nico_morris

February 2, 2015

It might help you to know that the zoom action of the 70-210 f4 is normally very light and the lens is fairly short and light. I was content to use it wide open whereas with many f2.8 I could only tolerate them at f3.3- gaining only 1/2 stop.

February 2, 2015

I tested a refurbished new-looking D7000 and guess what, it focused badly. Worse than thrashed ones.

Maybe your friend isn't such a 'friend' and passed you a camera that tantalisingly costs almost as much to repair as buy a used replacement of.

October 25, 2014

You have to think not once, not twice, but three times and then unlock it. It's to stop you taking bad pictures.

Obviously I don't bother with it.

October 11, 2014

Actually it would help if you tell us your body. There may be hardly any point in upgrading the optics if you are using an 8MP 20D. I used the kind of lens you are using and mainly what you can hope for is some extra resolution toward the edge of the frame on 200mm. And people taking note of you because you have quite a big white lens.

September 19, 2014

Firstly, I am not aware of any company themselves calling a camera a "prosumer" one. It seems to be a tag for review sites and possibly even retail sites and award bodies. Please give an example if I've missed something, I'm actually interested. Secondly, it reflects a price bracket more than anything else. If an entry-level SLR body is $500, and a professional workhorse is $5000, expect the difference to be split somewhere in the middle for the "prosumer" body. Thirdly, in practice these cameras are generally built to provide a high potential image quality subject to certain provisos that the controls are less convenient for constant use or the item needs to be "babied". A focus ring on a video recorder may not be broad and on the lens where it's most natural, or the body composition might not stand regular knocks in use.

The funny thing is that what is pro today is toy tomorrow. So pros of today cannot use their present gear to make pro pictures tomorrow. How did they "dislearn" their capability? (Btw: Dimage A2 was promoted as a prosumer camera when it was introduced. It had everything a DSLR had except a mirror and a lens mount. Who would call it prosumer today? The A2 was my first digital camera, back in 2004.)

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The Dimage A2 from 2004 needs to be understood in the context of the time. It was 8 megapixels released before the professional SLR the 8 megapixel Canon 1D Mark II and the A2 had a lot of serious-looking dials and buttons and a body grip available. Now we look on it as amateurish because it was cheaper to make the electronic viewfinder, the sensor was small and the lens was not interchangeable. But at the time it won an award for its professional results from DIWA and TIPA. Who probably existed for the benefit of the industry, admittedly...

September 18, 2014

<a href="/photodb/user?user_id=729251">Edward Chen</a> , Sep 17, 2014; 12:28 p.m. Canon shooters envy nikon'DR and nikon shooters envy canon's AF

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They don't envy Canon AF in the crop-sensor market. I've been invested in both camps and never seen D300 owners moan as much as 7D owners about their autofocus.

In the action shooter's market, DR advantage seems only limited though.

September 18, 2014

<a href="/photodb/user?user_id=620661">hn Crowe</a>, Sep 17, 2014; 08:25 p.m.

Okay, 22 MP vs 20 MP may seem trivial, and I don't mean to pick on this particular camera. However we are talking five years since the 7D was introduced and lets face it this could be Canon's premiere consumer crop body for another 5 years!

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... it's been too long, but there's a better chance it can hold its own for the next 5 years than the 7D, with the wide AF point coverage for instance.

I had just hoped that Canon would make an attempt to surpass Nikon in every respect in both full frame and crop body rather than continue taking baby steps. Five years ago Canon truly set the bar with the 7D and I think this time they have left a lot of room for the competition to jump much higher.

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... not sure why you wouldn't think the 7D II surpasses Nikon in this market. Higher build values, more fps, even more AF point coverage, very similar pixel pitch for instance. But Canon did not really set the bar with the 7D, they responded to a D300 with 8fps and 51 focus points with a camera with 8fps and 19 focus points, with a more recent sensor.

I understand that the AF system could/should be a significant improvement but 5 years to get 2 more MP and 2 more fps? I would rather they stuck with 8 fps and pushed the IQ beyond the current competition.

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I fail to understand why you do not see how important a leap this generation is for the money, if you shoot racing cars. The megapixels are not necessarily important for sports as there are usually simple backgrounds with big areas of out-of-focus colour wide open. And a real and usable 10fps on a mass SLR as far as I know was first achieved with the Canon 1D III, which was a ~$5000 camera 7 years ago. Your perspective makes more sense for a general-shooter amateur with some money burning a hole in his pocket expecting high megapixels and flashy features. I struggle to care about features like GPS and hinged screens personally.

