Wakey-wakey C64!

May 25, 2026 by

Look what did arrive to the workshop this morning!

The black & white picture hides the yellowed cases to show this great computer system in a worthy light.

Got my latest Commodore 64 salvaged from my parents’ house initially for the SID chip, which may find a new home in my C64 Ultimate as soon as the new machine arrives. Or I may just source another 8580 (well, actually a pair) as my old Commodore system is in a surprisingly good condition, and it might be worthwhile to fully restore it. Apart from severely yellowed cases, everything seems to work properly.

It’s mind-blowing that a computer that hasn’t been switched on for 35+ years starts up and just works without any issues.

And it’s even more amazing that floppy disks recorded 35-40 years ago still hold the flux and I could load everything I tried without any errors. The 3M disk sleeves look as if they were just purchased yesterday.

I wonder if I will find the source code for my earliest projects… The C64 represents the sole era of my life which isn’t properly archived.

I’m sure I will play a game or two, but the C64 Ultimate is destined to the synth corner in my studio. I’ll let you know more as the project unfolds.

Filed Under: Computer Hardware, Synthesizers Tagged With: , , , ,

Notes on CFexpress

January 20, 2020 by

I’m gearing up for the arrival of the Canon EOS-1D X Mark III, and the first thing to consider was memory cards. My goal was to find the fastest card with the smallest size. At the moment 64GB is my preferred cards size with CF/CFast/SD, but since 64GB CFexpress cards are much slower than 128GB, I went ahead and bought a 128GB SanDisk Extreme Pro. Since a camera is a good month away, I did some preliminary testing with computer transfers.

USB 3.1 Gen 2 is Not Fast Enough

When it comes to USB, manufacturers always advertise physical link speeds, which is rather misleading to the customer. For example USB 3.0 and 3.1 Gen 1 is advertised being 5Gb/s, but the usable data link speed is just 4Gb/s (or 500MB/s) since it uses a 8-bit to 10-bit encoding to have a desired balance of 0 and 1 bits on the wire. USB 3.1 Gen 2 is a bit better with 128 to 132 encoding, so the data link speed is 1.21GB/s (and NOT 1.25).

Every single CFexpress card is advertised to have at least “up to” 1.5GB/s read speed. So if you want to utilize the highest possible download speed of a CFexpress card, you need something faster than USB 3.1 Gen 2. The sole option at the time of writing is Thunderbolt 3.

To continue the never-ending stream of marketing lies, Thunderbolt 3 is usually advertised as a 40Gb/s line. Thunderbolt carries up to 4 PCI Express 3.0 lanes, plus video. So the maximum data link speed is 3.94GB/s (and NOT 5GB/s), period. This may be even lower if you connect your reader to a Thunderbolt 3 port whose controller is shared with your monitor(s), or depending on the actual controller chip to port mapping. But if you don’t connect a high resolution monitor to the same controller as the reader, you are guaranteed to have 2 PCI Express lanes, which is 1.97GB/s. CFexpress also uses 2 PCIe 3.0 lanes, so this is a perfect match. Bingo, go for a Thunderbolt 3 reader!

While quite a few companies are selling their (as we learned by now) inadequately slow USB readers, there’s only one Thunderbolt 3 device. The big and heavy AFT Blackjet TX-1CXQ. It is much larger and heavier than my ProGrade Digital CF & SD reader, not to mention the minuscule Wise WA-CR05 CFast reader I use (both of these are USB 3.1 Gen 2 readers, which is mandatory to utilize a full bandwidth of a CFast card). So I bought the Blackjet.

“Up To”…

On paper the 128GB SanDisk sports up to 1.7GB/s read and 1.2GB/s write speeds. Of course you have to deduct bandwidth consumed by file system and block device access protocol overhead, so you’ll get smaller numbers in real world scenarios.

I did measure average read speed around 1.45-1.47GB/s, which is acceptable compared to the advertised 1.7GB/s. Oh yes, you’ll need a rather fast PCIe SSD in your computer to be able to download these cards at full speed. Plus macOS 10.13 or later is required to work with CFexpress cards.

Write speed is a completely different story, however. Blackmagic Disk Speed Test measured speeds fluctuating between 800 and 1100MB/s, and it suddenly dropped to 430MB/s.

Head scratching, and consulting with both AFT and SanDisk (AFT’s support is first class, but I’m still waiting for SanDisk to reply)… Switching benchmark software to AJA System Test Lite… And presto, the truth started to reveal itself.

The following is a write graph generated by AJA System Test. Just ignore “frame numbers”, as since it was a 4GB write test, vertical blue lines indicate gigabyte boundaries.

