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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?"
My uncle was a die hard film person... but always enjoyed playing with digital... just never in his studio.
However, in the last 12 months he has converted his entire studio over to digital. His work still looks great... even blown out huge.
Anybody other pro/semi-pros out there made the switch?
Does everybody agree that digital is as good as film now?
Davak
The advantage to one of the digital SLRs versus pro-sumer models is no shutter lag. My 10D is very quiet and takes the picture when I press the button, not several ms later like my Olympus 3040 used to do.
As the proud owner of a Fuji S2-Pro, I can say I love the DSLR concept. When I got my first SLR almost 10 years ago, I lamented the lack of a digital SLR and since then had been searching around for a good D-SLR. Last year, they finally came within reach, but I had to save up for awhile to be able to afford the $2000+ pricetag.
I can honestly say that i went from taking 60 photos per month with my old 35mm SLR to taking 100+ per week, all without any processing costs.
The most important things to consider are:
1) battery life - Your photo shooting is usually limited by the battery life of your camera unless you shoot in super-high resolution or RAW modes.
2) memory size - Buy as big a memory card as youcan afford. Size does matter. I LOVE to take advantage of the RAW shooting modes, but the photos are dozens of MB each.
3) memory speed - when shooting bigger files, you will notice the speed of your writable media. You can fill up the buffer of modern DSLR cameras fairly quickly in rapid-shoot mode (unless you have a Nikon D2 with the 40-shot buffer).
But overall, I prefer Nikon lenses (Nikkor is really nice), but Cannon is quite nice too. And for the price you can't beat this new DSLR.
Stewey
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
Now that the Digital Rebel is on slashdot, surely firmware hacks are on their way. Heck, it's only a matter of time before someone is running a linux server on it. But seriously...something that has not been mentioned is the included lens. The digital rebel comes with a specially designed 18-55mm zoom lens. The kit with this lens is $999. DSLR 101: in most digital slrs, the image sensor is a little smaller than a 35mm negative. So when you use a lens built for a 35mm camera, the focal length is effectively multiplied by 1.6, as the edges of the frame fall outside of the sensor and get cropped. So the included 18-55mm lens is equivalent to your typical 28-90mm zoom lens that comes with film rebels. It is also specially designed for the rebel and won't work on the 10D. A lot of people may point out that the 10D is better and only few hundred dollars more, but people should remember that the cheapest canon lens that is equivalent to the 18-55 is the 17-40L...at $799. So Digital rebel kit = $999, 10D "kit" = approx. $2299. That's not a small price gap. Of course, if you never shoot wide angle, it doesn't effect you.
Plus, people who are mildly interested in cameras develop a liking for a particular camera, and having to switch to a new one is an akward progression.
Yeah, I think the 1.6x focal length multiplier pretty much makes it a non-starter. Almost all of the DSLRs have this problem, except for the super high end (Kodak DCS 14n, (14 megapixels, christ!), Contax, and Canon 1D).
;)
Overall, the notion of trying to make digital cameras use the 35mm lenses isn't such a great idea. Either you have to use an image sensor that's too small, and as a result have the focal length multiplier. This makes it much harder to have wide angle lenses, plus the camera body is filled with stray light - not good.
Or, you try really hard to make a huge, full-frame image sensor, at great expense, and in the end it doesn't work as well. Sensors work best if the light hits at a high angle of incidence, and with a big sensor the angle is too low at the edges.
Personally, I really like Olympus's "four thirds" system, which is a new "standard" for DSLR lenses based on a 4/3" image sensor. I don't know that this system is gaining much popularity, though. But it's a great system - all the benefits of interchangable lenses, but it's lighter and smaller than 35mm cameras, and you don't have to make all the compromises attendant in trying to kludge the old lens systems onto a digital camera.
Anyway, that's what I'm waiting for - an affordable, standardized, interchangable lens system made for digital photography. In the meantime, I can afford to buy a lot of film for my old Olympus OM-2 with the $7000 I'm not spending on a DSLR.
I've had a Canon 10D for a few months now. The camera is absolutely superb -- I even have a 36" x 48" print of one of the shots I've taken with it hanging on my wall, and it impresses people when I tell them it was shot digitally.
That being said, I've found one major drawback: sensor dust. On one trip, I shot an image at F/22 that had a lot of blue sky in it. When I got home, I discovered little black specks and what could only be a hair showing up in the image. Cleaned the lenses and the mirror, took another sky shot, same problem.
It turns out that the dust and dirt is on the sensor. I haven't had it cleaned yet (I hate to part with it for that long, and unless I'm shooting at high F stop settings it doesn't show up much), but rumor has it that doing it yourself is a big no-no, so I'm unwiling to try it. Plan to have this camera cleaned every few months if your'e in to serious photography.
In other words, you'll end up with higher maintenance in return for your phenomenal photos.
Personally, I'm happy with it -- but if you're picky and don't like having it cleaned a lot, you're in for a disappointment unless you're *really* *really* careful not to get dust in it.
--ZS
-- sigs cause cancer.
I've been using a pair of Nikon SLR cameras since I took a photography class in college and got to use my parent's circa 1970 Nikkormat cameras. The "new" one was built at a point when auto-shutter speed was a novelty, but you still had to set the aperture yourself; the other one is fully manual. Learning photography on equipment like this really made me come to enjoy the balance among shutter speed, focal length, etc, and even if I'm just poking around I'd rather work with something like than any modern point & shoot.
On the other hand, I've got a little digital camera now, and the convenience of it does have a lot of appeal. I took this camera to take pictures of a Man or Astroman concert a few years ago, and it was very educational to be able to "shoot from the hip", get instant feedback on what was & wasn't working (hint: at a rock concert, there's plenty of light, so don't bother with the flash, and have fun with any camera shake you end up with). The picture quality might not be as great as film, but the flexibility is a gift in itself.
That has led me to start looking around for a new pair of SLRs, one film, one digital. Ideally, I'd like to be able to have the same set of lenses that could be mounted on both a film & a digital camera body, and since I've been happy with Nikon, I'd like to get their gear. But damn it's expensive -- the "low end" D100 lists from $1400 to 1700, and the high end ones -- which in some areas seem to have lower specs than the D100 -- can be more than double that price. Yow!
I've been told that Nikon compatible kit is sold under a variety of labels, including Fuji, but I don't know enough about the compatibles to have made any decisions yet -- and from what I've seen, they're just as expensive as Nikon anyway. Does it make sense to go with someone like Fuji, or is the quality any better with "genuine" Nikon? (I'm a few decades behind on this stuff....)
I think the thing that scares me off so far is the durability, not just in terms of how rugged or useful the equipment will be in the future, but in the value. For example, the Nikon D1, from 1999, could do roughly 2.6 megapixels, as does the current D1H -- but that's barely a third of what the D100 can do, and the price is double the D100. Why that is isn't entirely clear to me, but it is clear that 2.6 mpix isn't a particularly big number anymore, where 5 mpix or 6 mpix point & shoot cameras are available for just a few hundred bucks.
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So there's the thing, in a nutshell: should it be assumed that the long term valuation of digital cameras, including digital SLRs, will have a trend like computers, in that you can always get a lot more capability for a lot less money than was available a year before? Or will these digital SLRs retain their value & utility better, the way the 30 year old traditional SLRs I'm using are still useful instruments today? I'm ready to get some of this new equipment, but the depreciation seems like it's going to be so steep that it still seems worth it to wait for at least a couple more years.
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At this point my hunch is that whenever Nikon upgrades the D100, I'll end up getting either the replacement model, or I'll try to find a closeout or second hand D100 hoping for a decent discount on it.
</rambling>
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