Sony a ( alpha) DSLR-A900 Digital camera - SLR with Live View mode - 24.6 Megapixel

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Product Details

General

Product Type

Digital camera - SLR with Live View mode

Width

6.1 in

Depth

3.2 in

Height

4.6 in

Weight

1.9 lbs

Body Material

Magnesium alloy

Main Features

Resolution

24.6 Megapixel

Color Support

Color

Optical Sensor
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Test Post

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Almost Time to Change the Bulb

YOU may have heard that the federal government wants to limit your choice of light bulbs, starting in January.

If only.

Thanks to regulations taking effect that month under the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, shopping for light bulbs is fast becoming akin to choosing a spouse: the options are almost endless, and the object of your affection might last longer in the house than you.

The misconception about limited choice is, specifically, that the new rules outlaw incandescent lights. But they don’t. They just place efficiency standards on incandescents. Starting in January, any bulb that can generate the amount of light produced by a conventional 100-watt bulb, but do so with roughly 30 percent less energy, will be eligible for the market. The new law is gradual — in 2013, the rule will be extended to 75-watt bulbs, followed, in 2014, by 60- and 40-watt bulbs — but the point is that nothing is outlawed if it meets the new mandated efficiencies.

What’s more, the looming rules have triggered rapid advances in a number of lighting technologies. Halogens, a type of incandescent that delivers light the way Edison intended, with a tungsten filament, are now available in the standard bulb shape. Compact fluorescent lights, or C.F.L.’s, have gotten better at delivering good light quickly, and without the buzzing and flickering for which they were known. And some bulbs with light-emitting diodes, or L.E.D.’s, now cast their light in all directions, not just one.

To help consumers, retailers like the Home Depot and Lowe’s are working to simplify shopping, with better merchandising and displays with samples of the forthcoming bulbs. Also, some manufacturers, like Sylvania, Philips and General Electric, are already putting “lighting facts” labels on at least a few bulbs, even though new labeling requirements do not take effect until January.

But the changes are still complicated. For instance, instead of categorizing bulbs in terms of watts, a measure of power, shoppers will speak of lumens, a measure of the light that bulbs cast. To ease this change, bulbs will be described in yet a third way, “watt equivalents.” A 60-watt equivalent bulb, for example, will emit as much light as the old 60-watt incandescent. And although the new law does not apply to fluorescent tube lights, three-way bulbs and other specialty lights, manufacturers are extending law-inspired changes to these exempt products, too.

Bottom line: If you go shopping without a good idea of what you want, you’ll leave the store with a headache and a fervent desire to never think about bulbs again.

I barely escaped that fate recently, during a massive bulb tryout for the roughly 40 sockets in my house. I gathered bulbs from three leading manufacturers — Philips, General Electric and Sylvania — as well as from niche lighting companies like Cree, TCP and others, to assess the latest technologies.

I sought shopping advice from three experts: Konstantinos Papamichael, a director of the California Lighting Technology Center at the University of California, Davis; Russell Leslie, a founder of the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, N.Y.; and Craig A. Bernecker, the director of the Lighting Education Institute, in Philadelphia.

Their advice: In the short term, you can continue to light your home with incandescents. But in the long run, they say, if you study the various lighting technologies, you can save money and time — and, perhaps, see every part of your home in its best light.

For most people, who are accustomed to a simpler light-bulb market, that’s asking a lot.

“Consumers generally bring habit, rather than intelligence, to their light-bulb purchases,” Mr. Leslie said. “It’s really problematic.”

Now, bulb buyers think primarily about the amount of light they need from a bulb, he explained, with the quality of the light and its suitability for the colors in a room as secondary considerations, if that. Still fewer people consider the different ways that bulbs distribute light. If you choose to wade into the waters of energy-efficient bulbs, however, these factors quickly come into play.

Don’t be daunted, Mr. Papamichael said. “Experiment with different light versions, and do it slowly.”

I followed his advice carefully. Except for the “slowly” part. Which I now regret. I gave myself 10 days, and a two-part mission. First, test the roughly 30 bulbs I had assembled in a few sockets in my house, and study their effects. Second, proceed to various rooms and see what looks good where — because what works in the kitchen might not work in the living room.

First up, halogens.

