joachim

<p>Hi Mark,<br>

Not sure how much cash a few used Canon FD cameras are going to generate. If you do sell them, it is more a "charity" thing (offering someone to get their hand on an FD-body, who doesn't have one yet) than anything else.<br>

As things stand at present (bodies get old and Canon doesn't care any more), I would definitely keep the A-1 (perhaps not the Motor). A-bodies without a drive are compact and light weight. Apart from the "screaming/coughing" they are robust and reliable. There are plenty AE-1, A-1 and AE-1P out there, butchering one to fix a few others will provide an ample supply of spares for a long time to come. Many repair people know how to work on them. To me, at present, certain A-bodies seem the best bet if you want to keep shooting Canon FD in the future. I think the only real thread to them is, if the 6V battery they use gets discontinued.<br>

The other cameras you list (including the F1 and T90) are more exotic, so finding another one to butcher for spares will not be as easy. In top of this, the T90ies have the issue of ageing LCDs where no spares are available. <br>

Not sure how much sense motor drives make these days for a user (not collector). To me using film is more planed, if I want a "machine gun camera", digital makes more sense. I think many people view it the same. I studied Nikon F3 prices recently. An F3 with an MD4 seems to costs about as much as an F3 without a drive. <br>

Enjoy Joachim</p>

<p>The new cameras (GX and FX) have multicoated lenses, while (most of?) the Fs are single coated.</p>

<p>Hi,<br>

if you look at page 18 of http://www.cameramanuals.org/mamiya_pdf/mamiya_645_accessories.pdf on Butkus' manual side, it says, that the finder needs modification to be used on the Super.<br>

Hope that helps.<br>

Joachim</p>

<p>Oops, typo: I can not un-mount it when the flash is attached to the camera.</p>

<p>Hi,<br>

I got delivery of a Mecabounce diffuser 44-90 today, to use with my 54 MZ-4i. The is quite tight to fit and even hard to remove from the flash. Removal takes a lot of fiddling, force and fingernails. It isn't quick and I can do it with the flash attached to a camera :( This clearly hinders reacting quickly to changing situations. The force required is that high, that I am worried of ripping of the Fresnel lens in front of the reflector.</p>

<p>Is that normal? Am I missing a trick?</p>

<p>Right now I am a bit disapointed. If that is how it is, this is clearly not up to the quality levels I am used to from Metz products. In particular not, considering the monies I paid for the Mecabounce.</p>

<p>Thanks<br>

Joachim</p>

 

<p>Hi Stephen,<br>

thanks for the reply. I tried to get there yesterday, but it seemed down - now it is working.<br>

The 70-150/4.5 doesn't seem listed and the input for the 75-200/4.5 is pretty low (three entrants). However these people didn't seem to like the 75-200 so much. Perhaps someone else from this group can still drop me a line. -Ta-</p>

<p>Hi,<br>

me again. I managed to buy a 200/4 on ebay and had my first roll back. There are some slight hints of CA when printing on European A4 size (8x11.5 approx), though my scanner (nikon IV driven by vuescan) could have a fair share here. Distortion is also very acceptable. The lens is a clear improvement over what I used to own.<br>

Thanks again to everyone for your time.</p>

<p>Hi,<br>

there seems presently a good supply of used and inexpensive 70-150/4.5 FD lenses. What are opinions on this as a light weight travel zoom. I know at f/4.5 it is not terribly fast and a close up limit of 1.5m is also not breath taking. But how is corner resolution and what about distortion (barrel/pin-cushion)?<br>

Another light weight option seems the 75-200/4.5 FD, which is even lighter.<br>

The obvious high performance variants seem a 135/3.5 FD or a 100/2.8 FD (the later not being dirt cheap). If performance is a concern, should I better stick with either of them?<br>

Thanks in advance.</p>

<p>Hi Gene,</p>

<p>It is a nice camera and nice photos, but is it really mint? There seems to be some paint loss. <br>

I had a good look around your web site. I find http://westfordcomp.com/classics/canonft/wildflowers.htm most impressive.</p>

 

<p>B&W darkroom is just so much nicer in medium format. Also the rolls are shorter, providing faster feedback. Did you think about a neat Rolleicord TLR? The V, Va and Vb modells are the best.</p>

<p>Many of the slow FD primes are dirt cheap these days. FD 135/3.5 seem to go below £15 on ebay these days (if at all). The faster ones 2.0 and 2.5 still seem to fetch a bit of money. Selling off slow primes will not generate much money. You could view is as an act of charity though. If they go to a good home and see some use again, I take it someone will be happy and they serve a purpose again.</p>

<p>Concerning the difference between A-1 and AE-1 Program, I thought the latter has the newer laser screen while the older A-1 does not. When the AE-1 Program was new, Canon made a lot of fuss about how bright the finder with the new screen was.</p>

<p>I just remembered from an old AE-1, for stop down metering I used to adjust for the lens speed. If I had a 1.8 lens fitted, I turned the shutter and aperture with the lens stopped down until the needle showed 1.8. That is to the point that the under exposure warning just stops being active.<br>

Seems to work on the AE-1 P as well. Open aperture metering shows "5.6" in the finder. Using my stop down method, I get aperture 5.6 or 7, which agrees reasonably with the full stop finder read out.<br>

On the discussion of the <strong>squeal</strong> . This is the first time I hear about this. Anyone has sound samples how it is supposed to sound and how a squealing camera sounds? I am wondering whether, what I regard as the "typical Canon A shutter sound" is actually the squeal.</p>

