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Digital 35mm SLRs?
pipingguy asks: "Canon has released the first(?) 'low-priced' digital 35mm SLR with interchangeable lenses with the Digital Rebel. I've owned a few digital and non-digital cameras over the years (and am by no means a photography expert), and most annoying was the lack of manual zoom and focus, not to mention the barely-noticeable millisecond delay between button click and shutter closure. Can any owners of this and other digitals provide some opinions on how this new model compares to the more expensive digital 35mm's and typical $300 SLRs? Is it time to buy?"
Well, that's the ultimate question the poster is asking, isn't it?
Historically, traditional photography has been a "rich kid's pastime," too. Just ask anybody who goes to art school for illustration what they think of the photo majors.
The question is whether we've got to the point where, in terms of TCO, you will come up even whether you use a traditional camera or a digital one.
Sure, digital cameras are expensive. But they have advantages:
- No film costs. Sure, you might have to buy CompactFlash, but those are completely re-usable.
- No darkroom costs
- Making hard copies of digital photographs can be expensive, but if you don't actually need hard copies (say, you're shooting for print publication), then you've got no costs there, either
- Digital cameras are more versatile than traditional cameras. You don't need to change film to change light or speed settings, for instance. This might mean you really only need one camera, while a serious traditional photographer might feel the need to buy and keep several
Bear in mind that I'm not much of a photographer at all, so I'm sort of pulling this list out of my ass. But I've been wondering, lately, whether a nice camera like a digital SLR might allow me to take better pictures, which might in turn inspire me to take more pictures. I really don't think I want to fool around with all the darkrooms, developing, etc... I'm much more comfortable with Photoshop. So digital is definitely the way to go, for me.But is an expensive digital camera really worth it yet?
Breakfast served all day!
Her sister owns a Canon Rebel 35mm camera, and my wife has been a die-hard film person. In the last week, she hasn't touched our 35mm camera.
The digital rebel can use all the lenses, filters, tripod, flash, etc from her 35mm, takes amazing pictures, and is SLR. (she wouldn't touch a non-slr camera)
The auto-focus is great, the shutter speed is better then any other digital camera we've played with (and very adjustable). Manual focusing gives her all the control she'd normally have.
It snaps shots a little slow, about 4 in the first two seconds, then one a second after that, but for a digital at 6.3mp that's not too shabby.
In my opinion, this is *THE* digital camera to buy right now... and at the rate I'm going at, I'll need to buy a second one since my wife won't let me have time with ours.
You can find a decent review of it here.
The thing that really makes you want to take more pictures is not so much the quality as the cost of seeing the results. With a film camera, I was always worried about the cost of film and developing, and that made me think before taking a picture. The result was that I never brought my camera with me to take casual photos, and when I did bring it I hardly took any pictures anyway. With a digital it's really easy to take tons of pictures because I know that processing them is as easy (and cheap) as downloading them to my computer. That means that my thought process has moved from "should I take this picture" to "why shouldn't I take this picture". The result is that I take a lot more pictures, and some of them actually turn out well.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Digital cameras are still relatively expensive, compared to their film counterparts:
Basic compact ~ $300 vs. $50
Basic SLR ~ $1000 vs. $300
What you gain though, especially once you leave the basic end of the market alone, is a fast, self-guided education in photography.
I bought the Sony DSC-V1 (a $600 higer-end compact). By that point, you're getting in to a camera which can just point and shoot but also lets you manually adjust apperature and shutter settings, add on flash units, etc. And the thing is, if you have any kind of an interest in photography, you will start playing with those settings.
I'd borrowed a film SLR from relatives in the past. I blew through about a dozen rolls of film and had next to no idea what I ended up with.
With digital, I blow through about fifty shots in a half an hour, reviewing each one as I go and, with the LCD review screen, learning a little bit more about how to improve the next shot. Then I end up ditching the thirty or so that didn't work and repeating. By the end of a session, I know I've got shots which really captured the depth of field I was after, that framed the subject well, that had the balance of light across the scene that I wanted, and so on. I've also probably stumbled on a couple of shots I didn't even expect.
