« July 2008 | Main | September 2008 »
August 28, 2008
[REVIEW—CANON EOS 1000D camera]
Price: $1000 with 18-55 lens
Affordable entry to a great system
The low-down: This 10 megapixel camera is the first SLR from Canon to break (just) the $1000 barrier. The construction uses a lot of obvious plastic, including for the lens mount. It is small and light and is well suited to small hands. Ergonomics are just so-so. There is no body top camera status LCD so the main LCD serves that purpose. In “live view” the status information disappears. The LCD screen is small (65mm). The penta-mirror viewfinder is a little dim and cramped compared with a good pentaprism.
Like: The picture quality is excellent, especially when a better quality Canon lens is fitted. Dynamic range is wide and the Auto Lighting Optimiser is useful in tricky situations, such as backlighting. Auto focus and exposure are very fast and accurate. Resolution and colour, with a good lens, are outstanding.
Dislike: The “live view” is ridiculous. The user guide recommends manual focussing in live view and yet Canon claim that they include the function because compact camera owners trading up to a DSLR demand it. But when they find that by holding the camera at arm’s length, as they are accustomed to doing, they lose auto focus will they be pleased? If you want auto focus in live view then you must focus first in the conventional way, using the optical viewfinder, and then switch to the live view mode. By which time your subject will be over the horizon. Why do they do it?
Verdict: Stupid gimmicks apart, this is a good way to buy into a system than will grow with the user’s expertise. And when the time comes to move up to a better body the Canon lenses will still be in the bag to use on the new camera. And as decent lenses generally cost more than the price of the EOS 1000D camera body this is an important consideration. So the two good reasons to buy this camera are Canon’s outstanding image quality and their extensive range of options and accessories.
*
Posted by terry at 12:27 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
[ MORE FOR LESS ]
In 1991 Kodak fitted a 1.3 megapixel sensor into a Nikon F3 film SLR, called it the Kodak DSC-100, and sold it for around $25,000. Miniature file storage was not invented at that time so you had to carry a big digital recording device to store the pictures.
Today we are reviewing a Canon DSLR that weighs 450 grams, has a 10 megapixel sensor and costs $999. Aren’t you glad you waited?
The Canon 1000D completes the line-up of sub $1000 cameras from major manufacturers. From advertisements in these pages we see that Nikon, Sony, Olympus and Pentax all have cameras under $1000. It’s worth having a look at what you get and what you miss in entry level DSLRs.
We spotted the OLYMPUS E-420 at $780. This is a well made, small, lightweight camera. The kit lens is one of the best. It has the Four Thirds image sensor which is smaller than other DSLRS, so images are a little noisier. On the other hand lenses are smaller and lighter. There is no in-camera image stabilisation and Olympus does not make an IS lens.
The PENTAX K200D ($900) is the successor to the camera that broke the $1000 barrier, the K100D. This has in-camera image stabilisation. And it is the only camera in this group to have a body-top LCD. It is special because it is not a cut-down version of a dearer camera. The Pentax kit lens is a good one. Image quality is excellent. And it runs on rechargeable AA batteries which seem to last forever. The only downside is a slight crudeness in finish and feel. The K100D Super, a terrific camera, is still advertised in some places for $500 with a good Sigma lens.
The NIKON D60 ($850) has the brand’s virtues of excellent ergonomics and a good kit lens. Finish and feel are just about the best in this group and it is delightfully responsive. Sadly, it lacks an in-body auto focus drive and that means that the range of auto focus lenses available is restricted to those that have focus motors in the lens itself. Nikon is slowly remaking its lens range, but genuine Nikkor lenses are not cheap. There are some good third party lenses with motors, particularly from Sigma. There is no exposure auto bracketing – cheap!
The SONY A200 ($890 with two lenses) is a well made camera that has the build quality we expect from the company. The basic design is carried over from the Konica Minolta, which Sony acquired. That means there are plenty of Minolta lenses around second hand. Which is just as well, because the Sony kit lenses are not great. However, Sony has a partnership with Carl Zeiss and they make fabulous lenses for this camera. You buy into a good system.
We have even seen a Canon 450D advertised here for $999 with an 18-55mm lens. That is an astonishing bargain. When you buy Canon you get superb picture quality, and you also buy into a great system of lenses and accessories.
