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08/08/2004 |
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Digicam Toys for the Boys David Dorn examines some fairly high-priced kit that he reckons is absolutely ace – especially if you’re into Digital Photography. Time was that if you wanted to take really good quality photographs, especially for publication, you wandered out to your local photographic emporium and shelled out a couple of months’ wages on a decent SLR camera and a selection of lenses. Now, of course, we’re all publishers – we’ve all got websites (or the means to have a website, anyway), and so we may well all need to be able to take decent pictures and get them on the web. Some of us, as well, need to get pictures from our cameras off to paper based magazines for publication, and in this kind of situation, a 640x480 snapshot in 256 colours is not quite what the doctor ordered. Nor, come to think of it, does that kind of quality work particularly well when it comes to reproducing 6x4 or 10x8 (A4) pictures to share with the family. These days, if you want to take decent Digital photographs, you may well want to wander out to your local photographic emporium and shelled out a couple of months’ wages on a decent Digital SLR camera and a selection of lenses!
Now, before we get much further down this road, let me tell you that the EOS D30 is not a cheap bit of kit. At a list price of £2200, for the body by itself (no lens included), this is not a purchase you’ll make just on a whim. To put that price into perspective, though, you have to remember that Minolta, Nikon and Fuji have similar offerings. The Fuji is priced at £2700 and the Nikon at £3700, while Minolta’s offering is now retailing at around £2300 so the Canon looks pretty neatly tucked up right at the bottom end of that line-up in terms of price. The D30 boasts a 3.11 Megapixel CMOS sensor (it’s
actually 3.3 MP, but the outside rows are discarded) vs the Nikon
and Minolta 2.1MP, while the Fuji boasts 5.4MP interpolated (it uses
a “best guess” algorithm to pad out a 2.7MP real CCD sensor).
So, it’s got the highest real pixel count of this type of camera
that’s currently available. In terms of storage, it handles CompactFlash cards,
rather than the somewhat less useful SmartMedia cards, and can
accept IBM’s delightful Microdrives. That being the case, I
decided that it might be nice to plug the latest 1GB Microdrive into
the D30 to see how it handled it, and how it affected battery life.
Ah, yes, batteries. Digital cameras have a tendency to eat
batteries, as anyone who uses one regularly will attest. Even my
wife’s aging 640x480 Sanyo compact digicam eats a pair of
rechargeable AA batteries after around60 shots. The D30, however,
uses Lithium Ion rechargables that are good for almost 600 shots in
normal usage, according to Canon. Being both cynical and sceptical,
I decided that the best course of action to test this theory was to
insert the 1GB Microdrive and shoot as many frames as I could,
reviewing each one for four seconds until the battery went flat. It took a whole weekend of pressing the shutter, but 632 shots later, the LCD faded and a recharge was in order. 632 shots! A recharge possibly costs a couple of pennies – that’s very, very cheap photography! The question is, of course, how does it all come together? Well, the D30 handles like a dream. It’s not for nothing that Canon pro SLRs are up there alongside Nikon as the camera of choice for the top flight of professional snappers, and, even though I’ve been a lifelong Minolta user, I found it very easy to get used to its controls. Teaming it up with a Canon 100-300mm USM zoom lens, I found its autofocus to be very quick and quiet, and its weight just about right for easy handling. At first, I thought the slightly offset viewfinder would be strange to get used to, but it’s not – the whole unit sits very comfortably on the face and in the hands. Actually, the viewfinder is very good. I must admit that I’ve often wondered why so many digicam users rely on the LCD to frame their pictures – aside from the fact that the viewfinder on a compact camera is a pretty awful effort anyway. It’s one problem that won’t beset the photographer behind the D30, though, since the LCD does not show a preview of the shot. You do, though, have a depth of field preview button, which shows you almost exactly what your final picture will look like, if you know how to use one. Technical stuff aside, it’s the picture quality that really counts. As part of my weekend of battery testing, I shot all manner of subjects, from a full-blown lifeboat launch to casual grab-shots of relatives walking through a park, to pigeons foraging, to some nutter windsurfing in temperatures of 2 degrees Celsius. Just to check out the quality, I decided to blow a couple of images up to A3 size on an Epson Stylus Photo 1200. The results were superb. At A4 size, onto glossy photo paper, they’re amazing – you’d be very, very hard pushed to tell that they’re not proper chemical photos, and at 6x4 inch onto glossy stock – well, you just can’t tell the difference.
In order to get the photos out onto paper, of course, you need software, and Canon comes up trumps in this department, too – the D30 connects via USB to your PC, and picture transfers are quick and easy using the supplied Zoom Browser software. There’s even a TWAIN driver so you can bring images direct from the camera into whatever software you’re using – especially handy for images in RAW format, which gives the highest quality. There’s a whole raft of other software included as well, including a panorama-stitching utility and a lite version of one of the top selling image editing packages. I have for ages thought that digital cameras had a long way to go to catch up with traditional film photography, but the D30 has changed my view more than somewhat. I am impressed by its handling, its battery life, and the quality of image it produces. In terms of cost, it’s not too much more expensive than the kind of film camera I would normally use (I’d normally expect to pay around £1200 for a camera body) especially since you can, if you shop around, get it discounted to around £1850. Its images are, at 2160x1440, way too big for websites, of course, but they’re very easily re-sampled down to something more As for the whole outfit, I’m thoroughly impressed by IBM’s Microdrives, too – on this 1GB unit, if I go for the middle quality of the D30’s five settings, I can get more images onto the Microdrive than the camera can count ( that’s better than 1500 – and even more in lowest resolution and highest compression), which has to be enough for anybody. I’m also impressed by its power consumption, or lack thereof. Indeed, the whole kit, taken together, is a superb outfit for digital photography – now all I’ve got to do is get my hands on a goodly range of lenses for the camera – yes, I have been so impressed, I’ve bought one. It’s that good. |
If
that’s the case, then check out Canon’s impressive EOS D30.
Based on the EOS 30 traditional SLR (that is, a single lens reflex
design), it looks very little different from its film-based
siblings, until, that is, you look around the back, where you’ll
find a 1.8 inch LCD panel that replays every picture you take and is
also where you access the copious menus the camera boasts.
