I admire what this person is doing, but some reasons I prefer raw + lightroom over eg camera jpeg are:
* Lightroom’s noise reduction is WAY better than what my camera (a D500) can do. I shoot sports, usually indoors, with highish iso, so NR’s gonna have to happen at some point.
* If I’m going to lug around a dedicated camera, I’m gonna have it do its best. I have my iPhone for everything else.
* I can apply today’s lightroom NR to raws I shot years ago. Similarly, I expect to be able to apply future lightroom’s NR to today’s raws.
* Lightroom Classic is a superb program - it has many warts and clunks and oddities but it achieved product market fit and it stayed there, doing what its users want. Adobe keep making small improvements, and yet they don’t fuck it up!! This is vanishingly rare in big tech!!! (Promos gonna promo!) I grudgingly pay for this.
(My theory as to how they have managed to resist the institutional imperative to destroy Lightroom classic is that they created a fork, named just “Lightroom”, on which the promo can wreak its destruction, it’s kind of a second golgafrinchan ark, leaving Lightroom classic alone. I pay for Lightroom classic as a way of saying: keep leaving it alone!)
I'm also a LR classic user. I think it's pretty terrible by certain aspects, but I haven't found anything better. No idea why the UI lags on a pretty high-end machine, even with test catalogs. And I'm talking about scrolling, or showing and hiding panels. Plus, the worst offender is making me use Windows (on this point, only Darktable is better – no, I won't buy a mac, it's way too expensive for my needs).
Price-wise, it's kinda expensive, but the buy-it-for-life alternatives aren't exactly cheap, either. You should hold off updating for multiple years to save money compared to the LR subscription.
Now, I haven't used the alternatives for more than just a short test-drive, but the recent improvements in LRc would have made me upgrade anyway. I'm thinking specifically about the noise reduction you mentioned, but there's also all the object detection in masking which saves a ton of time, and the ai object removal which is pretty great when I need it – saves time compared to fiddling with the old healing brush.
I think the alternatives have also gained similar features recently, which would have likely required a new (expensive!) purchase. But, I guess if you figure we've reached some kind of plateau and don't expect to have a new camera in the next 3-4 years, going for Capture One or similar may be a better bang for your buck.
Adobe's AI noise reduction is absolutely first class. The AI adaptive color feature has also saved me on a ton of old photos taken on older DSLRs and smartphones.
Gas pumps in the US are artificially capped at 10 gallons per minute, and a gallon of gasoline is about 33kWh, so petrol cars in the US “charge” at 330kWh/min ~= 20MW. But most cars only turn about a third of that into motion, so let’s say 7MW equivalent? While BYD’s 1.5MW is amazing, it seems a stretch to call it “almost as fast as gas pumps.”
Diesel pumps for trucks typically pump much faster too. And diesel is nearer 40kWh/gal. We have a ways to go!
(The energy density of oil is amazing: a fully loaded A380 with 84,500 us gallons of jet fuel at 37.5 kWh per, that’s over 3TWh. Which is about twice the capacity of all the li-ion batteries made in 2025. We have a ways to go!)
99.9% of use cases of EVs can charge at home/work/shop, don't need separate infrastructure, logistics and supply chains for delivery of electricity. There is a very small fraction of EV trips that need charging on the go. The vast majority of trips are under 3 (or 5 miles).
Well no it does change the point, because the place where the car resides when the owner is at home is less likely to be near a power socket unless its in a garage or the homes driveway. I can't realistically charge my EV from a socket if its on the street.
In NYC that would be the street. The great conundrum of ev's. People that have access to home-charging, worry about range. The one's that mostly sit idling in traffic, don't have access to charging.
> In NYC that would be the street. The great conundrum of ev's.
Most streets have street lighting and electricity, easy to add chargers to lamp posts. NYC probably hasn't heard of street lighting yet?
> The one's that mostly sit idling in traffic, don't have access to charging.
I think it would be an impressive feat of engineering to charge cars while they are on the move. I like how you think, cars are mostly idling in traffic, we can consider them as stationary, and charge cars while they idle!
Parking is not assigned, sometimes you got to drive around for 20 minutes to find a spot to park over-night and its not guaranteed to be next to a street light.
By idling in traffic, I meant that we would love ev's since most of the time we are just wasting gas and fuming up our own neighborhoods.
> This is yet again a very US-centric view where you assume people are living in house with a garage.
It is a US-centric view to think that the rest of the world is hunter gatherer tribes. Most people live in some kind of constructed building which has electricity, indoor plumbing, a place to park a car. Before that building is built, the first infrastructure that is ready is electrical, without which most of the tools required for building a home do not work.
A garage is not a sine qua non for EV charging. A place to park is. If a person is buying a car, they would've already figured out a place to park. That place is right next to a building with electricity unless you are sleeping in the woods.
I don't understand why people think that running a cable (a few feet) from the nearest building to a car is impossible.
Fair but any EV owner knows after a bathroom break, quick stretch and maybe a bite to eat every 1-2hr while charging and you never even notice the stopping to charge time.
As an EV owner, I'm not sure I agree with this. I'd make less stops if not for the car's need. That said, it's a compromise I'm willing to accept since 99% of the time I'm not road tripping but commuting, and the EV is oh so nice for the commute.
