Archive for 2011

Review of my new toy, the Sony Cybershot TX-10

Saturday, November 19, 2011 0 Comments A+ a-



Released in Malaysia: Sometime in mid-2011 (I think)
Price: RM1299 (now on discount at Sony stores for RM999!)
Specs: In the name of efficient use of blog post space, you may refer to the specs here
Disclaimer: This is not a paid review, the camera is my own and I will certainly not be liable for any problems you may have with the Sony Cybershot TX-10 if you bought it based on anything I write in this post and it turns out not the way you hoped. Just making sure we have a common understanding here. Now on to the review!

So my trusty old Ricoh camera 's on/off button has been failing on me, the video mode no longer records sound and it did not help that it took a nasty fall in the hands of a friend (which is why people must always put the camera strap around their hands especially when handling cameras that don't belong to them), so last week I decided get myself a new camera. I do like taking some arty farty photos on occasion and also wanting a hardier camera than my previous one which had problems of water entering it and screwing up the video sound recorder. So my specs for my dream compact camera were simple: high optical zoom (around 10x), able to take good macro shots, able to take good shots under low lighting, waterproof and reasonably priced.

The TX-10 unfortunately didn't meet the specs for high optical zoom (only 4x) but it had other cool features that got my interest. It also has some specs and features which seem to be most awesome but for me personally are unnecessary and has limitations. For example:

1) 16.8 megapixels: I think is ridiculously high as it would take much massive space on a hard disk, so I set most of my photos to 10MP. Of course this would be good if you want shots to make into large prints. No score for this feature coz' it really depends on the individual whether you like high MPs or not.

2) 3D still image: The camera has 3 modes for taking 3D images - 3D Still image, 3D Sweep Panorama and Sweep Multi angle. For the first two modes, you can only see the 3D effect on a 3D TV, but not on the camera, computer or print. Which makes it useless to me coz' I don't have a 3D TV, and I doubt even if I did, I would hardly take the time to hook up my camera to the TV just to ogle at some 3D pics. This probaly would be significantly cooler if you had a digital photo frame. The Sweep Angle mode effect, on the other hand, can only be viewed on the camera by tilting it left to right. Which is cool for all of two seconds, but since it's not viewable on computer or print, it's also kinda useless.

3) AVCHD Full HD movie recording: You need a special HDMI cable that can connect to the camera and to your HD tv in order to see recorded movies in HD. Currently I don't have one, so can't test it out and that to me makes it a cool but useless feature, especially since apparently you don't get the HD effect once the video is burned onto a DVD or other media (only plays in HD from the camera).

Nevertheless, there is plenty of good stuff about the camera which I love. I went on a trip to Sabah last week with a colleague, where I got to visit Mount Kinabalu, Poring Hot Spring and do some snorkelling at Manukan Island, so I had a good chance to test some of the many features and see what it was capable of, and I was quite happy with results although there are a few things about the TX-10 that could be improved. Here are some of the features and capabilities of the Sony Cybershot TX-10 which I think are pretty awesome, including my score for the feature out of 10 (the sample shots here are unedited except for size):


1) Touchscreen (6 out of 10): Just coz' everyone loves touchscreen stuff these days. The touchscreen menu is quite user friendly and easy to understand. However, the score is a bit low coz' I have some problems with the sensitivity of the screen. Sometimes on start up, the touchscreen takes a while to be able to detect my touch, and also on playback, I can scroll through photos by swiping my finger across the screen, but it also sometimes does not detect my touch properly and ends up zooming in on the photo where I touch it. Obviously, this can be quite annoying, although the touchscreen is still cool. I just hope the sensitivity doesn't deteriorate over time, but anyhow the camera has a one year warranty and I bought an additional 2 year warranty for RM90, so I can go bug the camera shop people to fix it when my touchscreen starts acting up on me and not pay a dime.
When underwater, the touchscreen totally cannot function, so I have to set the camera to whichever mode I want beforehand (usually Underwater mode) and then when I'm in the water, I can only on and off the camera, zoom in and out, press the shutter, record movies and view playback. Changing mode or adjusting white balance is not possible. I did try the camera while snorkelling, with some nice results (see below), but I have not tried taking it diving yet (need a casing for that), so I have no idea how good underwater mode will be under the changing lighting conditions when diving.


