Share Joetampico84's profile
Joetampico84
Joetampico84's stats
- Review count2
- Helpfulness votes46
- First reviewNovember 24, 2013
- Last reviewNovember 24, 2013
- Featured reviews0
- Average rating3.5
Reviews comments
- Review comment count0
- Helpfulness votes0
- First review commentNone
- Last review commentNone
- Featured review comments0
Questions
- Question count0
- Helpfulness votes0
- First questionNone
- Last questionNone
- Featured questions0
Answers
- Answer count0
- Helpfulness votes0
- First answerNone
- Last answerNone
- Featured answers0
- Best answers0
Joetampico84's Reviews
Canon EOS 70D DSLR Camera Body: From horse races to soccer games, freeze action-packed moments with the help of this DSLR camera. Record stunning high definition videos and capture fine details even in low light. Built-in Wi-Fi lets you print, share and transfer images quickly and easily. Because it has a wide range of manual settings, it is sure to meet the needs of photographers of all skill levels.Memory card sold separately.
Posted by: Joetampico84
from tallahassee
I love the camera overall, but a few of the negatives you should know before buying:
> the video mode uses the display screen, which will zap your battery quickly. There doesn't seem to be an option to turn this off, but I've heard the screen will turn off if you flip it around to face the camera... since you can't see it, it's not possible to know if this is true.
> multiple exposure shooting sounded promising, but has been useless. In multiple exposure shooting, you want different parts of the screen to have different exposures, however that is not what you get with this. You literally get multiple (even# exposures, so things don't really blend well. You can re-use some of your RAW images when shooting multi-exposure, so that could be neat if the overall multiple exposure setting worked better.
> HDR shooting is handled better than multi-exposure. This is actually semi-useful, but not as good as you get by separate, stand-alone applications. Ideally, it would take a single exposure #in say RAW format# and then process it 3 different ways to generate the HDR, but that is not what happens. It still takes 3 different pictures, which often leads to camera shake. There is also a lack of saturation/color settings for HDR; it's just a one-size-fits-all. I find I still use separate applications for both multi-exposure and HDR.
>the touch screen and quick menus work pretty well, but there are just too many options and it's hard to find things. There is a "Q" button which brings up the most common menu options you would need in that shooting mode, which is really useful. Otherwise, the regular manu has around 15 pages worth of options, so unless you know exactly where to look for something, you'll spend so much time looking through the menus that you miss the picture.
> picture quality I've always thought lacked color depth. The camera allows you many options for adjusting color which helps some, but the auto/default has always been lackluster.
> Silent mode is very quiet, but not silent. Silent mode also reduces the maximum FPS to about 3 or 3.5. You only get 7 fps when shooting in loud mode.
> video has below average audio quality, but that is not surprising given that it's a microphone in a camera body. I took some videos in a wind environment and you can't hear anyone talking, even though they are right next to the camera.
> the video mode uses the display screen, which will zap your battery quickly. There doesn't seem to be an option to turn this off, but I've heard the screen will turn off if you flip it around to face the camera... since you can't see it, it's not possible to know if this is true.
> multiple exposure shooting sounded promising, but has been useless. In multiple exposure shooting, you want different parts of the screen to have different exposures, however that is not what you get with this. You literally get multiple (even# exposures, so things don't really blend well. You can re-use some of your RAW images when shooting multi-exposure, so that could be neat if the overall multiple exposure setting worked better.
> HDR shooting is handled better than multi-exposure. This is actually semi-useful, but not as good as you get by separate, stand-alone applications. Ideally, it would take a single exposure #in say RAW format# and then process it 3 different ways to generate the HDR, but that is not what happens. It still takes 3 different pictures, which often leads to camera shake. There is also a lack of saturation/color settings for HDR; it's just a one-size-fits-all. I find I still use separate applications for both multi-exposure and HDR.
>the touch screen and quick menus work pretty well, but there are just too many options and it's hard to find things. There is a "Q" button which brings up the most common menu options you would need in that shooting mode, which is really useful. Otherwise, the regular manu has around 15 pages worth of options, so unless you know exactly where to look for something, you'll spend so much time looking through the menus that you miss the picture.
> picture quality I've always thought lacked color depth. The camera allows you many options for adjusting color which helps some, but the auto/default has always been lackluster.
> Silent mode is very quiet, but not silent. Silent mode also reduces the maximum FPS to about 3 or 3.5. You only get 7 fps when shooting in loud mode.
> video has below average audio quality, but that is not surprising given that it's a microphone in a camera body. I took some videos in a wind environment and you can't hear anyone talking, even though they are right next to the camera.
A couple of positives:
> You can shoot a still image while recording a video, but if you do, there will be a ~3 second pause within the video where you took the still image. In some situations this could be a neat effect, but really inconvenient in others #such as recording and shooting a concert performance#. It would have been nice to have dual SD cards and the ability to do both video and stills without interruption.
> Similarly, you can shoot both JPG and RAW at the same time.
