Odds and Ends

I've been using the Orbita Sparta 1 Mini winder for approximately three months now and really have nothing but good things to say about it. The winder is as close to silent as one could ever expect and has quite a small footprint. My Seiko Spirit has even shown a very slight increase in accuracy since I started placing it on the winder each night (a 1 sec/day improvement).  I was afraid initially that the supplied watch cushion was not going to hold up to daily watch strappings but it has proven to be more resilient than I thought.
 

The one criticism I do have is that the unit doesn't have a power switch (which necessitates yanking the plug every morning when I remove my watch). This is a very small point, however, and, given the price of the winder, it may be expecting too much.

All in all, I highly recommend it.

---

Canon has released the much-awaited Powershot G10. It has a few interesting improvements but, overall, doesn't represent a sufficient upgrade over the G9 to stir my interest much. 

Things that I like about the G10:

• The low end of the zoom starts at 28mm (24mm would have been even nicer)
• The hand grip has been redesigned to be a little larger and easier to grab on to
• The DIGIC 4 sensor (by all reports) appears to be less noisy (ceteris paribus) than the G9's DIGIC 3 sensor
• The already awesome 3" LCD monitor now has 460,000 pixels (up from 230,000 for the G9). This should be a boon for manual focusing.

Things that don't sound so hot:

• They kept the same 1/1.7" sensor as before. I realize moving to a larger sensor would have bulked up an already chunky camera even further but, for me, the gains in image quality would have been worth whatever bulkiness ensued
• Canon appears to have capitulated to the "more is more" faction and crammed 14.7 megapixels into the same 1/1.7" sensor (the G9 was already overburdened with 12.1 megapixels). The one thing this camera didn't need was more pixels.
• They failed to return to the legacy of earlier G-series cameras and include some truly fast glass. A zoom with a maximum aperture of f/2.0 (or even a zoom with a fixed f/2.8 aperture throughout its range) would have been far more useful than more pixels.

I think I'll just hang on to my G9 until Nikon finally comes out with a sub-$1,500 CAD full-frame DSLR body.

---

I pulled the trigger on a new Seiko SKX007 automatic diver (an SKX007J to be precise). It's in transit as I write and I will provide a full review shortly after its arrival. (I briefly toyed with buying a Sumo or a Samurai but I was pretty certain my wife would never put up with the additional cost of these two. The SKX007 had the cardinal virtue of affordability going for it....)

Ω