<p>Hi,</p>

<p>The readout of the aperture suggested by the exposure system on the AE-1 Program is in full stops only. However the lense is in 1/2 stops over most of its range. The best way I could come up with for a finer readout is to change the ISO and see when the finder indication changes. This way you get effectively a read out in 1/3 stops but it is not very convenient.<br /> Did anyone every come up with a better trick to estimate the exposure more precisely than full stop? I am a slide shooter and getting the exposure right to at least 1/2 stop typically matters.<br /> Thanks for reading.</p>

<p>Hi,</p>

<p>thanks guys. Seems that this lens would be a step forward from what I have at present.</p>

<p>Jeffrey, I like the chain picture.</p>

<p>Joachim</p>

<p>Hi Raid,</p>

<p>Just came across your pictures. While I quite like them in principle, I feel there is a certain magenta cast which drove me up the walls the last time I tried Reala. Did you ever try some slide film? I find this easier to get nice colours, in particular with a profiled scanner.<br>

As I said nothing wrong with your pictures, just the colours ...</p>

<p>Hi,<br>

I got a AE-1 P given by a friend and am attracted by the light weight of the FD200/4. I appreciate that due to age (designed in the 70ies or 80ies) this is not an APO lens and some chromatic aberration problems are to be expected. Also how is it with respect to pin-cushion distortion?<br>

I own a Tamron 200/3.5, which I have used in the past on Minolta MD and Pentax K. This lens, while having good centre contrast (clear step up from from the Tokina 70-210/4 I also own), produces an amasing level of colour fringing, clearly noticeable on a 6x4 print. Not a bad performance for how little I paid though.<br>

Anyone likes to comment on this one? Any samples to show?<br>

Thanks<br>

Joachim</p>

Hi,

 

I have the Coolscan IV and that has the same problem, it is the mechanics of the holders. With the MA-20 (used for mounted slides) you can scan the entire slide. (Slide frames are typically something like 23x35, which is less than the neg-size).

 

For negs there are two options: The SA-21, which is very convenient but one looses a bit at the top and the bottom of the frame. The manual says, the scanning area is 23.3x36.0, which is a larger area than reported here, but I don't have a precise measure to confirm that.

 

The other neg-option is the FH-3. It comes with the Coolscan IV but needs to be purchased sparately for the Coolscan V. The FH-3 goes into the MA-20 (slide holder). With that one you definitly loose less at the top and bottom. The manual says 24.0x36.0 for the scanning area. This one is less convenient than the SA-21 to load the negs, but when I care for the extra area I go for this one.

 

Since my cameras do more than the nominal 24x36 I never get the unexposed outer space around my negatives. For my needs this is good enough. With photoshop I can draw any border around it ...

Paul,

 

the sensor in the F700 is 3 Mpixels. They interpolate it to 6 Mpixel, but this will not any info beyond the 3 Mpixels. So from what you write, the F700 does not seem what you want (you have a 3 MP camera).

 

For a small pocketable camera I would have a look at the Canon Ixus 500 and perhaps at the new Olympus C60. The later offers more control than the the Canon. If you consider a Canon S50 small, than this might be an alterantive to the IXUS with more control. The real disadvantage of the S50 is, it is so ugly (I own its predecessor the S45).

 

Hope this helps. j

Hi Ronald,

 

I got the Coolscan IV recently and use it with XP. I started with NikonScan 3 (that came with it) and upgrade to NikonScan 4 (from the web). I had no issues with NikonScan 3, but people said that NikonScan 4 would be faster. I didn't notice any speed improvements with NikonScan 4.

 

I only used NikonScan 3 for a couple of days until switching to NikonScan 4. I am not aware of any obvious improvements so changes are quite subtile if there are any.

 

An advantage of the Coolscan IV over the V is that the IV comes with the FH-3 to feed strip films manually. Compare to the SA-21 this has the advantage of having a larger scaning window and it holds the film more flat. The FH-3 is a bit fiddely to handle and I only use it for special frames. For the Coolscan V the FH-3 has to be purchased separately.

A recently dicontinued Nikon Coolscan IV might be an alternative (if you still can get one). It has ICE, which I find particular valuable for negative scans.

Hi Mark,

 

the basic is to do it once. So either you can tell PS that you are using an EPSON R800 printer and tell the Printer not to mess with it (no ICM in the printer driver) or you tell PS not to bother (Printer Color Managment) and leave the conversion to the printer (ICM checked in the printer driver).

 

Renard DellaFave's links a nice document explaining this for Canon printers in http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=007U9k. I would expect the EPSON driver to be quite similar.

 

Hope this helps.

Hi P, the parallax is a function of the distance. The lens transmitts the distance it is set to the rangefinder in the body. This is used to set the parallax as well. Hope this helps.

John, not fully sure what it does. But I would assume that NikonScan knows about the scanner (Coolscan IV) it is driving. When I had it new I used Nikon sRBG and I had problems with red clipping in blue sky (red channel went below zero). Since I have changed to Adobe RGB I rescanned the same slide, even when cranking the colour saturation through the roof. Still the red channel is well above zero.

 

So I concluded it is doing something more sophisticated (i.e. it is fiddeling with the data) then just writing this is Adobe RGB.

 

In this context, it might be interesting that for some files I have, the picture changes quite dramatically when switching colour managment on/off in Photoshop Elements 2. I didn't investigate properly for which tags of the loaded file this is happening.

 

 

Hope this answers at least part of your question.

I want to contribute to what Benoit and Eric have written to you.

The option color management for print (the 3rd one), respects any profile the files come with. My digicam always attaches sRGB (in the exif data) and PS Elements 2 manages them in sRGB (when using profiling for print). In NikonScan 4 I can asign profiles and PS Elements 2 manages them in what ever I attach. If I don't attach a profile in NikonScan 4 it attaches Adobe RBG.

 

So the question is the source of your images. One might be able to attach their printer profile in the scanning software, but this might leave you with an odd set of files with a profile attached nobody else uses.