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Scott's Column
SugarSync vs. DropBox, The Camera Story
December 1, 2009
By Scott Lewis
This month I was rushed and didn't get to write about enough stuff. I am thinking about getting a Digital SLR camera, so I thought I would start off with my own camera history, or story. I also compared SugarSync to DropBox for file syncing and remote access.
Current Topics:
I have been having some issues with SugarSync lately. Before we get
into that I should bring you up to speed on what I am doing. I keep a
few text documents (in notepad) to jot down notes as I think about them.
I keep these in a folder on my home computer. When my company used
GoToMyPC for remote access I would use that to sync this folder with a
folder on my work computer. I also keep a couple of spreadsheets in this
folder. Nothing that would be unacceptable with my work. For instance I
keep historical information about my 401K plan and my investments.
When we switched from GoToMyPC to VPN software on company laptops there
was no way to sync files between my work PC and my home PC. So I looked
at a couple of web based file syncing solutions. I don't remember which
ones I looked at in the beginning. I know I picked SugarSync because of
one really nice feature they had. You go to your page on SugarSync that
lists your files. Click on a file and a pop-up menu appears with a
choice to "Edit with WebSync." This would download a copy of the file
and put you into the default editing application (Notepad or Excel for my
files). When you save the file in the application SugarSync uploads it
and it is synced with your home copy.
The beauty of this is that there is no software to install on my work
PC. I do not need a copy of the SugarSync client software on my work PC.
Unfortunately, SugarSync has not been completely reliable. I lost two
weeks worth of changes to my 401K spreadsheet. I saw the file missing
from my home computer. I found a copy in my recycle bin, but it was two
weeks old. I do not know what happened to the changes SugarSync should
have saved. Then I would get messages on my work PC that a file did not
upload. This is especially troublesome when I did my save while exiting
the application. My changes were in limbo until SugarSync could upload
the changes. That may or may not happen. I would have to leave the
download screen up on my computer and hope. There is no option to force
it to retry. So when will it retry? Since I closed the application it is
too late to perform a save as and keep a copy of my changes until
SugarSync gets working again.
I was reading an article that mentioned DropBox. This is the same thing
a SugarSync. You point it to a folder on your hard drive and you can
access the files in it from any computer on the Internet. You don't need
the DropBox application on the remote computer, you can access the files
through a web page.
There are two downsides to DropBox. First, it creates its own folder.
With SugarSync I pointed it to a folder on my computer, and told it NOT
to sync any subfolders. So in essence I had nice control over where the
files were on my computer (I didn't need to move anything around) and
only the files I wanted were synced. With DropBox I can tell it what
folder to use, but it forces a "DropBox" sub-folder and requires me to
put my files into this sub-folder. This may seem like a minor point, but it
is not. I have a shortcut on my desktop to the folder I kept my files
in. By making me change my shortcut it slows down access to other files
I have in that folder, but not synced. With DropBox I am forced to
navigate to a completely different folder for my other files.
The next problem is a larger one. You must download a file from the
DropBox web site if you want to edit it. So, you download the file,
edit, save, and upload manually. This is much more complicated than the
Edit with WebSync feature SugarSync provides.
Granted, I am using the free version of both of these services, which
provides up to 2GB of storage. I actually use far less than 100 MB.
I am forced to decide between DropBox which is harder to use, but may be
more reliable, and SugarSync with is easier to use, but less reliable.
In the end I decided to give DropBox at least one month before making up
my mind. Well, DropBox is the winner. Here are the reasons I like
DropBox over SugarSync:
1) It is fast. The web page that I navigate to comes up at least twice
as fast as SugarSync. Also, upload and download speeds of the files
themselves are faster with DropBox.
2) I have never lost a single byte of data with DropBox. The point is simple... it has
been more reliable for me.
3) This may be a browser thing, but when at work I download to the same
folder every time. And it remembers this. So this may be more for
Firefox than DropBox, but I find it very easy to download a file to a
specific folder, and when done editing it the upload dialog box opens to
the same folder. This makes the download/upload process as fast as
SugarSync. Even though SugarSync was more convenient,
in the long run it really wasn't faster.
All in all DropBox is more than good enough. Highly recommended.
I want to get a new Camera. A Digital SLR camera. That means I am going to research in painstaking detail everything I need to know about the dSLR market and what camera I should get. Before I get to that I am going to tell you a tale of my film SLR & digital camera history.
Here are the cameras I have owned over the last 25 years:
1984 - Canon T-50 (Film)
1988 - Canon T-90 (Film)
1991 - Canon EOS Rebel S (Film)
2000 - Kodak DC280 (Digital)
2002 - Canon EOS Rebel T2 (Film)
2006 - Sony DSC T9 (Digital)
It was the summer of 1984, and George Orwell's Big Brother lifestyle was
still fiction. I was going to a car show. My first real car show and a
large one at that. I believe it was over 2500 cars, but my memory could
be weak on that point. I bought a Canon T50 SLR Camera. All I knew about
cameras was that I wanted a camera that I could add a zoom lens to
later. The T50 came with a basic 50mm lens. I bought it at one of those
"catalog stores." You remember the type. They had catalogs all over the
place and had some stuff on display. Mostly you looked through their
catalog, wrote down the catalog number on a piece of paper, paid for the
item at a register and waited for it to show up on a conveyer belt and
get handed to you.
