cameras, etc.
Well the D30 now has a companion. Just last week, I bought a secondhand Canon G5 from Ebay. Two years ago I was drooling over this camera, and now have one for under half its price when new.
I must say though, having used a digital SLR (albeit an old one) for the last year or so, SLRs really are the most enjoyable machines to use if you enjoy the practice of composing the shot and pressing the shutter and getting an instant response from the shutter inside. The G5 is still a fairly high-end compact, but, like compacts in general, there's still a short delay and feeling of `detachment' from the scene when you press the button all the way home. However, I sort of bought the G5 as more of an everyday knockabout camera, having lent my Panasonic compact digital to my sister who is overseas.
So is the G5 a good machine? It certainly feels the business - well built and well laid out. It's a 5 megapixel CCD camera. The resolution is a bit immaterial, I reckon. As far as I'm concerned I get excellent results on the old 3 megapixel EOS D30 - I nearly always shoot in raw mode and import the images from a Firewire card reader through Adobe Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw. Much quicker than mucking about with direct USB 1 camera connections. Camera on-board image processing apparently has greatly improved over the last few years and I figure that by shooting raw with the D30 (circa 2000) I am reducing the amount of work that the camera has to do apart from just exposing its sensor to the world for short fractions of seconds.
There's no escaping the higher resolutions, though - the manufacturers make better, higher resolution chips for less money and can't help but incorporate them into the models that appear on the store shelves. Perhaps it is important for some people to always have the latest and greatest - higher resolution being a key selling point of the modern digicam gear. I now shoot with two secondhand cameras and process on a secondhand G3 Powerbook, and I believe that higher resolution images just make for more unnecessary work for an older computer like mine.
I took the G5 off and snapped a whole lot of shots around the St.Kilda Pier area on the weekend, and the results look ok on the computer screen. The pictures are good - but there is definitely quite a bit of noise in there. Best to keep the ISO setting as low as possible, I think.
I must say though, having used a digital SLR (albeit an old one) for the last year or so, SLRs really are the most enjoyable machines to use if you enjoy the practice of composing the shot and pressing the shutter and getting an instant response from the shutter inside. The G5 is still a fairly high-end compact, but, like compacts in general, there's still a short delay and feeling of `detachment' from the scene when you press the button all the way home. However, I sort of bought the G5 as more of an everyday knockabout camera, having lent my Panasonic compact digital to my sister who is overseas.
So is the G5 a good machine? It certainly feels the business - well built and well laid out. It's a 5 megapixel CCD camera. The resolution is a bit immaterial, I reckon. As far as I'm concerned I get excellent results on the old 3 megapixel EOS D30 - I nearly always shoot in raw mode and import the images from a Firewire card reader through Adobe Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw. Much quicker than mucking about with direct USB 1 camera connections. Camera on-board image processing apparently has greatly improved over the last few years and I figure that by shooting raw with the D30 (circa 2000) I am reducing the amount of work that the camera has to do apart from just exposing its sensor to the world for short fractions of seconds.
There's no escaping the higher resolutions, though - the manufacturers make better, higher resolution chips for less money and can't help but incorporate them into the models that appear on the store shelves. Perhaps it is important for some people to always have the latest and greatest - higher resolution being a key selling point of the modern digicam gear. I now shoot with two secondhand cameras and process on a secondhand G3 Powerbook, and I believe that higher resolution images just make for more unnecessary work for an older computer like mine.
I took the G5 off and snapped a whole lot of shots around the St.Kilda Pier area on the weekend, and the results look ok on the computer screen. The pictures are good - but there is definitely quite a bit of noise in there. Best to keep the ISO setting as low as possible, I think.
posted by Alex Wegman at 00:17
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