Quite A Box Of Tricks 1.8i Serial Number
Carlito Roby
Quite A Box Of Tricks is available for download. This is afully working version, which will mark your work with a largeX as long as it is run in demonstration mode. If you would like to test the software without the X, please contact sa...@quite.com for a temporary license number.
The Nirvana UL was the 11th kite I purchased. After a very favorable experience with the standard Nirvan, I wanted to try flying a full size light wind kite. While I still like my smaller STX 1.8, I was having trouble transitioning from my large movement Nirvana to the small and light STX 1.8 on those light and variable days. Several people had favorable reviews of the UL handling in light winds, so I purchased this 2005 model in blue used from a fellow flier.
Like the standard Nirvana, the UL is extremely well constructed. Though I have not had it as long, it has basically the same sail construction as the standard. The sail is made entirely of rip-stop Icarex with mylar reinforcement at key points. The frame is wrapped skyshark 3 Pt leading edges and lower spreaders which can take quite a bit of abuse for a UL. The 6mm spine has 15g of tail weight preinstalled. The bridle is a very solid three point. All of the stitching is reinforced and sealed appropriately. The LE is smooth and snag free with preinstalled R-sky yo-yo stoppers.
On the Nirvana UL I'm flying the stock 15g tail weight (available in late version models) with an additional 5-6g - for a total of 20-21g of tail weight. The weight seems about right - it is very stable in a fade but can still multilazy in a turtle.
I'm flying the stock 3 point bridle which I really like. It turns on a dime but still has excellent precision. In fact I think that the 3 point bridle on the UL actually has a slight edge in many maneuvers over my Nirvana standard's turbo bridle. So much so that I'm seriously considering converting my standard Nirvana to a 3 point bridle as well.
The only other addition I made was a small line between the inner outhaul and upper outhaul to prevent the inner outhaul from getting wrapped around the tail. This is a nice thing to do on any kite to avoid excessive tail wrapping.
I was pleasantly surprised with the Nirvana UL from its very first flight. My first day the winds were light and variable coming from the bad side of the flying site (through some buildings). Despite this, the Nirvana UL performed like a dream, holding its own in the lulls and handling well despite the choppy light wind. Later that week I had the opportunity to fly it in near ideal conditions, and then I really came to love this kite.
I can best sum up flying the Nirvana UL like this - I forgot I was flying a light kite and I also forgot I was flying in light conditions. The kite performed beautifully even in light and variable conditions, and it acted like a full size standard Nirvana.
The character of the Nirvana UL is distinctly R-Sky. It has almost all of the same characteristics as the Nirvana - but the 3 point bridle gives it just a little more responsiveness in my opinion. Some tricks, like the backspin, can be executed with less setup and a little more precision. What is amazing is that it does all of the Nirvana tricks (which is all of the tricks I know, plus a few others) even in very light winds. While I have not had enough time to fully explore the low end of the wind range, I would say it can probably fly down almost as low as the STX 1.8 SUL (which is the lightest kite I have that can still do tricks). In moderate winds, the UL also holds its own. For some reason the Nirvana UL does not produce the same trailing edge noise that I get on the standard, and it flies very much like the standard in moderate winds. The overall wind range is quite wide - perhaps 2-10 mph, though I would probably switch to the standard before I reached 10mph just to avoid accidentally breaking a spreader.
Precision is excellent - corners are sharp and figures are predictable. It turns within a wingtip, but has no oversteer even in light wind conditions. With a little bit of speed management, the slow flight looks awesome.
Tricking - well its a Nirvana after all! Just like the standard Nirvana, the UL can perform just about any trick you can throw at it. It has the same big-input feel to it, but it also has the same slow motion large kite grace. The predictability of the kite is superb in all flying positions. Axels can be fast or they can be tantalizingly slow. The 540 is breathtaking. Fades are rock solid. Backspins are a hair easier to set up and execute (perhaps the 3 point bridle?) than the standard. Flic-flacs, JL, lazy's and multilazies, etc...are all great. In good winds, the Jacobs Ladder is particularly pretty on this kite - it has a nice balance to it and it does amazing JL's. It is still one of my favorite kites to JL.
