benhai_zhang1

December 22, 2009

Yes, it is true ^_^.

For a better lens, ie the 50mm 1.8 prime, I don't need to adjust much. Sometimes the adjustments will wash out lots of details for the pictures taken with 18-70mm lens.

Probably, I'll just keep using my current lens until they died and move on for another one.

Now I got an real option, take off my glasses and then everything is about the same now. What a relief!

Merry Christmas to all!

December 22, 2009

Robert,

Sharp eyes! As I remembered it is -0.5 exposure. Normally I do +0.3. Yes, the picture quality can improve but still can't match prime lens.

December 22, 2009

Thanks for all of the responses. I don't want to spend huge money on new lens. Maybe I'd try MF prime lens since that's an alternative. I don't mind do MF but manual exposure is like a pain. Is there any way that we can hack the D70/D80 to do exposure in some way? Does a hacked verion of firmwire available somewhere?

December 22, 2009

Eric, you might be right. For 18-70mm lens if the aperture I use is at wide open then no matter how I adjust contrast and saturation the images doesn't look vivid. I started to notice this after I mistakenly sold my beloved Nikkor 70-210mm constant F4 several month ago. Since 70-210mm is a little bit too long for me, so I'd hope there is an cheaper alternative to the more expensive and heavy lens. Maybe I'd need to add up my prime lens instead of zoom lens.

December 22, 2009

Well, here is a picture taken with the 18-70mm though it is my intention to diagnose the 18-70mm lens.<div>

</div>

December 22, 2009

Here is a picture I took with the 50mm F1.8 AF lens. That's my prefered lens quality. The 18-70mm lens can produce same sharpness but it can't generate the color I saw in this picture.

December 22, 2009

I don't mean there is a lens problem just I don't like the color the 18-70mm lens renders sometime. It's still my primary lens on the camera. I tried two prime lens and seemed that I can get more color out of it. I forgot to mention that my kids made a deep scrach on the 18-70mm about 6mm. It might effect the picture quality a little bit.

December 22, 2009

Hi Keith, for the 16-85mm and 24-85mm, what's the price range for them?

Personally I like the the zoom range longer than 70mm cause I'd like to shoot kids with a little bit distance.

December 22, 2009

Hello All:

Do you have some advice on a walk around zoom lens other than the Nikkor 18-70mm DX lens? I've been looking for a better inexpensive alternative for quite a while.

I've tried older Nikkor 28-85mm which is quite good above certain apeterture but the sample I got have defocus (basically lost color and contrast) at 28mm wide open and can't focus to infinity. I got the repair manual from photo.net and after the adjustment I can't get both of the issues solved. I can only get either infinity or close focus correctly. It seems to be a design issue for this is a consumer lens at that time. You'll need to use DOF to fight for focus. Too bad, otherwise it would be good. The color that renders by it is quite pleasant to me.

I have two prime lens, Nikkor 28mm f3.5 AI and Nikkor 50mm F1.8 AF. I love the 50mm F1.8 very much. That's the picture quality I'm looking after. The picture doesn't seem to be much sharper than the 18-70mm but the color is extremely pleasant to my eyes when using F2.8 and above. 28mm f3.5 is also very good but not as good as 50mm f1.8 AF. I didn't use it often because it is manual focus and manual exposure.

The 18-70mm Nikkor is sharp and covers popular zoom range. Over the time, I am not quite happy with the color it reders. In many cases the details of color on a face is gone.

How about the Nikkor 35-135mm AF and Nikkor 35-105mm AF? Are they good?

Thanks,

Ben

December 17, 2009

Thanks for the info. On D70 I have to do manul exposure and manul focus. It's kind of pain now. But I'll play around with it and see how's the result.

December 16, 2009

I just got a Tokina 24-40mm F2.8 AT-X. How's this lens? I am currently using D70. So this manual focus lens would be a lot of work for me. If I'd like to sell it, how much would be a fair price?

Ben

June 8, 2009

Hi Bill:

Thank you! I'll try the -k option. I found out that picassa can display all of the info by property. I am quite amazed to see how much picassa can do.

