robert_roaldi1

Thanks for the responses so far. I appreciate that in 5 years there may be a model with greater features than the 10D. This is irrelevant to me if all I need is what a 10D can deliver, that is, good prints of a reasonable size. The fact remains that any new model will cost a lot; a 2nd hand 10D will be cheaper and it may be all I need. I feel confident in my ability in choosing an SLR body in good shape at a reasonable price. I have done so often. I can decide if the shutter has been fired too many times and weigh the cost/benefits versus the asking price. It won't be much different than choosing film slr's. But, I am less confident about judging the state of the sensor. Is it a fact that pixels will go bad over time? Are there ways to quickly determine this potential problem?

 

I am not sure that the 5 yr old computer analogy holds completely. Or maybe it does. Both my computers are 5 years old or older. They do everything today that they used to, and that happens to be everything I need.

As someone who almost always buys second-hand I have begun wondering

about the medium to long term durability of sensors. Will the 10D/N70

I buy 4-5 years from now still have all its pixels working? It may be

difficult to tell yet since digital users have tended to trade up

equipment fairly rapidly, or that's the impression I get, but do the

sensors start to exhibit stuck or dead pixels over time? What's the

experience out there?

 

I have not so much worried about catastrophic failure which may be

easier to detect, but I worry about shopping for a 10D in 5 years

time. Will it have 10 dead or stuck pixels that I have to spend time

on the computer working around? Are there tools emerging to quickly

find these before buying? It will be one more thing to check when

buying 2nd hand in the future.

 

Further, do the new camera warranties make specific promises about

this? Does Canon/Nikon/etc consider 1 bad pixel normal? 5? 50? Does

it say so anywhere in the fine print?

I have an old Takumar 400mm screw-mount lens that does the same. It overshoots at both distance extremes.

Somewhere on this page:

http://www.botzilla.com/photo/G1strobe.html

is a link to another page with trigger voltage details on many flashes and whether or not they are safe with EOS cameras.

Just a quick aside to the last poster who called the Elan a "great little camera". These things are all relative. Previous to the Elan I used a Pentax MX and to me the Elan is a BIG camera. :)

I picked up an Elan on eBay for around $90 U.S. but I was very lucky. There were several on tap that week and it was near a U.S. National holiday (Thanksgiving I think) so there was hardly any competitive bidding going on. The one I bought is not mint looking, but there is nothing wrong with it either. From what I can tell, $110-$120 U.S. is near the average. If the example you saw is in excellent to mint shape, it's not a bad price, but maybe a little high as a previous poster wrote. For Canadian price comparison you can check "vintagevisuals.com" in Calgary whose prices are generally high, along with their quality.

 

I am still waiting for that often anticipated calamitous drop in film camera prices. It's a little slow in coming.

Do you mean a car rally or a political rally?

I recently bought a used EF 70-210 f3.5-4.5 zoom. It is the only

sample of this lens I have used. When I hold it vertically, the lens

will "zoom-creep" (sorry about the language) out to its maximum

length under its own weight. At less than full vertical it won't

creep by itself, but it is not tight either. I expect this of a push-

pull zoom mechanism but I didn't expect it with this lens. I was just

wondering if others who own/owned this lens could tell me if this was

normal behaviour, or can I have the mechanism "tightened" in some

way? Thanks.

My story may or may not help. Years ago I bought one of the first CD players to hit the market from manufacturer "A". During my first 6 months of ownership, it spent roughly 2 months in warranty repair. That consisted of 3 separate trips to bring it in and get it back totalling roughly 2 months of downtime. When I got it back the final time and it still didn't work, I went to a store, bought another brand's CD player, and courier'ed the faulty one directly to the President of the Canadian subsidiary of brand "A". I told him I didn't want it anymore, had bought another brand's CD player, and that he could give me my money back or not, his choice. A couple of weeks later I got a refund cheque.

I shoot mostly film but process a lot of my wife's digicam pics for her. She shoots a lot of pictures for later reference in doing paintings.

 

My experience is this. It's not the time it takes to tweak a special picture that you like to produce the occasional top quality print that irks. That's something you do for fun.

 

I find that what is irritating is the time it takes to do all the boring stuff. Make sure the battery is charged up before going out, download pics, categorize and maybe rename pic files, print the proofs etc. Tweaking a large set of pics in a macro is not so bad, though, assuming you can find some setting that will work reasonably well for an entire group of photos. A lot of people view the trip to the lab as a pain but I like having someone else do the routine stuff. (I work in the software industry so the magic of computers vanished a long time ago for me.) She needs to keep almost all of the proofs with her while she's working. Along similar lines, when I've used her camera to shoot, I find I dislike having to sit at the computer to view the proofs. I may review a set of proofs several times over weeks or months before deciding which the keepers are or which ones I want to enlarge/frame. Having the proofs to look at wherever I happen to be sitting is preferable to going to the computer. This is nothing more than the equivalent of reading a newsmagazine anywhere I'm sitting rather than go to the screen to view a news web site, that is it's a personal preference.

Maybe those of who have operated labs can answer this related question. In many labs that I have walked past on the sidewalk or in malls I can see the prints as they make their way along on the equipment. Have you found that labs whose workings are easily visible like that are more careful about what they print? If the printing equipment is in a backroom and not publicly visible they might have to worry about public complaints less.

 

Is this a factor?

I've had good experience with "www.photo-co.com" in Montreal. Reasonable shipping and no PST since it's out of province for you.

