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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?"
P.S. I own the predecessor to the 10D, the D60, and it is an excellent camera. I highly recommend a DSLR, but be prepared...photograph is an expensive hobby!
There ain't no rules here; we're trying to accomplish something.
... instead of the people who would really know.
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.
First, I'll preface by saying I'm a professional photographer. My wife and I shoot weddings & portraits, and a magazine photo here or there. We use the Canon 10D, which goes for $1500. It's got a 6.3 megapixel sensor, and we have no problem blowing up a large-fine JPEG image to 20x30 or even higher.
The digital rebel has the same sensor as the 10D, and the same digic processor, and you can find them for $800 or so. A LOT of the features are the same. The white balance settings, the shutter speed options, flash compatibility, metering modes, 7 AF points, etc. The main differences are in the buffer, and the construction. The rebel can only do about 2.5fps and a maximum burst of 4 shots, instead of the 3fps for 9 shots the 10d can manage. Having handled the rebel at the local camera store recently, I can also testify that the body does not feel NEARLY as durable as the 10D. The 10D has a magnesium alloy body that feels solid, and seems like it could take some punishment. I think the rebel was more plasticy. Eh.
Still, if you're an amateur photographer who wants an SLR I have to say the rebel is the way to go. It's got almost all the features of the 10D, but for a lot less money. Digital will completely change the way you shoot, too...I never ever ever want to go back to film.
Oh, and some other companies have cheap SLRs out there...Fuji has a cheap DSLR, and I think Olympus or Sigma or somebody does, too, but I've never been impressed with any of their products, or their lenses (Sigma lenses are horribly soft) and I only shoot Canon, so I can't really comment on those.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Digital Rebel is 22.7 mm SLR. Canon 1Ds is 35 mm SLR. But 1Ds is not 'low-priced'. It costs $7,999.
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.
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.
Surely the image array isn't 24x36mm?
Click, click... no, it's 22.7x15 mm. Roughly comparable a half-frame 35 mm camera.
That means that no lens is going to have the same coverage on this camera as it does on a 35 mm camera.
Canon says "Focal length conversion factor: Equivalent to approx. 1.6x indicated focal length compared to 35mm format." Your 50 mm. lens will act like an 80 mm; your 35 mm like a 56... and if you like to use a 28 mm on your film camera, you'll have to shell out for an 18mm to use on this one.
It works in your favor for telephoto lenses, though.
It also means that for the equivalent angle of coverage, this camera will have a greater depth of field. Nice for some things. Not so nice for others, e.g. portraits.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Canon's digital SLRs don't use CCDs, they use CMOS.
And for the submitter of the article: the decision to get a digital SLR or not is a question of money, and of willingness to be an early adopter. I recommend (as someone who sells the damn things) to get a basic film SLR like the Rebel 2000 or Ti, both of which just had a price drop, and wait a year before upgrading the body to a digital SLR. Canon's keeping the same lens mount and flash hotshoe, so any extras bought between now and then will work just fine with a future Canon DSLR body.
Nikon is good, but they have no true DSLRs anywhere near the price range of the Digital Rebel. The closest they have is the Coolpix 5700. It's a good camera, certainly, but it's not an SLR. It's an all-in-one-system.
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.
So first thing. I have over 50,000 transparencies in my collection (mostly scenics of the western United States from the Rockies west, and from Mexico to mid Canada.) I love film, and it's going to be superior in many ways to digital for some time yet to come. With drum scanners you can sanely go to about 10,000 pixels per inch converting film to digital (and I don't care what kind of film you're scanning, at that rez you can see the grain.) Of course, if you're taking about original art being a 8 x 10 inch sheet, you're looking at 80,000 by 100,000 pixels or 8 gigapixels... needless to say, digital has some distance to go before it can sanely reach those kind of resolutions.
This is a meaningful point of contention. I have a 4 x 5 inch transparency of the Athabasca glacier in the Canadian Rockies. If you look at the image though a 10x loop, you can find a bus in the parking lot below the access to the glacier. If you look through a microscope at about 100x you can make out by color that the bus has Alberta license plates. At about 500x you can read the license plate. Film really is that good.
That said... digital is going to win over the long hall.
1. The new Foveon chip (found in the Sigma SD-9), produces moire free images with huge color fidelity and shocking clarity (the original gallery images had black and whites blown up on prints 8 feet high without grain or digital artifacts... you could see the threads in clothes, and the fine detail on the pores and small hairs in the skin of the models.)
2. There is currently a digital camera on the market that has two imaging chips, one for high light levels and one for low, The chips both record the image weighted to their specific sensitivity, so that the images have the same or even better exposure latitude than film.
3. There are now 8 x 10 digital backs in use (a famous photograher did a series on the National Parks using one a couple years back and his name escapes me...) The resolution and quality of those images was, is, and will be mind numbing.
The quality is improving, and not slowly... the cost is falling, and quickly... the freedom of producing an image, telling if you got the shot instantly (and reshooting if you missed it... this is especially important to large and medium format photographers), archiving them in a place that takes virtually no space, organizing and filing them quickly and easily, not having to process anything (film or print paper), and being able to show them and send them instantly to family or business partners... all these things make digital mighty attractive.
Add being able to use the same camera to do still and video shooting. Add digital image processing. Add being able to burn, dodge, color correct, contrast balance, and correct for printing characteristics in computer... and digital just takes it for even the most religious film shooter. Don't get me wrong... I wouldn't trade my Cibachrome prints for all the tea in China... I just believe we are looking at a technology with such operational and economic advantages in the long hall, that film's day are prolly numbered for everybody, but the fine art photographer.
I'll still shoot film for fun or for something remarkable that demands the greater depth, but soon, digital is going to be my bread and butter.
Genda Bendte