Photos Latest Purchases Thread: v2.0

Nice, looks like a good wee machine that!

I get what you mean about ThinkPads, and the golden age of fully user-serviceable and upgradeable laptops is well and truly gone and past, but having said that I have an X230 which is my sacrificial laptop that the kids get to bash about, and also an X280 which is my work laptop, and the only thing the X230 has going for it is... that it's upgradeable and serviceable. The X280 is better in pretty much every way - miles faster, vastly superior battery life (even with a brand new 9-cell extended battery in the X230), cooler, quieter, a fraction of the weight, a really nice IPS screen, even the trackpad and keyboard on the X230 aren't better then the X280. And the X280 has one of those awesome USB-C docking stations similar to the one you describe in your post - which makes my home office setup infinitely nicer than it would be if I had to rely on the old-school dock that the X230 uses

Now, all that said I might view things differently if I were paying for my work laptop!

 

Part of the reason I buy second hand is precisely because of ex-business machines - even this Latitude 7275 is an ex-business machine. A good friend of mine does the same thing for his kids: all three weans have laptops and they're all ex-business Thinkpad X-series machines!

I've had four Thinkpads over the last decade or so and they've all been X-series: X61, X201, X220, and X240. They've all been really great machines, but I really do fancy the idea of a hybrid laptop/tablet. I have an Atom X8000 series Win10 tablet and I found it really handy to be able to pop it off the keyboard and watch videos on it, but... that CPU is absolutely dire these days and it uses an atrocious WiFi card. It's tolerable if I don't use Bluetooth, but heaven forbid that I want to use both Bluetooth and WiFi at the same time!

 

That X201 is still serving up Plex from the roofspace of my garage, it's the perfect little low power workhorse.

 

What... this one...? https://forums.bit-tech.net/index.php?threads/thinkpad-x201-w-128gb-ssd-upgrades.280884/

I couldn't find who bought it, my message history doesn't go back that far!

 

That's the one, five years eh?

They don't make 'em like they used to.

 

Well bloody hell, good to see it's still in service! No idea when that particular machine was first used, but the X201 was released in 2010. 10 years service is damn good going!

 

it would but I’m limited on space and this thing folds flat as a pancake for storage really well. So it can hide from the missus between auctions/listing sprees!

I’m sure there are plenty of other solutions that do this but with amazons 5 monthly payments it just made sense to me, with the darker months afoot I really wanted to get some level of consistency when listing. If you scroll through my eBay you get a mixture of dark & light... dining table & kitchen... very few listings are clear but I try my best to capture the item fully

I received it today and I’m really happy, quality is really nice. can pop it open in a minute and achieve crisp clean photos in seconds. The ultimate aim was achieving full disclosure photos... if an item is blemished In anyway I want the buyer to get the full view of it rather than having to describe the issues.

 

I got some by Neewer. They look the same and came with basically the same bag. From what I've read online Neewer is some of the best bang-for-buck photo/video lighting equipment.

 

Yep. I have a bunch of Neewer LED lights with an assortment of their desk & floor stands. They do decent budget microphones too.

 

May I safely say they're the Anker of lighting equipment and maybe microphones?

 

Any experience with the mic arms perhance?

I'm after one and Neewer have come up a lot... I'm in analysis paralysis between a many-money Rode or K&M, a middle-money Neewer and a no-money no-brand one. They all look the same after all, but do want something that's relatively robust (for a 1kg mic), and has nice buttery movement. Amazon reviews are totally useless.

 

New bluetooth speaker for the workshop, seeing as my current one requires you to bash it on the bench to turn it on, an the battery is swelling i think its time to replace, on an amazon lightning deal so £20ish off

Going from 2X2W to 2X15W should be slightly louder.

Branding,m could be better?

 

I don't have one of those, but from my experience with Neewer products you usually get good performance for a very good price. The more expensive stuff will be smoother with less quirky mechanism (like locking mechanisms, for example), but you pay for that extra 10-20%.

TL,DR: I am yet to be unhappy/disappointed with Neewer products (for the price).

 

You mean working?

 

Moar tools

 

Yep. The mic I got came with an XLR to 3.5mm cable, an arm and a pop shield. All great (until I got a USB audio interface and needed an XLR-XLR cable).

 

I have a Neewer stand and IMO go for the Rode. You'll appreciate the difference in quality.

I bought it a few years ago so things may have changed in the mean time, but from what I can see most budget stands look like they might have similar issues. I used it with a shock mount to hold a Neewer NW700 condenser mic.

This is where the main issue is: where arm meets desk clamp.



You can see where the bottom of that hinge plate has rubbed against the stand itself when rotating the arm in the clamp. Why not face the desk clamp in the other direction so that the hinge plate doesn't rub on it? Well I did that and what you can't see in the pics (because they're under heavy stuff that I really don't want to have to move) are the marks on my desk caused by the hinge plate scraping across the desk when I rotated the arm...

This part is by far the weakest link:



Repeated movement of the arm back and fore, and locking the rotation in place with the threaded screw, caused this upright piece to bend and buckle. I had to bend it back into shape many many times after I realised what it was doing to my desk.

Plus it was decidedly not what I would call 'buttery movement'.

All of this is why I didn't include it when I sold the mic & audio interface recently; I couldn't, in good conscience, sell it to someone else.

It all comes down to what you're prepared to spend and how long you want/need it to last. The Sam Vimes 'Boots' Theory of Economic Unfairness is very much in play: buy cheap and you buy often; buy expensive and you probably only buy once.