... if I'm not mistaken, China may have added far more broadband lines, but those are federally funded - you know, the whole socialist thing - and heavily censored, at that.
It wouldn't surprise me if, in nearly all countries that beat the US in broadband penetration, those connections are supported much more by taxes than here in the US.
We once had a person apply, and told us flat out that he was just looking to pad his resume - that he'd do anything we wanted - for a very low salary - if we'd just give him an impressive job title. We told him to take a walk.
It worked for AMD. When the Opterons came out, which were the true "bread and butter" that finally put them into the black, Microsoft (in deference to Intel) delayed their 64-bit version of Windows for a loooooong time. When the chips were introduced, the only OS that provided 64-bit support and the high-quality NUMA support that really let them shine was Linux, and Linux carried the Opteron for a year or two.
Wait until you use a lens that not only lets you go to f/2.8 (or faster), but is still very sharp wide-open, focuses quickly and accurately, and don't suffer from chromatic aberration, flare, or other deficiencies.
With a cheap lens, if you want to capture a technically stunning image, you end up having to work around the limitations of the lens in order to do it. With a really good lens, you can use the lens just about any way that you want, and not have to worry.
With the Canon kit lens, I know that if I'm not at f/8, I'm not going to get a sharp picture. With my 70-200 f/2.8L, I don't even bother paying attention to the aperture with respect to sharpness - even wide-open, it's still going to be incredibly sharp, and have incredibly good contrast. It frees me up to use my aperture for depth-of-field control, not overcoming deficiencies in the lens. And since it's a full three stops faster than the kit lens, I have a lot more latitude with my shutter speeds. Of course, being almost 15 times more expensive, you would certainly *hope* for that.
Build quality is also a lot higher. My 70-200 was used by Sports Illustrated before I acquired it, and it has survived abuse that would completely destroy a cheap lens. Whether that is important to the average person is up for debate, however. As is whether most folks would find carrying around the weight and bulk of such a lens as a tradeoff for the increased image quality.
Their ideas look good on paper, but real-world performance had plenty of shortcomings, and weren't really taken seriously by very many people. That could have been because the foveon chips were only picked up by Sigma (who doesn't exactly have a history of high quality), or it could have been that only Sigma picked them up because of the problems. I don't know, I can't say.
In any case, interpolating for color, so to speak (as sensors with bayer filters do) works out much better than interpolating for detail, as the Foveons have to do in order to claim 10 or 14 megapixels.
"You think a "quick shutter" fixes it all? My camera can acheive 1/16000th sec Is that fast enough?"
To pick at nits, I would bet that your actual shutter speed is vastly lower, and that it's using fast strobing of the CCD to get such a low acquire time. But that's not terribly important.
To get to my main point, if your camera is a P*S with unbearable noise even at ISO 400 - and a relatively small aperture to boot - how are you ever going to achieve high shutter speeds in anything but broad daylight? A picture that's blurry from motion is only slightly worse than a picture that is washed out from the onboard flash.
The superzooms, for all intents and purposes, lump right in with the point-and-shoots. They still suffer from small sensors (and hence, high noise), inherant limitations in lens design (in fact, just having a superzoom lens on *any* camera is a sure way to kill optical performance), shutter lag, etc..
They might not be quite as bad in all areas, but by and large, the problems that are a hallmark of the point-and-shoots are also a hallmark of the "superzooms".
"It's all about the zoom. I reckon the human eye has about an 8-10x zoom equivalent."
Wow. I thought that mutants with superpowers only existed in the movies. If your eyeballs zoom, then I guess it's time to bow to our new mutant overlords.
Rebel II? Do you mean the Rebel XT? FWIW, the Rebel XT does *not* use the same sensor as the 20D, and Canon was pretty clear about that when it was introduced. The sensors in the Rebel are a little cheaper to make, and don't have quite as little noise at ISO 1600 as the 20D.
That's not to say that it's not a fine camera, it is incredibly capable. ISO 1600 is still quite usable on it, and at 800 or below, you won't be able to pick out any difference at all.
The 20D also has a less aggressive antialias filter, which will let you capture more detail, but you've got to be set up for capturing a VERY sharp image to begin with before that even becomes a factor.
Yeah, but some of them still sound pretty silly. The Rebel XT's shutter winder sounds as if it were playing a recording of a film-advance drive, and the first time many people here it, they think it's artificial.