> ISO is really clean and I love that it goes as high as 12800. It's a little grainy at the max ISO, but 6400 is still clean and works in almost all settings.
> You can shoot a still image while recording a video, but if you do, there will be a ~3 second pause within the video where you took the still image. In some situations this could be a neat effect, but really inconvenient in others #such as recording and shooting a concert performance#. It would have been nice to have dual SD cards and the ability to do both video and stills without interruption.
> Similarly, you can shoot both JPG and RAW at the same time.
> ISO is really clean and I love that it goes as high as 12800. It's a little grainy at the max ISO, but 6400 is still clean and works in almost all settings.
My Best Buy number: 0532347208
What's great about it: ISO, video, HDR, silent shooting, 7 fps, quick menu, touch screen, uses SD cards
What's not so great: multi-exposure, video uses display screen, cost of batteries
I would recommend this to a friend!
Picture Quality
4
Ease of Use
4
Features
5
Share this review:
+11points
20of 29voted this as helpful.
With a 2TB capacity and a Gigabit Ethernet interface, this WD My Cloud external network-attached storage device lets you easily save files via your existing Dropbox or other Cloud account and access them from devices connected to your home network.
Customer Rating
3
OK, but has tendency to run slow
on November 24, 2013
Posted by: Joetampico84
from tallahassee
Compatible with...:PC
I got excited when I saw this in the store. I take a lot of pictuers, love to travel, and my have multiple devices. I started by downloading the My Cloud app on my android tablet. It was amazing. The app came with a demo folder with sample pictures. Navigating and viewing was fast and easy. I was really impressed, so I bought the device.
Setup only took a few minutes. I connected via network cable, not USB 3.0 (network cable included, USB 3.0 cable not included). I pulled up the device on my laptop, did a firmware update and started xferring picture files. I originally got an xfer rate of 1.2 MB/sec, which was pretty good.
After I had copied about 10 GB, I setup the software. You have to create a user account in order to access the device (insert "duh" here#. I created a user account for myself and my wife, which involved registering an email address, confirming the email address, then creating a password. I also had to generate a code number from my laptop, and plug that into the tablet. It wasn't too bad, however the password requirements were a little strict and the password wouldn't work. #Tip: It appears that even though you create a password, by default the password requirement is turned off. In other words, you create a password, and you get prompted for a password, but you may just need to leave the field blank... very odd#.Even after completing all the registration, viewing the files my my tablet was slow and clunky.
Tip: the device has 3 default folders: Public, SmartWare and TimeMachine.Public seems to be where you put the files you want to access from multiple locations. I was concerned by the term "public" since I didn't want everyone in the worl to have the ability to get to my files, but it seems limitted only to the people you create user accounts for.
I continued to copy files to the device, the xfer rate dropped steadily to under 700 kb/sec, which was midly annoying. I set a large amount to copy, then went to bed. When I got up, the xfer had hung with some error messages, and when I tried to restart, the xfer rate was around 100 kb/sec #essentially nothing#. Trying to anything took forever and failed. To try and fix this, I downloaded the software to my laptop and tried to do things with that, but without success. It didn't matter if it was my tablet or PC, xfering or viewing took forever and ultimately failed. I was pretty disappointed at this point.
One of the options in the android app is to download an entire album. Since I couldn't view individual pictures, I figured I would try to bulk download an album and see what happened. I picked a small album and set it to download. It also ran incredibly slow, but what was worse is that there was no way to cancel it. If you start an album download, you have no options to stop it.
My next troubleshooting idea was to reset my network router, but that had no effect. The download didn't terminate/error out and it didn't get any faster. At some times, that will be a nice thing - to know if you get interrupted it will automatically resume when it can.
The final option I had was to unplug the device - there is no power or reset button on it. So, I yanked the power plug, waited a few seconds, and plugged it back in, Once I did that, xfer rate went way back up and my album downloaded after a few more minutes.
After the album downloaded to my tablet, I went to my tablets gallery to look at them, but they weren't there. They may be somewhere on my tablet, but are not in the most obvious place. I did notice that viewing the downloaded album in the My Cloud app was extremely fast. I may be able to adjust settings to indicate where downloaded files should be saved in my tablet, but so it would have been nice if these were taken care of by default.
I don't want to continue to risk damaging the device by constantly pulling the power plug to fix a slowdown issue. Plus, if I go out of town what am I going to do - ask the neighbor to come over and unplug my cloud? The slowdown issue is a dealbreaker: if it continues, the device is worthless. When it is not occuring the device functions wonderfully.
What's great about it: It is what you think it is - an external harddrive with lots of space that you can access over the internet
What's not so great: software limitations, tendency to slow down, terminology ("public" and "download") seem to be misleading. No power/reset
I would recommend this to a friend!
Ease of Use
3
Performance
2
Share this review:
+26points
26of 26voted this as helpful.
Joetampico84's Review Comments
Joetampico84 has not submitted comments on any reviews.
Joetampico84's Questions
Joetampico84 has not submitted any questions.
Joetampico84's Answers
Joetampico84 has not submitted any answers.