Benhai

June 5, 2009

Ok, I have 96 version of Pain Shop Pro but it didn't support Exif at that time ^_^

I may try the current version.

exiftool doesn't work on my laptop. I think I may need to install some perl module to support perl executable.

I can live with Nikon view. It gives out the information it can understand. Some other software just dump out a huge list with lots of infor it doesn't understand.

Thanks,

Ben

June 4, 2009

Hello Kodak users :

Can Kodak easyshare software display shooting information? I have the Nikon View that works but there is no ISO info in Nikon View. I tried easyshare but there seems no option to display the shotting info.

I tried some Exif viewer software but their display cubersome. I don't want to use it.

My Kodak camera is P880.

Thanks, Ben

May 11, 2009

Hi Sam:

For the last picture you saw the close part is quite sharp. I took several shots at the same location and only 1/4 of them blured. Smaller apeture doesn't help much here.

I think the problem is mainly due to the AF speed of this older camera. This is a single area, center area AF camera, so when the left corner leafs are sharp (no hands shake) in Auto mode which indicatres that center AF system has some trouble to focus at the center objects.

Benhai

May 11, 2009

Thanks All!

I tried all of above and seems that the reasons for blury are:

1. Slow focusing that I'm not used to it anymore (^_^) since I'm shooting with D70 for several years already and not used to a slow focus camera anymore.

2. No continuous focusing capability so it can not focus correctly from shutter pressed to picture taken.

3. It seems to have some focusing difficulty in some certain lighting condition which I didb't do enough experiment.

4. Hands shaken though I don't have these many blurred pictures on D70 (very few on D70 vs 1/4 on this PS).

Not sure what to do. Maybe time for an updated P&S for the coming vacation.

Blah

May 8, 2009

No focus info. Too bad! I did focus at the center.

Basic Image Information

<tbody>

<td>Camera:</td>

</tr>

<td>21 mm (Max aperture f/2)</td>

</tr>

<td>Exposure:</td>

<td>Program AE, 1 <big>/</big> 125 sec, f/2.8, ISO 100</td>

</tr>

<td>Flash:</td>

</tr>

<td>April 30, 2009 6:59:37 AM (timezone not specified) (8 days, 9 hours, 18 minutes, 12 seconds ago, assuming an image timezone of US Pacific) </td>

</tr>

<td>1,704 × 2,272 JPEG (3.9 megapixels) 1,747,540 bytes (1.7 megabytes) Image compression: 85%</td>

</tr>

<td>Color Encoding:</td>

<td>

WARNING: Color space tagged as sRGB, without an embedded color profile. Windows and Mac web browsers will treat the colors randomly .

Images for the web are most widly viewable when in the sRGB color space and with an embedded color profile. See my <a href="http://regex.info/blog/photo-tech/color-spaces-page1/">Introduction to Digital-Image Color Spaces</a> for more information.

</td>

</tr>

</tbody>

</table>

May 8, 2009

Note the AF area is in the center for this old camera.

May 8, 2009

I lost original EXIF info cause I overwrite the original. Here is another blured picture.

I don't see the focus distance information.

Here's the full data:

<big>EXIF</big> — this group of metadata is encoded in 4,747 bytes (4.6k )

