On this morning it took me to Glendora so I can take my mom to a dentist appointment. It was early, I was hungry, and I couldn’t stray too far from the dentist office. I consulted the oracles, and they spoke of Angelo’s.
Overall, a good breakfast burrito. They nailed the just right amount of cheese, it had some stringiness in bites, but wasn’t a thick lump of cheese spanning the burrito either. Bacon was crispy, but not overcooked. They gave it a little toast when rolled, but not too much so that the tortilla was cracking.
On the egg front, they’re good, totally fine, but I feel a little too much. Conversely when it comes to the potatoes, it was hard to tell there was any. Mostly the mushy part, but not any of the crispy bits, and the crispy bits matter.
Size wise, this burrito was perfectly sized, just enough for me, but some big eaters might want a bit more. The salsa on the side was good, totally fine, a smidge of spice. Went well with the burrito.
In conclusion, they make a good breakfast burrito, would get one again if in the area, but probably wouldn’t seek it out if I was at home.
I’ve been on this side of the valley for a while now, and still have not found a great breakfast burrito. Its not for a lack of places that make burritos, there’s plenty. So, there’s got to be some great ones out here, let’s find them.
Breakfast Burrito Baseline
This isn’t like a burger, where bun, meat, and cheese is all you need for a good baseline burger measurement. Different places make their burritos differently. So, let’s define a baseline burrito.
First, scrambled eggs, and a good tortilla are a must, easy, done.
Next, potatoes, this is where there’s a lot of variety. Some places have hash browns, other cubes, and some places even have large chunks of stewed potatoes. They are all good, but some are not ideal when it comes to being in a burrito – namely the stewed chunks of potato.
When it comes to meat there’s a lot of options out there, but once again, we’re looking for a baseline that all burritorias can meet. Based off of that, we’re down to bacon, ham and sausage for breakfast meats. Bacon probably being the most common of the bunch, so let’s go with that.
So, with that we have our breakfast burrito baseline:
Tortilla
Scrambled Eggs
Potatoes
Bacon
Everything else is bonus (cheese, avocado, pico de gallo). For the sake of science, whatever burrito a place has on its menu, un-modified, that’s closest to the baseline will be the one I order and use for the aforementioned scientific study. No substitutions, or add-ons.
Considerations
Now that delivery apps and ghost restaurants are thing, and there are definitely some good breakfast burritos on them, should they be included?
I’m leaning towards no. Mostly because of how regional some of these can be, and someone who is not ordering in my area may not be able to get one since they would be outside of it’s ‘area’. But they could drive out to any physical place to get a breakfast burrito should they want one, and not have to figure out how to be inside the geo fence that grants them access to a ghost restaurant on a delivery app.
I have one review cued up, and will continue to issue updates from the field. Stay tuned loyal reader.
Burrito Quest List of Excellence
Soon
The list will be updated as more quests are completed.
This bike has lived different ages. At first it had drop bars and track drops. Then it had risers and a basket. Now, It’s chill, not as aggressive generation 3.
Frame: IRO Mark V (group buy, diff tubing)
Wheels: Mavic Open Pro, Phil Wood hubs
Drivetrain: Sugino 75, Super Bee bottom bracket (ceramic)
Thompson stem and seat post
Brooks saddle
Velo Orange bars
Vans grips
There’s a lot of miles on this frame and wheelset. This has been all over Los Angeles and parts of Southern California. Beaches, deserts, gravel, dirt, and dry lakebeds.
I got started with film cameras. My first “real” camera was a Canon AE-1 with a 50mm lens. Still have it. It was a manual affair, the only automatic feature it has is what gives it it’s name – Automatic Exposure. It was one of the first on the market with that feature when it came out, but I never used it much.
Digital came around, I ended up getting a Nikon D300, which was great, but hefty camera. Loved using it, no frills, no dumb features, just a solid workhorse, it took pictures, that’s it. After some time I got tired of lugging it around – I have climbed volcanoes with it strapped to my back, carried across multiple cities.