So, with never owning a camera before, and never having taken any
pictures I sat in my room all night the day before I left for the car
show. I read as much of the manual as I could. Granted, the T50 was an
automatic camera, but I was very nervous about loading and unloading the
film. You did not have many controls with the T50. Basically you
compose, focus and shoot. But it was a great camera. I took 13 rolls of
pictures that weekend... without developing a single shot to know if I
was doing things right. Almost every picture came out great. It cost me
more to develop those thirteen rolls of film than it cost to buy the
camera. But that camera got me hooked on photography and Canon
equipment.
Alas, that wonderful little camera was stolen out of my rental car in
San Francisco in September 1988... with my only pictures of Lombard
Street. I was going to England that December, so I needed a Camera. I
bought a Canon T90. This was the most expensive Camera I could afford.
The T90 was the complete opposite of the T50. Where the T50 was an
automatic only camera, the T90 had tons of manual controls, as well as
the usual assortment of automatic and semi-automatic modes. A friend
owned a Canon AE-1 and had a zoom lens I could borrow. So I took the T90
and its 50mm lens plus my friend's 100-300mm lens to England. I did not
have a lot of time to play with the camera before leaving for England so
I used its programmed features more than I should have.
To get that camera I had to do a bad thing. I mail ordered it from one
of those cheap places in the back of a photography magazine. As it
turned out it was a gray market camera. Meaning it was not meant to be
sold in the U.S. The shutter started acting up on the camera just after
the warranty ran out, and when I took it to a camera store to get an
estimate for the repair they told me it would cost about $300... because
they would have to custom order the part for a gray market camera. Oops!
So I lived with the flakey shutter button. It would work great some
times and sometimes it would delay for up to a second or so. It was only
a problem with moving objects and serious action shots, but I did miss a
few good picture due to that shutter button.
For the Christmas of 1991 my wife (then my fiancé) bought me a Canon EOS
Rebel S. If memory serves me this is what I told her I wanted. It think
it was $320, close to what it would cost to fix the T90. The Rebel S was
one of the first in the EOS Rebel lineup with auto focus. I took the T90
to a camera exchange store and they gave me $150 for it. Which means we
could look at it as having gotten the EOS Rebel S for $170 (the
difference) or I could buy a zoom lens for the EOS Rebel S. I went the
zoom lens route and picked up a 80-200mm lens before we left for our
honeymoon.
That camera served us very well for many years. It developed a slight
problem of its own. The battery contacts would get flakey. The camera
would think the battery was dead. On one occasion the camera indicated a
dead battery. We thought it was right, as we had not used it a while. We
swapped batteries with my sister-in-law who had a more resent version of
the EOS Rebel (they bought it on our recommendation, as did a good
friend on mine). Their battery did the same thing. We swapped the
batteries back and suddenly our original battery was almost full. Fun! I
would pop the battery out once in a while and try wiping off the
contacts, but the problem would creep up once in a while no matter what.
In July 2000 we were looking to get a color printer that could print pictures, and
with that we bought our first digital camera. We bought a Kodak DC280
2.1 megapixel camera. It was a bit bulky for a pocket camera. I could only fit it in my
jeans when wearing pleated jeans... which are no longer in style. But it
did take some decent pictures. We used that camera to take pictures of
our house as it was being built. I was able to use it for panoramic
shots from the second floor, and I did a time lapse experiment using the
Kodak on my father-in-laws tripod.
The best thing about that digital camera was that we got used to taking
many pictures since there was no film cost and we only printed the good
pictures.
My wife accidentally dropped the Canon Rebel S. It landed on the 50mm
lens. There was no saving the lens, but the camera seems to be fully
functional. My wife still preferred film to digital for the import
shots. So we took this opportunity to get a new EOS Rebel T2. It came
with a 35-100mm lens, which reasonably compliments the 70-200mm lens we
still had.
We have had zero trouble with the Rebel T2. However, as digital cameras
have improved we bought our second digital camera in a Sony DSC T9, a 6
megapixel camera in the summer of 2006. Now we use the Sony camera exclusively. In fact, we
fight over it at times. No one wants to use the old digital camera (yes
we still have it) and the two film cameras are collecting dust in a
draw.
I think that is enough for this month. Next month I will have a
comparison chart to show the various cameras I am considering. I have
created a spreadsheet that shows the models and their prices. You will
be surprised how close in price they are. I hope to get a new camera
after the new year. Sorry this won't be out in time for your Christmas
shopping. But I will tell you that I have narrowed my choices to the
Canon Rebel T1i and the Nikon D90. My spreadsheet will cover the models
below these two in price from each manufacturer. So stay tuned for that.
I will finish this series up with whatever camera I end up buying.
Conclusion
That's all I had time to put into this column this month. Next month I am going to continue with my Windows 7 PC... buy looking at an iMac. You won't want to miss the logic behind that idea.
I also installed a 50" Plasma TV on the wall of our game room. I will have pictures of the installation. You won't want to miss that if you want to see how to mount a TV with no wires showing.
And we should have the second in the camera series.
Please come back next month to enjoy it all.
