Originally published on Hypeart.com

The Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C. has announced the acquisition of 141 photographs by 20 Chinese contemporary artists that were gifted by collector and No More Rulers founder, Larry Warsh. The lot of images previously featured in an exhibition entitled “A Window Suddenly Opens: Contemporary Photography in China,” that recently concluded at the institution on January 7.

Based in New York, Warsh is noted for owning an extensive collection of pop artworks from Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, as well as for his publishing arm, which has released books on Ai Weiwei, Daniel Arsham, Judy Chicago and more. While Warsh has always shown an interest in collecting work from Chinese artists, he began to understand more about the nuances and traditions of daily Chinese life upon a visit to the world’s second most populous country in 2004. “It gave me a better understanding of artists and how they live and how they work,” Warsh previously noted of the trip, adding that it also gave him a “sense of China in terms of its stage, where it was, because it was changing.”

Per Barrons, the newly acquired photos include works by Cui Xiuwen, Rong Rong, Song Dong and Zhang Huan — each of whom “employed photography to instantly record their responses to new ideas of identity, sexuality, and consumerism against the rapidly changing social, cultural, and urban Chinese landscape for audiences in and outside the country.” In particular, Warsh’s collection spotlights the response by China’s artistic community following the massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989, which began to reflect a freedom of expression that was scarce during the rule of Mao Zedong.

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The March 21 meeting of the Land of Waterfalls Camera Club will feature Noel Casaje, an award-winning landscape photographer, who will lead a presentation entitled “What Makes an Image Compelling?”

Casaje described himself as an “avid student of light and its interaction with the natural world.”

He is passionate about creating images which evoke emotional responses in viewers. Often working in low light, he explores the subtle nuances it creates, particularly in transforming scenes from the real to the surreal.

Casaje’s photographs have gained him recognition in multiple media outlets.

The Forbes website has listed him as one of its Top 5 Travel Photographers to Watch Out For.

Through his company, Wide Horizon Visuals, Casaje organizes photography tours to some of the world’s most visually dramatic destinations, including Patagonia, the Lofoten Islands in Norway, the Canadian Rockies, Costa Rica, the Italian Dolomites and American National Parks.

Following the presentation, LOWCC members will participate in a show and tell interactive program displaying photographs they have taken in recent months.

The presentation of each photograph will be followed by discussion during which club members are encouraged to provide constructive comments on the strengths of the image and how it might be improved.

A major goal is for participants to learn different approaches for improving the quality of their images in the future.

The March 15 meeting will be held in the conference room of the United Community Bank in Straus Park.

There will be an option to join via Zoom.

LOWCC meetings are open to the public. Non-member guests are encouraged to email info@lowccnc.com to obtain information for attending the meeting. The club welcomes participation from photographers at all skill levels. Memberships costs $35 per year.

To offer more focused forums for small group learning and discussion, the club features two Special Interest Groups.

The Capture SIG reviews the use cameras, lighting and other photographic equipment to initially capture the digital image.

This SIG meets on the third Monday of each month starting at 7 p.m. in the Community Room of the United Community Bank.

On the first Monday of each month at 7 p.m. the Post Processing SIG meets online using Zoom.

This SIG focuses on the use of computer-based processing to improve and enhance digital images.

Instruction is provided on use of photographic software such as Adobe Lightroom and Topaz products as well as updates of these products.

Further information about the Land of Waterfalls Camera Club, including membership information and past and future programs, can be found at its website at www.lowccnc.com.

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Step back in time at the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin where the pioneering work of two Scottish visual artists from the 1840s will be showcased. The center’s new exhibition, titled “Hill & Adamson: The Clarkson Stanfield Album,” presents the remarkable photographs of David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, a duo who played a significant role in cementing photography’s place as a serious art form. The public will get an up-close look at one of the early masterpieces of photography that still rivets viewers with its sheer historicity and aesthetic impact, as reported by the University of Texas.

Unveiled to a world just getting its head around the ‘miraculous’ medium of photography, Hill and Adamson’s collaboration began in Edinburgh in 1843, just four years after the medium’s public debut. Their album represents a significant era in the visual arts, having documented everything from intricate portraits to architectonic and landscape scenes. With more than 100 salted paper prints, the exhibition gives visitors a chance to admire these historical snapshots. As put by the Ransom Center’s Director Stephen Enniss, “The beauty of this work is its most enduring feature.” The album serves as a testament not only to the villagers and neighbors portrayed but also to the creative brilliance of its makers.

