Last week review 02-2024

And here we are at the weekly review of the 2nd week in 2024. But the week was bitterly cold in parts and you certainly didn’t expect such a drop in temperature 😉

The first post this year was the almost obligatory review of the year 2023 with one post and one topic. The year 2023 was at least mostly dominated by IT topics and in the field of photography by AI topics.

There was quite a lot to report on the subject of IT because I bought an Asrock Desktop Mini at the beginning of the year, an energy-saving PC mainly for home office use. This was later replaced by an Asrock Desktop Mini X300 with an AMD Ryzen CPU.

Since then, the other Desktop Mini has been used as an energy-saving server with the help of Proxmox, on which various applications, especially my Nextcloud, are hosted.

Of course, in 2023, AI was also a hot topic in all areas, including photography and video editing. There were some enhancements to Luminar NEO, but of course the competitor Photoshop also has a lot to offer when it comes to generative filling. The AI-supported noise reduction in Lightroom works really well and you can sometimes achieve good results with the bokeh function. However, the latter is still in the beta stage.

Then news are expected from Panasonic, or some are already there, well almost 😉 It’s the 100mm/2.8 Macro for the L-mount, i.e. full-frame cameras. I would have expected to pay perhaps €800, but almost €1,200 in the pre-order is quite a lot for a lens of this type.

After the Lumix S5 MK II, the S1 cameras could also get an upgrade. But so far there are only rumors, especially as far as the exact specifications are concerned. I’m still struggling with whether I should take the step towards the S5 MK XXx, as the improvements are probably mainly in the video area and the photo area benefits little or not at all.

But what is also important in the photo and video area is storage space. Ugreen has now presented several NAS systems at the CES. These range from a small 2-bay model up to a model with 8 bays and apparently 10GB Ethernet connection. It will be interesting to see the prices compared to QNAP or Synology models.

All in all, another very eventful week. I hope you enjoy the articles and look forward to your questions and comments.

ciao tuxoche