So the card is quite speedy with 1.1-1.2GB/s average for the first gigabyte, then drops to 430MB/s. This might be thermal throttling, but since it always happens after the first gigabyte, it might well be due to the internal architecture of the card. I don’t know, and still waiting for SanDisk to comment. This is the first time I saw such a thing with a memory card.

If you let the card sit idle and cool down a bit, you’ll again get 1.1-1.2GB/s for the first gigabyte. But if you keep pushing data, it will stay at 430MB/s. For short bursts, say 256MB or so, with a little time between them, write speed stays around 1.1-1.2GB/s.

But how much write speed do you actually need? The CFast cards I’m using in the 1D X Mark II have 400-410MB/s average write speed, and I can shoot RAW continuously until the card is full. CFast and CFexpress card prices are almost identical (although the 128GB CFexpress SanDisk is significantly cheaper than the CFast). So for less money, I get 3x faster download speed, with a little bit faster worst case and almost 3x faster best case write speed.

I’m going to use the 1D X Mark III almost exclusively for stills. 1GB is about 40 images = 2 seconds at 20fps before throttling kicks in (not counting the camera’s buffer). It may fare very well, but video guys might need to look elsewhere. Larger cards, more suited for RAW video footage, might also behave differently.

What About Other Brands?

Finding a trusted memory card vendor isn’t an easy task. During the last 18 years I grown to trust SanDisk (used lots of CF cards from them and still are my favorite SD card vendor), and Lexar for CF and CFast before they went Chinese with unknown quality. I don’t buy anything from Sony given how they ignore customer security (think firmware updates requiring root permissions). I have zero experience with Delkin, ProGrade or Wise cards, and a little bit reluctant to begin experimenting with expensive cards.

So it’s basically SanDisk only at the moment. Canon is also pushing SanDisk, so I suspect that these products were tested together and will provide the promised performance. The above results did cast a little shadow on this, but only time and further in-camera testing will tell. I’ll let you know.

  ☕ ☕ ☕

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EIZO CG279X – A Truly Superlative Monitor

July 16, 2019 by

I had been using an EIZO ColorEdge CG241W for the last eleven and a half years, and during that time grown to love and trust that monitor. Well, in fact also grown to not trust any other brand when it comes to high-end color correct displays (no, it’s not prejudice, it’s experience).

While the CG241W still works perfectly, my recent upgrade to the current (2019) 8-core MacBook Pro having 10-bit per component color capability was a good cause to get a new monitor.

I did think about going larger than 24″ for a while. But also didn’t want the super tiny pixels of a 31″ 4K display.

Here I have to note that Retina-style (high DPI) displays are totally unusable for photo editing – you simply can’t see what’s sharp and what’s not. Unfortunately the CG319X, having an even superior panel than the 279X, fell out because of its tiny pixels (at 149 PPI vs the 109 PPI of the 27″ size).

From EIZO’s current lineup two monitors matched my size/resolution criteria: the CG2730 and the CG279X (the latter replacing the CG277). The 2730 was quickly ruled out because it doesn’t support Gray Balance priority I’m used to with the CG241W. Plus the CG279X can be fed with a single USB-C cable (for both DisplayPort signal and upstream USB), which greatly reduces cable clutter on my desk (more on this in a later post).

The monitor arrived six days ago, and I’m still in awe. It is a very rare occasion to see me running out of (positive) superlatives when describing a device. This is because it is very rare to have a device that doesn’t exhibit even a tiny fault within a week.

The EIZO ColorEdge CG279X is such a device.

Setup

It is pretty straightforward: connect the cables, and install ColorNavigator 7. But since the monitor’s main market is HDR video editing, it has to be reconfigured for a better fit for photo editing and print proofing. The setting I’m referring to is called DUE Priority, which needs to be set to Uniformity (which is also the one recommended by EIZO). My unit arrived set to Brightness, so you at least need to check it before calibration.

Well, my only minor gripe with the monitor is that this setting isn’t trivial to access. You either have to go to the administration menu (hold the leftmost button and the power switch for two seconds when turning on the monitor) or use ColorNavigator. In the latter case you have to manually enable the Monitor option setting extension in the app’s preferences for the DUE Priority item to appear under the Monitor settings menu. Both are documented in the user manuals, so it’s worth reading them.

Calibration

My usual practice is to set the monitor to 80 cd/m2, D50, L* gamma (my complete workflow, even working spaces, revolves around L* gamma) and Gray Balance priority.

The CG279X calibrates beautifully, with the average deltaE 2000 being less than 0.5, and the highest deviation not being more that 2.