Showcasing a body of work that extends beyond historical significance, the collection comprises images that fuse Hill’s artistic sensibilities with Adamson’s technical skill, resulting in a trove that has attracted scholars worldwide. The Clarkson Stanfield Album – the exhibition’s centerpiece and named after the English marine painter who purchased it – remains a steadfast piece of photographic history, according to Jessica S. McDonald, Nancy Inman, and Marlene Nathan Meyerson Curator of Photography at the Ransom Center. “Scholars have visited from around the world to study this unique album, and I am thrilled to share it with more audiences,” McDonald shared with enthusiasm in a statement obtained by the University of Texas, according to the University of Texas.

Preserving these prints has been a challenge of both time and technique. Remarkably preserved, the prints have benefitted from the album’s protection for over a century and a half, necessitating skilled conservators to undergo structural repairs to the album. When treating the album, these professionals have taken the opportunity to display several sections of the album at once. The Ransom Center’s conservators and preparators are to credit for the exhibition’s current form and the album’s ongoing preservation, pointedly underscoring the institution’s dedication to heritage and art. The exhibition will be on view to the public through June 2, offering an immersive journey into one of the earliest sustained explorations of photography as an art form.

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Leica has once again pushed the boundaries of camera technology with the release of the SL3. This third-generation SL camera is not just an upgrade; it’s a redefinition of what professional photographers and enthusiasts can expect from a high-end digital camera. The SL3 emerges as a beacon of innovation, boasting a larger 60MP sensor packed into a body that’s lighter and more compact than its predecessor.

The heart of the Leica SL3 is its formidable 60MP full-frame sensor, which introduces Triple Resolution Technology. This groundbreaking feature allows photographers to switch between 60MP, 36MP, and 18MP resolutions for images in both DNG and JPG formats, ensuring flexibility and precision in various shooting conditions. The sensor’s dynamic range stretches up to 15 stops, coupled with a 14-bit color depth, enabling the SL3 to capture images with unparalleled clarity, color fidelity, and detail.

Photographers can push creative boundaries with an ISO sensitivity range from 50 to 100,000 and benefit from the 5-axis image stabilization system designed to mitigate camera shake. Whether shooting in low light or capturing fast-moving subjects, the SL3 ensures your images remain sharp and detailed.

Underpinning the SL3’s performance is the Maestro IV Processor, the powerhouse responsible for the camera’s blazing-fast performance. This processor is not only behind the SL3’s exceptional color reproduction, a hallmark of Leica’s cameras, but also enhances the camera’s efficiency with CFexpress Type B cards and enables 8K video recording across various codecs.

The SL3 doesn’t stop at internal excellence; its design is equally impressive. A tiltable 3.2″ touchscreen display and a 5.76 million-dot EyeRes OLED viewfinder offer unprecedented control and visibility, while an 8GB buffer allows for seamless shooting. Moreover, the camera supports quick image transfers wirelessly via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, in addition to wired transfers through USB-C, ensuring that your workflow remains uninterrupted.

Leica has made the SL3 available for pre-orders, with shipments starting on March 14th. With a price tag of $6,995, available at adorama.com, the SL3 is a premium investment for those who refuse to compromise on quality, performance, and compactness. Whether you’re a professional photographer or a passionate enthusiast, the Leica SL3 promises to elevate your photography to new heights, capturing the world in stunning detail like never before.

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The Center for the Visual Arts (CVA) Gallery is proud to announce the launch of its spring exhibition, Between Experience & Reality. This innovative showcase not only presents an eclectic array of photography from both Brookdale students and esteemed 20th-century artists but also pioneers a groundbreaking initiative in accessibility and technology integration within the realm of art interpretation.

Scheduled to debut on Thursday, March 21, and extending through April 24, Between Experience & Reality promises to captivate audiences with its dynamic blend of traditional and contemporary photographic works. From intimate portraits to sweeping landscapes, the exhibition offers a thought-provoking exploration of human experiences, and the ways photography intersects with reality.