<tbody>

<td>Color Space</td>

</tr>

<td>Components Configuration</td>

<td>YCbCr</td>

</tr>

<td>Compressed Bits Per Pixel</td>

</tr>

<td>Compression</td>

<td>JPEG (old-style)</td>

</tr>

<td>Create Date</td>

<td>2009:04:30 06:59:37 8 days, 9 hours, 18 minutes, 12 seconds ago</td>

</tr>

<td>Date/Time Original</td>

<td>2009:04:30 06:59:37 8 days, 9 hours, 18 minutes, 12 seconds ago</td>

</tr>

<td>Exif Image Size</td>

</tr>

<td>Exif Version</td>

</tr>

<td>Exposure Compensation</td>

</tr>

<td>Exposure Program</td>

<td>Program AE</td>

</tr>

<td>Exposure Time</td>

</tr>

<td>F Number</td>

</tr>

<td>File Source</td>

<td>Digital Camera</td>

</tr>

<td>Flash</td>

<td>No Flash</td>

</tr>

<td>Flashpix Version</td>

</tr>

<td>Focal Length</td>

</tr>

</tr>

<td>Image Description</td>

</tr>

<td>Interoperability Index</td>

<td>R98 - DCF basic file (sRGB)</td>

</tr>

<td>Interoperability Version</td>

</tr>

<td>Light Source</td>

<td>Unknown</td>

</tr>

</tr>

<td>Max Aperture Value</td>

</tr>

<td>Metering Mode</td>

<td>Center-weighted average</td>

</tr>

<td>Camera Model Name</td>

<td>CYBERSHOT</td>

</tr>

<td>Modify Date</td>

<td>2009:04:30 06:59:37 8 days, 9 hours, 18 minutes, 12 seconds ago</td>

</tr>

<td>Orientation</td>

<td>Horizontal (normal)</td>

</tr>

<td>Resolution</td>

<td>72 pixels/inch</td>

</tr>

<td>Scene Type</td>

<td>Directly photographed</td>

</tr>

<td>Thumbnail Length</td>

</tr>

<td>Y Cb Cr Positioning</td>

<td>Co-sited</td>

</tr>

</tbody>

</table>

<big>PrintIM</big>

<tbody>

<td>Print IM 0x0002</td>

</tr>

<td>Print IM 0x0101</td>

</tr>

</tbody>

</table>

<big>File</big> — basic information derived from the file.

<tbody>

<td>Bits Per Sample</td>

</tr>

<td>Color Components</td>

</tr>

<td>Encoding Process</td>

<td>Baseline DCT, Huffman coding</td>

</tr>

<td>Exif Byte Order</td>

<td>Little-endian (Intel, II)</td>

</tr>

</tr>

</tr>

<td>Image Size</td>

</tr>

<td>image/jpeg</td>

</tr>

<td>Y Cb Cr Sub Sampling</td>

<td>YCbCr4:2:2 (2 1)</td>

</tr>

</tbody>

</table>

<big>Composite</big> This block of data is computed based upon other items. Some of it may be wildly incorrect if the image has been resized.

<tbody>

<td>Aperture</td>

</tr>

<td>Flash</td>

</tr>

<td>Focal Length</td>

</tr>

<td>Light Value</td>

</tr>

<td>Shutter Speed</td>

</tr>

<td>Thumbnail Image</td>

<td>(3,895 bytes binary data)</td>

</tr>

</tbody>

</table>

May 8, 2009

Another bad picture<div>

00TImS-132959684.JPG.8be4b09a54c95ad2a18a881efa84ce38.JPG

</div>

May 8, 2009

Hello Friends:

My old P&S sony dsc-s85 tent to give me more and more blured pictures. Here are 2 bad pictures. Can you tell if this is caused by hand shaking or something else. I noticed that the outer lens group of this S85 is loose. I checked my Nikon DSLR and don't see moving parts on the lens.

If it is likely to be caused by the loose outer lens then what can I do?

Thanks,

Benhai<div></div>

April 17, 2009

After playing with it again. I have to confess that I have to keep it because of the excellent lens. I can do frefocus as in the manul film age. The result turns out fantastic when I use it correctly.

Here are some examples of a bad moment and a macro mode.

http://picasaweb.google.com/Benhai.Zhang/S85#

^_^

April 13, 2009

I'm going to have a trip in June so I'd like to take a small camera with me. The smallest I have is this Sony DSC-S85. This is an old camera in the Canon G2 age. I choose S85 because of it's good lens and long battery life. I haven't been extensively use this camera for a while. The draw back is the slow lens extension and big shutter lag. I paid good bucks at that time $600 at the good guys. Look at the old pictures, they are good! Especially the close shots. I have to confess that I can't capture the moving things very well with it. I have to predict and wish to have good luck.

Just want to see how would you do? Throw it away or keep using it?

A tough decision for me. I'm always want to keep the old friend.

Benhai

^_^

June 6, 2008

Here is what the manual said. I'm clear now.

Benhai<div></div>

June 6, 2008

I used to be able to sync with 1/500 with the on camera falsh in some mode. I'll check later when I go back to home.

Ian, under full manual mode, will i-TTL still work?

Stanley, your suggestion seems to disable the i-TTL communication on the camera. Are you sure it works this way?

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