Note that this is a hardware calibrated device, so the calibration curves are stored in the monitor’s internal LUT. It’s worth mentioning that all monitors drift over time, so regular re-calibration is mandatory.

Calling any monitor that lacks hardware calibration abilities a professional device is pure marketing bullshit in my book (yes, I’m referring to Apple’s new Pro Display XDR, for example).

The CG279X removes another pain from my life: assembling the spectrophotometer for calibration. It has a built-in colorimeter for the job. It is so much easier to just fire up ColorNavigator and let it do everything without human intervention.

There’s even self-calibration ability: you can program the monitor to wake up in the middle of the night, sit for 30 minutes to warm up and do an automatic calibration. The only downside is that your display profile won’t be updated, so I prefer to do it the good old way.

10-bit per component color

Or 30-bit color, in Photoshop parlance. As I mentioned earlier, this was one of my excuses to get this beast. Please keep in mind that you need a cooperating graphics card, operating system and applications for proper 10-bit color. The Radeon Pro Vega 20 in my 15″ MacBook Pro supports it. macOS 10.14.5 supports it. The weakest link is application support.

At the time of writing, I get 10-bit color in Photoshop CC 2019 and Capture One 12.1. Maybe in earlier versions, and other apps, but these are what I’m using and can say anything about. Lightroom doesn’t handle 10-bit color. In Photoshop you should check whether 30-bit display is enabled (in Preferences > Performance… > Advanced Settings…), but Capture One automatically engages it.

Pricing – in different light

Retailing for around 1700 EUR net, it isn’t a cheap shot. But if you are only using the monitor for the five-year warranty period, that’s 0.93 EUR a day. My former CG241W did cost me about 0.33 EUR a day (during its 11.5 year service time). And this doesn’t include the resale value. So for less than the price of a coffee a day, you can get the best monitor money can buy for photo editing and print proofing. Think about it.

  ☕ ☕ ☕

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Filed Under: Computer Hardware, Photo Equipment Tagged With: , , ,

Downgrading AirPort Extreme to 7.6.1

February 11, 2013 by

I made a mistake last Thursday evening: upgraded my AirPort Extreme base station’s firmware to 7.6.3. Until Sunday afternoon WAN routing stopped three times (for which I first blamed our ISP), but when WiFi is also stopped last afternoon I decided to go back to the very well behaving 7.6.1.

But, to rephrase what Mr. Scott said: downgrading is easy, finding the file – that’s hard. Apple’s respective firmware page is an insult: it contains no link to the firmware update itself. Google turned up nothing, so I decided to go after a solution myself.

Note that I’m still using AirPort Utility 5.6. I consider 6.0 a huge step backward.

AirPort Utility stores the firmware files under the ~/Library/Application Support/Apple/AirPort/Firmware folder. You have a numbered subfolder for each model. My 4th generation AirPort Extreme’s number is 114. Here I found just one file: 7.6.3.basebinary.

So I knew that I had to look for 7.6.1.basebinary and put it into that folder. I also found a file named version.xml under the Firmware folder. Opening it quickly revealed that it contains actual download links for firmware images under the firmwareUpdates key (it’s actually an array of dictionaries, with each element corresponding to a firmware file). To find your file look for a dictionary containing your product number under the productID key, 7.6.1 under the version key, and you’ll get the download link in the location key, as you can see below:

<dict>
    <key>location</key>
    <string>https://apsu.apple.com/data/114/041-3395.20120130.Ka1Br/
        7.6.1.basebinary</string>
    <key>productID</key>
    <string>114</string>
    <key>version</key>
    <string>7.6.1</string>
    <key>sourceVersion</key>
    <string>76100.4</string>
    <key>sizeInBytes</key>
    <integer>6364116</integer>
</dict>

Also note that I had to download the firmware directly attaching the ADSL modem to my Mac, as at the end routing was so hectic that I was not able to do it via the AirPort Extreme. Having downloaded the file the actual downgrade procedure was seamless: put the file in the aforementioned folder and choose “Upload Firmware…” from the “Base Station” menu in AirPort Utility 5.6.

I also noticed a strange thing: while on 7.6.3 the Upload Firmware dialog only allowed me to upload 7.6.3 and nothing else. Now that I’m back on 7.6.1, it allows me to choose between 7.5.2, 7.6, 7.6.1 and 7.6.3.

All is well since then.

  ☕ ☕ ☕

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Calibrating the Retina Display

August 22, 2012 by

In a recent post about the new MacBook Pro I mentioned that it “calibrates very accurately”. Let me elaborate more on this subject.