At the heart of this exhibition lies a revolutionary approach to art accessibility: Alt-Text. Based on Bojana Coklyat and Shannon Finnegan’s “Alt-Text-as Poetry” model and spearheaded by a collaborative effort involving authors Oudai Al-Shuaibi, Sophie Jimenez, Gianella Rios, Anna Boiarchuk, Amy Farris, David Levy, and Barbara Russo, this initiative aims to enrich the viewing experience for individuals with low or no vision. By providing descriptive text for select photographs, the CVA Gallery ensures that art remains inclusive and accessible to all community members.

The exhibition combines famous artworks from Brookdale’s collection by artists like Walker Evans, Danny Lyon, Ansel Adams, Arthur Tess, and Bruce Davidson with pieces from current and recent Brookdale photography students. This comparison encourages discussions about how traditional and contemporary issues meet in photography.

Among the collection pieces is Bruce Davidson’s “East 100th Street, Spanish Harlem New York City, USA, 1966.” Davidson, an Illinois native, captured the essence of East Harlem with remarkable insight and sensitivity. His journey into the hidden worlds of East Harlem began in the early 1950s, spurred by a fleeting glimpse through a commuter train window. After receiving a grant from the US National Endowment for the Arts, Davidson photographed 100th Harlem Street. The piece in this exhibition demonstrates the intimacy and mutual respect between the photographer and the subject indicative of Davidson’s moral vision. His subjects are looking at the camera as he challenges the viewer to hold their gaze and consider their desperate circumstances. Davidson said, “I didn’t want to be the observed observer. I wanted to be with my subjects face to face.”

Another notable inclusion is Edward Weston’s “Dunes, Oceano, 1936.” Weston, a seminal figure in American photography, masterfully transforms ordinary subjects into extraordinary compositions. In “Dunes, Oceano,” Weston explores the contours and textures of shifting sands, blurring the lines between form and abstraction. His keen eye for detail and composition elevates the natural landscape into a realm of timeless beauty and intrigue.

Whether exploring the intricacies of Alt-Text or engaging with the timeless beauty of photographic art, Between Experience & Reality promises to inspire, provoke, and challenge perceptions.

One of the single most worthwhile investments you can make as a photographer is paying for a bespoke website. Whether you’re a commercial assignment photographer looking to showcase your best work, a batch shooter wanting to create a home for your purchase galleries, or anything in between, an online presence outside of social media is a crucial component of any creative’s toolkit.

The double-edged sword that comes with this, however, is that there are almost as many ways to do this as there are customers to pay for it. For those who are technically minded and willing to tinker under the hood, there are platforms like WordPress that offer nearly unlimited customization, and for people who just want a simple, all-in-one solution to get their work in front of more eyeballs with as little faffing around with plugins and add-ons as possible, we have a number of services promising to get us going quickly and easily. Having an abundance of options is great, but it can lead to option paralysis, which, if you’ve ever tried to comparison-shop something like a 50mm f/1.4 for your chosen mount, you’ll know is decidedly not great.

Here, I’m going to do my best to cut through the noise and figure out which of the most popular hosting services might be best for a given creative use case.

Let’s take the on-ramp to the information superhighway.

Built vs. Bought

The core difference between many of the hosting solutions on offer is the degree to which the website owner needs to worry about actually “building” their site beyond editing page content. As previously mentioned, if you’re willing to get your figurative hands dirty, you can put together a solution that is tailored precisely to your specific needs, using a site like WordPress. This path offers complete control over every aesthetic and technical component of your site, so if you’re well-versed in Javascript, CSS, or HTML, this might be the option for you.

However, I, probably like most of you, am much more concerned about having things taken off my plate and having my website “just work” without having to fuss around with a bunch of technical stuff. For us, there are thankfully a bevy of turn-key solutions available that make going from nothing to a fully functional website a snap, and these are primarily what I’ll be focusing on here.

The Big 2

Darlings of content creators everywhere, Wix and Squarespace are undoubtedly top of the tree of consumer-level DIY web hosting when it comes to the sheer number of people using their platforms, at least when it comes to paid users. Each of these offers a similar purchase proposition – a visual website builder accompanied by a suite of back-end tools designed to make managing your site and generating traffic more efficient.

