When my Minolta D7Hi suffers from shutter lag, it seems to be almost exclusively the fault of the autofocus. In sunny conditions, when the autofocus can get a good, quick lock on the subject, i notice virtually no lag at all. It is when the autofocus needs to hunt, in low light or low contrast situations, that it becomes difficult to take the picture.
While the D7i/D7Hi series does have a manual focus ring, it’s not much use for moving subjects. It is hard to tell exactly when an object is in focus by looking through the Electronic Viewfinder (too pixellated, unlike an SLR’s optical viewfinder), and the camera does not have a focus-confirmation light for manual focus. The manual focus ring is really only useful for minute corrections, when you have plenty of time and your subject isn’t going anywhere. This is usually fine for me, as i tend to take pictures of landscapes, scenery, flowers, etc.
You can improve the situation by:
-using a camera that accepts regular batteries
-using at least 1800 ma rechargable batteries
-using a 12 volt recharger (charges off car battery)
Everyone seems to be giving the impression that digital is cheaper. My biggest problem is the cost of printing film. Even if I shoot B&W, I do not have the time nor the inclination to print my own images. Many photographers find Nirvana in printing their own photos, but I find it rather tiring. As a result, many many negatives are gathering dust, while I have used commercial outlets to make proofs and fine prints of some negs. Of course, the biggest resource constraint is $$$.
Now, if I decide to move to digital, how do I save? The little I have enquired, the cost of making prints from the digital medium is high too. If I were to do it myself, I would need a high quality scanner, printer etc.
Can someone tell me how digital is cheaper? Is it a long-run calculation?
True, but then, digital SLRs are getting cheaper by the day. You can get toy 35mm film cameras that don’t take lenses too. It’s unfair to mark down the whole digital format just because most people have crappy PAS digicams. ACK that decent digital stuff costs more out of the box, but you get your money back pretty fast.
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Er, yes. On most digital cameras, you can set the ISO. The rest you can control with any free photoediting package (most cams come with a crude one). AND you get to control the changes, instead of relying on the dweeb at the photomart.
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Oh for heavens’ sake. How often do you shoot for billboards? How often does ANYone shoot for billboards? Let alone billboards, how often do you want a bigger than 11x19" print?
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Sure. Not much good without film, tho, are they? Every camera needs Something. Just because digital camera need some things film cameras don’t, doesn’t make that a drawback for the format.
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Yeah, you get what you pay for. The shutter lag on cheapie digital cams pisses me off, too, but no where near as the host of annoyances on cheap 35mm cameras.
On the up side, shutter lag is getting less, and those with no lags are getting cheaper.
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Sure. My 1D (Canon, digital) looks like that. Nikon F2 is not that cheap, last time I looked.
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Most photo shops here in Australia do prints from CD, MemoryStick, CFII, etc, in under an hour. Not sure what it’s like where you are, but if we have it here, I expect that’d be elsewhere. Ever asked?
You save by not having to print out every single photo. It costs nothing to take 1000 experimental shots and throw them away. It costs nothing to send snapshots to friends and relatives by e-mail. It costs almost nothing (order of 40 cents per 500 shots) to save the images on a CD-R disk. Only the very best shots get printed out to be displayed or shared with other people.
Let’s say you spend $5 per roll of film including processing. If you upgrade to a $500 camera and $200 inkjet printer, the equipment will pay for themselves after 140 rolls’ worth of photos, or around 3500 shots. An avid amateur can easly go through that in a couple of months. And if those 3500 shots include 20 shots worth printing out, that only takes a few dollars worth of paper and ink.
Because an extra memory card won’t let me catch up on the Dope…duh!
Seriously, we already were hauling at least one laptop (and sometimes two) on vacation with us. Between maybe needing to dial in for work, wanting to keep up with both personal and work email, the desire (it isn’t a need, really…really…I swear) to be here, and my husbands similar “desire” to play Diablo II until 2am, the laptop was already part of the deal. This just made it more. But yeah, we have a couple of memory cards - I’m just scared I’ll lose them, or they won’t be readable when I get them home - where I am less concerned I’ll lose my laptop or its hard drive will die.
litost, plus you don’t buy film. Memory isn’t cheap, but it is reusable.
I print maybe 20 pictures a year (mostly my kids, it isn’t like I shoot for magazine ads - I’m strictly a “mom” photographer). Those I hand to the Grandmas. The rest we watch on the TV - we have TiVo set up to grab the pictures from my hard drive.
Before the digital we were spending about a hundred bucks a month on film and development (three sets of everything - one for us, one for each set of grandparents) - for maybe two good pictures. But it was such a pain to get reprints, that we’d just get three sets up front. Now we just snap away. Print a couple pictures every so often for the grandparents (just the good ones) off the deskjet (good enough - and practically free) or order them through Shutterfly (easy).