I started to dabble in compact cameras, mostly due to the timing – this was just before micro 4/3rd and mirror less cameras were around. I had a Sony, Canon, and Lumix. They all took decent pictures, but never really captured images the way I saw them. I had to do quite a bit of post to get colors and feel right. It was more than just getting the “hazy layer” out. But at the end of the day, those cameras never really scratched the manual itch. I found myself having to dive through menus to help get the image I wanted, but doing so would pull me away from what’s going on, and take so long the shot would be lost to time by the time I had the camera ready to go.
A few years went by, I found comfort in my phone camera and a camera app called Vignette, which let me dial in a faux-instant film look I liked and used that. But the hunger remained. I missed taking pictures.
I picked up a Sony a6100, my first mirrorless. It had some of the manual settings I liked at my fingertips, it took good pictures. It had a ton of features I never really took advantage of, I mostly kept it in aperture priority mode. This one was close, so close, but still felt odd, clumsy for me to really use.
I always had my eye on the Fujifilm cameras, but they were hard to get. You either had to be ready to buy when they went up for pre-sale or be around at the right time when stores would get re-stocked, and I was never able to get the stars to align.
Until this last November. We decided to go to Maui for our annual vacation and I thought it “Hey, lets see if I can get a Fuji for the trip”. What do you know, most of them were in stock, I had a wide selection to choose from, all a couple days away.
DISCLAIMER: I don’t care about megapixels and censor sizes, this is the wrong place for in depth technical discussion, that stuff is boring.
Interface
It feels great in the hand, with a little bit of heft. The downside to it – for people with larger hands – is it can be a little hard to hold, not enough grip points. I ended up getting a thumb grip that fits in the hot shoe, feels like a 35mm SLR advance lever, sits right over the small wheel on the right backside of the camera, under/behind the expose compensation wheel on top. With that small addition, it makes it feel way more secure when holding it with a single hand.
Its not a compact camera, your not putting this in your pocket. Its still smaller, and lighter than a DSLR that’s for sure. If using a strap you can still keep it on the DL by tucking in front/behind your arm, and its not sticking out or swinging around.
It comes with a real chunky rope strap, which is fine and all, but a little bulky for my tastes. I mostly use a simple Peak Design strap (it has great adjustability on the fly).
This camera seems to be more geared towards someone primarily shooting in manual. You can put aperture and shutter in auto mode, but that’s about as far as it goes with automatic modes. Its easy to throw into auto mode right before you hand it off to someone to take a picture.
In auto the pictures come out ok, you can massage them into what you like, but sometimes misses the mark on what you want to be the priority when it comes to exposure, and it tends try and get an even balance which results some lost detail or muddiness.
Auto focus has been fine, no big problems. There’s a few different options that allow you to use the focus style you are used to. I found I like to use the lock-on style box to choose what I’m focusing on, and then shift back into the composure I want to shoot.
In regards to shooting there’s some small details that I absolutely love. The exposure preview when the shutter button is at the half way point is great. In manual focus mode, you can enable a little round preview bit in the middle that’s magnified to help you dial in you focus – something that’s always been a weak point of mine.
Most of the knobs, buttons and wheels are customizable. I found a setup that allows me to dial in most settings I tend to change frequently, without needing to pull my eye away from the viewfinder. That’s a big deal for me, when it comes the kind of camera I like to use.
For the rest of the stuff that’s not on knobs, the “Q” menu covers everything else you would need to change in situ. A single screen with a grid of config info, you either user the d-pad nub or the touch screen to change one of them. It even shows in the viewfinder, but I’ve found that when I do use the “Q” menu, I’m usually not looking through the viewfinder at that point.
In regards to the rest of the configs, their menus are huge, but well organized, and easy to navigate. Its totally fine and gets the job done.