My standard display calibration parameters are: 80 cd/m2 luminance, D50 white point and L* tone reproduction curve (TRC). I had used this setup for years with my EIZO on both Windows and Mac computers. I’m also using a complete L* workflow (with ProStarRGB working space in Photoshop for example). So my target was the same for the Retina display.

Due to the incompatibility with OS X 10.8, I gave a shot recently to basICColor display for color calibration. The MacBook Pro arrived just before the trial expired on my old desktop and I got another 14-day trial license for the new machine. This allowed me to test the software again before committing to the purchase.

So I spent the whole Sunday on profiling displays and evaluating them side by side. My initial thought was that it’ll be a piece of cake. How naive was I…

First, I calibrated both monitors to the aforementioned conditions and profiled them. The EIZO was good as usual, but my usual 50% gray desktop background on the Retina display showed a strong, ugly reddish color cast. Black levels were also quite different, making it hard to see and make decisions about contrast and work with delicate shadows. I was far from being satisfied with the results.

Then gave a try to X-Rite’s new i1Profiler. Although printer and press profiles created with the application literally sing, there’s a lot to be desired regarding its display calibration abilities. Frankly, I still prefer display profiles from the old i1Match application (not available since Apple eliminated PowerPC emulation from OS X). It also lacks L* TRC support, the most perceptually uniform TRC you can get is the one modeled after the sRGB color space’s TRC. The results were disappointing. Even watching a movie I complained about burnt highlights and ugly gradations (causing a little bit of indignation from my Loved One).

I was thinking what the hell should I do to make the otherwise gorgeous display usable. And a faint memory reared its head. Some 8-9 years ago I evaluated a display calibration and profiling tool named ColorEyes Display Pro. Downloaded the latest version and gave it a try. This was the first time I got acceptable results without the unbearable reddish cast.

The app works fine under 10.8. There’s one thing to watch for, however. For better monitor match it recommends to calibrate to “absolute black” instead of treating the monitor’s lowest black as 0/0/0 pixel value. Yes, this will cut the visibility of the deepest shadows on the monitor. Actually it behaves just like paper and ink, so it’s even easier to fine tune my images for printing (and of course I can always use the levels tool to bring up the shadows a bit temporarily). This worked out very well. Examining my favorite test image side by side showed only very small differences. Actually, I think the Retina display is usable for semi-critical color work, such as quick edits during field trips.

Unfortunately, the desktop and every non-color managed app still had a slight reddish cast. After 4-5 hours of trying every imaginable solution (tuning white points, changing colors, etc, etc.) I ended up with two profiles. One, the usual 80cd/D50/L* for editing images and another one with 80cd/5300K/L* for other types of work I do (such as app development and writing). With 5300K the non-color managed apps look just like D50 does on the EIZO, and even I do light photo editing with it sometimes.

The two displays side by side now look as if they were prints on a matte Hahnemühle Museum Etching and a semigloss Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta. Sweet!

Some closing numbers. With absolute black level calibration I can easily see into the shadows as low as about level 8 (from 255) on the EIZO and as low as about 6-7 on the Retina. Maximum deltaE is 0.90 for the EIZO with an average of 0.5. Maximum deltaE is 0.63 for the Retina display with an average of 0.34. Most impressive! And the Retina display’s color space covers roughly the entire sRGB space (as viewed in ColorSync Utility).

I must mention again that the resolution advantage is huge! Just enabled Retina support this morning in the application I’m working on these days and it looks really awesome. The EIZO doesn’t get much love these days…

Filed Under: Color Management, Computer Hardware Tagged With: , ,

MacBook Pro with Retina Display

August 18, 2012 by

It took a month, but my machine finally arrived two days ago. I spent the whole yesterday on moving my digital life over to the new machine and set it up for work. This post is a collection of my initial impressions. I will not reiterate the specs that can be found in numerous online reviews. All of those I recommend watching just this one.

My configuration is the 2.6GHz machine with 16GB of RAM and a 500GB SSD.

Winner of Two Lotteries

You enter two “lotteries” when you buy an Apple notebook. The SSD lottery and the display lottery. The reason is that Apple sources these components from two vendors: Samsung and Toshiba for SSDs/flash memory (I will use the Solid State Disk term instead of Apple’s “flash memory” marketing talk from now on – because these are all SATA connected SSDs – although in different form factors) and Samsung and LG in case of displays. Unfortunately the non-Samsung options are vastly inferior to the Samsung ones.