"But I can't beleive that in this day and age of computer modelling of lenses and the large size of some of the lenses on some compact digitals, that they can't produce a decent lens on an affordable camera."
Lens design and manufacture is a tough, expensive business. By the time you correct for spherical aberration, chromatic aberration, coma, astigmatism, and everything else, you have quite a few elements. That means more chances for loose tolerances to screw things up. It also means that many more elements to coat. And finally, it means a heavy lens that can't be retracted into the body of a compact camera.
Look at the really best zoom lenses, and you'll see that they often have 15, 20, or sometimes more optical elements in them in order to achieve that quality. By the time they did something like that in a compact camera, it would be too large, heavy, and expensive for people who want an inexpensive compact camera.
One of the easiest ways for them to make impressively better lenses would be to ditch the zoom, and use a fixed focal length lens. But that, of course, would turn off most buyers of compacts as well.
All that means is that you had enough focal length, and a sufficiently fast shutter to stop the motion. In broad daylight, when point-and-shoots can use low ISO and still keep shutter speeds high, they'll capture that, too. The main limitation would be the awful delay that most (but not all) have.
A much better example of what you can't get with a point-and-shoot is an interior shot in a dimly-lit room without flash, where a decent SLR will give you relatively noise-free images at ISO 1600 (better than a P&S at 400), and your f/1.4 or f/1.8 lens lets in enough light that you can keep somewhat reasonable shutter speeds.
Every time someone says "Oh, your camera doesn't flash", I feel sorry that most people have to deal with such crappy equipment in their P&S cameras.
They don't let you adjust the CCD gain? Uh.... what do you think happens when you change the ISO setting?
In a few cases (like ISO 50 or 3200 on some models), you're not - it just under/overexposes the image, then boosts or cuts it later, reducing your dynamic range. But for all other cases, you're changing the gain on the CCD. In fact, rumor has it that Canon actually uses different amplification transistors for each of their ISO settings, each one particularly suited to the ISO it is used for.
There might be some film SLRs, but not many, by a long shot. Companies are dropping out of the 35mm film-based camera market left and right. Nikon has dropped most of their lineup, and don't sound like they're going to introduce any more. And when was the last Canon film SLR release? Even within the 35mm SLR market, the rest of the players are/were vastly smaller in sales - and some of those, like Konica-Minolta, have dropped out of the film business, too.
Without any disrespect to the merits and strengths of film, the number of new film-based SLRs sold is already incredibly small with regards to digital, and will only continue to drop. Like it or not, digital is now the norm, and film is now a niche market. We're quickly on our way to the day when you'll have to specify that an SLR is *film* in order to differentiate it from what everyone else has.
They also sacrifice on coatings on the 50mm f/1.8. Under certain conditions with my strobes, my 50 will occasionally produce green or blue internal reflections. Again, it's only in certain conditions - and even then, only sometimes. My 70-200 f/2.8, under the same conditions, absolutely WILL NOT produce them - but still, at one-fifteenth the cost, the 50mm does an outstanding job.
My only other gripe is that it is rather long for everyday use on an APS-C sensor, but it's still quite workable.
Dust is highly hyped. I find that even changing lenses somewhat regularly, I need to clean my sensor about once or twice per year. Even when their is dust on the sensor, it's only visible at smaller apertures. At f/8, it is only slightly visible. At larger apertures, it doesn't even show up.
My Rebel XT, on the "cut-down" battery of Canon's lineup, gets about 1,000 shots off per charge, even with a 70-200 f/2.8 or a 100-400 IS. I don't know if your old camera gets that many or not (it might), but still, a thousand shots is a *lot*. Even with 4-gig cards, if you're shooting RAW, you'll swap out several cards before you swap a battery.
Actually, if you put the Rebel's kit lens at exactly f/8, you can produce images that will make a point-and-shoot look like crap. The true measure of a lens is what it will do wide-open, or nearly so - and in that regard, the kit lens is a complete failure.
Forget the $250 prime lens, the $75 50mm f/1.8 is worlds ahead of the kit lens.
If you want dust-protection, buy a fixed-focal length lens. You'll be more creative, your images much sharper (and better color and contrast), cost less, likely have a larger aperture, and you aren't putting a bellows on your camera to suck in dust.
