Paul's blog, University of Warwick

July 17, 2006

The moon

I've had time to experiment a little with my new Powershot IS S3 camera – oh and read the manual (hangs head in shame!).

(click for a larger image)

Paul Strapps : 17 Jul 2006 15:34 | Tags: Photo | Comments (2) | Close comments | Report a problem

July 03, 2006

Canon PowerShot S3 IS

Writing about web page http://www.dpreview.com/news/0602/06022111canons3is.asp

For some time now I've been considering replacing my old Fuji finepix 6800Zoom. The problem was I wanted a camera that could be used for quick point and click photos and still generate a great photo. I also wanted something with a reasonable zoom lens – the finefix has a 3x optical zoom which is pathetic, taking photos on full zoom often lead to blurred photos.

I finally opted for Canon's new PowerShot S3 IS digital camera with 12x zoom – I won't waste time explaining all the great features you can find them here, but I thought I'd share some of the photos I took yesterday.

The first 2 were taken at Coventry airport – both were taken on fully automatic and both at full zoom, bearing in mind I just pointed and clicked and that both helicopters were a long way away (the air ambulance was about half a mile away) I think the results are rather good. I didn't get chance to play around with the sport option which should be used while taking fast moving object.

The peacock was taken in a hurry while queuing for an ice cream at Hatton County Park, it was about 30ft away in a rather shady spot, I just pointed the camera and clicked and the result is quite good – the colours are much better than expected. I'm also impressed with the macro and super macro feature allowing you to take amazing close up shots. The camera is much lighter than expected and the battery life is amazing!

I'm very pleased with it's performance and all the reviews I've read gave it top marks – I can see why.

Paul Strapps : 03 Jul 2006 14:01 | Tags: Photo | Comments (2) | Close comments | Report a problem

May 14, 2006

Sky+ box reboot

One of our Sky+ boxes developed a fault with the HDD a while back, any function that required the use of the HDD (live pause, record etc..) failed with a message saying contact sky (followed by a large repair bill no doubt!).

As it was simply a HDD problem and on the off chance it wasn't a hardware failure I searched the web to see if there was a way of getting the box to format the disk again…..and there is. So far it seems to have fixed the problem and the box is working normally again.

To do this you have to do a 'Full System Reset':

1. Press Services
2. Press 4
3. Press 01 then Select
4. Press 8 (Housekeeping)

Wait a few minutes while the box does its stuff and it's ready for use – excellent!!

I'm sure the nice people at sky would have talked me through this procedure and not given me details of how to send it off to be repaired but at least it saved me the phone call.

Paul Strapps : 14 May 2006 18:42 | Tags: Sky | Comments (6) | Close comments | Report a problem