dslr.ws

A few scattered DSLR rumors for you this New Year’s Eve day.

Nikon D60

First is the Nikon D60. The rumors say it’ll be arriving in spring of 2008. These rumors supposedly come from someone who leaked the news about the Nikon D3 before the official announcement, and so are slightly more believable than what some random person with no credibility posts on the Internet.

These rumors are being paired up with news that the Nikon D40x is being discontinued, and the theory is the D60 (or whatever it’ll wind up being called) would be the replacement for the D40x.

Canon 450D

Canon is scheduled to make some big announcements in their DSLR line in January, and this rumor of a Canon 450D (which would be a successor to the Canon Digital Rebel XTi) fit with that.

According to these rumors, it would have a 10.1 megapixel sensor (not full frame), the Canon DIGIC III processor, offer 14-bit RAW images, have a 2.5″ LCD display with live view, better autofocus, support for sRAW, a dust removal system, and burst mode up to 5 fps.

The rumored date for the rumored camera is January 24th (no big surprise what with PMA at that point.)

Pentax K200D

This one looks like the most trustworthy rumor of the bunch, see all the photos over at Photography Bay. That’s an insane amount of image chopping if it’s fake.

The rumored specs — which didn’t come attached to the photos, so they might be a little more suspect — are that the K200D will have a 10 megapixel Sony image sensor, 3 fps burst mode (a maximum of 10 shots in RAW, no limit with JPEGs), 11-point auto focus, and a larger LCD than the K100D (size unspecified in the rumors I could find.)

Big heaping salt blocks should be used with any of this news, but I’m passing it along because what kind of irresponsible web journalist would I be if I didn’t? Not a very good one, I can promise you that.

Just for completeness, I point you in the general direction of a Canon 40D review that came out a few days ago (many months after everyone else posted their 40D reviews.) This one is by Anthony Dhanendran of “Computeract!ve” and is all of 230 words, six paragraphs long, and not much more than six sentences total. Seriously.

Let’s review their review, shall we?

First paragraph: States that the 40D is the “most expensive” of Canon’s “consumer-level” digital SLR cameras. It then states that the price range does go higher, for example for the Canon 5D, but that’s more expensive. I kid you not, that’s really what it says. Don’t believe me? Allow me to quote it:

The EOS 40D is the most expensive and, so far, most impressive of Canon’s consumer-level digital SLRs. The range goes up higher (see the professional 5D), but you’re talking about adding £1,000 to the price.

Second paragraph: One sentence which states that it’s bigger than many digital cameras, but easy to handle and similar to the 30D.

Third paragraph: Two sentences, one stating that the 40D has a better sensor than the 30D and a larger LCD display, and the second sentence saying that most DSLRs can’t compose pictures with the screen but the 40D can.

Fourth paragraph: Easy to use, menus are good.

Fifth paragraph: They tested it with the Canon 17-55mm lens, but it will work with all EF-S lenses. Obviously, that’s not a very accurate statement, since it works with all EOS lenses, EF and EF-S, but they just say that it works with EF-S lenses.

Sixth paragraph: Here we get into the actual meat of the review, the test results and image quality. This paragraph devotes one sentence to that, which I will quote in full:

Image quality throughout was excellent, although in truth not far above the 30D.

Immensely helpful. The last sentence of the paragraph, and of the review, is their conclusion, which is that this the Canon 40D is an expensive camera but something that’s good for replacing your “ageing [sic] film camera or entry-level digital SLR.”

Now, my post here making fun of their amazingly pointless review is about 50% longer than their review of a complex digital SLR camera. But it was fun to make fun of, at least for me. For you, random reader, who might have been hoping for some actual useful information, I apologize. To make it up to you, I’ll point you towards a much better Canon 40D DSLR review and hope that you’ll forgive me for wasting your time with this foolishness.

And happy new year’s!

Happy holidays to all of you anonymous and quiet readers out there!

