I agree! I suppose it depends on how much they manage to climb in the google rankings but my guess is they wont appear outside the US and maybe the UK for a long time.
(Just as a curiosity, Google returns 2.8 million hits for “Massdrop” of which the great majority will relate in some way to them, “Drop” returns 2.1 billion!!!)
Drop is so generic. MassDrop was unique. Don’t see how it’s an upside.
Is it marketing just for the sake of doing something?
Shane D
I sent Customer Service a note suggesting they should change the name back immediately. I received a reply entitled “Drop Community Support”.
Not joking unfortunately.
Not simply web devs, but web devs influenced by international aesthetic design fashions.
Give me an old fashioned book. Two wooden rods with parchment/papyrus wound between them.
I also think brands may not like the title…
Drop Senneheiser 6XX
Drop AKG K7XX
DropPlus
Massdrop seem to have been dropping more than a brand name. Me thinks they’ve been dropping acid too by the look of their site now. Total ballsup. Not impressed.
It makes the user work too hard to shop and this isn’t how it should be done.
Drop a Deuce and Drop it in the Trash, but Don’t Drop the Soap!
I couldn’t come up with a more horrible brand name than “Junk” or “Garbage”.
Indeed, it’s certainly a strange turn of events. They seemed to be growing as a brand name. I would love to know the reasoning behind it all. I do hope it isn’t as per the speculation that they are just going to be selling a lot more ‘crap’ now. Stocking fillers as I like to call them. Let’s hope that they still keep up with the Audiophile gear as much as they have in the past. I know it may be looked upon as cheaper gear by some but some of it is good value and a gateway into our hobby.
And hopefully, they never offer Schitt products…
Set up a new NAS. 10TB x 4, RAID 10 = 20TB of space. Tied my Plex server into it. Can stream my lossless library and Tidal from one app, anywhere. Yay.
File copy completion ETA: 6 hours. (It’s been cooying for 7 hours already.) I guess I’ll go make lunch, or something.
Then you get another 20 hour wait while you make a backup copy 
HA! That will sync to Backblaze over the next week or so, 'cause no one got time for that $***.
So elsewhere on the forum, I was reading @antdroid talking about a chore he has coming up. It put me in mind of an old joke.
B-Girl: looking suggestively at a mid-age gentleman at the bar "I’ll do anything you want for $300.
Enticed gentleman: Anything?
B-Girl: Wiggling a bit and breathing heavily "Anything you want"
Gentleman: reaching for wallet, and removing 3 crisp Franklins, the setting them on the bar in front of the temptress “Paint My House.”
I recently returned my OCD attention to camera gear and picked up a Sony DSC-RX100 M5A in preparation for a trip. I’m used to shooting with the Olympus mirrorless system and a Ricoh GR for street photography. As a parent, the Sony’s autofocus precision and overall speed attracted me, and oh boy does it deliver!
Just fooling around with it for a couple of days I’ve already gotten nearly a thousand stills and a good bit of video, with a fair number of keepers!
I used to shoot RAW almost exclusively, but at these volumes I’m not going to be able to keep up in post. Thankfully, Sony provides a ton of control over color, gamma curves, detail, white balance and such, and I’ve already tweaked my settings to where I’m liking the out of camera JPEGs a lot.
Just one example of the level of control it gives me…
Every camera I’ve shot and every editing software I used end up picking up too much of the color cast of ambient lighting when using auto white balance, which drives me up the wall. It’s particularly noticeable with incandescent soft white lights, but not confined to it. This little Sony has a setting that allows me to bias the auto white balance towards finding true white rather than picking up the ambient light, and so far it’s working pretty well. When I actually want to pick up more of the ambience, I can change the setting. Pretty cool!
Under perfect conditions when I nail focus and exposure, the Ricoh GR is definitely capable of better ultimate IQ, but for anything other than landscapes, the higher rate of keepers on the Sony is far more important to me.
Kudos to you. I just threw out a B&H catalog today because I had started to look back and forth between the photography section and my wallet. Also things have advanced fairly quickly in photography, and I’m uncertain what I would want. Mirrorless, DSLR, 4/3 format, etc. As always things that I think I would really like are expensive (Leica), and probably too advanced for my current state of knowledge anyway.
Just when I get comfortable with color film and some of the associated darkroom work, it all goes digital. And I find Lightroom to be easier than Photoshop. I also still have trouble finding a good process to copy old B&W. Nobody creates an interneg anymore, and most of the paper people use is color paper, not strictly black and white. I do think there is a difference between them, particularly with a smooth luster paper that shows detail.
Not that I personally would go back to using film today.
What editing software do you use?
I use Lightroom and like it will enough. They sort of dumbed down the interface when it became Lightroom CC but it gets the job done. Before kids, I would spend more time post processing than shooting, now it’s the opposite.
I never graduated from black and white to color in my darkroom days. I do miss the comradery of the communal darkrooms-I think I learned more about photography from the other photographers than I did from any classes or online material.
At one point, not so long ago, I was running multiple ILC systems … full-frame Canon & Leica, APS-C FujiFulm XF and micro-Four Thirds setups, as well as a couple of compacts … one pocketable, one bridge/super-zoom.
In the end I found that 99% of the time I either needed the low-light/shallow DoF capabilities of the full-frame stuff, or I could get excellent results with the compacts.
As a result, I sold almost everything … and now just have a full-frame Sony FE setup, a Sony RX-100 MkV (for the faster lens), a RX-100 MkVI (for the longer reach) and an RX-10 MkIV for the fast, long, lens. I did keep the Leica for my “art” stuff (hard to argue with the size/quality vs. other full-frame setups).
The RX-100 stuff really only lacks in terms of external controls and DoF control, otherwise they’re amazing for >90% of my travel/non-pro stuff. Hell, you can pretty much leave them in “Auto” mode and they just seem to have the magical ability to know what I want as my subject, are super-fast to focus and almost always nail the exposure too.
I will say that for shooting fidgety kids and in low light, the relatively deep DOF even at large apertures is more of a feature than a bug. For critical portrait work I can always pull out the bigger sensor stuff.
Oh, there’s DEFINITELY a place for having naturally deep DoF!
It makes ad-hoc landscapes a breeze, “I was there” shots trivial, and is really only a limitation when I’m trying to be creative without having to come up with contrived compositions just to get a shallow field.
In most cases I found that when I specifically wanted/needed shallow-DoF, then both M43 and APS-C were just far enough shy of full-frame that I either a) really needed full-frame or b) I could get close enough that it didn’t matter with the RX-100.
Hence I only have full-frame and 1" sensor based cameras now.