2) Intelligent Auto mode (8 out of 10): This is the default mode and quite useful because in this mode, it automatically detects what kind of photo is being taken and changes mode accordingly. For example, a landscape shot will result in the camera adjusting to landscape mode, and when I move the camera up close to an object for a macro shot, it change to macro mode. That is pretty cool coz' I don't have to change modes all the time. However, the camera sometimes detects the wrong mode (like a few times, close up shots were mistakenly detected as landscape shots).

3) 25mm wide angle lens (10 out of 10): This is one seriously wide angle lens. It's wide enough that I can take camwhoring shots without it being so blatantly obvious that I'm camwhoring, as in my face doesn't look like it's extremely up to close to the camera, as shown below.



4) Sweep Panorama (9 out of 10): Gone are the days where I had to take time  to stitch photos together with a program to make a panorama. Sony cameras are on up on most other camera brands with this feature, which is made extra cool because not only can I shoot panoramas from left to right or right to left, like below:


I can also change direction of the panorama from top to bottom or bottom to top, resulting in cool shots like this:


And combining camwhoring AND panorama shots is just super cool. ^_^


Some panorama of straight lined objects may however come out looking a bit weird though, as seen below (the platform was perfectly straight in real life), and that's where it lost one point from me. I'm sorry, Sony, it's still a great feature though! 


FYI, there is also an underwater panorama mode, but I did not test this because the site I snorkelled at had poor visibility, and most of the corals were quite dead, i.e. not colourful, and since I can't change camera modes when in the water, I decided to skip on testing this feature out.

5) Macro shots (9 out of 10): I was very very happy with the TX-10's ability to take macro shots. It can focus up to 1cm distance and that means I can take pretty nice shots of pretty flowers up close:


The one above was taken indoors in a shaded area, whereas the one below was taken outdoors. In my opinion, the colours came out beautifully under the lighting conditions.


The reason for loss of one point is the macro shots as still not as detailed as I would like, but for a pocket-sized camera like the TX-10, the shots are still awesome. 

4) Optical and digital zoom (8 out of 10): The camera has a small optical zoom range of 4x (unfortunately there is no underwater camera that has an optical zoom above 5x), but under the Settings menu, there is an option to select Smart Digital Zoom of 5.1x or Precision Digital Zoom of 16x. The Smart zoom makes little difference, so I opt for Precision Zoom. I took the following photo without any zoom while I was soaking my feet in a tub at Poring Hot Springs. The area in the little red box is what I zoomed into with Precision zoom for my next shot. 


The picture quality after zooming in such a distance on 16x digital zoom is pretty good, although it has a little water-coloury effect. And words on the signboard can be read although in real life, I could not read it where I was sitting. For me, the quality may not be of print quality but it's good enough to serve the purpose of capturing a clear zoomed up shot.


5) Low-lighting shots (10 out of 10): The TX-10 performs SUPERBLY under low lighting. The camera has a Twilight mode (if you're using a tripod) and a Handhedl Twilight mode. Shots below were taken at night on the latter mode, and the camera did a great job of picking up and enhancing whatever light there was, especially on the photo below of the boats and hotel because in real life, it was NOT as bright as it looks in the photo.



6) Background Defocus (6 out of 10): One of the reasons I was lured in to buy this was the Background Defocus feature, which makes the subject of the photo clear while the background is defocused. This effect is usually only achievable on DLSRs, although it can also be achieved on most compact cameras when taking macro shots, as seen in my shots of the flowers. So to be able to take shots that are not so close up and defocus the background sounded like a pretty cool feature for a compact camera.



Unfortunately, this feature was a little disappointing for me because the recommended distance from the subject of focus is only 30cm (which is about the distance of a camwhore shot) but when I try to use this mode, more than 50% of the time, the defocus effect does not work and the background is still in focus. If I take a self-shot, with arm fully extended further than 30cm from me, the defocus effect does not work. So I have to move the camera closer to me. Which makes the wide-angle screen really really helpful for making sure my face does not take up more space on the photo than I want it to. Out of about 15 times that I took variations of the shot above, only 3 came out defocused. Maybe the distance wasn't right, but if it's going to take that many times to get a nice shot, it's annoying.