Like the standard, the Nirvana UL is not quite as quick to roll up as some of the newest crop of pitchy kites, but it is not that hard to yo-yo or lewis with just a little forethought - it just takes a larger input. The Nirvana UL handles very well in all positions and is extremely predictable.
OK, I'm a little biased towards the Nirvana series, but they have never disappointed me yet. The second time I flew the kite I took the Nirvana UL to the beach around the Spring break and several people came up to me afterwards and commented that they had never seen any kite do tricks like that. I like the full size feel, I like the precision, I like the 3 point bridle, and I like the light wind performance. I have a few other kites that will roll up just a bit quicker than the Nirvana UL, but when it comes to predictability, consistency, feel, balance and all around low wind tricking, I think this kite is a hard package to beat.
Lately the apologists and the haters started exploring a new battle field: the financial reports. So we have haters celebrating the idea that Olympus will soon close because their Imaging Division is failing, and apologists saying that everything is just fine, that bad reports are the norm, that they mean nothing in particular. YouTube Channels and photography forums shifted from pseudo-tech to pseudo-economics.
Just as most of the people fighting about which sensor tech or size is better know very few about semiconductors and physics, in the same way the ones fighting about economics know very few about market dynamics, mass production strategies and financial planning. And yet they all meet in a photography forum to fight about that!
I think nowadays most cameras are good enough. Writing about some particular model is bound to be an exercise in repetition. Unless a model has some serious issues, what else is there to say?Something will be marginally better, something will be marginally worse. At some point a new impressive feature will appear, but it will become mainstream in a matter of months. All cameras share more or less the same tech made by same companies.
I bought this camera 2 years ago after gathering a lot of information. As I wrote somewhere else, I use Nikon full frame cameras for work and a Ricoh GR is always in my pocket. My iPhone is also a camera I use very often. What I was looking for was a camera for personal projects and for traveling, with interchangeable lenses, better image quality than the iPhone, not too heavy, and most important, fun and inspiring to use.
The PEN-F is the most beautiful digital camera I ever saw. There are only few details I would change, from a design point of view. The tripod mount is in a weird forward position. The thumb fake leather has a different texture compared to the one on the rest of the camera. Apart from these small details, the camera is just gorgeous. I did pick up the silver one because I think it fits better with the 60s mood the designers were after.
Some may consider shallow that I start talking about how the camera looks, but I think this is also an important matter. Nowadays, it is hard to find a camera that is not at least decent. Most of the modern cameras are good enough for shooting good photography and are exceeding the skills of most photographers. So, details like the design become important in differentiating the models and defining the experience.
Handling the camera is a pleasure, it is small but not too small, there is no grip and it feels like holding an old rangefinder, only smaller. Some people need a protruding grip, I am happier without. The controls are quite well thought and I appreciate there are no shutter speed and aperture manual controls, like on a Leica or Fuji for instance: I think a dual dial configuration makes more sense in a digital camera, but I recognise this is absolutely subjective and it belongs to that set of features that make a camera more or less fitting us.
The EVF in the Pen-F has decent resolution, lag is rare and not distracting, it is not as big as others you find in the latest mirrorless cameras but still not too small, and most importantly it serves its goal good, which is to help us compose our images. A bit of green tint is noticeable when shooting with a black and white mode, but nothing terrible: I shot for years with soviet rangefinders with really greenish optical viewfinders and I survived, taking decent photos in meantime.
Talking about comparisons: being used to the huge optical viewfinder in my Nikon D850 I still find it weird to use an EVF, and I doubt having more pixels in it would make a difference. It is still a small screen one cm from my eye. The viewfinder in my Panasonic G9 is much better than the one in the Pen-F but still far from ideal. I guess the tech will keep improving and at some point EVFs will be a good experience, but right now I feel they still need to improve. At some point I would like to try the ones on the Leica SL2 and on the Panasonic S1, I heard they are quite good.
So I am fine with the bad High ISO performance on the Pen-F: it is ok I can expect mediocre quality at 1600 and bad one at 3200. When I think of this, I consider: what can I do for beating this limit? And I am captured by the process. Sometimes I will be unable of solving the problem, and the photos will bee too noisy. It is part of the game and it is luckily much rarer than what marketing of other camera brands wants you to believe.
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