David B. Brooks Blog

I was at least subliminally aware of LG Electronics between 2 and 3 year ago when I searched through their LCD Display offerings and decided to purchase one of their Flatron L2000C 20 inch displays. At that time in America LG Electronics was a barely known brand name, but has gotten more cache in the last year or so, but mostly for cell phones and TV’s, and little awareness in the LCD display market for computers. Since I purchased my 20 inch LGE display I have acquired two more different brands and tested and reported on several more, including LaCie and Eizo, both of which are familiar brands only in the niche pro-graphics market.

How many things do we continue to do out of habit that we don’t change until circumstances force us to? That questions as far as tradeshows go seems to be one that 2009 is answering. I followed what was happening at the MacWorld show in San Francisco via the Internet, and what was reported was mostly disappointment overall. A lot of the anticipated new products from Apple did not materialize, so maybe besides having his own health problems, Steve Jobs did not make his annual keynote presentation just out of habit. Why bother in these difficult times doing something just for show and to keep an unneeded function alive? Like Jobs my health is a personal issue but more important I don’t need to go to a tradeshow to learn what new products there are available, the companies that have anything of interest to me have already sent me a news releases by e-mail. The only thing I found new shown at the Moscone Center floor of MacWorld is a neat, new inexpensive software package to design, format and output words and pictures in a Acrobat .PDF documents called iPublisher from iStudio (http://www.istudiopublisher.com/index.php/home/home/). Of course thats not all that was new, beside another MacBook model, Apple upgraded their functional software suites iLife and iWork with their usual evolutionary efficiency improvements.

Some months ago a photographer posting in the Shutterbug Forum mentioned he had purchased a Kodak Kodachrome K3 IT-8 profiling target slide from B&H. I must confess I did not know Kodachrome IT-8 target slides existed only those made on Ektachrome for calibrating and profiling a scanner. I thought I had kept up with Kodak Color Management, but maybe the company never catalogued or made public the existence of Kodachrome IT-8 target slides, but on the internet in the Kodak FTP site I did find an Index File to enable using the Kodachrome K3 IT-8 I purchased from B&H, And then after borrowing a Color Management suite from X-Rite containing software to make input profiles I was able to use the Kodachrome IT-8 to profile my scanners and run some tests.

Have you ever blown through a red light in your car, and as soon as you got through the intersection you realized what you had just done? Other than worrying about whether a cop saw what you did, you may have realized that your eyes saw the red light, but your mind did not register the perception and respond as usual so you could stop and wait for the light to change. What this kind of incident illustrates is that human vision is made up of two distinct functions, what our eyes see and what our mind perceives. As well as a third factor memory, which allows us to not pay conscious attention to everything familiar our eyes see in the course of daily activities, otherwise we would never get anything accomplished if we had to consciously deal with everything in our vision familiar or not.