7) Underwater mode (9 out of 10 - tentative): I say tentative for the score because I am itching to get an underwater casing for this camera and test it out when diving to see how the lighting affects the photos. But from what I saw when snorkelling, the camera took shots that were better than expected. The camera did pretty well focusing underwater, with only a few slightly blurry shots, and those were usually for the fish moving really fast. But I took many pics of moving fish that came out really well in focus with no flash whatsoever, and the colours were nice considering the visibility was a bit poor. Some sample shots below (be reminded that these are completely unedited from the camera).







8) Shockproof and freezeproof (no score): At least, this is what Sony says about the camera. I didn't give a score because I didn't test these features and I am not about to throw my camera around or put it in the freezer coz' it's MY camera and I don't want to end up killing it before it's time. But these are of course really cool features as well coz' I no longer have no be so worried about drops except for unsightly scratches, and I can use the camera in cold countries without it freezing over... which was another problem I had with old cameras. So if these features work like they should, I say, double thumbs up for the TX-10!

On a final note, here are some things that could be improved about the camera:
1) The camera battery must be inside the camera to be charged. It would obviously have been nicer if the battery could be charged outside the camera so I could continue using the camera with a spare battery while charging the other one.

2) Battery life is ok but not great. According to the battery specs, it can be used for about 250 shots. During my snorkelling day trip, I took about that amount of photos, and also playbacked photos in between before the battery knocked out.  So on a typical vacationing day, expect your battery to last you about one day before knocking out. I bought a spare one as back up and it cost RM180 or something like that.

3) Photos come out too orangey under incandescent light. I guess that's the downside of a camera that does too good a job of capturing colours well. There is a mode to adjust the white balance under incandescent light, but it still turns out bit too orangey for my liking.

4) No options to change colour of photos to black and white or sepia or other filter effects. Not that I actually used such effects, but if you are one of those who do, this might be a bit disappointing although it can be easily rectified with a good photo editor.

5) IT DOESN'T COME IN RED! Yeah, you lose big marks from me on this aspect, Sony. Blek.

CONCLUSION: Pretty awesome cool looking compact camera producing pretty good photos with few minor flaws, although I could do without paying for some supposedly awesome features that I'm hardly ever going to use. I give it an overall 9 out of 10. ^_^

P.S.: You folks at Sony, if you're reading this and would be so kind to send me an underwater casing for the TX-10, I'll be most happy to review that during my next dive trip. As long as I get to keep the casing. *GRIN*

I'm licensed... to dive ^_^

Wednesday, June 01, 2011 0 Comments A+ a-



And that was my photographic evidence to prove it! :P

In continuation of my last post, my weekend at Perhentian Island came and went, did 4 dives without a hitch and am now a certified open water diver! Which means I can officially dive down to up to 18m... which I found is actually not as deep as I would have liked, and so I'm very much looking forward to continue on with doing my advanced diver course after which I can dive up to 40m, and also do go into shipwrecks or caverns (which I can't do now coz' I'm not trained on how to deal with the associated hazards of being in enclosed areas underwater, and that's where bad accidents happen :P) as well as learn other adventurous diving skills. But that will come later, once I amass a bit more wealth to afford it and find the time to do it too. :)

But basically I'm a diver a now and hyped about it, so that's just about the most important thing I have to say on this post.

Getting to the island is part of the fun. I was on the same flight with two others in my diving group, and so we took the same boat to Perhentian, which was half an hour of really choppy boat ride. So choppy that taking photos was a bit of a challenge. But at least only my camera strap went flying and not my camera itself.

Hang on tight to this crazy boat!

At least we got there in one piece and this place was to be my residence for the next 3 days and 2 nights.

Almost immediately after arriving in late morning, I got together with the rest of my group (all of whom I met during this course itself, and they're all a pretty fun bunch). A group of 3 had arrived earlier in the morning and already had gone with another instructor to start their first of 4 dives. So I ganged up with another 3 of the later group, and we started our first dive in the afternoon.

We wannabe divers met our friendly island diving instructor, Mat Yie, who would be guiding us over the next few days to apply the basic skills we had learned during our pool dives to the big ocean, and making sure none of us drowned in the process. Thankfully, he succeeded. At least in making sure no one drowned.