September 17, 2014

To give an idea of what to expect, I have had stable-looking shots at 1/10s for 28-70 zooms and 1/15s 70-210 types before. The mechanism does not seem to be able to move far enough to do so much for lenses over 200mm if not held steady.

Stops does not seem to cover it as quite adequately, even if the simple mathematical formula is tempting. It's as if the mechanism can follow your oscillations to a certain optimum frequency, so long as it's within the movement range of the mechanism. You will not be able to in practice extrapolate a successful result at 200mm 1/15s to getting 18mm 1/2s for example. Try it yourself, it doesn't work. Or does it? ;)

September 17, 2014

D7100 can easily write 7, 8 fps, 24MP directly into the memory card with no more concern about the buffer. However, I don't think that kind of consumer-grade body is going to sustain 8 fps for long; the mirror box is not going to last.

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You've made this kind of assertion before. Could you please outline your engineering design or repair experience. Independent workshops doing insurance repairs have been known to fraudulently resort to the mirror box replacement tariff because it is the highest, which skews the statistics.

The mirror mechanism I believe is controlled by more than one electromagnet in modern cameras. It's not fired on a spring, waiting to shatter.

Mainly I believe people miss the point that the retail price reflects the features ladder and profit margin.

September 17, 2014

There is really no innovation here just an improvement over what other manufacturers were already offering...

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Only one other manufacturer in this price range as far as I know, and a very minor player in this market.

Sony A77 Mark II has some intriguing specifications on paper, but when the conditions of achieving its highest framerate are met and the lag of the electronic viewfinder investigated, things are not so encouraging. That is even before their lens range is considered.

And the D300 is a very old camera now.

April 1, 2014

I just knew this post would be from a new user name.

Draw your own conclusions from it.

March 31, 2014

On the dpr sample picture comparator the D4S doesn't even have a 2-stop noise advantage over an APS-C sensor 70D in raw for high ISO, never mind the D700. It's easy to go and find out for oneself.

Many of the jobbing pros are sports veterans who shoot wide aperture lenses with blurred backgrounds and judge the noise performance by the quality of jpegs in such flat color areas.

I've never seen image smoothing not at the expense of sharpness.

March 29, 2014

A massive D3 body or better to put a slow little lens on it seems perverse to me. If you really wanted to save weight, you could go pure DX and a D7100 + Sigma 50-150 f2.8 for 1550g total which would claw back a stop over the 70-200 f4 and give you better and more accurate focus point coverage across the viewfinder- in return for losing the stop re FX.

If you just want to an overkill body and an overpriced slow lens to show off to people - then I can't help you.

March 26, 2014

Sounds like he wants to continue with weddings with the flash and the battery grip. That means he is getting serious. 100% viewfinder coverage, wireless commander mode and more comprehensive controls you can save to a dial position make the D7000 sound a good fit for him.

March 26, 2014

I hope someone somewhere will take note of the following: rambling diary-like entries to self do not constitute a review, it constitutes a ramble. Apart from being self indulgent, it is difficult to scan long material without heading signposts. Such headings would make it clear why anyone would be interested in the piece. You need to apply a higher level of organisation and focus and think why a random visitor would want to spend 10 minutes of time on a dense text.

February 21, 2014

Clever people know when they are being supported and don't bite the hand that feeds them.

February 21, 2014

I don't know if anybody does "spray and pray". I think it's one of those put-downs to elevate the accuser above the accused. For instance it only takes a few hours of watching a sport to identify where the peaks of action will occur. What people are being accused of here is being an alien who knows nothing about our earth ways.

You could restrict yourself to taking one or two well-time shots of a sporting moment, but if you were there to cover an unrepeatable event, why would you risk only taking one photo? You can get rewarded for the shots you might get, not the ones you won't get because you were being parsimonious. Apart from anything else, I don't know of any camera that will let people fire away constantly without locking up the buffer after a minute, so nobody can be entirely indiscriminate anyway.

February 19, 2014

1) About the first thing any mental health professional will learn is that depression is usually accompanied by feelings of inadequacy or worthlessness

2) No mental health professional will know you as well as you know yourself

3) In view of the above, do you know that despite feelings of inadequacy and misery you could possibly see yourself grinding your way through a job if you were forced to, or are you the type that will flee or make a florid emotional scene instead? If you know you are a runner or like to make a scene, you should cancel the jobs for your clients' sake. It's that simple. If you are not the type of person that inwardly waits to make a florid display to show everybody else what you're feeling, then once you start on your familiar routine your learned routines should see you through to the end. Yes, the clients may notice you are not peppy but are too absorbed in themselves and once you are through it you'll gain a lot by knowing you can just grind your way through it anyway- most of the torture people put themselves through in these situations is the uncertainty. You're on a hiding to nothing trying to guess if you will at some stage make a serious mistake and I don't feel molly-coddling talk is going to help you. If you choose that way you could just drift in circles for years. You already know how to do this stuff, so I say just do it anyway.

