rickstare

>shutter sound (kinda thumpy...didn't like that)

It's not just the sound - you can feel it. The mirror on the 5D is much larger

than what we were used to on the 10D and 20D (larger sensor=larger mirror)

and so the camera body does move in your hands when that big mirror

swings. I've had my new 5D about 24 hours and that was one of the first

differences I noticed as well. I think I'll be pulling out the tripod more often,

and programming that "C" setting on the mode dial to access Mirror Lockup.

Calumet is great! I had wonderful service from them buying my EOS 10D with

two lenses. They had no problem shipping the camera to a Fed Ex location in

Colorado where I was going on vacation. B&H had said it was against

company policy to ship to any address other than my home or business.

Calumet explained that all I had to do was call Mastercard and set up the Fed

Ex location as a valid shipping address for me. Worked like a charm. I have

always found the folks who answer the phone at Calumet to be very

knowledgeable and friendly. I have never visited their stores so I can't speak

to that, but I know they are a reliable company and should have plenty of

stock available since Chicago is their home base.

>I'm not aware of the aperture having the slightest effect on the visibilty of

sensor dust.

The aperture has a very pronounced effect on how visible the dust is. Just do

an aperture series against a blue sky and you can see it. f22 and f32 are

certainly killers.

>Surely it's like dust on film, if it's there then the shadow it casts will show no

matter what the aperture?

You would think so, but I think the answer is that the dust is NOT on the

sensor itself, but is on a glass filter that sits in FRONT of the sensor. The cone

of light coming out of the back of the lens at f8 contains light coming from

wider angles and will not focus the image of the dust on the sensor behind it.

But the cone of light at f22 is very narrow and will cast a sharp shadow on the

sensor. That's my theory.

Tamrac offers several memory card and battery storage wallets that have a

nice red flag system so you can keep track of which cards are full and which

batteries are low. The photo I saw at Amazon shows each elastic pocket will

easily hold a Compact Flash card or 4 AA batteries. But I am thinking it would

be a really tight fit for a BP511 battery. Anyone have any personal experience

with the Tamrac system? (They make models with 2, 4, or 8 pockets).

Thanks everyone for your replies. I did get some good information. Thanks

Wilfred for the idea of changing the .THM filenames to .JPG.

I have been shooting more RAW format files with my EOS 10D. The

Photoshop CS File Browser does a good job of displaying a preview of each

CRW image and seems to ignore the accompanying THM file. I am archiving

all my camera originals to CD and want to catalog all the images using

Cumulus or Portfolio or some other image management software. The

newest version of Cumulus displays a blank generic icon for the CRW file,

and gives an image preview from the THM file. This means I would have to

catalog the THM files, which I was not going to do. Maybe I could only catalog

the THM files and skip the CRW files if the software can't preview them.

Does anyone know of an image management application that does a decent

job of previewing the Canon RAW format files, even if I have never converted

them? I have an older version of Cumulus, so was hoping to get the upgrade

price for the OS X version, but would be willing to switch to some other

program if the price isn't too steep. Just to clarify, I am NOT looking for

software to convert the RAW files - I use Photoshop CS for that. I just want to

catalog them and get a decent preview for searching later.

Sorry, that was a 540EZ Speedlite in the package I was looking

at.

Thanks everyone for your postings. Good information.

Too bad, I was looking at a used A2e with 50mm Compact

Macro and 550EZ flash (including the off-camera cord) and

remote switch all for $495, but it looks like the 550EZ would only

work with the A2e and not at all with the 10D.

Anyone care to give a recommendation for one speedlite to work

with both a 10D and an A2e? I am new to Canon and really don't

fully understand the older EZ and newer EX features and

limitations.

I don't use flash very much, so I just want something for those

situations where the built-in unit isn't strong enough, or for when

I want TTL flash off-camera with the special cord. It does need to

be swivel & tilt for bounce, but should be compact enough to

carry everywhere in my bag.

thanks

>>So, what do we do to prevent this in the future? Underexpose

by 1/3 to 1/2 a stop or meter off the only white in the frame?<<

Brian,

I have only had my EOS 10D for a few weeks, but so far my

strategy is to underexpose by about 1/2 stop because I really

hate to have the extreme highlights clipped. The 10D seems to

have a tendency to overexpose the brightest highlights even in

evaluative metering mode. Too bad we don't have true

spotmetering on this camera!