Oh yeah, if you're thinking my wetsuit looks a little weird, it's coz' I was wearing a full body swimsuit under my rental short sleeved suit (called a Shorty). It bought the swimsuit the week before as I thought it would be handy as extra protection against accidental cuts or scraps underwater (corals are nastily sharp buggers), plus it's easier to slide a wetsuit on with a swimsuit under than without. And it also helps to reduce sun exposure and getting more tanned on uncovered areas than covered parts, which results in your colleagues giving you weird looks the following week. So functional-wise the full body swimsuit under the wetsuit thing worked great. Style-wise, I think I looked kinda weird. I was almost considering buying the top of my swimsuit in another colour instead of black too. Luckily I had the good sense not to do that. Still, for future dives, I'm now lusting for a cooler looking full-body wetsuit. They're a bit more of a pain in the butt to put on compared to a shorty, but they really look much cooler. I have the camwhoring pics to prove it. Taken from a dive shop in Summit with a changing room that doubled as a meeting room (hence the whiteboard and office chairs).

I haven't bought it, was just checking out wetsuits, and of course I will fall for anything with red on it coz' RED IS COOL.

So anyway, back to the island dives, all our dives went well. For me, I was totally comfortable in the water and my diving gear, with no big complications, although some of the others had a bit of problem with equalizing their ear pressure when going underwater, and some also couldn't get used to clearing their diving mask underwater (we need to do this if water gets into our mask or it gets fogged up and we allow water in to clear it). Only problem I had was that after some time of breathing though my mouth underwater, my nose tends to get clogged with mucuous, and although I don't need to breathe through my nose, it feels uncomfortable and gives me a slight gagging feeling. Hopefully that problem won't happen in future dives, but anyhow, I could still manage underwater.

Since I was busy learning to keep myself alive underwater, I couldn't take any photos of what we saw (learning underwater photography is in the plan. One day. When I can afford the big ass camera). And even though we didn't dive to any particular amazingly beautiful corals (most of the ones we saw were quite bleached, which is sad), we still saw quite a few cool marine creatures that I would never be able to see while snorkelling. Here are some of the fishes and other creature we saw during our four dives (photos stolen off the internet):

1) Sharksucker: A very streamlined fish about 25 - 30 cm long and likes to glide along the bodies of sharks and other fish to clean whatever little marine bugs are off them. And they did the same job for us 'dirty' divers too. One of them came right up to my flipper and as I held up my foot to watch it, it glided up and down my flipper, cleaning it up and looking like it was dancing on my flipper. I couldn't help laughing coz' it was so dang cute. Of course, laughing underwater just means extra bubbles released and some weird sounds of 'glub glub glub' coming through my regulator. Even more cute it was when we continued to swim and I watched the little bugger continue to glide over and nibble away at the legs of my fellow diver.


2) Swimmer cleaner shrimp: These are also pretty tiny buggers. We found them inhabiting a crevice in a coral, and my dive instructor, seeing that I was somewhat able to control my buoyancy (very important skill in diving, to ensure we can control when we move up or down in the water without accidentally crashing into corals below), invited me to put my hand on the surface of a rock near where the shrimp were moving around. After a while, they were crawling on my hands, apparently trying to to clean it off (which is why they're called cleaner shrimp), but I couldn't feel anything. It was still cool having little shrimp walking on me.


3) Boxer cleaner shrimp: Much bigger than the swimmer cleaner shrimp and a lot prettier too. We didn't touch these though, just saw them.


4) Razorfish: These little fish swim with their head facing down and tail pointing up and it just looks really funny, like they're super drunk or something.


5) Spiny devilfish: A fugly little fish that is camouflaged to look like the sandy bottom. And I was wondering if it's actually a fish coz' I never saw it swim, but it was actually crawling along the bottom with manny little legs. It was weird.


6) Short-tailed pipefish: A close relative of the horsefish, and the one we saw was male coz' apparently it was pregnant, but it was so thin I couldn't really tell. :P


7) Reef cuttlefish: It's really tiny, only about 8cm long. But apparently it can change its colour to match its background, but all the time I was watching it, it didn't change colour. Or maybe I missed it. :(


8) Zebra lionfish: We saw this one hiding in a coral, and it was really purty!