I am not EV owner but that’s not how like my car trips. I can drive 4 hrs nonstop and then expect to “charge” my car in 5 minutes at the pump with a bathroom break, and be on the road.
Sometimes we like a more leisurely drive, but it should be up me to decide when that happens not the car.
I am not saying there is anything wrong with liking how EV behave, it’s just it’s not for everyone. And I think a lot of recent pullback from EVs (Ford, Honda) kinda points that way. With as fast a charger as a gas pump situation may change though, so let’s what happens!
I felt the same way as you until I took a few road trips in sn EV.
I drove about 20 hours in two days. The thing that struck me is how refreshed I felt when I arrived. Normally I'd be dead on my feet and the travel day would be lost completely but I was ready for activity on arrival. I was very surprised.
I have heard that the combination of self-driving and mandatory 30-60” breaks every few hours is very relaxing. I look forward to trying it some day. Meanwhile…
I would be very wary of taking my bolt on a long journey. I have no confidence that what few fast chargers are out there would actually work, or be available, and I wouldn’t want to plan my journey around charging stops, with copious backup plans! It would be very stressful!!
Not to mention that my bolt has only 300mi range in summer, and less than 200mi in winter. And fast chargers are rare enough that I’d be scared to get anywhere near the limit.
By contrast, my Elantra hybrid has a ~600mi range. And I can “charge” it anywhere.
The past is still here. It just isn’t evenly distributed.
e-GMP platform (IONIQ 5, etc.) is really good for road trips.
At least in summer temperatures it reliably charges to 80% under 20 minutes. Its range estimate is quite good, and I can depend on it to know when I can skip a charging stop (when I first drove an EV I was freaking out about the 20% state of charge like it was a cellphone. Now I roll to the chargers with 2% left when it saves time).
It depends where you live, but infrastructure in the UK and EU has got good enough to the point I don't need backup plans. Chargers are as common as McDonald's (often quite literally). If a station is slow or busy, I can just go to the next one (and they are in clumps often enough that even with a low battery it's not a big deal).
Ok, so how about: we made about as much in batteries last year as all the A380s in the world can hold fully loaded in jet fuel. (There aren’t many of them!) Not as impressive, but still.
You're right that it seems close enough, but only as long as we're talking about the time it takes a single vehicle to "fill up". Taking 2 minutes vs 8 minutes to fill up your car doesn't matter to you personally, but it is a significant difference to those installing and operating the fill up infrastructure since it takes 4 times as many charging points as it does gas pumps to serve the same volume of customers in a given period of time.
In a lot of cases that probably won't matter since chargers can be installed in more places than gas pumps and for gas stations that serve mainly local customers I'd expect demand for an equivalent charging station to be lower since some people will charge at home at least some of the time. But things like highway rest stops could be more of a challenge since you'd expect customer volume for EV charging to be similar to the demand for fuel so you'll need more charging stations at each stop to handle the increased time it takes each customer.
A joke I read recently: "A fortune teller told me I was going to experience the most terrible heartbreak in twelve years time. This totally bummed me out, so I got a dog to cheer me up."
The radius is too big. This monitor is R4200, 4.2m. I have a Samsung odyssey something 49” monitor and it is glorious. It is R1000, and since my head is about a meter from the screen, it works: even the edges are usable.
I used to use two 27” 1440p monitors, which together are about the same size as the Samsung 49”, and also the same resolution, but the edges were further enough away from my head that they were annoying to use. Not to mention the bezels in the middle. While this dell wouldn’t have the bezels, the edges would still be too far away.
The only drawback of my giant R1000 monitor is that I can’t easily use my laptop’s camera. So I don’t; I use an iPad for video conferencing, it sits happily below this monitor.
My only regret is not getting the 57” 2x4k variant!
The biggest advantage of NG is that we can store months of it. (Currently we can store only seconds of electricity, if that. Citation needed!)
I have a dream that some day we will come up with an efficient process for generating methane from atmospheric CO2, water, and electricity, and we’ll be able to take advantage of our extensive natural gas grid. (Natural gas is essentially methane.)
Not tiny, but I have a corner desk, and I mounted big long 16 port power strips under each “wing”: Tripp Lite 16 Outlet Bench &... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000051174
Roll of very sticky Velcro tape To mount things under desk.
A “toaster” style sata adapter: I treat it like a tape drive, clunk in a “tape” (sata or spinning disk) to back up to.
British TV is doing _great_ in the streaming era: black mirror, adolescence, peaky blinders, the crown, call the midwife, derry girls, downtown abbey; and so many great police procedurals: line of duty, endeavour, the bay, Sherlock, grace; even those Harlan coben miniserieses - the ones with at least one absurd plot twist per episode - are great fun!
While I’ll be among the first to moan that we’ll never see another red dwarf, python, tinker tailor/smiley’s people, yes minister, father ted [0] .. British tv is still producing great stuff.
It’s the “bureaucrats” in the bbc who are under threat from streaming. I’m not losing sleep!
[0] made in Britain; simply could not have been made in Ireland as was.
Another upside seems to be that every Arab country in the Middle East seems to be on the same side as Israel. Nothing unites like a common enemy!
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