before when photo editing. The amount of precision control is just amazing compared to a standard mouse.

When you’re at your desk, you will find it integrates well with your workflow. This machine has three ways to connect external displays – VGA, Dual Link DVI, and DisplayPort all built into the side. I wish it could drive three displays at once using each one of those ports, but sadly only two simultaneous displays for now. Perhaps a future version will have this capability.

There is a 7 in 1 card reader built in, and you can also add an integrated Compact Flash reader as an option to replace the Smart Card or Express Card 54 slot. There’s also an optional port replicator with an eSATA port so that you can backup to your network storage device at your office or home.

Admittedly this isn’t our lightest weight machine, but think about what it can do to reduce the clutter in your bag. You can leave behind your color calibrator and USB cable. You can leave behind your digitizer. Since there is support for a second built in HDD, you can have instant backups and leave your external USB HDD at home. This saves time because for the first time you can actually edit in the field or on the airplane ride home vs. having to wait to get to your “real” machine later.

And to top all of these great features, it’s a ThinkPad. It has rock solid design and is built like a tank, not a fragile toy. Just like you buy professional cameras for their build quality, you choose a ThinkPad for the same reasons.

It has thoughtful design touches that are designed for people who actually want to use this system day in and day out. Things like our legendary keyboard, thoughtful ergonomics, and ThinkVantage Technologies designed to help make your life easier, not complicate it.

It has the best service and support in the business.

Can you tell I’m excited? This is a phenomenal piece of equipment unlike anything that has ever been done before in the industry. But of course, I have a few wish list items to improve the next version.

1. I’d like to have a Photoshop overlay template option for the keyboard. Photoshop has a myriad of keyboard shortcuts that are nearly impossible to remember unless you use them every day.
2. I’d like to have an integration bundle with Adobe that includes Photoshop and Lightroom preloaded on the system – preferably at a bundled price.
3. I’d like GPS capability. Geotagging is about the only option I can think of for us mere mortals to care about integrated GPS devices.
4. For a machine this big, a carrying handle would be quite useful, though I think my esteemed colleague, Mr. Hill and fellow members of the Corporate Identity team would heartily disagree.
5. Wi-Fi software tuned for wireless camera sync. Many of the newer SLR cameras have Wi-Fi capabilities in them to wirelessly transmit photos as they are being shot. I can easily imagine a wedding photographer who brings his/her assistant with them. While the ceremony is going on, the assistant is sitting in the back of the church, editing in real time as the images flow into the PC. How cool would it be to have ceremony pictures already available for viewing at a slide show at the couple’s reception? The WOW factor would be HUGE and great for future business. (Or even repeat business if you happen to be a Hollywood celebrity.)
6. I’d LOVE to have a built in battery charger for four AA batteries. This way when I’m out and about with my SB-600 and SB-800 external flashes, I could leave one more thing at home and always be sure of having a source power for battery hungry flashes.

Now it’s your turn. Are you as excited as I am about this machine? Did we get it right? What would YOU like to see on version 2?

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UPDATE 8/30/08

Our ThinkPad team has been able to do some more performance tuning of the W700 system since I last posted.  Now it gets straight 5.9s for the Vista Experience Score.  As you may recall 5.9 is currently the highest possible score available on a Windows system.

For the naysayers, yes, this is a cherrypicked configuration with maxed out specs, however, aren’t all benchmarks?  It just shows what this system is capable of.  I’d argue that if the scores went higher, this system would probably score better still.

Today I am welcoming two guest video bloggers to Inside the Box.  I had the pleasure of working with Rodrigo and Jackie several times while they have been summer interns here at Lenovo.  One of the things that they mentioned early on is that they use a competitor’s tablet at their high school and wondered how they could share their experiences with it – perhaps with a blog entry.  This seemed a perfect thing for a video blog entry.  Take a look if you’re interested in seeing the experiences of two real-world tablet PC school users.  Their script and words are their own. 

As a side note, please keep your discourse civil.  I will be extra careful with moderating comments on this particular post.  It is all right to say negative things, if applicable, but I will not tolerate mean spirited comments and will delete them without warning.  All praise gets directed to them.  Any derision gets directed to me. I was most impressed with what they came up with.  I hope you will be too.