And the cutest little fish of them all...
9) Yellow boxfish: Yes, it a fish shaped like a box. And also really small. It made me wanna grab it and snuggle it coz' it's just too damn cute for words.


We also saw two hawkbill turtles (one was happily munching away at a coral while we divers were watching it and it wasn't bothered with us at all), a couple of pufferfish, and some tenggiri, plus all the other fishies I would normally see while snorkelling. The thing we didn't see while diving were sharks, even though we dived at a place called Shark Point, which as the name suggests, has a shark population. I was a bit disappointed with that. But that disppointment was resolved later on, and will be explained later on.

After completion of our four dives, on the last night we were there, our diving instructor gave us a crash course on Chapter 6 of our diving manual. Officially our diving manual has only 5 chapters. Unofficially, every diver has to learn Chapter 6. And we didn't know what the heck he was talking about until the night itself.

It turned out to be a 'mandatory' stunt to be carried out by all newly certified divers, involving wearing a snorkel (with the lens taped up so you can't see through it) and attempting to drink a can of beer through a snorkel in one breath (note that you can't breathe through your nose when wearing a snorkel).

I think the snorkel made my eyes look bigger, don't you?

It was crazy, we cheered each other on, I wish I had video but I didn't (dumb camera of mine was out of batteryyyy! These pics are from my diving buddies), and all of us got through our can of beer in one snorkelled breath. Which officially officially meant we were divers. Yay!


After that we were treated to a cool fire dance by one of the lovely female dive instructors, who will appear here as a fiery blur swinging her two fire-on-a-chain whatchamacallit thingies around.



And AFTER that, another one of the instructors ambushed us with an unexpected magic card trick, which turned out to be even more unexpected awesome. Worthy of his own magic show on tv, I would say. :)

All in all, it makes me think being a dive instructor is such job for them to have time for this stuff. So that's it. Mummy, I wanna be a dive instructor when I grow up.

Anyway, as I mentioned before, I was a little peeved at not being able to see sharks on my first few dives. However, since we could only dive up to the 2nd day (this is to prevent ear pressure complications that may arise from flying on the 3rd day), I had some free time on the 3rd day to chill on the island and decided to do my usually crazy thing, which is go snorkelling off the beach. By myself. Even though it's nowhere near and potentially dangerous as diving alone, it's also usually not a good idea to snorkel alone lest something happens to me out there and there's no one around to help me. But as I mentioned earlier, we didn't get to see sharks, and Shark Point was quite close to the beach. And so crazy me had to go shark hunting just to satisfy myself. I had actually seen a pretty big shark off the beach at Redang before, and just for those readers who think I have a death wish, sharks in Malaysia are quite safe compared to say, sharks in Australia like Great White sharks which can and have killed people. Malaysian sharks are much less psycho with people, coz' they're smaller and probably are more scared of people than we are of them (and they should be! Just think of how many of these buggers get killed for Chinese wedding dinner soup!).

Anyway, long story short, after shorkelling off the beach for about 40 mins, and I was far enough way from the shore than no one would hear or see me if I was in trouble, I saw what I was looking for. A lovely black-tipped shark... and bigger than ones I'd seen before at Redang which were babies. This one was at least 1.3 m long... definitely not and long as I am tall. But big enough to be cool, and I was saying to myself "Yessss!!!!". Followed it around for a while before it swam away, but then a few minutes later, while I was chasing after a big Parrotfish, I saw TWO big sized black tipped sharks swimming together. Weeee!! And these guys seemed a little curious of me coz' instead of swimming straight off, as I swam towards them, they swam in a big circle around me... kinda like they were watching this slow-poke creature with bright coloured flippers to check me out. But then they swam off too. But I was already happy at that point. Sharks were observed. Mission accomplished and after that I headed back to the beach. Still funny that I saw them snorkelling instead of diving, which is why I guess snorkelling still has its plus points (no need to worry about running out of air, for one thing!)

Still, I'm hyped to I finally got myself certified as a diver and can't wait to see what other awesome possum stuff I'll at my next dive trip. And meet more cool fellow divers and entertaining dive instructors. And learn underwater photography. I foresee this becoming an obsession. Hyuk hyuk.