"Canon's digital technology lead has largely evaporated"
What have you been smoking? If anything, their lead in sensor technology is getting even farther ahead. The 5D, with stunning ability to produce enlargements (rivalling medium format in that aspect), and incredibly low noise at ISO 3200, has really, really stuck it to Nikon in a lot of market segments.
Other manufacturers duke it out for the low-end, but the higher you go in the food chain, the more Canon really starts to dominate the scene. None of the other manufacturers even have a viable alternative to the 5D or 1Ds Mk II, let alone a price-competitive alternative.
You think you get Ansel Adams pictures with a hotshoe flash? You must not have ever seen an Ansel Adams. An onboard flash (even if it's in the hotshoe, not the popup) is, if it is aimed right at the subject, a sure way to ruin a photo.
Put an f/1.8 lens on that baby, crank up your ISO, and see how much better things look. steve
Power? On my Rebel XT - which has a smaller battery than the rest of Canon's lineup - I can still get out 1,000 shots on a single charge. There aren't a lot of people who really can't get along with a "measly" thousand shots at a time. I'm at something like 70,000 shots on my original battery, and that battery's capacity is only slightly reduced from when it was new.
As for size, yes, they are larger than point-and-shoots. The 40mm pancake lens from Pentax is pretty cool, if Canon mwould make one that would fit on a Reb XT (or XTi), you could fit the whole thing in your jeans pocket.
... is that lenses are more expensive, particularly if you need decent telephoto performance. With the larger sensor size, not only does the lens have to project a larger image circle, you need a longer focal length to achieve equal framing - which, if you keep your aperture the same, means significantly larger optics, and that means $$$.
That's the reason why the 20D has been so particularly favored with wildlife folks - in that game, you can't get enough reach, and the 20D (with the "crop factor") packs more pixels into the "sweet spot" of the image circle than even the 1Ds Mk II. That means that you can get about as much use out of a "measly" $600 00mm f/2.8 as someone with a full-frame camera (or film) could from a $4,000 300mm f/2.8.
Don't get me wrong, I love my SLR. If I had to use a point-and-shoot, I'd just quit taking pictures. But they're not for most folks. The higher potential image quality invariably comes at a greater cost and complexity.
Slashdot Mirror
... if I'm not mistaken, China may have added far more broadband lines, but those are federally funded - you know, the whole socialist thing - and heavily censored, at that.
It wouldn't surprise me if, in nearly all countries that beat the US in broadband penetration, those connections are supported much more by taxes than here in the US.
We once had a person apply, and told us flat out that he was just looking to pad his resume - that he'd do anything we wanted - for a very low salary - if we'd just give him an impressive job title. We told him to take a walk.
It worked for AMD. When the Opterons came out, which were the true "bread and butter" that finally put them into the black, Microsoft (in deference to Intel) delayed their 64-bit version of Windows for a loooooong time. When the chips were introduced, the only OS that provided 64-bit support and the high-quality NUMA support that really let them shine was Linux, and Linux carried the Opteron for a year or two.
steve
No problem. :-)
It's actually a quote from my wife, when she was speaking to me...
2,000 cubic meters per day of desalinated water from each unit. That's over 350 gallons per minute. Impressive!
Wait until you use a lens that not only lets you go to f/2.8 (or faster), but is still very sharp wide-open, focuses quickly and accurately, and don't suffer from chromatic aberration, flare, or other deficiencies.
With a cheap lens, if you want to capture a technically stunning image, you end up having to work around the limitations of the lens in order to do it. With a really good lens, you can use the lens just about any way that you want, and not have to worry.
With the Canon kit lens, I know that if I'm not at f/8, I'm not going to get a sharp picture. With my 70-200 f/2.8L, I don't even bother paying attention to the aperture with respect to sharpness - even wide-open, it's still going to be incredibly sharp, and have incredibly good contrast. It frees me up to use my aperture for depth-of-field control, not overcoming deficiencies in the lens. And since it's a full three stops faster than the kit lens, I have a lot more latitude with my shutter speeds. Of course, being almost 15 times more expensive, you would certainly *hope* for that.
Build quality is also a lot higher. My 70-200 was used by Sports Illustrated before I acquired it, and it has survived abuse that would completely destroy a cheap lens. Whether that is important to the average person is up for debate, however. As is whether most folks would find carrying around the weight and bulk of such a lens as a tradeoff for the increased image quality.
