Ok, after the recent announcement from apple on HDR photography, alien subspecies in small planets near Betelgeuse have an awareness of HDR and are probably shooting exclusively in HDR. Probably there is a revolt somewhere that the professional camera makers are not including it along with the kitchen sink in their cameras.

Well, I am pretty excited to be able to expand the Dynamic range of the iPhone by cool software tricks and to me HDR it is a welcome feature. It is really impressive that the iphone is able to capture multiple frames in a really short burst and process them in mere seconds. This is really mind boggling. But the trick with photography has always been the ability to understand and use the camera as a tool and HDR is not an exclusion. One needs to understand there is a time and place for using it and it should be used with care (and understanding). Here is a sample image I shot, hoping HDR will help me get some details in the shadows, Here are the results.

You can click through to see reasonable sized images in  new window.

First off, the HDR version (full image) has indeed ‘brightened’ the shadow areas. Look particularly at the front wall of the church and the flowers in the foreground. But I do not particularly like the ‘processing’ the camera has captured very little details to begin with and the HDR algorithm seems to have eaten a lot more of the details. It should be noted that the processing of HDR is kind of arty-farty right now and it requires a quite a bit of judgement to merge the images to make them look natural. It is no wonder that decent HDR packages cost upwards of 100$. I am sure there will be a lot of research on improving the standard algo and in time the merging will get a lot better, but I do not like what I see now

In the second row, I picked a crop of the clouds along with a church steeple. You can see there is a little more discernable details in the clouds in the HDR. That is nice and the blues in the sky were a bit darker too. but it seems that there is  a bit of visible noise introduced in the image. You might also notice a bit of ghosting in the steeple in the HDR. This is because to capture HDR, they shoot 3 images in sequence with different exposures and merge them. Now the 3 images are shot sequentially and quickly but they are different exposures. This means that a bit of hand shake, moving objects etc will confuse the algorithm and the merging will have to guess what to keep or to average (or dodge or multiply or whatever else) the local perturbation. The result is ghosting. I found this pretty bad with people moving around. Now it is not a deficiency of the algo, I am just saying that one has to take care of this issue.

You will notice the issue pretty pronounced in the clock crop. The strong contrast seems to have messed up the internals of the HDR algo. *Geek* I am guessing there is a global translation / rotation transform that is applied at the point of merging. I can think of a slightly more process intensive solution, by applying a sequence of local corrections.. But it would take more processing time and one has to balance time with quality *Geek*. As you can see the Standard version actually preserved a lot more of the details. I am also guessing that the lens is of a standard aperture and the camera captures 3 images at the same shutter speed but different ISO which might explain the pronounced noise in the HDR image…

Lastly, the centre crop is what I shot the HDR for: A bit more details of the inside of the church. As you can see the exposure adjustment is probably not very pronounced, there is very little details brought out in the shadow. The Mid-tones have been pretty strongly influenced but the shadows are not touched at all. It is a bummer, but an understandable tradeoff, pulling a lot out of the shadows will make things more difficult for the algo to work with and the results will be very unnatural too. But when I look at the loss of details in the flowers, I regret shooting this in HDR. ugh…

I guess my point is this. HDR is a cool idea but it is not a cure all for thinking about the scene before shooting. I will use the feature but am going to switch on the ‘settings’ for keeping the standard image. Now that iPhone has implemented this, I expect every phone camera to update their software and some geeky app will allow you to tweak a lot of parameters too. The algorithm will improve a lot over time, thats for sure. But it is going to be just another tool in a decent photographers kit.

So my iPhone screwed up on me.  What happened is this, a few days back, the phone started to behave funnily. It started to get extremely hot, especially when running off batteries. Worse was the fact that the battery ran out in a few hours after charge even when the phone was not being used. Seemed to me that some rogue program was keeping the CPU very busy with its computation or may be there was some program constantly accessing the network. It was also possible that the battery was getting wonky and was showing signs of distress.

As a geek, I had a responsibility to do some tests to narrow down the problem before heading to the service center. So I did what I could, after a bit of research from the internet of course.

1. Stopped all background notification services (including push for mail). No change.
2. Hard reset the Phone. No change.
3. Backed up data, restored the phone to factory settings and restored the data. No change.
4. Stopped using music player (assuming some short circuit in the headphone jack. No change.
5. Shutdown the phone for a few hours and restarted it. No change.

Well I would not think 0f anything else I could do except restore the phone and start the setup of the phone from scratch. I thought I’d take a slightly easy way out and called Singtel reg the service enquiry.

As it turns out, Singtel serves iPhone service queries only at their headquarters and I was asked to go there. I went there. One of the service guys looked at the orifices in the phone with lights like a dentist and the first response was.

“Sorry, We don’t fix iPhones. Why don’t you go to the hello Shop near by and buy a new unit at $350. Singtel is providing a cheaper alternate to people who want to upgrade their faulty iPhone.”

I was thinking, and explained to him, “Dude, I have not even told you my end of the story. Further, I came here to ask for some diagnostic info. If I wanted to buy a phone, I would not have come to the service centre.”