What don’t you get? Entry level DSLRs lack true pentaprism viewfinders and they have a less luxurious build and feel, with more plastic. And which would we recommend? There’s not a dud amongst them, but if you can track down a Pentax K100D Super for $500 you will have done well.
*
Posted by terry at 12:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 14, 2008
[REVIEW—CANON Pixma iP100 portable printer]
Price: $450
Excellent prints at a price
The low-down: This little printer (32cm long by 18.5cm deep and 62cm thick and weighing 2kg) is designed to go anywhere with a laptop computer. It comes with a rechargeable battery. There are two small ink cartridges, one black and one four-colour. Paper up to A4 can be used. There are USB, infrared and PictBridge connections but no memory card slots. Bluetooth is an option. Setup is easy and head alignment is a one-step process. Canon’s excellent automated Easy-Photo Print is included.
Like: The output from the printer is consistently good after some fiddling with the print parameters. Images printed tended to be a little darker than on screen. Print speed is good, faster than some standard photo printers. The black ink is pigment and the colours are Chromalife 100, so print fade should not be an issue.
Dislike: The price is inexplicably high. In the US this machine sells for AUD $258. Why does it cost $200 more here? Neither GST nor market size will justify this difference. And American reviewers are critical of what they consider a high price in their shops!
Verdict: The combination of small size and light weight, together with the respectable print speed, make this printer an ideal companion for a business laptop. Because it doesn’t hang around when printing it is possible to turn out printed pages from a presentation without making participants wait impatiently. The ink cartridges (black $15, colour $30) are minuscule, so we expect that it will not be an economical printer to use, but Canon do provide advice on settings that reduce ink usage without affecting print quality too badly. If only the price were more reasonable – after all there are printer/scanner/copier combined units that cost half as much and produce prints of equal or better quality. But, of course, they are not portable. It seems we must expect to pay more for less.
*
Posted by terry at 04:45 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
[ THE FINE ART OF POINTING AND SHOOTING ]
MOTOR CAR ROAD TESTERS, as we know, pretty much confine their assessments to German cars that cost more than $120,000. And why not? They only have space to review a few of the hundreds of new models released every year, so why not indulge yourself with the best?
Just so with camera reviewers. You may be forgiven for concluding, on the evidence of Imaging, that digital cameras are all single lens reflex and cost more than $2000. Our excuse is that they are so nice. And trying them out for a week or two is as near as we are going to get to luxury in this life.
Anyway, we are mindful of the fact that for most happy snappers the digital point-and-shoot is the camera de jour. And we doubt that the photographer has yet been born who has fully exploited the potential of the pocket digicam.
Straight out of the box the compacts are set to just about the worst possible shooting parameters, and the way to improve pictures is by changing the default settings.
First, switch the camera from Auto to a setting – perhaps Manual or Program – that gives control of the functions to the user. Left on Auto the camera will choose ISO speed, shutter speed, aperture, auto focus method, metering and flash use. Not good enough. You need to show the camera who is boss.
Generally speaking it is best to keep the ISO as low as possible, which on most compacts means ISO 80 or 100. The lower the ISO the lower the image noise. The trade off, of course, is that shutter speeds are going to be longer or apertures wider. Here, chez Imaging, we cut our photographic teeth on Kodachrome which had an ISO of 16. When it was increased to 32 we thought all our Christmases had come at once. So don’t whinge to us about the problems with ISO100. Just get on with it.
Then you should fix the auto focusing method. By default all new digicams are set to “face recognition”. This is beguilingly clever but not the best way to focus. Plunge into the menus and set the focus to centre spot. Then, when taking a photo of the Adored Offspring, centre the focus spot on an eye, half depress the shutter button and hold it there and then reframe.
Flash should be turned off all the time, except for dimly lit parties and strongly backlit faces, where a bit of flash fill can do wonders. On-camera flash has the subtle illumination qualities of a nearby nuclear explosion, turning subjects’ eyes a hellish red. Also turn off Digital Zoom. This is a nasty feature that produces ghastly results.
Exposure metering should be reset to either Centre Weighted or Spot. Spot metering measures the light from a small area in the centre of the viewfinder, which makes it easier to follow the golden rule of digital camera metering – measure the light from the brightest spot in the image. This doesn’t always work, but in general it is better to have dark shadows than blown highlights.
And never forget Golden Rule Number 2 – digi snaps are free, so just keep firing away until you get it right.