The actual product offerings between the two are similar enough in functionality to almost be the same. The drag-and-drop website builders are very similar, as are the feature packages available in the various subscription tiers. Of the two, though, Squarespace certainly seems like the better value, with each of its paid plan tiers being significantly less expensive than the approximately equivalent counterpart from Wix (the least expensive option that supports e-commerce is $23/mo on Squarespace and $29/mo on Wix).

The main problem I have with both of these platforms is that they do not seem to be particularly well-suited to monetizing your photos in the ways that I, and many photographers, would want to. Since they’re both designed to do everything pretty well, they forego a number of features that would be incredibly useful for a particular user.

As of the time of writing, neither Squarespace nor Wix seem to have any kind of support for uploading a gallery of many photos all at once and allowing visitors to purchase one or more. In order to sell photos at all, you have to upload each photo individually as its own product, with an individual title, description, price, and all associated data. This might not be a concern for a fine art photographer or someone who only wants to sell prints, since both sites offer integrations with 3rd-party printing services, but for volume shooters like me who come away from a shoot with thousands and thousands of photos, this is likely to be a dealbreaker.

To make matters even worse, Wix actually did have this function in the past. My site has been hosted on Wix for the entire time I’ve had it, and the Pro Galleries and Art Store features allowed my customers to browse the relevant galleries and purchase only what they wanted to purchase. It was exactly the functionality I wanted, and I was happy with it.

However, after a spate of external assignments that had taken my attention away from my normal work, I was shocked to find that the Pro Galleries feature had been replaced with the Photo Albums system, without any form of notification-no email, no text, no pop-up in the builder, nothing. This meant that rather than simply being able to create a new page for each album with a grid of photos for browsing, I would need to go into the back end of the builder and create what is basically an entire new multi-page site for each batch of photos. Clunky and slow, but I guess if it still works, it still works?

Except it doesn’t. At some point between the implementation of the Photo Albums system and the moment I first had to use it, they seem to have entirely removed the ability to monetize the photos in the albums on a per-image basis. I know for certain it existed at some point based on the help center articles I found, but I scoured the Wix forums and Reddit and everywhere I could think of to try and find some kind of workaround, and as far as I can tell, there is now no way to have this kind of gallery functionality on Wix. The kicker? I found this out while trying to get a previous day’s event album posted. That was fun.

At the end of the day, if all you want to do is create a portfolio site to showcase your best work and you want the peace of mind that comes with having your site hosted on one of the two biggest platforms in the space, either one of these options is likely to be fine. Just do your due diligence and make sure that whichever you pay for will actually fit your needs.

For the rest of us, though, we need a different solution.

Challenger Approaching

Newer on the block is Format, a website building and hosting service pitched as a “by creatives, for creatives” experience. It provides many of the same features as Wix and Squarespace, in the same general visual builder style, but since it is designed specifically for photographers, designers, editors, and other creatives, it supports more specialized functionality for our particular needs.

The Format user interface isn’t quite as straightforward as those of its competitors, but it is by no means difficult to use. Rather than a purely drag-and-drop system where all of your edits are done on a facsimile of the actual live site, Format’s editor is much more behind the scenes. However, subjectively, it’s definitely simpler to use in that you’re less likely to screw up the layout of a page by changing one thing incorrectly, and it’s much snappier to use than a fully-rendered drag-and-drop editor, which, if you’re like me, is almost as important as anything else.

As well as being a generally good experience to use when building your site, the platform offers a number of tools tailored to the creative field. For example, included in the Format suite is a contract builder, a godsend for those of us who take on a number of one-off or short-term jobs, as well as an integrated file transfer function so you needn’t pay for WeTransfer or another service to facilitate delivery to a client, and can avoid the potentially-unprofessional impression that a Google Drive or Dropbox link might give. Plans are also pretty reasonably priced, with the middle “Pro” plan coming in at $17/mo annually.

Seems awesome, right? Well, again, frustratingly, there doesn’t seem to be a purchase gallery function, exactly the same problem that I had with both Squarespace and Wix. The print store and individual digital downloads are present, but support for a large batch upload from which site visitors can choose photos to purchase is conspicuously absent.

The King of Commerce

And that brings us to SmugMug.