Others have posted similar advice in this forum saying that with

the 10D you need to expose like we always did with slide film -

underexpose to avoid blown highlights. The EOS D60 had the

reputation of underexposing, but the programming of the 10D

has unfortunately gone the way of many other digital cameras

and seems to assume that you won't care if you lose the extreme

highlights. Luckily the 10D makes it so easy to use the exposure

compensation.

I have found myself starting to use the partial metering and the

AEL function instead of relying on the 35-zone evaluative

metering.

*RIck

>>The old dictum when scanning slides was that for the

absolute best image quality there should be 300 pixels per inch

when sending the data to a printer.<<

In my experience, the rule of thumb of 300 ppi images applies

primarily in the publishing industry, where magazines are printed

on litho presses at 150 line screen. The thinking is that the RIP

from pixels to litho dots is smoother if you give the RIP more

pixels to choose from (and an even multiple) when calculating

each dot. That is certainly not an exacting science (the company

I work for routinely publishes from color separations made at

200ppi, and tests showed you couldn't tell the difference

between 200ppi and 300ppi when viewing the final printed

results side by side).

For photographers printing on their own Epson printers, the

issue is a little different. You are not conforming to someone's

arbitrary rules of submission. Epson claims printing resolution

of 2880x1440, but you can also print in 720dpi mode. Most

people seem to agree that your best quality will come if you print

from Photoshop files that have a resolution that is evenly

divisible into 720, so 360ppi or 240ppi are theoretically going to

give good results. If I have the pixels available, I like to print from

higher res files, but I have had excelent results printing to my

Epson 2200 from 240ppi Photoshop files.

My EOS 10D still only gives an 8.5"x13" print at 240ppi, so some

upsampling is unavoidable to get your desired 13"x19" print. If

you are willing to stay with 240ppi, you only need to resample up

150%, which is a reasonable amount for Photoshop or Genuine

Fractals to accomplish with minimal image degradation. If you

insist on working at 300ppi, the upsample required is nearly

200%. A 200% upsample means that the final image has four

times the original number of pixels, which means that only one

out of every four pixels in the final image is original (all the others

are calculated). I'd go with the lower resolution and less

upsampling most of the time.

Custom Function 6 not only allows you to set the exposure in 1/3

stops during Av and Tv modes, but also extends to Exposure

Compensation (the readout in the finder gets a little weird) and

also allows AEBracketing in 1/3 stop increments.

In a separate thread I've been recounting my own bad

experience with a EOS 10D that had bad dust on the sensor right

from day one. Same spots with any lens, same size and same

location. They do become much more distinct as you stop down,

which did make me think they were the lens at first.

Canon tech support says using the sensor cleaning swabs will

void the warranty, so I definitely would not recommend using

them during the first 6 months to year if you can help it. If you

can't clean it with air, it needs professional help. My dealer also

agreed to replace the body. I just hope the replacement is clean.

I talked to Canon tech support. They wanted me to test with a

second lens, so I went to a local dealer and shot sky. Same

exact dots, same size, same location. This was at the 80mm

end of the zoom range, and my lens I shot at the 17mm end of its

range. The Canon tech said that using sensor cleaning swabs

would definitely void the warranty. Canon said they would clean

it, but they didn't really believe it could be dust trapped under the

glass filter because "these things are assembled in a clean

room". They said it would take about 3 weeks to get the camera

back.

That's when I decided to get serious about asking Calumet to

send me a new camera. They listened to my story and agreed to

replace the camera. I will try to post a photo composite showing

the dirt. These are the upper half of the frame, and full width.<div></div>

Timothy,

I have not done such testing, but am interested in the subject. I offer some

links that recently caught my attention on this subject.

First, Tim Grey in his 8/11 DDQ (Digital Darkroom Questions) e-mail letter

answered a reader's question about whether images shot in RAW format

would have a wide enough range such that we could process the same

image twice in the conversion software to produce one image maximized for

highlights and one for shadows, then combining the two in Photoshop. That

would imply that one RAW image might be comparable to a normal-under-

over bracketed sequence on film. Certainly a worthy test subject.

