2006-09-17

Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT

A few years ago I complained about problems with the original Canon EOS Digital Rebel. I'm happy to say that the newer Digital Rebel XT is a great camera and costs nearly half as much as the Rebel. Newegg has a body-only Digital Rebel XT kit for a good price.

Since I bought a kit without a lens I decided to get something a bit more versatile than the usual 18-55mm lens. So I got a Canon EF 28-105mm f4-5.6. But the Canon EF 28-105mm f3.5-4 Mark II would have been worth the extra money. It has better optics and it affords a faster shutter speed. I think my next lens would be a Canon EF-S 17-85mm f4-5.6 IS. Its much wider angle and has image stabilization to help steady the shakes.

I took some photos of insects feeding on Sedum Telephium (Autumn Joy) flowers. I believe the first is some sort of skipperling. The second is a bumblebee, of course.
A skipperling feeds on sedum telephium (autumn joy).A bumblebee feeds on a heart-shape bunch of sedum telephium (autumn joy).

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- posted by Augur @ 22:23 [Permanent link]
2004-12-14

Canon EOS Digital Rebel

I never posted much about the Canon EOS Digital Rebel while I was using it. Here are a few test shots I took with the camera. My opinion of this camera follows:
Pros
  1. It has a shutter. Any camera without a shutter is a toy.
  2. It has good optics.
  3. It produces good images.
  4. It feels and works mostly like a 35mm EOS.
  5. It is faster than similar cameras. ~3.5 shots per second for 1 second, then it drops to about 1 shots per second.
  6. I like that it supports all of the 35mm EOS accessories.
  7. It will run for nearly two days of heavy use on a single charge.
  8. It uses cheap Compact Flash cards. A 1 GB "hi speed" card cost about $90.
  9. I read that it acts as a mass storage device via the computer cable but I never tried.
  10. I love the preview feature that lets you visually check the aperture.
Cons
  1. It frequently locks up with "OS Err" on the screen. You get to tear the camera apart to pull the battery while the world passes you by.
  2. It really does cost too much for what it is. The digital body is worth $500, at best. If they can't make a profit on it for $500 then they need to throw away that design.
  3. They tried so hard to clone the 35mm EOS exactly that they buried some important digital features (quality, etc) in a separate menu mode.
  4. It forgets many menu settings when you power off. Duh.
  5. It's very time consuming to change anything in the menu. And almost impossible in the sunlight.
  6. They have deeply buried the flash F Stop and PC sync settings in the menus.
  7. OK, so I hate the entire menu system. I hate all menu systems, I suppose.
  8. On more than one occassion I hit something in the goffy menu and it wiped a photo from the flash card without prompting me. Very scary.
Seriously, I'd never pay $1000 for this thing. We took it back after about 3 days of using it heavily. It is capable of taking some very nice still photos. But it is way overkill for taking still photos. And it is a lousy camera for taking action shots. I would absolutely hate to have to rely on this thing because it will lockup or eat a photo just when you need it the most.

I think a nice Nikon D70 would be the way to fly in that price range. Sadly, I don't think the more expensive Canon cameras are much better. A few years ago I had a Kodak DCS420. Which is simply a Nikon N90S 35mm body with a Kodak digital backplane. That was the ugliest, nastiess camera I have ever seen. It looked like it had been drug down dirt roads. But in good light it produced glorious photographs for the resolution it had. The CCD had its quirks because it is so old but it gave me a certain appreciation for the Nikon cameras I never had for Canon.

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- posted by Augur @ 19:07 [Permanent link]