dslr.ws

Sure, I’m a couple of days late on this one, but what would you rather have: late DSLR camera news, or carnivorous otters eating your face off? See, it’s not so bad to get your camera news a little late.

So, anyway, Olympus has announced the Olympus E-3 DSLR, to be available in November 2007 along with some new lenses. The important bits of information, all in a neatly formatted list:

• 10.1 megapixel sensor
• In-camera image stabilization with a claimed 5 EV of exposure improvement
• “Dual-axis flexible-angle” 2.5 inch LCD with live view (meaning an articulated, swing-out LCD)
• 5 fps high speed burst shooting speed
• 11 point AF system, all of which are double cross-type — two horizontal and vertical lines for each AF point, which is something I haven’t heard of before
• Shutter speeds up to 1/8000 sec
• Splashproof sealing of major parts, including the flash, LCD monitor, and switches
• Dual memory card slots, one CompactFlash and one xD
• High resolution LCD (230,000 pixels)
• Automatic Dust reduction system

The list price will be $1699 for the body only. Sounds like an interesting camera, I look forward to reading some reviews and avoiding the killer otters.

Olympus has also said that they hope to get 20% of the digital SLR camera market over the next five years. That would be an impressive gain, given the current market shares of the big players:

Canon held a 46.7 percent share in the global digital SLR camera market in 2006, followed by Nikon with 33 percent, Sony with 6.2 percent and Olympus with 5.9 percent, according to research firm IDC.

I guess someone remind me to check up on them in 2012 and see how they’re doing.

DPReview always does an excellent job reviewing digital cameras, and many people would consider them the de facto go-to camera review site. Endless pages upon pages of test results and image comparisons, graphs, charts, and lots of full-size images to pixel peep. And now they’ve posted their review of the Canon 40D, all 29 pages of it.

What’s the verdict? No big surprise, it’s a highly recommended camera. The main negative points they list aren’t a big deal, in my opinion at least. Those negatives include poor automatic white balance under incandescent lighting, which is something that every single Canon camera has; apparently it’s an intentional decision by Canon to give incorrect white balance in order to give a warmer image, and they keep getting dinged in reviews because of it.

Another downside they note is that their burst shooting speed is slower than Canon’s specs say it should be, down to 6 fps at 1/500 sec shutter speeds. They also point out the useless “print” button on the camera, wasting a button that could be used for something more photographically useful. But they do say that it’s tough to find negatives with it, it’s an excellent camera.

And tons of praise, of course:

From an image quality point of view the combination of the Canon CMOS sensor and DIGIC III processor means equally detailed images at all sensitivities (except maybe ISO 3200), low noise and a complete lack of unnatural artifacts. The new high ISO speed noise reduction option has no effect on luminance detail but removes any lingering chroma noise, giving high ISO images a more film-like grain; something Nikon has been doing for some time. We would be interested to see Canon using a less strong anti-alias filter which would mean that JPEG images would require less sharpening and would be naturally ‘crisper’ straight off the sensor, but it’s a minor point and would really only be seen by ‘pixel peepers’.

One surprise came from our testing of the cameras dynamic range, it delivered a consistently higher range than both the competition and its predecessor. The majority of this improvement, however, was in the shadow range, a function we presume of the new 14-bit processing pipeline.

I don’t suppose there have been any negative reviews of the 40D, have there? It seems like you can’t really go wrong with it, especially if you’re buying it for me as an early Halloween present. Please?

The Online Photographer has a list of the top 10 camera recommendations for fall 2007. Six of the ten are DSLRs, along with one digital point-and-shoot, two 35mm film cameras, and the Phase One P45+ medium format digital back.

The DSLRs that made the top ten are — in order listed on the site, though it’s not clear if that’s an actual ranked order or not — the Pentax K10D (“pretty much the camera with the mostest at the moment for the serious amateur and artist”), the Nikon D80 (“the D80 really feels right — a sort of baby-bear camera”), the Canon 5D (“the 5D provides exactly what many art and landscape photographers most need”), the Olympus E-510 (“the most feature-laden of the amateur DSLRs”), the Fuji S5 (“high dynamic range and very accurate color, and this makes it the #1 choice for the most numerous type of professionals and semi professionals, namely, wedding and portrait photographers”), and the Canon 1D Mark III (“simply a technological wonderment and a superb piece of engineering and design”).

The article also mentions a few other cameras in passing (e.g., the Nikon D3 as upcoming competition for the 1DMkIII), and is a good read overall (as The Online Photographer always is). You should click that link up top and read it all for yourself.

CNET has posted a review of the Sony Alpha A700 digital SLR camera.

The reviewer was hoping that the camera would be a little faster, but can’t really complain with the performance:

However, like many of its competitors, under dim, low-contrast conditions, the A700′s focus slows, bumping the lag to 1.2 seconds; though common, I still think that’s still too long for cameras at this price. Though it can’t match the 40D’s 6.3 frame-per-second (fps) burst-shooting rate, the A700′s 4.8fps acquits itself quite nicely, especially since I think the focus matches its speed better than the 40D’s does at maximum. (Sony’s rating of 5fps assumes use of a UDMA-capable CF card; we obtained 4.8fps with a SanDisk Extreme IV, which is non-UDMA.) In field tests, I was quite happy with the A700′s continuous-shooting performance.

They report good image quality, and recommend it as a good alternative to the Canon 40D, unless you need the 40D’s burst mode speed:

All in all, I’m very impressed by the Sony Alpha DSLR-A700 as an all-around midrange digital SLR. Though more expensive than the Canon EOS 40D, the built-in image stabilizer and higher resolution are worth the extra bucks, unless you really need the little extra oomph in continuous-shooting performance that the 40D delivers. Of course, it remains to be seen how the forthcoming yet pricier Nikon D300 will stack up relative to the A700. If you want to buy now, however, the A700 is a great choice.

The sample photos are all very low resolution, but include some small 100% crops, so if you’re really desperate for pixel peeping the A700, they’ll do. Otherwise, just ignore the sample photos and read the rest of the review.