pete_su

some of the AF bodies have viewfinders that make manual focus harder than you

might want, especially as compared to the beautiful viewfinder in the FM2 or F3.

of course, the F5 and F100 don't have this problem.

yeah, that's true. it's much better for the OS to make the user manually allocate blocks

of memoty for each application. better yet, you should have to tell the machine

exactly which parts of the application to swap to disk at any given time. that'll be

great for the rest of us.

on the other hand, you could have the OS keep track of all of this on your own so you

don't really have to think about it at all except in extreme circumstances.

as others have said, as long as its working, don't worry about how much memory the

app thinks it has. in general the system will take care of it reasonably well.

It's never been clear to me what the people who moan about AF lens compatibility

really want. If you aren't happy with what Nikon is doiing, you can always just go buy

something else. But, oh wait, you'd have to buy new, incompatible lenses.

When you think about it, the root of the problem is the fact that there are different

lens mounts at all. The *only* reason for this is so the camera companies can make

more money from you than what you just spent on the body. Given this, is it any

surprise that companies would also evolve the lens mount over a period of 50 years to

keep you buying the new stuff?

If Nikon is going to update the AF prime lenses, I'd like to seem them make them all

use those nice ring motors for AF. The current lenses (even the wides) don't track

focus well enough to hit focus wide open in low light. My 24-85 AF-S wide zoom does

much better, and gives you manual override to boot.

Did Pentax ever make a half frame SLR? My wife says that her dad traded one for the

Olympus OM-1 that he had while she was growing up, but I've never been able to find

reference to such a thing. I have seen mention of a Pentax 110 format SLR, but not a

half frame. Does anyone know anything about this?

Thanks

I could never get 120 film on plastic reels. I tried for years but finally gave up after I

ended up shining light on 4 rolls of film in my Jobo tank.

With a bit of practice, stainless reels are really much better for this. Buy the Hewes. I

never, ever, missed once with the Hewes.

i find the author links being before their text to be disorienting and hard to read.

that's really the main thing.

please put the old format back. the new format gives me a headache and i can't read

any of the content.

i don't care about the ads, but having the author lines on top just breaks up

everything the wrong way.

Here are some reasons to like G lenses

- no useless extra apeture ring that serves no purpose on modern bodies

- if you set f5.6 and then switch lenses, you are still on f5.6

- can change apeture and shutter speed with one hand, hold a flash with the other.

- the 24-85 zoom is a great lens with really nice fast quiet autofocus.

- easy to get half stop increments in apeture, if you are into that sort of thing.

Obsessing over small details like 1/3 stop exposure dials is sort of unhelpful IMHO.

If you want 1/3 stop control on an 8008s, a combination of auto exposure, exposure

compensation and a bit of creativity will get it for you. It's not as convenient as the

newer bodies, but the 8008s viewfinder is a lot better *and* the analog scale is 4

stops wide in third stop steps instead of only 2 stops. This is much more helpful to

me than 1/3 stop exposure dials.

YMMV

I've never understood this mentality. It's not like ANY of the EOS lenses have aperture

rings. What is the rationale to switch all your equipment over to buy electronic lenses

that you claim not to like? It's not like there is a shortage of Nikon lenses available

with aperture rings.

I have an F100 and I have never noticed any real difference in frame to frame speed

when continuous AF is on under normal shooting conditions. The af-on button works

just like you would expect it to, allowing you to park the focus and then shoot away.

I tried this little trick with putting a hand over the lens, and it does seem to slow the

camera down, but only when shooting continuous frames. The *shutter lag*, meaning

the time it takes the camra to fire after you hit the button, is unchanged. What

changes is the frame to frame speed while you hold down the button.

It's not clear to me why it should slow the camera down, but what is clear is that I

don't spend a lot of time shooting with my hand over the lens.

I couldn't come up with any other scenario that makes the camera slow down, so it

doesn't seem like an earth-shattering problem.

a 120GB drive costs about as much or even less than 10 rolls of film + processing

and proofs.

at that rate, you can practically just completely replace every disk you own every year

with a new one and have room left over for extra backups... and you could still come

out ahead of film costs.

that, combined with judicious CD or DVD burning is probably enough to keep the

image files around and in good shape for as long as you need. and, there are nice

programs to automatically index everything for you so you can always find it.

The bullet time rig shown in my copy of THE MATRIX, in the extras, shows a bunch of

cameras all of which clearly have a Canon back dial... so, not Nikons, and not the

Rebel, as far as I can tell. But they probably had more than one rig.

Whatever else you want to say about the Rebel, comparing it to a point and shoot is

not really valid. The larger sensor (same size as the 10d) and the faster image

processing means that the handling of the camera will be more similar to a 10d or

Nikon D100 than to a digital point and shoot. In fact, the Rebel has a frame rate and

buffer size that is pretty much identical to the D100.

I think the real question here is whether Nikon will be able to deal with the fact that

DSLR product cycles are much shorter than film camera product cycles.

We'll see.

>My main problem with the camera is inconsistency.

Digital cameras are no more inconsistent than film cameras that I've used.You just

have to keep in mind that CCDs act much more like *slide film* from an exposure

standpoint than negative film. This means 2 things

1. Almost no latitude for underexposure

2. Relatively short total exposure range

3. Lots of latitude for underexposure.

If you walk out the door and shoot like you have negative film loaded, you'll get

inconsistent results. But this doesn't mean the camera is off. This is *especially* true

in high contrast situations where you have no latitude for error, but where the

situation lends itself to fooling the meter.

Under the right conditions, even my crappy 3mp Canon S30 has been able to capture

a file good enough for a very good 8x10 print. I have to believe that the D1's 2.7mp

would be able to match that, and therefore I have my doubts that such prints would

be "marginal".

YMMV I guess. But if you need the faster response time, better handling, and deeper

memory buffer, the D100 is not going to do it for you, and the D1's relative lack of

resolution might be an OK tradeoff to make.

I tend to shoot RAW files if I think the picture is really important or if I'm in wierd

lighting that will be hard to adjust in JPEG mode, and if I'm close to my laptop and I

have time to flush the files.

The main advantage of RAW is that in post processing you have a lot of flexibility. It's

not clear to me that it offers a huge advantage in overall image quality, assuming

decent light.

If your entire point is that digital systems don't have the resolution that you think you

need, then just don't buy one. Simple.

You have to be pretty naive or ignorant to compare the evolution of CPUs to the

evolution of CCD or CMOS based imaging systems. The engineering requirements and

constraints for the two types of chips are totally different. Further, the economies that

drive their development are entirely different.

CPUs don't just get cheaper and faster by themselves. It takes huge teams of

engineers paid billions of dollars a year to keep that growth curve alive. So, in turn,

you have to be able to *sell* billions of units a year to be able to make a profit from

the whole endeavour. The market for PCs has been large enough to support this

growth. But, think about it... how many 16mpix CCD imaging chips were sold last

year?

I don't know crap about how chips are made, but I do know one thing. Making big

chips is hard and expensive. And guess what, CCD imagers for digital cameras are big

chips.

Go back home and learn something.