ed_avis2

<p>Are you quite sure it's a Foveon sensor? I have a Sigma DP2 Merrill and I can see the per-pixel sharpness from that; the Kodak DCS Pro SLR/c made good images, but it didn't have the same bite. The quality was broadly comparable to the Canon 1Ds Mark I and II, which have Bayer-matrix sensors. Check the size of the raw images - do they really have three separate colour channels per pixel?</p> <p>My understanding is that the sensor came from another company called Fill Factory. The irony is that Kodak pioneered CCD sensors, and in the early DCS line, Canikon provided the camera body while Kodak provided the sensor. By the end Kodak were reduced to fitting third party sensors into third party camera bodies.</p> <p>http://www.nikonweb.com/files/DCS_Story.pdf has some interesting info.</p>

<p>Also investigate using a dioptre lens in front to let you focus closer. Others mentioned extension tubes, and you can also use a teleconverter (or perhaps even the funky 'life size converter' which is a combined teleconverter and extension tube, if you can find it). This article shows what is possible with just tubes and teleconverter: http://www.the-digital-picture.com/News/News-Post.aspx?News=14731<br> Apologies if you are already a macro photography expert, you know about all of this, but you particularly want to use the reversed 50mm lens.</p>

<p>I can see a 100-400 lens (mark I) on ebay.co.uk for 600 GBP buy it now. That is probably the cheapest you will get it. Then an older Canon camera body can be picked up for quite little (Canon 30D or 20D for under a hundred pounds). If you want the Mark II version of the lens then it will be way out of your budget.</p> <p>In equatorial Africa most animals are fairly inactive during the heat of the day, and start moving at twilight. But that makes it hard to photograph them with enough light for a fast shutter speed. I imagine that South Africa, although a bit cooler, is broadly similar in this.</p>

<p>I doubt you'd get anything much for it at all. As you have no lens, you have no way to test that it is all working. A local buyer might bring their own lens to test with - but if they have a lens already, they surely have a camera body too, and likely a newer one than the 20D.</p>

<p>Kodak had a nice sideline in digital SLR cameras when they were still a niche market. Canon or Nikon would make the bodies and Kodak would modify them into Frankenstein digital versions. Once Canikon decided they wanted to make their own digital cameras with their own sensors and electronics, Kodak were toast. They tried to collaborate with Sigma but the resulting product just wasn't up to scratch - far too clunky compared to Canon's offerings, which "just work".</p>

<p>Why don't you try out your lenses (particularly the 24-105) on the 1D2 and see what you think?</p>

<p>Perhaps this someone also wants to swap lenses, if you have EF-S lenses that won't work on the 1D2, and he or she has full frame lenses which work better on the full frame body?</p>

<p>It could be worth it if you have some FD-mount supertelephoto lens like a 400mm, which Canon made with fluorite elements for the older system. For the exotic 50mm f/1.2 in FD mount there might be some value if you enjoy tinkering as much as taking photos. For an ordinary 50mm or 24mm lens forget it. If you really want to save every last penny and you like making life difficult for yourself then there are other manual lenses which can be adapted (Olympus made 50mm and 24mm lenses which are cheap to pick up used), but I would suggest instead looking for a used Canon 50mm (any of them) or saving up for the EF-S mount 24mm pancake lens.</p>

<p>To photograph the baby itself you will want to get close, so check the minimum focus distance, and check the lens performs decently at that distance. Something like the 60mm f/2.8 macro or the old 50mm f/2.5 compact macro would be a decent choice, and gives you the option of photographing just one hand if you want to. I wouldn't want to wave around a big zoom lens like the 70-200 when photographing the baby up close.</p>

<p>I do not want to say anything against the 5D but while we are on the subject of low prices it is worth noting that the original 1Ds and many of the older 1D models (such as the Mark II) are also quite cheap to pick up these days. The 1D series are not quite full frame (they have a 1.3 crop factor) but are still a noticeable step up from the T2i. It depends on what you can find for sale and your personal preference.</p>