Second, in The Luminous Lanscape, there is a very interesting article that

surprised me a great deal. In it, Michael Reichmann proposes that we forget

what we learned shooting transparency film and begin to learn a new

technique of exposing as far toward the right of the histogram as we can

without blowing out the highlights. The main point of this article is that in 12-

bit capture (RAW), half of the available levels are used to capture the brightest

stop in the scene. Significantly, if we purposely underexpose the digital

image, we underutilize the available levels. This article also contains

comments from Thomas Knoll (who wrote the Photoshop Camera RAW plug-

in) and Ian Lyons and is definitely worth reading. http://www.luminous-

landscape.com/tutorials/expose-right.shtml

Mike,

I'm sorry I don't have an answer for you, but I do share your pain. I was

recently showing some images on the TV and wondered the same thing. It's

really quite distracting having the info displayed. I'm responding so that I will

get notified if anyone else has the answer :-)

The new Lexar CF cards come with a program called Image Rescue (may not

be remembering the name exactly right) that is supposed to be able to

recover images after you format. Check out their web site, and good luck?

Yikes! I purchased a new EOS 10D from Calumet Photo two weeks ago (I

recommend Calumet: they had the camera body and lens in stock when B&H

did not, same price, and Calumet shipped to hold at a Fed Ex facility for me to

pick up, which B&H will not do). I attached the EF 17-40 lens and did not take

it off for over a week. During that week I shot several hundred images,

downloading to a laptop for temporary storage.

When I returned home and looked at the images larger in Photoshop I noticed

some images had dark fuzzy circular spots, especially noticeable against a

clear blue sky. I did more testing and found that the spots are invisible at f4,

quite noticeable by f11, and much more distinct at f22. Focal length and focus

distance make no difference.

From everything I have read, this sounds like dust or dirt on the CMOS sensor.

I guess it makes sense that it would be more distinct at smaller f/stops

because of the different cone of light coming from the rear lens element. But I

am really miffed that this many particles could have appeared during the first

week of shooting, especially since I only used the one lens and never took it

off. Hate to think it came from the factory dirty.

Last night I looked at the sensor - it looks clean to me - and I used the rubber

bulb Canon recommends to blow air on the sensor. Made no difference. So

now, do I use the sensor swabs all the dealers sell (but Canon states never to

touch the sensor with anything). WIll this void the warranty if I do use the

swabs (with the Eclipse liquid)? Calumet won't say whether it will affect the

warranty, but I can't envision sending the body to Canon every time for

cleaning.

Thanks to everyone for your responses. Sounds like my lens

choices were good ones. Can't wait to start using the new

equipment.

I am awaiting delivery of my EOS 10D. I ordered the 17-40 f:4 L and am

about to order the 28-135 f:3.5-5.6 IS lens. I know these are both very popular

lenses for the 10D. I am a little nervous about how dim the viewfinder image

will be since these lenses do not have a fast max. aperture. The reviews

comment on the camera viewfinder image being somewhat small and dim.

When combined with slower lenses is this a problem for anyone already

using these lenses on the 10D? I don't do much indoor available light

shooting, but do shoot outdoors before sunrise or after sunset.

Thanks everyone for the very informative posts!

*Rick

Dave,

I have always appreciated your detailed camera reviews on this

site - they are the best resource I know of. When you reviewed

the EOS D60 you commented at some length about the dynamic

range, and how it preserved hightlight detail and shadow detail.

The test shot of the outdoor portrait really demonstrated this.

For the EOS 10D, you don't mention dynamic range yet your

comments are very favorable overall. You mention that image

quality is one of the improvements of the new camera. Yet, when

I look at the outdoor portrait test for the 10D, I see highlights that

look like so many other digital cameras, seemingly blown out to

pure white in many areas of the blouse.

I know the EOS 10D has some nice new features, but I am most

concerned with image quality. I am wondering if I should

seriously consider a used D60 instead of a 10D. Autofocus

speed and flexibiliy is of little concern to me. The additional

adjustment range for Contrast and other image charactieristics,

plus the exteded ISO range and the additional LCD brightness

steps are all valuable, but if the 10D really has more of a

tendency to push tones off the top of the curve I would be

frustrated.

Any comments on the dynamic range of the 10D vs. the D60?