SmugMug takes a different approach to the other offerings here in that it is clearly designed entirely to display and monetize photo and video content. Everything not related to achieving that goal has been gotten rid of. On SmugMug, you won’t find a slick marketing suite or other ancillary tools, but what you will find is, in my opinion, the single best platform for monetizing your work the way you want to monetize it.

This platform offers exactly the functionality I had lost from Wix, in a package that is both uncluttered and easy to navigate. I really do have an actual paid SmugMug site in addition to my Wix site, which I was forced to spin up in an afternoon when I realized I wouldn’t be able to use Wix anymore for selling my work, and while it’s still pretty basic, it serves my e-commerce needs to a T. Not only are purchase galleries easy to create and organize, but I can offer package deals and other discounts, which is something I hadn’t been able to do before.

The main gripe I have with SmugMug is that, because of its sharp focus on commerce, the site builder is a little basic. It reminds me of Format in that much of the assembly is done using fixed content blocks rather than a freeform system that allows you to put anything anywhere. I suppose, though, that this makes optimization for mobile much easier since nothing the user does can break the formatting. Aside from that, SmugMug seems to only support video up to a resolution of 1920×1080/30p, which might not be much of a concern for everyone, but personally, 4K has been my minimum standard for quite a while now since even many smartphones can display significantly higher than 1080p.

Given that it’s primarily a commerce-based solution, SmugMug does have a bit of a wider spectrum of pricing than the other options here. A basic personal site can be had for as little as $10/mo, while the “Pro” subscription tier can go all the way up to $32/mo when paid annually. If that still isn’t enough, there is an enterprise plan on offer, but at a starting price of $500/mo, I have a sneaking suspicion that that may be beyond the scope of most photographers.

Other Hosting Options

Aside from the previously mentioned offerings, there are dozens of other services available to create your own website. For the sake of brevity, I’ve picked a few of the best-known for a lightning round.

GoDaddy

GoDaddy started life as a domain registry, somewhere where you could purchase and register a specific web address to connect it to a website, an email inbox, or whatever else you might want to do. Nowadays, they’ve dipped their toes in the site-building market as well. Their in-house building interface is rather basic, being based around a set number of content blocks with a relatively small number of preset theme templates, and seems to lack very many customization features. However, GoDaddy offers managed hosting for WordPress sites as well for as little as $11/mo, so they might be worth checking out if you have a pre-existing WordPress site and want some help on the back end.

Web.com

Web.com is another relatively new player in the web design and building market, with a major component of its purchase proposition being an “AI-assisted” (yawn…) approach to getting set up. Indeed, their entire home page is festooned with mentions of AI in just about every line of copy. The general gist is that just about everything in their builder can be created and edited simply by telling it what you want to see in text form, and it will generate images, copy, and any number of other elements to fit that request. They also seem to be heavily cashing in on this aspect of their service – while a top-tier paid plan starts at only $20/mo, it balloons to $45/mo after the first year, which is a bigger jump than any other competitor I’ve seen.

Personally, I’m not much of a fan of AI replacing creative work in general, so such a heavy emphasis on the technology kind of rubs me the wrong way. If, however, you just need to get online at absolutely the fastest speed possible, or are interested in messing around to see what you can come up with, this might be an interesting proposition. Just don’t forget that spike in renewal fees-yikes.

WordPress

WordPress is, more or less, the OG of getting yourself online for cheap. Whether that was a personal blog, small business site, or anything in between, chances are there was a way to do it on WordPress. That flexibility and freedom comes at a cost, however – having worked on a WordPress site for a previous in-house position, it is nowhere near as user-friendly or seamless as the other options here, and that’s before you even start talking about plugins and other integrations. The upshot of this, though, is that whatever your problem might be, there’s probably documentation to be found somewhere online on how to fix it. In addition, its popularity means that there are a slew of “on-top” services like Bluehost and Hostinger that promise to take some of the pain points away from building and managing your WordPress site – these are, of course, subject to an additional cost.

If you’re just starting to build your online presence, I would advise you to stay away from WordPress unless you’re willing to commit to spending quite a bit of time and energy managing your site, but if you absolutely have to have an environment where you can do pretty much whatever you want, it could be a good pick.

