Dick Pountain /Idealog 337/ 07 Aug 2022 02:01
Just back from a holiday visit to in-laws in Scotland, our first proper break from London since the lockdowns disrupted everything. Before Covid we would visit Scotland most years, by car or by train, to Edinburgh, the Highlands or The Mearns of the North East. However, since PC Pro is not a travel magazine, I figure that the best way to tie this column into technology is just to describe what felt so different this time round.
Packing used to be a matter of some concern in the days of Windows laptop, tablet, digital camera and phone/PDA, along with their rat’s nest of cables and power supplies. This time I took just my Chromebook and phone, and though it would be nice to claim only one cable it was actually two. We flew by Loganair from London City to Dundee. I’d booked on their website and didn’t need to show any tickets (even on a phone), simply some photo ID. Once we arrived in Montrose reconnecting to the online world was almost entirely seamless, as my Chromebook remembered their wi-fi address and connected automatically, while the phone being new had to be told. Chromebook also effortlessly cast YouTube and Spotify streams to their Sony TV and sound system, even though they don’t have a hardware Chromecast dongle. And while once upon a time mobile signal coverage was distinctly iffy in Northern Scotland, but that’s no longer true.One of the day trips we made was through the rolling hills of the Howe o' the Mearns to visit villages mentioned in Lewis Grassic Gibbons’ trio of between-the-wars novels which I greatly admire. These hills were covered by a vast harvest of ripe golden wheat: the valley contains some of the most productive soils in the world, and around 85% of UK bread flour is from home-grown wheat. The hills also display quite a lot of wind turbines, which neither ruin the landscape nor incur the frothing NIMBY wrath they do in England. Out sea there are vast wind farms, some right on the horizon, slowly replacing the fading oil industry.
For me the biggest change compared to previous visits was that while I took many photographs, it was with my phone rather than a camera (despite having often declared in this column that I’d never succumb). Last year my trusty old HTC phone died and I replaced it with a Moto G8 Power Lite which has served very well and takes far better pictures. That summer I decided to experiment using the Moto instead of carrying (or forgetting to) my Sony WX350 pocket camera, and I was pleasantly surprised by the sharpness and colour balance of its pictures, and the convenience of always having it to hand. What I didn’t like was its user interface, which often had me shooting videos when I wanted stills, and occasionally blurry pictures that took ages to process which I discovered was because I’d inadvertently pressed a tiny, indecipherable icon and turned on 'bokeh' mode.
I grumbled on Facebook about such options persisting after the camera was turned off, and wished the phone would reset itself to defaults between sessions: a FB friend Tony Sleep pointed me toward Open Camera, a free, no ads app that’s way better than Motorola's own camera app and works well with most Android phone cameras. With that obstacle overcome I’m happy enough with the Moto’s image quality for viewing online on FaceBook or Flickr, though it wouldn't do for large prints.
I still don’t like the narrow phone portrait format as used on Instagram and in FB 'stories', but I've become very fond of the wide landscape format. After six months of this testing, one day I took both my Sony 350 and the phone, snapped identical pictures and compared them. I concluded that both lens and sensor in the phone appear superior; that neither is quite wide-angle enough; that the Sony camera has optical rather than digital zoom, but I rarely use telephoto nowadays. My overall impression is that pix from the phone look good over a fair range of zoom scales but then quite suddenly collapse at the deepest zoom into ugly sharpening artefacts, while the camera’s pix degrade more gracefully with scale. Probably the phone’s tiny lens demands a more aggressive sharpening algorithm.This Scottish visit was the first time I’ve travelled anywhere with a phone as my only camera, and I have to say I’ve been delighted with the results, though it’s taken over a year to learn how to exploit its abilities to the full. So am I now tempted to spend £1000 to get a flagship Apple, Samsung or Google phone? Nae chance.
[You can see a selection of Dick Pountain’s Scottish photos at https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?vanity=dick.pountain&set=a.10162151385019478]
No comments:
Post a Comment