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Sunday, May 28, 2006
Canon fodder 
| | Back on April 13, I shared my interest in getting a new digital SLR camera. Since then my consideration of candidates has broadened a bit, to include the Olympus E-330 and the Canon 20D and 30D. |
| | What made my mind up was this photo by Richard. Among the tags was 20D. And among the pools was this one here. And again, I've never met anyone who hated their Canon. (Not that I know of, anyway.) |
| | Also, I took a pile of pictures with all the candidate cameras in the store. When I got home and looked at them on the 23" big screen, the shots from the Canon 30D stood out. Next to it the Nikons were soft, the Olympuses had lousy skin tones. These were all shot indoors under a mix of flourescent and outdoor light. White balance was set to automatic. |
| | Also, I figured out the UI on the Canon almost instantly. The Nikon D70 was still opaque to me. And I had some experience with that one, shooting my stepdaughter's wedding last September. Very few of the shots came out the way I wanted, and many times it just refused to shoot. Later some folks told me the Nikon actually has a terrific UI, once you study it and get to know it; but next to the ease of the Canon, that was unconvincing. |
| | So I got the 30D, with a Canon 50mm 1.8 lens, a Tamron 18-200 zoom, and the biggest of the Canon flashes. I considered the older 20D, which is almost identical except for a much smaller LCD screen in the back. But I liked the bigger screen and thought the difference was worth the money. I'll get more lenses after I recover from the big bux I just laid out for the system so far. You'll see the results soon, I hope. (Here ya go.) |
| | Meanwhile, the old Nikon Cooolpix 5700, which has probably shot over 100,000 photos, including 99% of the shots here, has croaked. (That's another big reason I moved on the 30D, besides my upcoming trip to Denmark for Samtalerne and Reboot.) It gets the "lens error" screen of death, repeatedly. I have a routine for fixing it, but it involves a series of moves that takes about five minutes to do, and don't always work. I'll take it in for an estimate; and if fixing it costs too much, I'll retire it. For a second camera (one with a flip-and twist viewer, which is necessary for getting the kind of shots from window seats that I got with the Nikon), I'm tempted by the Canon Powershot S3 IS. Thoughts welcome on that one. The cost is less than many of the Canon professional lenses I covet. |
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