Analogue vs Digital.

You don't need a digital camera for those sort of shots!

 

Depends on the camera. It's not inherent to digital cameras. The one I am getting has a whole 67ms delay, which is less than most of the fastest film SLRs (excluding fixed-mirror models).

 

All 4 Canon Ixus Digital Point and shoot cameras that I have bought all have this weakness. They make very good present for parents and family. Especially I get to play with them for a few weeks 'to make sure they work' and see how each generation appear to have improved yet again in all areas. This delay you mentioned have almost become not an issue. The way I see it the tool is only as good as the user skill to work around their strength and weakness aquired by experience. These digicams have altered photography as I know it since picking up the hobby in college days. I have the 'unfortunate' experience to have a flatmate who had turn his whole bedroom into a permanent darkroom. At least it make me realise photography do not stop at pressing the shutter only. Now you could do all that and more with suitable computer softwares and with these latest range of user friendly printers in the comfort of your desk if you wish.

 

wolfgang,
fine if you are taking pictures of still life, landscapes etc. but if you are trying to capture your childs first bike ride, them on a roller coaster, etc. then it's very annoying. taking photos is meant to be fun, not some sort of temporal puzzle. my phone has a slightly faster response than my camera so i find myself using that more. i was just wondering if there were any digital cameras (of the p.a.s. variety - digi slr's are too expensive at the moment) that didn't suffer.
cheers


julian.
cheers

julian

 

The other issue julian is that many people mis-use the camera. They point it and then stab at the button. Most (I've not come across one that doesn't) have a two-pressure shutter button, where the first pressure sets up the focus and metering and makes the camera ready to take the shot pretty quickly at the second pressure. When people stab at the button in one go, the camera has to sort out its focus and metering before taking the shot.

 

Julian, That was my bugbear as well with the earliest version of P&S digicam. You are right to say it is an important feature that all camera should have. They have improve the loading (more correctly copying the image on storage media) time a lot so at least you could get another chance to get it right should you missed the previous event. The latest versions are much better but still not as good as the response time of my manual focus NikonFE shutter. As Isaac suggest you could improve things a lot with better technique by half pressing first in anticipation of the moment you would like to capture. SLR always have many advantage but as you say cost is an important issue (and the weight) but there is absolutely no basis to claim digital photos are any worst then film based photos now.

 

Hi Julian. This Ricoh claims to be extremely fast. Might be worth a look.

 

I'm still with my ancient Olympus OM10... Cost me £100 10 years ago including Olympus 28mm lens, and still takes great pictures (especially if I focus it correctly, none of yer auto rubbish )
And that's why I haven't bought a digital SLR yet, because they cost the same as say, a Bronica medium format (you'd need some amount of pixels to beat one of those!).
Might buy a point and shoot though - Anyone got any recommendations for something that's 4meg or so, and is reliable (I had a Samsung 35mm zoom P&S which died after about 4 years, plastic-bodied sh*te!)

 

I know where you are coming from as my favourite camera is still the manual focus Nikon FE. Nevertheless, I am not expecting they will ever release another toys as reliable and as satisfying to own as those generation of cameras for anything less then say £400. This Canon 350D is the only SLR has tempts me to change. Got a quick look at the shop this morning and it does feel the part.

As for reliability, the first generation Canon Digital Ixus that my bother took over is still going strong and I have a suspicion it probably would out last mine bought last year. My personal rule of thumb is if you get a Jap camera it would difficult to go wrong. Four years is a long time for this new format. Do you people think we have yet to see more of this evolution? I know marketing hyperbole is very real but in the case with digital photography toys it does feels relatively justifying.

 

The megapixel race is slowing down. Improvements over time will be better high-ISO performance, possibly seeing a successor to Bayer grid sensors (Something along the lines of Foveon, but with decent performance), etc. The other thing will be prices coming down. The 350D is really not a bad starting point. I ordered my 20D yesterday.