Most importantly though, I've learned to take risks that I would never have done with film. While my wife drove tonight, I was shooting the sunset almost as fast as I could get shots off. I would never have even tried it with film - what kind of idiot would use an unstabilised setup in a moving vehicle on San Diego's bumpy freeways? With digital, it didn't matter. Worst case, I wasted a bit of time, blanked the memory stick and recharged the battery. As it happened, I got the most incredible sunset image I've taken yet.
You can get the same education with film, from an instructor. No doubt an instructor can teach you many things you'd never have learned by yourself. But a simple question for the slashdot readership: Who taught you the software you use professionally? I'm guessing the typical slashdot-type much prefers tinkering with things and finding out for themselves and that's where digital offers itself much more freely than film.
It's more expensive to start. Once you start adding camera accessories and good photoprinters, it gets expensive fast and it works out about the same to print (save you only print the perfect shots, you can review on the computer or LCD). What it does though is give you much more freedom to explore with faster feedback. To me, that's been worth every penny and it's worth the several thousand I'm budgeting for in several months time as the freedom and education of cheaper digital has convinced me I want to try more and more still.
bottom line: dont buy a digital SLR, unless you really need a SLR.
I think in part you're right.
You need an SLR camera if you want to:
1) Shoot in dimly lit conditions (i.e. f/1.2 ISO 1600) without a flash and use the results for anything serious.
2) Be able to get a nice, shallow depth of field (i.e. blurred background) with good bokeh (pleasing "blur") for portraits or graphic shots.
3) Shoot wildlife or other "field" shots involving long telephotos or extreme lighting or weather conditions with any kind of sincerity or usability.
4) Shoot action of any kind that might need the likes of continuous tracking focus, zero shutter lag, and the ability to fire off shots in sequence just as fast as you can hit the shutter.
You do not need an SLR camera to:
5) Shoot the kids' birthday parties.
6) Take pictures of your pets.
7) Take vacation snapshots.
BUT... with that said... If you know how to properly use an SLR camera, know something about photography, and you have quality lenses, your results in the case of #5, #6 or #7 will be much better with an SLR than with a point-and-shoot.
Do be aware of the quality lenses caveat, however. Far too many amateur SLR users, film and digital, see the camera body as the "real" investment. They drop $1000 on a camera body and then go to their local camera store and buy a plastic 24-300mm zoom for $80.00 and wonder why the pictures look like they were taken through a dirty window in a rainstorm.
So I suppose corollary to your "don't buy an SLR unless you need one" post is "and don't buy an SLR unless you can afford lenses that will do it justice because a camera body can only capture what the lens shows it."
If you can't afford to spend significantly more on your lenses than you did on your SLR body (whether film or digital), you will definitely get better photos with a Sony digicam.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
For a full discussion on this topic, try a photo.net search for the "film vs digital debate." It keeps popping up, and the photographers are a lot more adequately suited to argue it than us geeks.
That said, I am a photographer, so let me summarize the debate briefly. Aside from the silliness ("Digital isn't photography!" "Film is obsolete!!") from both sides, the central issue is the quality of the final product. Clearly, for many applications, digital makes significantly more sense. Obviously any web-based service, as well as virtually all major publications, and a great many quick-turn-around studio applications make good use of digital.
Film, on the other hand, still holds tenuously to the market of photographers who enjoy photography for the sake of photography. While digital is unarguably easier, and at the high end shares similar quality with average 35mm films, it has several major weaknesses. First, in color applications, saturation and dynamic range are typically still wrong. Great strides have been made, however, so most normal people can't tell the difference anymore.
The great bastion of film-based photography, Black and White, is still incomparably better than the digital equivalent. Nothing compares to a print made from the 4x5" negative made using a Korean War Era press camera. The rich, full tonality and smooth gradation are impossible to match digitally. The complete lack of grain is also quite notable -- no matter how good the camera, short of printing on a dye sublimation printer, there will always be some semblance of digital remaining in the prints. However, with the massive 4x5" negs, grain totally disappears, leaving an ultra-smooth, incredibly rich photograph.
So the bottom line -- digital is gaining more and more advantages over film every day. Film still has the financial advantage, and still holds B&W, especially in the medium and large formats.