*
Posted by terry at 04:43 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 09, 2008
[REVIEW—SIGMA 10-20mm EX DC HSM Lens]
Price: $800
Outstanding
The low-down: This wide angle zoom lens, with a film equivalent focal length range of 15 to 30mm, is one of Sigma’s superior line of zooms. The HSM refers to the hypersonic focus motor, which is indeed very fast and very quiet. The lens construction is superb and typical of Sigma’s better lenses. The crinkle finish on exterior surfaces feels pleasant and the mechanics are absolutely outstanding. Both the zoom and focus ring are smooth and well damped. The maximum aperture of f4 is not fast, but it is par for this type of lens. At 20mm it drops to f5.6. It is threaded for a 77mm filter.
Like: The lens is remarkably free of objectionable distortions. In fact at 10mm distortion is only extreme and noticeable in the corners, if you look hard. Resolution and general sharpness are excellent. And the auto focus is a delight. Third party lenses are usually a little noisy in the auto focus mechanism, but not this one.
Dislike: There is little to criticise about the lens. Vignetting is apparent, but that is also par for the type. And it is easy enough to remove in Photoshop.
Verdict: Extreme wide angle lenses are a lot of fun because they provide a new perspective on the world. Even for portraits, where the rule of thumb is telephoto-is-better, the wide angle can integrate the subjects with their environment in a way that creates a pictorial biography in a flash. And for architectural photography, such as the inside of a cathedral, a very wide angle is indispensable. The Sigma excels in such situations. What’s more the price of this lens makes it a winner. The Canon equivalent costs $1400. The serious competitor for the Sigma in this configuration is the excellent Tokina 12-24mm zoom. The Sigma’s HSM focussing gives it a slight edge. It pained us to send it back.
*
Posted by terry at 02:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
[ EYEBALL TO EYEBALL ]
If you fancy yourself as Ernest Hemingway with a camera and you are looking for photo opportunities of the big game kind, then you could hardly do better than pop over to Tanzania and take a safari in the Ngorong Goro crater.
On the other hand, if your green conscience won’t come at the enormous carbon footprint created by taking the heavier-than-air flying machine to Africa then you might consider the Werribee Open Range zoo.
We went on Werribee safari last week and had a good time making friends with rhinos, hippos and giraffes. And taking their photos with the newest Olympus digital SLR, the E-520. (A full review is coming soon) And this little camera has some features that suit it well to wildlife photography.
The lens we used was a 70–300mm Zuiko zoom. On the Olympus, with its Four Thirds sensor, this is equivalent to 140–600mm on a film camera, and that is an impressive reach. On a camera with an APS sized sensor 600mm would mean a heavy lens. On the Olympus it is compact and light.
Still, hand holding a camera-lens combination at 600mm when standing on the back of a vibrating truck on a freezing, shivery morning, is impossible. Or so we thought until we saw how effective the Olympus in-camera vibration reduction is. Shots that should have been blurred were pin sharp. This is just about the most effective image stabilisation we have seen.
The charming thing about the Werribee zoo is that the humans are kept in the cages and the animals roam around, gawking at the intruding truck load of dangerous predators. This meant that there were times when the 70–300 was not wide enough. When Tony, the giraffe, stuck his head under the canopy to get a closer look at the visitors we needed a very quick change to a wide angle lens.
The whole experience made us reflect on the matter of depth of field. This expression, DOF, refers to the distance between the spot in focus closest to the camera to the spot in focus furthest from the camera. When an awe-inspiring rhino comes rumbling up to the truck you want to get everything, from the tip of his horn to his scaly rump, in focus. But at the same time we like to keep distracting background stuff blurred.
DOF is related to aperture diameter – the smaller the aperture the deeper the focus and the larger the aperture the shallower the focus. But aperture diameter is also related to the size of the sensor. It is difficult to achieve a shallow DOF with a compact camera because of the relative sizes of the sensor and the lens diaphragm. Conversely, with a full frame sensor (35mm film area) it can sometimes be hard to get the desired depth of field in low light.
The Four Thirds sensor, as used by Olympus, Panasonic and Leica, gives a little less DOF compared with a compact and a little more compared with other DSLRs – assuming light, focal length and exposure are equal. This little extra latitude in focussing can be a bonus.
All in all nearly as good as Ngorong Goro. Now if only they would throw in some lions with the zebras and giraffes, for the sake of safari verisimilitude…
*
Posted by terry at 02:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack