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Sony is really good at letting me test their new cameras. A little while ago I had the chance to test the Sony nex-5n, the successor of the nex-5. I had the pleasure of photographing with the nex-5, which I reviewed over here. As I said then, I didn’t like the menus, the startup time, …

The 5n is a whole different deal, in fact it’s a great camera. Sony really listened to their users, they did a real good job cleaning up the menu-interface. It feels snappy, intuitive and very logical.

The quality of the photos is great, it can match the quality of my 5d MK II, which is about 1500 euro more expensive. The photo above is a shot of a concert at 3200 iso, with the standard jpg b/w conversion on it. There is almost no noise and the image is pretty sharp.

My other concern about the nex-5 was the that the camera was pretty slow, well the 5n is definitely not slow. It has a fast autofocus, pretty short start up time, but when you can capture a race-car in full focus on a track, I can only say that it’s really fast.

But as with every camera, there are a couple of drawbacks, the first being that you don’t have a viewfinder, that’s pretty annoying when photographing in bright light. Sony kinda solved this problem by adding a swiveling screen, a very sturdy one I have to say.

Then there is the fact that the flash is external, an sich not a real problem, except sony doens’t like standard hotshoes. They didn’t even include the typical sony hotshoe, so the only way you can use a flash is by using the included small flash, a flash I don’t like. It’s small, there are almost no way to control it and it feels pretty filmsy.

The most annoying thing, but that’s something I have found in all Sony cameras is the way, you can review your photos and videos on it. I can imagine some people find it very good, but I don’t want to go through the menu to view everything I have on my card.

Despite the few things I didn’t like that much, the nex-5n is a very decent camera. Even so good that my girlfriend and I are actually considering buying one, how’s that for a reference. I test a lot of mirrorless cameras and this is the first I really think is up to par with all DSLR’s in the same or even a bit higher price range.

Thx to my girlfriend Saravdv for taking most of the pictures.

UPDATE: in minutes of me posting this tutorial, my airport utility got an update to v6.0 and all I said is obsolete, my WDS network still works, but I don’t know yet how to set it up correctly.

Over here we have a nice setup for our wireless network and playing music in all the rooms of our house. It’s supported by Apple airports. As you can see in the above screenshot. We use an Airport extreme as the router and 3 Airport expresses as relays. Last saturday evening however, disaster struck and our Airport extreme died. Well it did not die completely, it stopped serving internet through the wifi connections and there was only connection via ethernet connections. The wifi clients however could still connect, authenticate and got an ip-address, but there it all stopped. I tried everything to restore the connections, but despite all my efforts for about 3 hours. Rebooting, resetting, hard resetting nothing worked. So I setup a temporary solution and went out today to get a new Airport extreme.

Let’s get to the technical part of this article. How do you setup a network of 4 airports across the house on the same network with wpa2 security enabled? The first and most important step is to hard reset all the airports, the only way to do that if the airports don’t come straight from the box is to hold down the little reset button while pluggin in the airport. If you don’t know how, check this support-page on the Apple.

Configure the base station or WDS main

You start by selecting manual configuration in the airport utility, don’t use the wizard, as you will not be able to setup WDS. On the next screen, you’ll see a couple of tabs, but none of them shows WDS, at least when you have a recent airport extreme.

1. Now setup your Base Station like always, fill out the name, choose a password, … under the Base Station tab.
2. The next tab is the Wireless tab, this is 1 of the 2 tabs where all the magic will happen.
   
   In the dropdown menu next to “Wireless Mode” select “Participate in a WDS network”, if you don’t see it, hold down the “option” key, it will magically appear.
3. You setup your network as always, but make sure you select the checkbox “Allow this network to be extended”, leave the Radio mode on Automatic, choose WPA/WPA2 Personal, choose a password, go to the Wireless Network Options, set your country and leave all the rest. (Hint: Write down all settings, we’ll need them later)
4. Next is the WDS tab, that has appeared after you selected “Participate in a WDS network” in the previous step. Select “WDS main” in the dropdown from “WDS Mode”. Select the checkbox next to “Allow wireless clients”.
   
   Fill in the Airport ID’s of the soon to be remotes, you find the airport ID’s on the bottom of the airport it should be a string of 12 alphanumeric characters.

That are all the steps for the configuring the base station.

Configure the WDS remotes

For configuring the remotes, repeat steps 1 till 3 exactly as in configuring the WDS main station. Make sure you have all the wireless settings exactly the same, as for the WDS main station. Make sure you did not miss any setting and if you must choose a channel set it to 11, because otherwise the remote station can’t connect with the WDS main.