How much do good commercial outlets charge for a proof, say, a regular 4x6 matte? How about a fine print, say, 8x11? My goal is to ultimately create fine prints.
I currently spend $15 for a 36-exposure roll for developing and 4x6 proofs. Are you saying that I can completely eliminate this cost by looking at the proofs on a PC and only make the fine prints as necessary? Wow.
My follow-up question would be: how well can you judge the potential print on the PC? (I assume from the previous posts that the objective quality of a digital print is as good as film.)
One key issue for me is the aesthetics. (I am not what Dangerosa calls a “Mom” photographer — nice term by the way!). I treat it as a mainly creative medium. Any thoughts on how a film print and digital print differ on aesthetics? Any web links where I can compare and contrast? The few digital prints I have seen looked “too sharp”.
The digital file is like the negative - it contains all the information. The question is not “can you tell the quality by looking at the file” but “can the printer reproduce the image faithfully?”. This depends on the printer, but the user’s skill is also important.
I don’t think anyone said that, at least not as a generalized statement. It depends on print size, quality of equipment and supplies (paper/ink/film) and the user’s skills. If you’re very good at non-digital photography, your prints will be better than anything produced by a <$3000 digital camera. For the rest of us, image quality is limited not by equipment but by skill, and a $500 digital camera is good enough.
How about comparing the quality of film and digital prints made by, say, the same commercial outlet? I don’t think I would take the plunge and purchase a scanner and printer without testing out the medium.
I have a really nice Rebel 35 millimeter, and I love it. My mom has a really nice digital, and it is just a hassle. The picture quality is not as good…I look sick in all the pictures. I do like how easily they can be edited, but I’ll take an old fashion film camara any day.
Interesting. I’d love to try this camera out. I was taking DPreview’s word for it that there was a noticable autofocus lag with the 7hi (although even in this review the lag is quoted as .9 to 1.1s, which seems better than what I see w/ other cameras). Can I assume you disagree w/ thier assessment. ?
Oh boy. Another thread on the same day for me to blather on about the different light sensitivity of CCDs… (here’s the other)
These days, I’m of the belief that the greatest lag in digital cameras is color accuracy. Indeed, there are countless factors that determine how faithfully colors are reproduced, but here’s my take:
I can say for a fact that CCD’s have a funny sensitivity range. You can see this by pointing an infrared remote control at your video camera: the infrared light appears white on the video. I do not have the background to know the exact details of the sensitivity of modern CCDs over a range of frequencies, but the IR remote trick proves that what you see is not exactly what you get. I photographed my nephew playing with some brightly-colored plastic beads and in the photo, they appeared to be neon, likely due to the extended range of sensitivity. I photographed a friend’s mother and her purple dress appeared blue in the photograph.
I’m sure that 35mm film has its own light sensitivity issues, but for some reason we find its behavior more lifelike, warm, and pleasing, in the same way that tubes sound better than transistors for certain audio uses.
Oh, and here’s a picture I took of my infrared remote a half hour ago to demonstrate the IR sensitivity.
I dunno. I just took a few pictures indoors, under a tungsten lightbulb, to test out the autofocus lag, and it seemed to be less than a second to me. And this is a relatively low-light situation, compared with outside in bright sunshine or even a bright overcast day. From personal experience, i would tend to put the DPReview figures at the higher end of autofocus lag times that i have experienced.
The 7Hi is certainly slower than my old autofocus SLR, but it’s only in very low light situations that i have had any real problem. It sometimes seems as if the autofocus is a little slower when the batteries start running down, but i don’t suppose this is too surprising.
It could also be that shutter lag is less of a problem for me than for some other people, because most of my pictures are of things that don’t tend to move very quickly–buildings, landscapes, scenery, flowers, etc. An extra half a second to focus in situations like this is really no big deal. It could be that if i were constantly trying to get pictures of running children or something, i would have a bigger problem with the AF lag.
As i said before, i would love a D-SLR, but it’s out of the question right now, and i’m very happy with the 7Hi. If you want to see some of the pictures i’ve taken with it, click on the www button at the bottom of my post. All the galleries except the first one (Baltimore Snow, December 2002) were taken with the 7Hi. They are mainly snapshots of places i’ve been and things i’ve done over the past six months, designed to show friends and family abroad what i’ve been up to. The pictures on the site have also been extensively reduced and compressed for the web, obviously.
I like digital. I like the near instant results (shutter delay excepted) and teh fact that I can erase obviously bad pix.
However, I don’t print out pictures (paper is so archaic) so I’m not bothered with my printers quality.
I think most mid end cameras have a video out, just hook it up to the video in on the TV or VCR and instant slide show.
My Olympus c2040 has lots of manual options (focus, shutter, aperture), but I haven’t really used them. It also has a long shutter option (16 secs I think) for astrophotography. Tho there are tricks to get around it, CCD noise is a problem with most digicams for astrophotography.