philip_ganderton

<p>I'm glad you got resolution, albeit not through the responses to your OP. I know I was attracted to your thread because of the "controversial" nature of the title. You didn't think it would attract the kind of responses you got when you said in your OP (to paraphrase) "I don't want to argue...the AF problems were real?"<br>

Once people are viewing a thread, they feel invested, and so they want to post. It's just human nature. I recently sold my 1D3 after 5 wonderful years with it. It was never one of the "problem" serial numbers, had a blue dot on the box and was checked by the Canon factory at one time, a couple of years after I bought it. The guy I sold it to got a great under-10k click camera for a steal (by which I mean a 1D3 body for $1200, which is the going price these days.)<br>

So, I'm posting this because I'm sorry you didn't get a 1D3, and settled for a poorer option. Perhaps the "new" camera will satisfy your needs and one day you'll be able to upgrade to a 1D4, or even a 1DX. Given my experience with selling my 1D3, that day may not be so far away...I am dreading selling my 1DX in a couple of years for mere pennies on the (many) dollars I paid for it!</p>

 

<p>I have had the 24-105L for many years and it's a great lens. Almost a perfect "one lens" for a full frame camera, although many people use the 24-70 options, including the new, and expensive 24-70f2.8L. I find the IS on the 24-105 quite good, never intrudes, but does allow longer exposure times. An f4 lens is always going to be "slow" compared to a faster prime. And that's where the prime's advantage comes in. Fast, bright, better bokeh and shallower depth of field. From your current collection, I presume the 24f1.4LII is out of the question, but it's certainly THE 24mm lens to get if you want the best performance possible. But it's not perfect and the slower 24mm lens is even worse. <br>

When compared at 24mm, the zoom has a lot of distortion and the corners are soft wide open. The prime has less distortion and by f4, the corners are going to be sharper.<br>

Given your budget constraint (and I am only surmising here) I would recommend the 24-105L zoom. You can correct the distortion in LR or other software, the lens has a great range for walking around, and the performance is overall very good. It's weather sealed with a filter and has a really cool red ring around the front end! </p>

<p>Just want to confirm that it's the ACR (Raw converter) part of LR that is doing the hot pixel fix. So any Adobe product which uses ACR (PS, CS, LR) will do this for you automatically. It's so automatic, that it's quite possible that if you use LR exclusively, you'll never know that your camera has any, or many, hot pixels! and you may never care... <br>

If you want to confirm, open the raw file in DPP, and you'll see the hot pixels light up like a Christmas tree!</p>

In response to Kelly's post about 10-year old dual processors: while the architecture of Dual Cores might look like dual processors, any number of processors working at 200MHz will be pretty slow compared to a Dual Core at 3.2GHz. While the AMD DCs are outperforming Intel's at present, it's only a matter of time before Intel moves ahead again. I love the to-and-fro, as the ones who benefit are us, the consumers!

I recently custom built a Dual Core system (Intel 840) around an Asus motherboard as it was one of the very few to offer dual PCIx video. I run dual Raptor 10,000rpm harddrives, dual 6800 256Mb DVI video cards, 2Gb of dual channel RAM, and a water cooled Dual Core. You need lots of power for something like this (600W) and I drive a Dell 2405 24" flat screen at 1920x1200 native, and a Dell 2001 flat screen at 1600x1200 native. I chose dual video cards so that I can calibrate each monitor separately--I found it impossible to do it effectively with a single "dual monitor" video card (even a really fancy one!)

The 24" Dell is amazing - built by Samsung - and about the best FP screen I've seen for digital photography.

Here's what it cost: computer $2200, 24" Dell $800, 20" Dell $500. You can easily build a Dual Core computer with 24" monitor for under $2000. I had dozens of Dells before this computer, and I'm happy to self-insure into the future. I'll always build my own now.

 

cheers,

philip