Posts by Orange

Western Digital's hard drive encryption is useless. Totally useless

Re: If it's easy...

l had the same problem. An information recovery company stated that they have to buy another drive not just with the same make and model but also very close in manufactured date so that it has the same batch of encryption chip. I seems that WD changes the chip contents regularly, so it is difficult to get 2 identical chips.

Personally, I have found the WD encryption to be a giant pain. And there is no way to stop it or turn it off. Your data is always encrypted, even when you don't put in an encryption key.

== Which brings up another problem: A random glitch sent some garbage over the USB line to a WD drive, which it interpreted as me setting the encryption key, so now the whole drive is unreadable because the drive "decrypts" all the the data with a garbage key.

My defense is to no longer buy Western Digital drives.

Pentax K20D digital SLR

Noise?

I did not see the word "noise" anywhere in the review. Sensor noise is one of the most important characteristics of a camera, and is a big determinant of the image quality.

And then there is dynamic range, and possible clipping of highlights. That wasn't mentioned either.

This comment is not meant as a put-down of this camera. It's just that after getting my fingers burned on a noisy range-limited Olympus E-510, I want to hear all about sensor noise and dynamic range on any camera reviewed. That is much more important than how many knobs the camera has.

Oh, and one more thing: Are the metal brackets of the hot-shoe connected to the internal metal frame of the camera? If not, then just mounting an external flash unit on the camera, and doing some walking-around city-street shooting with the camera occasionally banging against your chest will pull the hotshoe brackets out of the plastic case, and now you have a broken hotshoe, like happened with my E-510. I expect more from a thousand-dollar camera.