Closing Thoughts

Creatives today live in a world in which it is easier than ever to get our work in front of others. Starting off by building a social media following is a great idea, but ultimately, if you want to take your craft to the next level, it’s a good idea to make yourself a website. Depending on your needs, it may be beneficial to go with one over another. Here are my final recommendations:

Best General-Purpose: Squarespace. More-or-less equivalent to Wix, but cheaper. Good mix of customization and fixed elements that act as guard rails so you don’t get into too much trouble with broken formatting and other issues. Great for a portfolio, photo blog, or other site designed primarily to show off your work.

Best for Commerce: SmugMug. If you’re looking to sell your work, especially if you’re a batch shooter, SmugMug is in front by a country mile. It’s certainly not the most flexible or modern when compared to others, but given the lack of competition in this very specific use case, there is almost no reason to go with anything else if monetization is important to you. SmugMug is tailored specifically to working photographers, and it shows.

Best for Power-Users: WordPress. It’s pretty cheap, even with a paid building service like Bluehost added on top, almost endlessly customizable, and adaptable to just about any need. Its one major downfall is how much work it can be to maintain in comparison to the others. For the right person, though, nothing else will come close.

Honorable Mention: Format. Format strikes a good balance between general-purpose features and those a working creative can take advantage of, at a competitive price. It has its quirks, but overall is an excellent choice if you don’t need the overwhelming amount of features that come with Squarespace, Wix, or another platform, and would be an excellent main site companion to a dedicated purchase site from SmugMug if you’re willing to manage two.

CHICAGO (CBS) – A new book showcases where Chicago artists create their works.

Mark Ballogg’s home is full of art, mostly locally crafted. Each piece is meticulously displayed with the collection, almost mimicking a museum or an art gallery.

“I have a relationship with Chicago artists, and I try to collect a lot of Chicago art, and I especially like collecting people that are not fully at their peak exposure,” He said.

Ballogg is an artist, too, though it’s not a title he’s always been comfortable bearing through his 40-year career.

“I’ve always struggled with this idea that photography is an art form, and I always felt like we’re kind of second-class citizens, you know, it’s not it’s not as precious as a drawing or a painting,” he said.

As a commercial architecture photographer, he spent most of his career photographing other people’s work.

“Now I’m at a point where I’m semi-retired, and my focus has shifted to my own personal work,” Ballogg said. “So, I’ll be 73 in April, so now, now is my renaissance.”

The most recent act in his renaissance is his latest project – a photobook fit for a coffee table documenting the words and studios of the city’s artists – aptly named “Making Space.”

“Interestingly enough, in the end, I realized that I was in the process of making a space for my own practice.”

Ballogg spent six years photographing and interviewing over 160 Chicago artists in some of their most private spaces. Sometimes in their homes, always in their studios, and often, the two overlap regardless.

For painter Tim Anderson and his cats – George and Frankie – their home and studio space are one and the same. 

“A lot of artists have never had people come to their studio for any reason except their friends, you know, and it’s so cool to see some of these studios. I mean, it lends credence to your mess,” Anderson said.

“And then he, he did it the way he wanted to do it, with no superfluous stuff from publishers, and it’s just brilliant. His premise of not necessarily the artist.”

“That’s not what he was after. It wasn’t really about my work. It was about the space and how it looks,” said Phillis Bramson.

Bramson’s studio also made it into the final edit, and like many artists in the book, her first in-person introduction to Ballogg was when he came over with his camera.

“I just. I just trusted him, you know, I felt that he was… I hadn’t met him before, but I just felt that it was a valid endeavor,” she said.

He may have ended up with 166 artists in the final copy, but he reached out to over 500.

“My initial goal was to expose everyone to the Chicago artist community and its diversity, and I wanted to try to represent everyone,” Ballogg said.

“I think it’s really important to expose people to that. There’s kind of a myth, I think, around artists. They’re damaged, or they’re unusual. They’re unique, and we’re all artists.”

Each artist in the book was included to show a different facet of Chicago, not just within the art scene but across the city as a whole. 

EBL sent us their Updated 808U Battery Charger with eight AAA batteries. It has a flexible design that might appeal to photographers.

Note: EBL sent us the Updated 808U Battery Charger. However, this is a completely independent review. All thoughts about this item are our own.