The one complaint I have about any of the physical controls is the on/off switch. Maybe it’s my unit, I don’t know, but, its hard to catch a read on whether or not the switch is where it should be. It doesn’t have much of a detent, or bias towards the side its tipped to. It doesn’t have that nice click of my Nikon’s on/off switch. You can easily have it in a halfway point, in which the camera will not be on, it doesn’t come on until the switch is completely at the end of the on side of travel. I find myself visually confirming the status after I use it, which, is a bummer. I never needed to do that with any other digital camera I’ve used regularly. I also checked a friends XV100 and that one had a nice tactile on/off switch.
Lastly, the Film mode wheel and screen sensor are a bad mix to have so close together. Because of where the wheel is, you tend to reach for it with your left hand, which then covers the sensor, which – depending on how you have it config’d, but it’s setup this way by default – will turn the screen off, and activate the viewport. You end up doing some odd reach over hand contortion.
Connectivity
The camera has both bluetooth and wifi on it. Their app is pretty ok. You can use it as a remote, with access to a some settings, or you can see what’s on the card and transfer photos to your phone. The remote is pretty good, they know why your using it, and give you way more exposure options than what the camera has available via dials. You can tap the preview to set the focus. Its fine, it works. The only downside is the low frame rate preview, its behind by a split second too, so you have to pause for a second when adjusting the cameras composure. Also, its can be wonky about connecting, it was rare, but every now and then, it took a couple tries to get it to connect to my phone.
Post Experience
This is one of the huge surprises I got with this camera. I’ve found that in post there’s a lot less ‘haze’ that I need to adjust out. There’s still a tiny bit of adjustment, but its usually pretty close as-is, the closest I’ve had with any digital camera I’ve used.
I still find myself bumping the contrast, but find I’m needing to use curves a lot less, because levels usually covers what I need. Color corrections are usually pretty minimal if any at all.
The film dial/recipes thing is fine, but to be honest, not for me. They each look fine, and sure, if I really tried I could find some use for them. But all of that is stuff I would rather apply in post, and not when taking the picture. For the most part I flip between the regular, vivid, and black and white modes.
Pros
Great UI
Great lens assortment
Solid build quality
Cons
Short Battery Life
Meh on/off switch
Fiddly sensor by film wheel
On the plus side, menus and customizable physical buttons make this a camera you can adjust to fit your need. I had no problems finding all sorts of lens for this camera. I found a crazy fish eye lens for super cheap, and even a lens that uses a plastic lens out of a disposable camera.
The camera looks good and feels good, which ends up getting noticed, with could be both good and bad. When handing it some one to get a shot of me and the group, they have commented on how nice the camera is. Its cool, but I’m not that crazy about it, I like to be a little more on the DL.
When it comes to the cons, the battery life is short, but isn’t that much of a problem. It’s a standard battery they use in other cameras, so you can easily get spares. But, since it charges over USB-C, who needs spare batteries? You can give it charge with anything you would charge your phone with.
One day in Maui, I forgot to charge the camera the night before, and the camera was dead when I went to use it the next morning at our first stop. I gave it a zap in car on our way to the next spot and that was enough to bring it back to life and start shooting again. But the batteries for are not expensive or hard to get if you just want to keep an extra in your bag, think I’m ok just using USB.
The Film wheel/sensor thing can be configured to not be a problem, but it’ll probably come at the cost of battery life. You can disable the sensor, but both the screen and the viewport will be on at all times. I like the switchover and lack of glow from the big screen when your looking through the viewport, so I’m just learning to live with it.
Over all I have been pleasantly surprised by this camera. The quality of shots, the feel and overall usability of it have been great, with a minimum of a learning curve.
It’s just a good camera, one that is capable of taking better pictures than I am able to take. But, at the end of the day, its a tool, and one that takes practice to use better. I am glad to have something so capable that can allow me to grow and improve. I really don’t need a lot of features, when it’s basic operation does everything I want.
When I started to shop around for a cargo bike, I wanted to get an idea of what people were riding in areas like mine. I never see any cargo bikes, but there has to be some out there right? When I go to a Ciclavia or similar, they come out of the woodwork and I see a few, mostly long tails, but there are some front loaders around too.
I wanted to make sure it can be ridden, and not stuck with odd gear ratios or being too heavy to push up hills.