Their ideas look good on paper, but real-world performance had plenty of shortcomings, and weren't really taken seriously by very many people. That could have been because the foveon chips were only picked up by Sigma (who doesn't exactly have a history of high quality), or it could have been that only Sigma picked them up because of the problems. I don't know, I can't say.
In any case, interpolating for color, so to speak (as sensors with bayer filters do) works out much better than interpolating for detail, as the Foveons have to do in order to claim 10 or 14 megapixels.
"You think a "quick shutter" fixes it all? My camera can acheive 1/16000th sec Is that fast enough?"
To pick at nits, I would bet that your actual shutter speed is vastly lower, and that it's using fast strobing of the CCD to get such a low acquire time. But that's not terribly important.
To get to my main point, if your camera is a P*S with unbearable noise even at ISO 400 - and a relatively small aperture to boot - how are you ever going to achieve high shutter speeds in anything but broad daylight? A picture that's blurry from motion is only slightly worse than a picture that is washed out from the onboard flash.
The superzooms, for all intents and purposes, lump right in with the point-and-shoots. They still suffer from small sensors (and hence, high noise), inherant limitations in lens design (in fact, just having a superzoom lens on *any* camera is a sure way to kill optical performance), shutter lag, etc..
They might not be quite as bad in all areas, but by and large, the problems that are a hallmark of the point-and-shoots are also a hallmark of the "superzooms".
"It's all about the zoom. I reckon the human eye has about an 8-10x zoom equivalent."
Wow. I thought that mutants with superpowers only existed in the movies. If your eyeballs zoom, then I guess it's time to bow to our new mutant overlords.
Rebel II? Do you mean the Rebel XT? FWIW, the Rebel XT does *not* use the same sensor as the 20D, and Canon was pretty clear about that when it was introduced. The sensors in the Rebel are a little cheaper to make, and don't have quite as little noise at ISO 1600 as the 20D.
That's not to say that it's not a fine camera, it is incredibly capable. ISO 1600 is still quite usable on it, and at 800 or below, you won't be able to pick out any difference at all.
The 20D also has a less aggressive antialias filter, which will let you capture more detail, but you've got to be set up for capturing a VERY sharp image to begin with before that even becomes a factor.
steve
Yeah, but some of them still sound pretty silly. The Rebel XT's shutter winder sounds as if it were playing a recording of a film-advance drive, and the first time many people here it, they think it's artificial.
"But I can't beleive that in this day and age of computer modelling of lenses and the large size of some of the lenses on some compact digitals, that they can't produce a decent lens on an affordable camera."
Lens design and manufacture is a tough, expensive business. By the time you correct for spherical aberration, chromatic aberration, coma, astigmatism, and everything else, you have quite a few elements. That means more chances for loose tolerances to screw things up. It also means that many more elements to coat. And finally, it means a heavy lens that can't be retracted into the body of a compact camera.
Look at the really best zoom lenses, and you'll see that they often have 15, 20, or sometimes more optical elements in them in order to achieve that quality. By the time they did something like that in a compact camera, it would be too large, heavy, and expensive for people who want an inexpensive compact camera.
One of the easiest ways for them to make impressively better lenses would be to ditch the zoom, and use a fixed focal length lens. But that, of course, would turn off most buyers of compacts as well.
All that means is that you had enough focal length, and a sufficiently fast shutter to stop the motion. In broad daylight, when point-and-shoots can use low ISO and still keep shutter speeds high, they'll capture that, too. The main limitation would be the awful delay that most (but not all) have.
A much better example of what you can't get with a point-and-shoot is an interior shot in a dimly-lit room without flash, where a decent SLR will give you relatively noise-free images at ISO 1600 (better than a P&S at 400), and your f/1.4 or f/1.8 lens lets in enough light that you can keep somewhat reasonable shutter speeds.
Every time someone says "Oh, your camera doesn't flash", I feel sorry that most people have to deal with such crappy equipment in their P&S cameras.
They don't let you adjust the CCD gain? Uh.... what do you think happens when you change the ISO setting?
In a few cases (like ISO 50 or 3200 on some models), you're not - it just under/overexposes the image, then boosts or cuts it later, reducing your dynamic range. But for all other cases, you're changing the gain on the CCD. In fact, rumor has it that Canon actually uses different amplification transistors for each of their ISO settings, each one particularly suited to the ISO it is used for.