Pros

• A clever design allows you to charge AA or AAA batteries in each bay.
• Each bay uses independent IC control, meaning that you can charge a combination of AA and AAA batteries.
• Has two USB ports for charging other various items…and they have a nice, snug fit.

Cons

• I can’t really think of any.

EBL Updated 808U Battery Charger — Technical Specifications

All of the technical specifications for the EBL Updated 808U Battery Charger are from the EBL website.

Battery charger

• Input: AC100-240V 50/60Hz 15W Max
• Output 1: DC 1.2V 1000mA
• AA: 1000mA Full load single slot charging current: 230~250 mAh
• AAA: 500m A Full load single slot charging current: 125mAh
• USB Output: DC 5V 2A
• Product Dimensions 1.1″D x 3.7″W x 7.2″H
• Item Weight 9.87 Ounces

Battery specifications

• Voltage 1.2V
• Battery Type Ni-MH
• Rechargeable Yes
• Weight of Single AA Battery 24.8g/0.87oz
• Weight of Single AAA Battery 13g/0.46oz
• Dimensions of AA Batteries (50.3±0.3)*(14.3±0.5)mm
• Dimensions of AAA Batteries (44.35±0.3)*(10.35±0.25)mm

What’s included in the review copy (there are numerous options on the page):

• 1 X EBL 808U Battery Charger
• 1 X AC Power Cable
• 1 X User Manual
• 8 x 1100mAh Rechargeable AAA Batteries

EBL Updated 808U Battery Charger — Ergonomics and build quality

Ergonomics

It is easy to place the batteries into the charger. The charger is large enough so that it lays flat. I know that sounds ridiculous, but sometimes if there is a kink in the power cable, accessories such as battery chargers can sometimes flop over.

USB cables fit snugly in both the USB ports. I’ve had numerous devices that don’t offer this. I like to know that my USB cable is less prone to falling out and has a good connection if I am charging my flashlights, camera batteries, phone, and other devices.

Build quality

The Updated 808U Battery Charger seems to be solidly. As mentioned, the USB ports are nice and snug, and there are no seams or ill-fitting pieces anywhere to be found.

The battery bays are also snug. I turned the charger upside down and shook it several times. All of the batteries remained in place.

The batteries

The eight included batteries use what EBL describes as “ProCyco technology”. I Googled this, of course, but it seems to be a proprietary phrase from EBL. EBL says that this technology helps batteries maximize their fullest capacity, enabling them to charge and recycle up to 1200 times, and up to 500 times for deep charging and discharging cycles. The website states that a normal amount is 400 times.

I’ll quote EBL for the batteries’ structure: “Embedded seal structure expand the space of crystal lattice, make more room for hydrogen, so EBL batteries will holds 80% power after 3 years benefit from its concentration to low self-discharge project.” So yes, the batteries are designed to hold their charge longer.

EBL Updated 808U Battery Charger — In the field

I took the charger and batteries on a short night photography trip. The included power cable was reasonably long for the desk area.

Some of my other small, lightweight devices are prone to twisting on their sides if there is a kink in the power cable. Not so with this battery charger, which lays flat.

I found the addition of the two USB ports to be valuable. The EBL charger was able to charge almost all of my devices. You won’t need to hunt around for as many outlets. I plugged in one Pentax battery charger and one USB-chargeable flashlight, and didn’t need more than that.

With the added ability to charge any combination of AA and AAA batteries simultaneously via the independent IC controls, this battery charger quickly became rather useful. AAA batteries are used in a number of photography-related gear, including intervalometers and remote intervalometer devices.

Final thoughts

Here’s where I make my usual comment about chargers. I am red-green colorblind, also known as deuteranopia. Approximately 8% of males have this, so it’s not unusual. 

The EBL smart charger uses red and green lights to indicate the status of each battery. While ordinarily, this poses a problem, EBL designs their green lights so they glow considerably brighter. You have no idea how useful this is.

Of course, I do wish that manufacturers of charging devices used different methods to indicate when they were charging, and when they were fully charged. For instance, chargers could have blinking lights to indicate charging, then simply stop blinking. Or they could use red to indicate charging, and blue to indicate that it’s finished.

But how EBL addresses the lights is an effective one, and for that, I am grateful.