<p>FWIW, when I had this lens I almost preferred it on a crop sensor body. It was a way to get an ultra-wide angle of view and use almost all of the sensor, while on full frame most of the sensor is wasted as outside the image circle. But if your project calls for a circular image then you won't be satisfied with the 'pill' shape you get after cropping. One could take two shots, rotating the camera from horizontal to vertical, and put them back in post; or else as someone else suggests crop to a smaller circle (but then you lose the 180-degree angle of view).</p>

<p>The DCS 560 is from 1998. But it was very expensive, something like $30k if I recall correctly.</p>

<p>I have this camera with accessories - JDM von Weinberg, would you like to buy it?. I remember some marketing noise from Kodak about 18 megabytes or another magic way to multiply the pixel count by 3, but as far as I know it's just a Bayer sensor that records one of the three colours at each point (it's not like the Sigma Foveon sensors, which do have some vague claim to provide triple the number of pixels).</p> <p>You are right that the quality is a lot better than you might expect just from seeing the number of "only" 6 megapixels. I reprocessed some of my early shots with decent tools (RawTherapee) and they came out very nicely (where the photo was well taken to start with, of course). There are some examples in my Flickr photostream around <p>The raw images (and I think it only saves raw images, not JPEGs) are indeed in TIFF format and perhaps it bloats them out to write a full 6 million pixels for each colour. That would partly account for the slow burst speed...</p>

<p>Why not shoot at 55mm and then crop to a 70mm equivalent field of view? You have more than enough pixels.</p>

<p>David S., that's interesting. The fact that the difference appears when using teleconverters (which do not change the amount of work the motors must do to move lens elements around) makes me wonder whether this is a software issue. The teleconverter tells the camera body to focus more slowly, which may be necessary in some cases because of the longer effective focal length and reduced effective aperture. The less expensive bodies slow down their autofocus accordingly, but the 1DX does not, or not as much. That is a convenient selling point for Canon, of course.</p>

<p>Steve D., are you sure that's the whole story? The 1DX and the 5D3 have the same autofocus system, but the 1DX is said to focus big lenses faster since it can provide more power to the lens motor. That might be a marketing myth but it needs to be considered.</p>

<p>I believe there is a difference with the bigger lenses like yours. The bigger camera body has more battery power to drive the focusing motor to move the heavy lens elements around.</p>

<p>It sounds like you want the high frame rate of the 1D Mark II (about eight frames per second I think). You may find the 7D (original, or Mark I) a good alternative, though it costs a little more used.</p>

<p>If you want to do macro work with the 90mm then consider a dioptre at the front as well as an extension tube at the back. Canon sell a suitable close-up lens I think. You may also want to experiment with a 1.4x teleconverter depending on whether a cheap one fits your budget. In the end, though, there are plenty of 90mm macro lenses (like the old Tamron adaptall, with an adaptor) which are available dirt cheap and have image quality better or equal to the TS-E, with closer focusing too - just they don't tilt or shift.</p>

<blockquote> <p>I'm not sure if one can do multi-stitching with a perspective-corrected image, though.</p> </blockquote> <p><br />Is this a post-processing question or are you asking about the lenses? I would have expected you would stitch together the large image from the multiple shots and then apply keystone correction, etc, to the stitched image. If you want to use the shift function on the lens as a way to avoid tilting the camera upward to reach the top of a building (for example), then of course you can do that (though you will be moving further towards the edge of the image circle, so optical quality will be worse than in the centre, particularly with the 24mm).</p>

<p>Canon won't repair third party equipment. They are happy to repair Canon equipment, for a fee, provided it is not too old (typically about 10 years).</p>

<p>Thanks for your observations.</p>

<p>I think your 1Ds will autofocus at f/8.</p>

<p>The Novoflex Pro adaptors sometimes pop up on Ebay for a cheaper price - it seems they have some excess stock and are selling it as 'surplus'.</p>

<p>There's also a new revision of the focusing screen, the Ec-CVI (or Ec-C6). I wonder whether this will be a worthwhile upgrade for older 1 series bodies?</p>