To finish the setup, go to the WDS tab and choose for “WDS remote” in the drop down next to “WDS Mode”. Select the checkbox next to “Allow wireless clients” and fill in the Airport ID of the “WDS main”, update and test.

Repeat the steps for the airport remote for as many times you need it. You should now be able to use the network and if you activated airplay under “Music” you should be able to play music through every airport with boxes or a headphone connected.

A last piece of advice, if you configured a airport and it doesn’t connect or shows up, put in a ethernet cable so that you can access it again. This will save you a lot of time, because the only other option is hard resetting the airport.

Yesterday, I got invited to the logitech magic event in Belgium together with some other bloggers. We rode out to Arquennes about 30 minutes from Brussels in Henegouwen. On arrival we were greeted with a glass of champagne and a short explanation of @wimwauters.

We got a tour around all the different products and in the mean time, there was a contest organized. I saw some nice products, but the most are not suited for me, because I have a fondness of the keyboards and mice/trackpads from Apple. The keys are just nicer from apple then any other keyboard I have used. However the accessoires for the ipad were very interesting, sadly enough the most interesting ones, like the keyboard cover are not suited for my iPad 1. But I can understand why a company developing products for Apple lines, are developing for the current versions alone.

The contest had a pretty interesting take, because Logitech and Hill and Knowlton anticipated that we would cheat. So they had a guess question included, which was how many tweets with the logitechmagic tag would be posted between 20 and 22h during the evening. As everybody was working together on finding the answers to the questions this actually was the only relevant question to receive the prices.

The range of prices was impressive, there was a surround system with a value of 350 euro to mice of 30 euro. But at least everybody got a price. I managed to get a set of Logitech 600vi in-ear phones. I’m currently testing them and I have to say the are amazingly great. These earphones are from the ultimate ear line, which is the same product line where a lot of professional musician are wearing headphones from during their concerts. The pair Sara and I got have a price value of 109 euro, which for me is very steep. That price means I would have never bought them myself, because I have a very bad track record with headphones. They tend to lay around and get tangled, ripped, get loose connections and so on.

These seem very nicely and sturdy designed, so we’ll see how they handle my abuse in the long run. The sound experience is quite impressive. I get a wide range of tones without any distortion or scrambling. The nice part is that there is a whole range of foam and plastic tips so you can choose the ones that fit your ear very nicely. I have a rather small ear channel and most tips don’t fit my ears, but the ones with the logitech ear phones actually fit my ear quite comfortable. I’m wearing them already several hours in a row, without getting any problems with having them falling out of my ear or without any discomfort. So my initial experience with these in-ear phones is very positive. So thanks a lot Logitech for a quite expensive goodie of good quality.

Yesterday a pretty serious thunderstorm passed over Belgium. I setup my tripod in the bedroom and tried to shoot some lighting. I got one shot that worked out great. This one…

After more than 2 months using the Navibot, I want to give you a review. Let me say, we’re pretty pleased with the Robot vacuum cleaner.

Although it’s not a total solution for cleaning, it does a very good job keeping the house clean, when you set it on a daily routine. It takes a structured path, which takes it through the most part of the room. During it’s path, it tries to cover the whole area, but misses some spots. Luckily it doesn’t take the same path everyday and does the missed spots the next day.

Once a week we empty the container containing the dust and hairs,. So it doesn’t require a lot of maintanance but whenever you forget about putting away all toys for the cat or the floorcloths, we use as doormats, something is bound to get stuck in the rotating brushes. Then the robot stops and starts beeping, until you fix the problem, that’s annoying and drives our cat crazy when we aren’t at home. But apart from that, it doesn’t get trapped under furniture, it doesn’t wrecks anything around the home. It only bumps into the furniture that has legs that are smaller than 5cm because it is in the blind spot of the sensors. Even when it does bump into your furniture, it doesn’t really damages it, because of the rubber bumpers.

The only very annoying thing about the robot is whenever you use the guards, it gets confused because the beam of the guard spreads wider then you intend and that leaves areas around the guard without cleaning. Our robot also had a little defect, which broke the system that makes the back brush rotate and we had to send it in for repair. Since then it drives around and cleans the whole area very good.

If you are looking for a decent robot vacuum cleaner, then this is definitely what you need. It does a really good job keeping the house clean, without you lifting a finger, it’s definitely not perfect but it’s a great aid. For us it is a great tool and definitely cheaper than paying a cleaning lady. So yes, it’s an expensive buy, but it will pay off after a while, because maintenance is not expensive at all. Even after 2 months we didn’t have to change any of the brushes.