‘The Maids’ Now Have Their Say The Help (2011)

There’s a scene in “The Help,” the new movie based on Kathryn Stockett’s novel, that cracks open the early-’60s world of strained smiles and gentility that rarely leaps out of this big, ole slab of honey-glazed hokum. It’s after hours, and Aibileen, a maid played with determined grace by Viola Davis, is going home. Suddenly the bus stops, and a white man orders the black passengers off, explaining that a black man has been shot — except that he doesn’t say black, Negro or colored. In a pool of dreadful night, Aibileen and a young man trade goodbyes and rush off. And then this sturdy, frightened woman starts running as if her life were in danger, because it’s Mississippi, and it is.

When she gets to safety, Aibileen learns that the man who has been shot is Medgar Evers, the civil rights activist who was gunned down in Jackson, Miss., on June 12, 1963, in front of his home. His wife and three young children, who were trained to lie on the floor in case of gunfire, found him, and Evers died shortly afterward. Hours before, President John F. Kennedy, spurred on by different national events, including the demonstrations in Birmingham led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., had delivered his landmark speech about civil rights. He said we were facing a “moral crisis as a country and a people” and soon introduced legislation that would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the same year “The Help” rises to its teary, insistently uplifting end.

If the movie’s director, Tate Taylor, had his way, your tear ducts would be sucked dry by that big finish, emptied out by a pileup of calamities that include a painful romantic breakup, the devastations of cancer and the mighty wailing of an emotionally abandoned toddler. And that’s just what’s ailing the white folks. The black characters have it tough too, no question, and Mr. Taylor includes enough scenes of Aibileen and her best friend, Minny (Octavia Spencer), cleaning white houses and polishing the silver — and cooking meals and tending children and smiling, always smiling, even as they pretend not to hear the insults — to remind you that this is at least partly about backbreaking, soul-killing black labor.

Aibileen works hard for one family in Jackson, minding a pale dumpling named Mae Mobley, whose own mother, Elizabeth (Ahna O’Reilly), called Miss Leefolt by Aibileen, scarcely touches the child. Aibileen loves the white babies she helps raise, though that affection comes with so many choking complexities that they can leave her near-speechless, as the promising first scene shows. Did you always think you would be a maid? an off-screen woman asks. Aibileen answers quietly but with matter-of-fact directness, yes: Her mother was a maid, and her grandmother had been a house slave. Did you have dreams of being something else? the unseen woman asks, her voice so guileless and so maddeningly oblivious that it’s a wonder that Ms. Davis, who has been looking directly into the camera, nearly burning right through it, doesn’t sneer.

But Ms. Davis keeps her cool even as she warms your heart and does her job, often beautifully. She doesn’t just turn Aibileen, something of a blur in the novel, into a fully dimensional character, she also helps lift up several weaker performances and invests this cautious, at times bizarrely buoyant, movie with the gravity it frequently seems to want to shrug off. She keeps your attention focused on her and Minny even when the story drifts over to Elizabeth and her white friends, who include a segregationist housewife, Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard, energetic in a thankless role), and the far more liberal Skeeter (Emma Stone, uncharacteristically wan). A would-be writer, Skeeter is the one asking Aibileen all those questions.

The story, which Mr. Taylor adapted for the screen, involves Skeeter’s attempts to interview Aibileen, Minny and others about their experiences as maids. Skeeter, recently graduated from the University of Mississippi, has returned home to find that Constantine (a frail-looking Cicely Tyson), her family’s longtime maid and the woman who raised her, has disappeared. As Skeeter tries to find out what happened to Constantine — Skeeter’s ill mother, Charlotte (Allison Janney), isn’t saying — she begins a process of discovery. She lands a newspaper job, meets a boy (Chris Lowell) and slowly starts to see her friends for the bigots they are. Alas, she doesn’t cozy up to the only interesting white woman in town, Celia (a winning Jessica Chastain), a bottle blonde shunned by almost everyone but her own maid, Minny.

Mr. Taylor handles these story threads ably as he moves from one household to another, from the bright, open plantation where Skeeter lives to the shotgun shacks that Aibileen and Minny call home. Everything looks good, polished to a high industrial gleam. Save for Ms. Davis’s, however, the performances are almost all overly broad, sometimes excruciatingly so, characterized by loud laughs, bugging eyes and pumping limbs. Ms. Chastain and Ms. Spencer make quite the raucous comedy team, and while there’s pleasure in their routine, all that comedy can feel misplaced. They have some genuinely touching moments together when you see two women, each struggling with the burdens of race and class. But just when you think it might get too heavy, Minny starts vacuuming a stuffed bear for some laughs.