What I have in mind is a digital storage provider to which one could

upload data for later retrieval. I can imagine being on vacation

without a laptop (or with one that suddenly becomes flaky) and

running out of CF cards and not necessarily wanting to buy more or

even being worried about your environment's effect on them. It might

be convenient, if you have access to the internet, to upload pics to

a service for temporary storage, to be retrieved later when back at

home. I can see where this may even just be a convenient backup if

one is away for a long period of time, say a few months.

What you may end up missing is the feel of fine craftmanship. This has nothing to do with how good a picture you produce but is a pleasure all on its own. I got rid of Pentax manual gear to conform to my wife's EOS equipment (Elan, Rebel and zooms) and the new stuff doesn't feel as good to use in my hands. But it hasn't affected how good or bad my photos are.

This is not really going to answer your question so I offer it partly with tongue in cheek.

 

Up to last year I used a manual Pentax system but changed over to my wife's EOS system mainly to eliminate duplication. But when I did it I knew that I would not be able to afford long EF tele's. So, I kept my old beat-up 400mm Takumar that I bought for about $100, and bought a $25 Chinon screw-mount body to go with it. That arrangements works for me because I use it rarely so its deficiencies don't affect me much.

When my time comes to pass over into the other side and meet the old man on the hill to get all those questions answered that I have been saving up, like, "How does a automatic transmission work?", and "Who really shot JFK?", one of the questions I am going to ask is, "Why do so many people care if Canon starts selling a new model a couple of months ahead of Nikon?"

Loosely speaking it is software. It's just that it's recorded permanently on a chip, an EPROM for example, rather then being stored on a disk. It is a common way to store the operating program for an embedded device. That is, a device with a specific repetitive task, like a camera or calculator, rather than a general purpose device like a computer.

 

I suspect the term firmware comes from the fact that the contents of an EPROM chip can be changed but that when a program is written to it, it behaves like any other computer chip. So, it's somewhere between hardware (not alterable) and software (infinitely alterable).

 

When firmware is upgraded they either replace the chip or erase the program that's on it and replace it with the newer version. Cameras on which the user can update firmware use types of chip which allow program updates in the field.

There's not a big variation in price, so far as I can tell.

 

http://www.photo-co.com/ in Montreal is good. If you don't live in Quebec you avoid PST and their shipping rates are good.

 

http://www.mcbaincamera.com/ is in Alberta where they have no PST.

To answer the original question, at the moment for me using 35 mm film is cheaper than digital and more convenient. I shoot for my own gratification, from 30 to 60 rolls per year, a mixture of slide and colour negative. I bought a perfectly functional $90 Elan off ebay, my first auto-focus camera and I have a couple of moderate quality 2nd hand zooms. I used to use K-mount manual focus Pentax till last year.

 

Were I to buy the cheapest DSLR available to me, Digital Rebel, it would cost me $1500 Cdn or so. I can buy and process a lot of film for that money.

 

I also find traditional labs more convenient. I read all about the colour management issues, sRGB vs Adobe RGB knowing that there will be yet some other choice next year, and I have to stop and ask myself, do I want to spend my free time doing that? So far, the answer is no. It's intriguing stuff, mind, and I have nothing against knowing it, but it's not how I want to spend my evenings.

 

For decades now, I and others have been able to find decent labs that produced very satisfying pictures to frame and hang on my walls. That didn't end when they started selling digital cameras. I am certain, as I read on various sites, that if I bought a Canon 10D, say, and did all that they say I should do with regards to workflow, etc, that I would be able to produce equally good pictures myself. Others can so there's no reason I couldn't. In the end though, would my walls looks significantly better? It's not clear. And certainly not clear enough to me that it makes me go out and spend thousands of dollars. I would have to keep upgrading computers, software, inkjets, and keep buying a lot of ink cartidges to boot. I like the idea that a lab is doing all that equipment calibrating and supply purchasing for me. I trust my ability to find a lab that gives me nice results.

 

Obviously this is a purely personal point of view. It seems to me that at the present time I would have to spend a lot of time and energy on digital equipment and knowledge to get the equivalent results that I get now with stuff I already own. It is obvious though that were I taking 1000's of photos per month, then the issue would be dramatically different. It would then be worth my while to invest in the equipment and knowledge since it would allow me to control costs directly.

It will become obsolete when you stop using it.

You should read this: http://www.botzilla.com/photo/G1strobe.html

I have lived in Ottawa about a year. So far, GINN has done a terrific job on various C41's films incl the B&W ones and also on E6. (I am not a pro but shoot quite a bit lately.)

I didn't think there would be a physical mounting problem. Have you tried fitting this lens onto another K-mount body? Maybe, the lens' mounting bracket is damaged, bent or something.

I was told that globalization was a good thing. How come I have less product choice now and fewer stores to purchase from? Homogeneity benefits who, exactly?

Wasn't it the case that Provia 400 was the same as Sensia 400 but that Sensia 100 was the same as Astia? And that Provia 100 was on its own. I seem to recall reading that in these pages.

 

But then at some point I noticed that the actual names on the boxes are Provia 100F and 400F and I don't know if they are distinct from other ones without the "F" that I just happened never to have bought. It never seems as though what's in stores corresponds to what's on the Fuji (Cdn) site, or at least they are out of sync often enough that I simply give up trying to keep track.

 

I know I may not have helped much but at least you know you're not alone. :)