I wish you the best for the holidays and the new year, no matter if you want to buy me a Nikon D3 as a Christmas present, or you just want to give me a cheap little $15 keychain camera. Either will get you a sincere holiday wish from me, although one might be slightly more sincere than the other. Just sayin’…

I don’t know whether or not I’ll get a chance to update much over the holidays, so don’t be too surprised if things settle into a quiet stupor around here. Rest assured knowing that I am just busy and holidaying, and not ignoring you and the lack of DSLR news that’s sure to be spreading throughout the Internets over the holiday season.

DPReview has posted their review of the Sony Alpha A700 DSLR. Let’s take a (quick) look at the highs and the lows of this new digital SLR, according to DPReview.

They got a comment from Sony about the surprising lack of live view on the A700 (surprising, at least, compared to all the other DSLRs coming out these days):

When we spoke to Sony about this the answer was simple; they believe that the compromises involved in current systems are satisfactory, and they won’t implement live view until they can ‘get it right’. Whether the lack of live view has any real relevance in a camera at this level remains to be seen; we doubt it.

They feel that the A700 might have too much luminance noise reduction going on at high ISO settings: there was little luminance noise, although a fair amount of chroma noise remained and a lot of the detail had been blurred away. They compared it to the Nikon D300, which returned images with less noise, and the Canon 40D, which had the most detail. It did perform better than the Olympus E-3 in the high ISO noise competition, however. I guess that means the A700 gets a bronze medal, with the D300 and 40D being more or less tied, depending on how much NR you like.

Speaking of NR, you’re kind of in a bad spot with the A700, since, unlike every other DSLR that I know of, it still performs noise reduction even when you shoot RAW. Every other camera just gives you what came off of the sensor — isn’t that basically the implied definition of what a RAW image should be — and lets you do noise reduction later (Noise Ninja, etc). Apparently this is a design decision, and a side effect of doing the noise reduction on the sensor itself. Hopefully future cameras that do on-sensor NR will come up with a way to disable it for RAW shooting, if desired.

They report excellent dynamic range (better than average) and long exposure results, and they really like the optional battery grip.

They put the anti-shake feature in the “pros” section, but looking at their test results shows that it doesn’t give you as much anti-shake correction as other cameras do. Their test shows roughly 1.5 stops of improvement. Maybe I’m comparing apples to different apples by keeping in mind the 3+ stops of improvement that the Canon EF-S 18-55mm IS lens provided, and Canon/Nikon’s claims that doing it in the lens is better really do hold up. I’ll have to look into that some more.

Interestingly, their testing reveals that the camera’s “base” ISO setting is 200, and shooting at ISO 100 makes things a little wonky. You get much better results at ISO 200 than ISO 100, no matter how unintuitive (and undocumented in the manual) that feels. They also found poor automatic white balance performance, especially under incandescent light.

In addition, the Image Data Converter SR software just doesn’t convert RAW images well; you lose detail and introduce moire artifacts:

The differences between these three are pretty obvious, and stark. The JPEG from the camera demonstrates good resolution beyond absolute resolution which would mean good representation of texture and distant detail. Adobe Camera RAW (as usual) delivers great per pixel sharpness and resolution. The biggest disappointment however is the output from Image Data Converter which produced a large amount of moire as well as blurring anything beyond 2500 LPH.

I don’t know many people who do RAW conversions with the manufacturer’s software instead of Adobe Camera Raw or other third-party tools, but with the Sony it sounds like you really don’t have a choice. Their software should have a big warning sticker telling you that you’ll get worse results using it than if you had just shot JPEG in the first place. Kind of scary.

In the end, they label it “highly recommended” and say it’s a decent camera, especially for the price:

Overall then the A700 is a good performer with good overall image quality with a nice range of features – even if on the negative side there are some quirky design decisions which may or may not affect you. Best of all though is the fact that it weighs in at the lower end of the price band for this category of DSLR, that makes it about $400 less than the Nikon D300 and $300 less than the Olympus E-3.