dslr.ws

While it’s a little bit sad that we can’t keep making up new rumors about the Canon 40D, I guess it’s a positive development that Canon has officially announced the camera today.

The major updates over the 30D are a dust reduction system (it looks like the same one that’s used on the Digital Rebel XTi), a resolution increase to 10 megapixels, 14-bit RAW files and a 14-bit A/D converter, a larger and brighter viewfinder, faster burst shooting speed (now 6.5 fps, and able to go for 70 JPEG images before filling the buffer), a Live View sensor, DIGIC III, and a larger LCD screen (3 inches).

Interestingly, they’ve added a few bits from the 1D line. The 40D now uses the same menu system as the 1D, and supports sRAW at 2.5 megapixels. sRAW is a lower resolution RAW file (“small RAW”) for situations when you want the flexibility and power of shooting RAW, but don’t need the camera’s full resolution and don’t want to use up that much storage space.

The autofocus system on the EOS 40D is 9-point, all of which are cross-type AF points. The eight outer points are supposed to only work up to f/5.6, though, with the center point “capable of accurate focusing up to aperture f/2.8,” according to Canon’s press release. I have to assume the auto focus still works at larger apertures, but possibly not as well? The auto focus on my Canon 350D seems to work just fine at f/1.8, and I don’t have any lenses that go beyond f/1.8 to test with.

One awesome new feature which I haven’t seen mentioned much — and I guess it is a pretty simple one, but one which I’ve been wanting to see for a while — is that the ISO is permanently displayed in the viewfinder now. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve shot photos with the ISO set much higher than I thought it was, simply because I forgot to turn it back down after doing some low light shooting. This would (hopefully) have prevented that, and I’m glad to see it in the 40D.

Speaking of ISO, the 40D also adds an improved auto ISO setting. The Canon 30D had auto ISO, but only when you were using Auto mode or one of the scene modes, which wasn’t very helpful. With the 40D you can now use it in all modes. Unfortunately, it’s still not as powerful as the auto ISO functions that Nikon has had for a while, but at least it’s a step in the right direction.

The Live View sensor can be used remotely (with included software) in a studio environment.

Canon announced a few other new products as well. There’s the Wireless File Transmitter WFT-E3, which will work with the 40D, which will even connect directly to a hard drive for tons of storage on a long shoot.

There are also two new EF-S lenses:

• EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS — I guess the main difference between the old EF-S 18-55mm kit lens is that it’s image stabilized? It’ll be interesting to see what the quality is like on this, Canon describes it as “affordable.” I’m not sure what the cheapest Canon IS lens is right now, but maybe this will be the new champion?
• EF-S 55-250mm f/4-5.6 IS — Canon touts this as the longest focal range in the EF-S line so far, and says the image stabilizer offers 4 stops of shooting range improvement.

In conclusion, if anyone wants to buy me a 40D for my birthday — let’s just say that my birthday is whenever the 40D goes on sale — please feel free.

Digital Photography School has compiled a list of the top 20 DSLR cameras according to their readers. Note that these are the cameras that the readers own, not the cameras that the readers think are the best DSLRs out there; it’s a popularity contest, not a vote for the best. Not that there’s anything wrong with a good popularity contest once in a while.

Canon really takes the cake — that delicious DSLR cake, undoubtedly slathered with low noise frosting — taking the top two slots (for the Canon 350D at #1 and the Canon 400D at #2), and with over half of the respondents saying that they own a Canon digital SLR. Nikon has a decent showing, taking slots 3 through 6 (for the D80, D50, D40, and D200, respectively) and being owned by a quarter of the respondents.

Sony, Olympus, Pentax, and Konica each get a small slice of the pie (no, wait, it was cake that we were talking about), but nothing really noteworthy. And that can’t be a big surprise to anyone, Canon and Nikon have always been the DSLR leaders.

I’m curious about how representative this sample is of all DSLR owners. I always thought Nikon and Canon were running more or less neck and neck for market share, and my guess is that Digital Photography School’s audience tends to be skewed more Canon-heavy than the general DSlR public. That guess is more or less unfounded in anything resembling actual facts, so I could be completely wrong. Anyone have cold, hard numbers to toss into the discussion?

Yes, you read that right, it’s really a Canon Digital Rebel XTi review at a site called Mad Shrimps. Another extremely belated review (following in the spirit of the Sony A100 review that just came out as well, which I discussed earlier today.)

I have to say, it’s not a very good review. Given the .be domain name, it possible that English isn’t the reviewer’s first language, which would explain a lot in terms of the confusing writing. But it doesn’t explain the decision to have the image quality comparison be between the 400D and two non-DSLR point and shoot cameras (the Canon PowerShot SD1000 and the Samsung Digimax S700). Not only that, the images were taken outdoors under different lighting conditions — the Digital Rebel XTi’s photos were taken on an overcast day, while the point and shoot photos were taken with a blue sky and a few scattered clouds. The review even states that it’s not a very helpful comparison (at least, I think that’s what it’s saying):

With the cost of a single lens of DLSR will cost more than a regular compact digital camera, the comparison below is to illustrate how well low end digital cameras could perform. However, the quickness of SLR and steady hold and lens quality could escape the not so demanding users. Since the comparison photos were not taken at the same time under the same condition, this might not present much help.

The large sample photos that you get from clicking on the thumbnails are also reduced versions of the original, so they’re useless for any pixel peepers who really wanted to compare a digital SLR directly to point and shoot cameras that are in a completely different class (the 10 megapixel 400D’s image has been reduced to about 1.5 megapixels.)