(I think ;) )

February 18, 2014

CF seem more backwards-compatible than SD cards. SD introduced a break in the specification over 2GB with SDHC. Plastic spines on SD cards crumble after any abuse, and sometimes after too many insert/remove cycles. All those pins on CF are part of a very old parallel interface and the world has largely moved on to serial buses.

I have used SD card without spines with the contacts flush with the card that feel robust. I don't know if there is a strong technical reason why they cannot do make them like this anymore. They inspire much more confidence. I have had to remove SD when it cracked in a slot into its wafery plastic layers. (This is a cue for someone typically to jump in that says in a decade of use that's never happened to them, so I must be at fault...)

For the moment CF inspires more confidence, but those extra pins make it a lot more expensive.

February 16, 2014

That kit is going for C$1269 in Toronto--an even better deal at current exchange rates.

Just curious how Nikon will squeeze the EXPEED 4 chip into the current D7100 without effectively creating a new model?

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You can afford to forget about it, it's not as if it's the strangest thing he's said. Nikon were the ones who crippled the D7100 and a lot of people wrote it off as a dead loss unless you are a fanatic of DX + 1.3x crop.

February 16, 2014

I have used several lenses that testified to the accuracy of lenstip reviews, so I'd give them credibility. To focus on an offhand comment from someone not writing in their native language smacks of desperation or a reader that only ever knew one language. There are pages of cold, hard test results there and readers can give the writer some latitude in the way he expresses himself in response to them.

The world needs reviewers that don't have their snouts in the trough for either manufacturer adverts or free kit.

February 14, 2014

What is the point arguing about a 24-120 f4. The questioner probably has at least as good in the 18-70 for its range. I can tell whose "ego" is really involved here.

The questioner is asking an unanswerable, the matter of value. I can only suggest that if he is so concerned, he carefully buy used to limit his loss if he wants to pass it on.

February 14, 2014

A great example of that in the wild is the 50-150/2.8 OS HSM. By all reports a stunningly sharp lens, and a heckuva deal @ ~$1100 for that length/speed/ w OS. ...not a huge seller though. And a lens few of us would even consider - despite IQ on par w/ a 70-200/2.8 L II ! Frankly, I'd be very interested in it if it could do duty on a FF body. as a GP portrait lens, while not as fast as is ideal, the flexibility of the zoom and +20 mm on the wide end (!) would certainly have it replacing the 70-200/2.8 for much in my kit. ... but, it's a lens I'll never try, and certainly never buy.

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Sigma thought they were stealing a march on the OEMs by providing a crop-format lens with the equivalent of the traditional 70-200 range. If it had been cheaper and smaller that might have been well and good. But it wasn't, and then they added stabilisation to it, and now it has exactly the same length and filter size of the 70-200, and even the price is almost the same! ! They've been afflicted by a kind of madness in an effort to fill a very small niche. At least with the Canon 70-200 you can put it on 1.6x/1.3/1.0 sensors and use it in slightly different ways.

February 9, 2014

Companies don't think about cameras in the same way that we do. They want to sell fully professional models for $$$$+, or rich amateur models for mere $$$$, and sell cheapos at $$$ to get people locked into their system rather than those of competitors. The rich amateur fad is big-sensor cameras. The companies don't seem to want to build tough, fast, cheaper cameras for limited number of amateurs and those professionals to use as backup bodies any more. They really want to make those professionals pay ;)

February 7, 2014

Didn't expect to set anyone off, but you need what you need. If what you need is a camera that uses 24-105 at a true wideangle, or if you need up to 10fps, then you don't have a true backup in an APS-C camera. It doesn't do the same thing and it will not allow you to carry on working as before. I'm used to seeing people with 2x D3 and maybe a D700 too, which does much the same. But they are usually agency-supplied. Bringing a 1DS III along with a 1DIV for example, would be bringing a complementary camera rather than an ideal backup because the former is a workhorse for a portrait studio and the other is ideal for sports. Hope I've made myself clear.

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Posts posted by nico_morris