Saturday, May 9, 2015

Manfrotto Magic Arm 244 Disassembled

My Manfrotto Magic Arm 244N stopped working a few months back.  One of the ends would refuse to loosen when you loosened the knob. After two attempts, one of which involved taking the entire thing apart, I was able to fix it.  I had over-tightened the knob causing one of the 2 sections inside the arm to slide and push a hole right through the washer.

Here is the arm completely disassembled laid out in order of how it would be reassembled.

Here is the washer that I pushed a new hole through. The smaller piece was wedged inside one of the two arm sections as you can see in the first photo.


Here it is reassembled with out the small hole piece. I might try to get Manfrotto to send me a new orange washer.

The metal piece that sits inside the knuckle has a indentation in it to hold the ball bearing. When you tighten the arm, you cause the bearing to move up out of the indentation putting pressure on the long pin and the piece at the end which puts pressure on the ball.  If the part in the nuckle doesn't go back out, then the arm will fail to work as it had for me.

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Lightroom 6/Lightroom CC and AMD video cards

Lightroom 6/Lightroom CC (same thing) came out last week and has several nice features including performance.  Installing it at home on my machine running Windows 8.1 with AMD Radeon HD 6950 I was hoping to see how the new GPU performance would perform.  Unfortunately the GPU was failing to initialize properly.

After talking to a friend, who also had a much older AMD /ATI video card, I soon discovered that the 14.4 driver works just fine with Lightroom 6/CC but, the 14.9, 14.12 and beta do not.

If you want to use acceleration, and you do because its nice, you'll need to revert back to this older driver.

Why they release a product that only works with a year old video driver, I do not know.

Just to be clear the following DO NOT WORK.
http://www2.ati.com/drivers/amd-catalyst-omega-14.12-with-dotnet45-win8.1-64bit.exe
http://www2.ati.com/drivers/beta/amd-catalyst-15.4beta-64bit-win8.1-apr9.exe
http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/desktop/previous/detail?os=Windows%208.1%20-%2064&rev=14.9

But this one
http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/desktop/previous/detail?os=Windows%208.1%20-%2064&rev=14.4

does work.