davidlong

I think it's likely to eventually drop, perhaps by $50-100 in terms of street price. But even if you're willing to pay full retail, the 20mm is hard to find as a stand-alone item right now unless you're in Japan. To get it in the US, you'd probably have to go the eBay route, and prices there are currently running $100 over US retail.

At the least they need information about the electrical properties/protocols of the two mounts, and manufacturers don't go out of their way to document those.

I'm don't know about the 9000, but I played around with the 5000 a bit under linux, and the SANE interface (scanimage) seems to offer pretty complete control from the command line.

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A bit of dust inside the lens isn't going to affect the image; just ignore it.

Distance to subject should be about equal to guide number divided by aperture. So if the GN says 16 meters and you're shooting at f/8, then the flash will "correctly" illuminate a subject about 2 meters away.

 

In practice, you don't usually calculate this stuff. It doesn't take into account things like the presence of modifiers (umbrellas, snoots, etc.) anyway. Just guesstimate and then adjust based on the image/histogram. I vaguely recall someone wirting that there's a way to make the flash display power output (1/1, 1/2, 1/4, ...) rather than guide numbers, which may be less confusing.

Lightroom editing is non-destructive regardless of what the input is. Just don't export over the original JPEGs.

Ironically, if you look at the code for a RAW processor such as dcraw, you'll find that the Foveon sensor requires much more complex processing to produce reasonable images than a Bayer sensor. The Foveon approach looks simple and elegant in a brochure, and it has some good properties, but the sensor has poor color separation. That is, a lot of the "red" and "green" photons that the sensor captures are actually absorbed by the "blue" layer, etc. The RAW processor has to tease all of that apart, and it's not very easy, leading to a lot of color noise in low-light situations.

 

I suspect that cameras will eventually use something other than Bayer sensors. But I don't think that the "something" will be a Foveon sensor.

<a href="http://www.smugmug.com/help/skin-tone">Here are a few comments</a> from SmugMug on skin tones.

If you don't mind older tech, you can get an Olympus E-1 and 14-54mm lens for about $600. Both body and lens are sealed.

Of the ones I've tried, my preference is for the Olympus E-1.

I've seen exactly one somewhat systematic IS test (at slrgear). At 300mm (35mm-equivalent), they tested a body-based system (Olympus E520) and a lens-based system (Canon 70-200mm f/4L IS). For a fairly steady shooter, body-based gave 2.1 stops of improvement in hand-holdable shutter speed, while lens-based managed 2.3 stops. For a shaky shooter, the improvements were 2.6 and 2.8 stops respectively. So the lens-based was a bit better, but hardly earth-shaking ;-). And at 100mm equivalent, the body-based gave 2.7 stops to both shooters, while the lens-based only managed 1.9 and 2.3 stops. (The real benefit of lens-based IS is that it can help with framing. In the future, with electronic viewfinders becoming more popular and sophisticated, even that advantage will disappear.)

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So I'd say that (1) is at least questionable, assuming you consider 300mm reasonably long. And based on the numbers <a href="http://www.photoscala.de/Artikel/DSLR-Welt-im-Wandel">here</a>, I'd say that (3) isn't necessarily true with regards to Sony. Of course, they might be stealing more share with high-resolution full-frame sensors than they are with body-based IS, but one way or the other, they are taking market share. (2) of course is eternally true.

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I think one of Canon or Nikon will eventually cave and add in-body IS. (They will also hail it as a wonderful technical breakthrough.) The other will cave six months after that.

Noise and resolution and pretty similar on all of them. Wanting a viewfinder means either the G1, the GH1, or the GF1 with the optional viewfinder. The G1 and GH1 have the nicest (biggest, highest resolution) viewfinders.

Panasonic's compability list is <a href="http://panasonic.jp/support/global/cs/dsc/connect/g1.html">here</a>

It's (now) a known issue, doesn't appear with 2.4, and only appears on non-Intel Macs. It's not only with the E-620, but with lots of other cameras (from Olympus and Panasonic, and maybe others; perhaps all the ones that have 4-color sensors). It'll presumably be fixed shortly.

If it doesn't work with Olympus cameras, odds are against it working with the G1.

Thanks Chris. "Raw output with: save" is the trick. I had it set to "scan". When you do that, another check box appears which says "Raw save film". That box makes Vuescan save the RAW output AFTER it has done the inversion (and dust removal too!)

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<p>Since starting to use Lightroom recently, I decided that I liked its image manipulation controls much better

than Vuescan's, and so for my color negatives I'd like to get a basic scan from Vuescan and then do the

more extensive work in Lightroom.

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This is what I'm doing now:

<ol>

<li>

Lock the exposure and base color in Vuescan<li>

Scan my film. I use Vuescan's RGB histograms to set the black and white points for each image, and I tweak

the overall white balance to get it in the ballpark. I leave the contrast low.<li>

Output full-size 48-bit TIFFs from Vuescan. Import those into Lightroom for further work.

</ol>

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I noticed that Vuescan also has a DNG raw output option. Thinking that might be better, I tried it, but when I

import the DNGs into Lightroom, the image is still inverted. (And yes, I do have Vuescan set to color negative

mode.)

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So my questions are:<ol><li>

Is there any point in worrying about this, or are the 48-bit TIFFs just as good as what I'd get from the raw

DNGs, assuming I could make them work. Would the DNGs save any disk space?<li>

Is there a way to invert the colors in Lightroom?<li>

If not, is there a way to get Vuescan to output a raw DNG but with the color inverted?

</ol>

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I currently have Vuescan's dust-and-scratch removal enabled and that is reflected in the TIFFs, but I'd be willing to give that up and do the spotting by hand in Lightroom if there was an advantage to using the DNGs.

I always wondered why Olympus (at least, maybe Panasonic too?) uses two slightly different greens. There's obviously got to be some reason for it, since it's not the natural thing to do and it makes the demosaicing harder and/or costs some resolution. Presumably it ties in somehow with the color rendering. The secret behind Olympus blue?

18mm on 1.5x = 27mm, not 24mm. That would be a big difference.

If you go the Olympus route, I wouldn't recommend the 18-180. 18mm isn't very wide on 4/3, and the lens is also one of Olympus's most so-so performers. The two kit lenses are both pretty good though.

If you consider 12MP (your E-30) good only to 11x14, then to get 24x36 at the same resolution, you need about 4 times more pixels. But nobody (yet) makes 50MP DSLRs.

It's obviously physically possible to increase the pixel count, but given their recent comments, I doubt they'll do it. If you've just got to have more, time to start shopping for a different system.

 

If you want better noise performance, presumably you shouldn't want them to increase the pixel count. The E-P1 images look another step better to me than the previous DSLR output, so if you want improved ISO performance, you may have some basis for hope.

Try searching for "300 fd g1" on flickr and the flickr-mailing the photographers.