There might be some film SLRs, but not many, by a long shot. Companies are dropping out of the 35mm film-based camera market left and right. Nikon has dropped most of their lineup, and don't sound like they're going to introduce any more. And when was the last Canon film SLR release? Even within the 35mm SLR market, the rest of the players are/were vastly smaller in sales - and some of those, like Konica-Minolta, have dropped out of the film business, too.
Without any disrespect to the merits and strengths of film, the number of new film-based SLRs sold is already incredibly small with regards to digital, and will only continue to drop. Like it or not, digital is now the norm, and film is now a niche market. We're quickly on our way to the day when you'll have to specify that an SLR is *film* in order to differentiate it from what everyone else has.
steve
They also sacrifice on coatings on the 50mm f/1.8. Under certain conditions with my strobes, my 50 will occasionally produce green or blue internal reflections. Again, it's only in certain conditions - and even then, only sometimes. My 70-200 f/2.8, under the same conditions, absolutely WILL NOT produce them - but still, at one-fifteenth the cost, the 50mm does an outstanding job.
My only other gripe is that it is rather long for everyday use on an APS-C sensor, but it's still quite workable.
Dust is highly hyped. I find that even changing lenses somewhat regularly, I need to clean my sensor about once or twice per year. Even when their is dust on the sensor, it's only visible at smaller apertures. At f/8, it is only slightly visible. At larger apertures, it doesn't even show up.
steve
My Rebel XT, on the "cut-down" battery of Canon's lineup, gets about 1,000 shots off per charge, even with a 70-200 f/2.8 or a 100-400 IS. I don't know if your old camera gets that many or not (it might), but still, a thousand shots is a *lot*. Even with 4-gig cards, if you're shooting RAW, you'll swap out several cards before you swap a battery.
Actually, if you put the Rebel's kit lens at exactly f/8, you can produce images that will make a point-and-shoot look like crap. The true measure of a lens is what it will do wide-open, or nearly so - and in that regard, the kit lens is a complete failure.
Forget the $250 prime lens, the $75 50mm f/1.8 is worlds ahead of the kit lens.
If you want dust-protection, buy a fixed-focal length lens. You'll be more creative, your images much sharper (and better color and contrast), cost less, likely have a larger aperture, and you aren't putting a bellows on your camera to suck in dust.
"Canon's digital technology lead has largely evaporated"
What have you been smoking? If anything, their lead in sensor technology is getting even farther ahead. The 5D, with stunning ability to produce enlargements (rivalling medium format in that aspect), and incredibly low noise at ISO 3200, has really, really stuck it to Nikon in a lot of market segments.
Other manufacturers duke it out for the low-end, but the higher you go in the food chain, the more Canon really starts to dominate the scene. None of the other manufacturers even have a viable alternative to the 5D or 1Ds Mk II, let alone a price-competitive alternative.
You think you get Ansel Adams pictures with a hotshoe flash? You must not have ever seen an Ansel Adams. An onboard flash (even if it's in the hotshoe, not the popup) is, if it is aimed right at the subject, a sure way to ruin a photo.
Put an f/1.8 lens on that baby, crank up your ISO, and see how much better things look.
steve
Power? On my Rebel XT - which has a smaller battery than the rest of Canon's lineup - I can still get out 1,000 shots on a single charge. There aren't a lot of people who really can't get along with a "measly" thousand shots at a time. I'm at something like 70,000 shots on my original battery, and that battery's capacity is only slightly reduced from when it was new.
As for size, yes, they are larger than point-and-shoots. The 40mm pancake lens from Pentax is pretty cool, if Canon mwould make one that would fit on a Reb XT (or XTi), you could fit the whole thing in your jeans pocket.
That's the reason why the 20D has been so particularly favored with wildlife folks - in that game, you can't get enough reach, and the 20D (with the "crop factor") packs more pixels into the "sweet spot" of the image circle than even the 1Ds Mk II. That means that you can get about as much use out of a "measly" $600 00mm f/2.8 as someone with a full-frame camera (or film) could from a $4,000 300mm f/2.8.
Don't get me wrong, I love my SLR. If I had to use a point-and-shoot, I'd just quit taking pictures. But they're not for most folks. The higher potential image quality invariably comes at a greater cost and complexity.