It just gets weirder, though. One set of sample photos is of some rulers. The two point and shoot shots were done with automatic white balance, and low ISO (ISO 100 for one camera and ISO 200 for the other). The Canon 400D image, however, was shot with manual white balance that’s completely off, and ISO 800. It’s also badly out of focus. So the point and shoot shots look much better, simply because they’re in focus and have the correct white balance. The reviewer doesn’t point out how they were set completely differently, you have to look at the EXIF information yourself to see it. he just says “I will let you decide.” at the end of the comparison photos. It’s all a little bit surreal.

The review’s conclusion — I think — is that you might want to consider a small point and shoot camera instead of a digital SLR:

Canon EOS Rebel Xti is priced very competitively against Nikon, Pentax, Panasonic and Olympus. I found the lowest price at Sam’s Club for under $740. I recommend taking your time in choosing a DSLR camera; ask your friends around I am sure there are camera enthusiasts in the circle. Don’t be afraid to walk into an old fashion camera store to ask for help and inputs; most importantly, put one on your hands; glance through the optical viewfinder; push the shutter button and forget about price tag for a moment. Compare the same motions and image quality with a smaller non-SLR camera, if you are not convinced, DSLR is not meant for you. If you are convinced and the high price scares you away, you will be back when you are ready.

So, honestly, that was one of the most half-hearted and confused reviews I’ve ever seen. You might want to look at it yourself for entertainment value, but I can’t recommend it to someone who’s trying to figure out what camera to buy. My apologies to the reviewer, I’m normally not a mean person, but this review is just one of the strangest things I’ve ever read. I still can’t get over the out of focus and poorly white balanced sample image… I better close that browser tab and forget about it before I drive myself mad trying to comprehend it all.

A site called wrotniak.net has posted a very comprehensive Olympus E-510 review. Keep in mind that this isn’t a general camera review site, this is someone’s personal web site who has a strong commitment to Olympus cameras, so I’d recommend reading the review with that potential bias in mind.

He posts some very impressive results when doing tests of the Olympus image stabilization system, estimating that it was able to give him roughly 2 to 3 EV of assistance, which is very significant:

I’ve run an informal test…consisting of 120 frames shot in both modes and then analyzed. The experiment was carefully designed, and the shutter speed used was 1/15 s at the focal length of 150 mm (corresponding to 300 mm on a 35-mm frame camera). At this length, the generally recognized “safe” handheld speed is 1/300 s, so I was more than 4 EV (or a factor of 20x) below that.

The results were quite dramatic: image stabilization increased the share of clearly “good” frames from 2 to 32 out of sixty, and the fraction of obviously “bad” ones dropped from 47 to zero. This leaves no doubt: image stabilization really works.

This does not answer the most frequently asked (if not the best-phrased) question: by how much does the IS lower the safe handheld speed? While I’ve seen this one answered in a number of sources, I do not trust a single one of them, without being able to verify the testing method used and the statistical interpretation of results. I have already designed a proper experiment, but this will take shooting and analyzing at least 500 frames, obviously not a one-hour task.

For the time being you’ll have to accept my guesstimate of a 2 EV or, maybe, 3 EV gain, i.e., a factor of 4x to 8x in terms of shutter speeds.

That really makes me drool over the thought of having a good in-camera image stabilization system. I can get great low-light results with a nice fast lens (e.g., f/1.8) and moderate ISO settings, but another 2 EV would make a big difference in the results. I’d be able to get away with lower ISO settings for lower-noise low-light shots, and be able to shoot in even lower light conditions. I wonder if Canon and Nikon would ever consider doing in-camera image stabilization in addition to their lens-based IS; I’m guessing they wouldn’t play well together, but the in-camera could kick in when using non-IS lenses. Cameras like the E-510 are in the same price range as cameras like the D80 and Digital Rebel XTi, so it doesn’t seem like it would be prohibitively expensive for them to offer it as well.

Anyway, back to this review. This reviewer echoes something I’ve seen in other E-510 reviews, namely that the noise filtering should be turned off or set fairly low, because it’s too aggressive by default. This review gives more fine-grained advice with recommended settings at different ISO values:

Only after some extensive experimentation I realized how much is the image sharpness affected by noise filter setting. In this context I find the default Standard setting excessive at any ISO; my preference is Off for ISO 100 and 200, maybe even ISO 400, and Low above that… [T]his, unfortunately means that after changing ISO I have to dig into the menu system to adjust the noise filter — a cumbersome process.

One interesting lens feature that I hadn’t seen mentioned before is that a Four Thirds lens will communicate its vignetting characteristics to the camera, which can then correct for vignetting when saving the image. This is obviously something that would have to be done in your RAW importer if you shoot RAW (or, as Olympus calls it, ORF (Olympus Raw Format)).

There’s reference to the discussion over whether the E-510 has a slightly reduced dynamic range:

Some reports indicate a slightly narrower dynamic range in the E-510, compared to the competing models and to the E-500. I cannot say much on this, having done any actual measurements, but some of my samples shot in bright, contrasty sunlight hint that this is probably true. This is not much of a problem, as the difference, if any, does not seem significant. Any camera needs a proper exposure compensation to be applied to protect the highlights; maybe with this one I’ll have to watch it more closely. So far I haven’t lost any frames because of that. Lowering the in-camera contrast setting will help: while it does not widen the dynamic range per se, it expands its usable central part.

Overall, he reports very good image quality:

All in all, the image quality delivered by this camera is hard to beat — certainly not in this price range, and possibly much higher. I say “possibly”, because to make a stronger statement I would have, again, to use all cameras compared, and my experience is limited, with a few exceptions, to entry-level models from other makers.

I’d strongly recommend checking out the full review, since it’s extremely extensive — most likely the most comprehensive E-510 review I’ve seen so far. There are also a large number of sample images with different lenses and settings that are very educational. A highly recommended review.