 

And now I am reminded of one of the prime reasons I'm making the switch. I just got the last roll of film I shot with the EOS 3 back... The negatives have been badly scratched every which way, the prints are washed out (and there's no exposure problem on the negatives) and have an unpleasant yellow/green colour cast and the machine is slightly out of focus giving the entire print a softness (which is not due to the lenses used, from prior experience and their use on the digital). It seems that with the meteoric rise of digital and the massive drop in use of processing labs, the labs are not taking proper care of the machines and print and handling quality have gone through the floor.

I take delivery of my 20D on thursday.

 

sorry if this has been done before on this thread but can you use normal EOS SLR lenses with the new D range of Canon kit?

 

From being intially anti digital I am now sold on it.

It's overwhelming advantage over film is it lets you see the result straight away so you can see whether you need to retake - plus of course you can delete the bad ones - hell, with film you have to try to remember what you've taken. Even if the processing costs more, whereas you might only get 50% usable shots from film, with digital you only print the good ones.

The shutter delay can be annoying (as I found with my Canon A70) but with my Nikon D70 it is virtually eliminated. The other small problems I found with the A70 are barrell distortion, inability to limit depth of field and some purple fringing. Again, with the D70 none of this is an issue and with a fast lens (50mm F1.4 Nikkor) you can blur the background out a treat (plus that lens turns into a perfect 75mm portrait lens).

I still have my Contax T2 which is beautiful and takes stunning shots but I just can't see myself putting another film through it.

Matt.

 

My aforementioned Olympus 1400XL (bearing in mind this is a SIX YEAR OLD digicam) has the twin-pressure button AND a 5-image buffer, so doesn't suffer from this problem and can take 5 images in quick succession (think it's ~1 second), but it can ONLY do 5 images, then writes them to the ancient smartmedia card... My Fuji is non-focus, but it's totally shite compared to the Olympus.

My Nikon F-301 is a far superior tactile experience, but it's film. Wish they'd make a databack-style cassette for it with all the digital chip and memory gubbins built-in; one concept did come out, but turned out to be vapourware(TM).

 

Am I correct in thinking that a lot of delay in early digital cameras was the actual time taken to write to the media, which I belive they have made better in the media domain now days, thus adding new media to a old camera will help speed up the button press to actual picture taken time. ?

 

Philip - All canon DSLRs take Canon EF lenses. Additionally, the 300D, 350D and 20D take the new EF-S lenses as well.

Matt- the D70 is by all accounts a fine camera.

Dom - you should find the D70 trounces the F301 in all respects. Mind you, there are digital cameras out there far faster than the olympus you mention... the 20D I'm getting will do 5fps for 36 exposures, then 1.7fps for another 25 before dropping to shooting as the buffer space becomes available (so speed depends on your cf card).

 

Interesting bit of news has just broken... Nikon have decided to encrypt the white balance data in their raw (.NEF) files. That means that it isn't possible for a third party RAW converter to read this WB data so all files opened will default to a standard WB value unless you use Nikon Capture. For most people this adds a further step in the workflow just so that nikon can sell and extra $100 piece of software. So far the reaction to this has been "That's it, I'm switching" from a lot of people (not helped by Nikon Professional Services reputation), although there are a few saying "So what?". We'll see how this one pans out, but most commentary sites (and Thomas Knoll, who wrote photoshop) think that nikon just shot themselves in the foot with a very large artillery piece.

 

WTF? Thanks Isaac I hadn't seen that. At the moment it only seems to apply to the new D2H and D2X though I will now be wary of Firmware updates for the D70. I do have Nikon capture but I usually use ARC.
It's a daft idea and hopefully Nikon will see sense.

 

Indeed it currently applies only to D2x and D2h (or maybe only the D2Hs). However, I'd expect this "feature" to find its way to the forthcoming D70s and D50 models (just as canon's data verification capability has found its way down the ranks). I have read one comment from someone who's resorted to using JPEG output on his D2x for this reason.

 

I bought a Pentax *st (what a bloody stupid name that is!) at the weekend, spurred on by their £100 cashback offer. Unfortunately the shop did not provide me with the requisite voucher, so I'm having to wait a while for the cashback.