Anyway, it seems that Apple does not service iPhones in Asia and it is the responsibility of the telecom companies. And the telecom companies do not service the phone and instead provide replacement. I am OK with the idea, mind you. But I wanted Singtel to tell me to go and “fly kite”* after answering some proper questions. Is it a Software fault? Is it a hardware melt down? Is my battery dead?

As it turns out, the service people seem to be trained to push customers to sales and not equipped to answer technical questions. Pretty sad state of affairs if you ask me.

Anyhow, the guy who attended to me was competent and I managed to get through the idea that I don’t mind buying a phone if my current phone is dead. But I need to know it is really dead.

Eventually, he had to tell me that there is no way for him to find that out and I have to continue my experiments to figure out the life of the phone myself. At least, he told me to carry on with part 6 of my experiment and see if it helps.

So off I went home and promptly reset the phone and Avoided restoring the data. Instead I reinstalled the apps I need and re-setup the mail and contacts sync. I left it to charge for a while. And lo and behold, the phone is back to its original form.

The lesson is this. Singtel has a very weak iPhone service policy and I would strongly suggest DIY fixes instead of relying on Singtel to give proper advice. I am tempted to think Starhub and M1 will have similar policies too. Don’t trust the corporations.

* Fly Kite is a singlish expression.

Most know I am a mac convert and I have been impressed with their line of products. As is known in the mac rumor community, 3 or 4 times a year, lots of rumors start spreading on the next product that apple will release. It heats up a few weeks before their scheduled product launch timeline and the persistent rumors are currently in relation to Apple working on a touch enabled handheld (a la tablet) that is being called the iSlate.

Well that speculation is for professional rumor generators. I am interested instead on the directions that Apple might take on convergence via software.

Here is one.

Apple has a couple of product lines that do not get very much air time. The Mac Mini which is a compact desktop computer that runs Mac OSX and the other mysterious product being Apple TV.For all the amount pur on developing and marketing the AppleTV, it is intriguing that the box is simply a console to stream content (from your iTunes or Audio / Video streamed through the internet. You can also watch You Tube content, but really, who the hell wants to watch silly YouTube videos on their living room TV. The idea of Integrating YouTube is simply a way of saying, “there, we can do it too”. So I am thinking, what is possible to do with AppleTV, something that will turn into a straightforward revenue stream for Apple instead of a protracted negotiation with Broadcasters on TV rights and a piecemeal bite into the home entertainment pie.

Firstly, AppleTV is a console. A console that has a capable CPU, memory, storage and GPU that can push HD content to your TV. It is a sizable box that, with the help of hardware engineers can be easily upgraded to a mid-high end computing machine. Note, the software is ready to access your iTunes account and make purchases (even without using a PC or Mac). It works wirelessly (adding bluetooth is a matter of 5$ hardware upgrade). Now the controller for this console is a simplistic Apple Remote that is (almost too simplistic). However the Apple TV can also be controlled via your iPhone or iPod Touch.

That is the second part of the puzzle. The iPhone (and iPodTouch) can control your AppleTV. The iPhone is an absolutely stunning device that has brilliant controls with its neat touch screen and accelerometers. Tons of extremely innovative games and control schemes have been developed in the last couple of years that has shown the ingenuity of game developers and the platform.

It seems logical in my mind that it is time for AppleTV to take centre stage. Not as a movie streaming box but, you heard it first here, as a Gaming console. Imagine the possibilities. The apple TV takes centre stage in the Living room plugged to a large screen TV with tons of CPU resources. Now, if game developers start developing games that can play on the AppleTV, all we need is good game controllers. There is the iPhone in your pocket. Whip it out, connect with the AppleTV, start the specific game ‘map’ and the controls magically appear on the phone, joysticks, tilt controls, multi touch controls, all in the palm of your hand. It gets better, sync 2 or more iPhones and you have multi player gaming in your living room. Even better, the in thing in gaming is online games and Apple need not be left out of this either. The AppleTV is always online. Hah, I might have cracked a long standing enigma that is AppleTV and potentially, cracked open a new revenue stream and industry for Apple to butt their nose into and make billions in revenue (remember iTunes music sales crossed a Billion $ mark in its first year).

It gets even better, you need not have to purchase the controller ‘map’, AppleTV can stream the game controls to your iPhone when you are connected and the controls disappear when you log out. Just run over to your friends house to play a game you do not own but the controls are beamed by the Local console and you need not be left out of the gaming fun during the next party.

Sell the games via iTunes / app store and the circle is complete. Apple being Apple, will keep the games playable on AppleTV alone and not on all macs (including Mini). Well that means Mini has a different product strategy planned out. And that is ok in my book.

Now, whip out your wallets and be ready for picking up the Next Gen souped up AppleTV when it comes out.

Well if anyone in apple wants more ideas, there is lots more where this comes from, I would gladly be an advisor for product development

Now, that is fresh speculation! he heh.