For example, Samsung SSDs are using the great Samsung PM830 controller. The Toshiba one use a Sandforce SSD controller. Sandforce SSD controllers compress all the data before it gets written into the chips for an almost twofold throughput increase. But if you are like me, and use FileVault to encrypt your disk then this compression becomes useless: almost random data can’t be compressed. Which results in halved performance. Fortunately, for larger capacity drives Apple seems to be using the Samsung ones. So I ended up with an 500GB Samsung SSD. One win.

You might wonder why did I mention 500GB instead of the advertised 512GB. Because the 512GB is simply a lie. The drive actually measures 500GB (if you count 1,000,000 bytes as one GB – as the storage industry as well as Apple does) and 476GB if you count (1,048,576 bytes as one GB – which is how many bytes a GB truly is).

Regarding the display lottery, lots of LG manufactured panels are defective out of the box. Just execute the command in the linked article to show your display’s manufacturer. LP is for LG and LSN stands for Samsung. I have a Samsung panel. Another win.

Is the Lack of Upgradeability a True Problem?

Lots of people on the Internet fret about this. Frankly, in the last 15 years I can only mention two occasions when I upgraded memory in my machines. And CPUs were never changed. Disks are another story. Before SSDs I regularly went to faster disks as they became available. But since I’m using SSDs I don’t feel the need to upgrade yearly. I usually buy my machines maxed out with RAM and disk, and opt for the one-less-that-the-fastest CPU option (they cost way less and the performance difference is negligible). So the lack of upgradeability is not a problem for me.

And on the positive side, soldering RAM to the motherboard gives some huge performance benefits (read the section below the graph). Wow, 99.9% processor bandwidth utilization IS something!

Two Missing Pro Features

ECC memory and 30-bit display output capability. I know that ECC (Error Check and Correction) has disappeared from consumer machines and Intel only supports ECC with their Xeon processor line, but 16GB is a lot and for mission critical work (like huge CAD models) ECC is a must. So for situations where it is not acceptable that your memory can forget a few bits here and there, the Mac Pro is the way to go. For example I use a Xeon E3-based server machine with 16GB of ECC memory.

The other one is 30-bit color. This is available on all current high end graphics displays and NVIDIA makes mobile chips that support 30-bit. Usually these chips are completely identical to the consumers ones Apple is using, just high precision stuff is enabled in them (I remember those times when I hacked consumer NVIDIA cards to Quadro ones…). For a notebook at this price point, pro graphics should be the standard.

Needs a Thunberbolt Dock

On the left side of the machine I have:

  • The power cable.
  • A mini displayport to DVI adapter for my EIZO CG241W display.
  • A Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet adapter.
  • An USB connection to the EIZO. Keyboard and mouse is attached to the EIZO’s hub.

Looks ugly. And plugging in all these when I use the machine as a desktop is a hassle. I can hardly wait for Matrox’s solution.

Usability

The machine is light (for such a powerhouse), fits neatly into the notebook pocket of my Lowepro Pro Trekker 400. Key travel is a bit short, but it’s not really a problem. I miss PageUp/PageDown and Home/End keys…

It gets a bit warm during use, but it’s bearable. As the majority of current applications are incapable of driving the four processor cores (with eight processing threads), so fans are spinning silently. Even if you can put some heavy load on the machine they produce an almost pleasant noise. Nothing disturbing (and believe me I’m overly sensitive to machine vibration and noise).

Battery life is rather short – I found it about 5 hours in my normal usage patters. This is way less than Apple’s advertised 7 hours, but there are reports that Mountain Lion causes this reduction. We’ll see.

Applications and the Retina Screen

The screen resolution is astonishing. Brightness uniformity is not on the same level as my EIZO (actually I would score this as pretty bad). The display calibrates very accurately (in one spot at least). I was surprised that it produced less deltaE2000 than the EIZO. If uniformity would be better, this could be a great graphics display. All in all I want this high resolution on my desktop graphics monitor! Hope that either EIZO or NEC will come out with a high resolution display like this.

I would also note that the Intel integrated graphics is not capable of handling such large amount of pixels. You can’t even watch a movie full screen using integrated graphics, so the machine uses the NVIDIA chip a lot.

The real problem is that most of the applications are not yet ready for supporting the HiDPI modes of the Retina display. These apps would really need the upgrade:

  • Photoshop
  • Lightroom (it displays UI text in high res, but everything else is pixel-doubled)
  • Capture One
  • Kindle

Others, like Parallels Dekstop and VLC, already support the display. It’s still a waiting game. And the display would only realize its full potential when these apps become ready.

Filed Under: Computer Hardware Tagged With: , , ,