Diver down! Yeaarrgh!

I'm diving in!

Sunday, May 22, 2011 0 Comments A+ a-


Finally got some time to blog, although I'm a bit half dead now coz' I've had less than 5 hours of sleep the past couple of days and if I don't get to bed by midnight (which is technically in 10 minutes), I will be a total zombie at work tomorrow.

But I just wanna post coz' I'm excited and I'm excited coz' by next weekend I am going to be a PADI certified open water scuba diver! YESsSSSss!!!

I've been wanting to do my scuba diving course since forever, but the normal price for a course is RM1600, which is a bit pricey (not including having to buy or rent dive gear, both of which is also pricey). Being a lover of the deep blue sea who enjoys a good snorkelling sessions every now and, I kept having people tell me that once I've tried scuba diving, snorkelling is just crap. I've seen quite a bit of stuff snorkelling too...black tipped sharks, a manta ray, huge turtles, moray eels, huge fugly looking fish which I'm not even sure what they're called.... and yet people always say that I get to see way cooler stuff when scuba diving (which I'm sure is no exaggeration).

So one day, I'm thinking that it would be great if Groupon could offer a discount on scuba diving. I've already gotten do some pretty cool stuff at discounted prices from this site (such as motorised water sports at Puchong, and next month I'll be doing paintball. After which I think I will take a nice long break from crazy fun Groupon activities for a while). The site has a page for subscribers to give suggestions and feedback, so I wrote them and suggested to post up a discount deal for scuba diving.

Lo and behold, the wonderful people at Groupon answered my wish, and a few weeks later, they had up a deal for scuba diving at Rm990, and I think I was one of the first 5 people to buy it. And the way this site works is that every discount deal requires a minimum number of buyers to become activated, and if it doesn't reach the minimum number, then those who bought don't get to use the deal and we get a refund. So the minimum number of people required for this deal was 30 poeple, and once I bought it, I kept going back to the page to see if there were enough buyers... and the number went up ssooooo slowly. But not only did it eventually get past 30 buyers, on the last day before the deal closed, the number of buyers went up to 139 people! And after talking to my dive instructor, she said even she was surprised at how the number went up so expectedly. :P So anyway, Groupon is so awesome for helping me save RM610 for my diving course. Which I can use to by my wet suit and other diving gear. :)

Of course, we scuba diving wannabes don't jump into water without prior training! All of us got a PADI instruction manual to start us off learning about the theory.

I personally love this manual coz' it's explains technical stuff in a very easy manner, even has some humour in it, and has a lot of small quizes and reviews after every chapter which really helps us to remember what we've read. It makes me wish all my school textbooks had been written like this. Would have make learning history a lot more interesting! :P

Then I spent the whole of last Tuesday (which was a holiday) doing two of my pool sessions back to back, purpose of which is to get used to the dive equipment and be trained on various specific skills we need to know when in the water. We were split into two groups of 5 and 6 people each, and each group had an instructor. And I have pictures!

Suited up and ready to rumble, but not before some shameless camwhoring :)

Here's my group's instructor (the Indian guy) giving some explanation of what we're going to do before we hit the pool.

And they had our gear all laid out for us too. The scuba cylinders were bigger than I thought they would be!
These are our BCDs (buoyancy control devices) which is the thing that helps us to sink or float in the water. Which is pretty important when diving, as you might guess.

We were taught how to attach our regulators (the thingy we breathe through when underwater) and scuba cylinder to the BCDs. And lugging around a huge oxygen tank strapped to our back it not easy too!

The regulator has quite a few tubes sticking everywhere, and if I don't strap it down properly, it just kinda all hangs out and that's not supposed to happen. In the ocean, it may drag along stuff and injure corals, and other things. Out of the water, it just looks like some weird alien dangly thing stuck to me.

Of course, all the weird alien dangly thingies are necessary for staying alive underwater. :)






So anyway, I just did my diving exam today and got 96% for it! Weee! And next weekend I'll be going to Perhentian for my ocean diving sessions, and then I get certified! Double weeee!!!



I am so ready for the ocean, baby. BRING IT!
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