Grant,
Although I am not a Nikon fan, about the bad: I told you you would use the handheld meter more than ever before. Digital is extremely critical.
About the ugly: the display on a dSLR is to check the lighting balance. That’s all.
Never pay any attention to the opinion of the majority of magazines. They have to sell adds. Have you ever seen a bad review of a camera advertised in the same magazine?
Cameras are just like women. You desperately want them, you love playing with them and then comes the hard part: getting used to the whims. Just like me you have been married for quite some time and you know as well as I do: one can learn to live with their peculiarities. That’s the moment when real love starts and you never want anything/anyone else.
Leen
BTW: although you didnot show any images, are you satisfied with the results?
Leen
Although the 10D has an adjustable brightness LCD screen, it’s totally useless between 5h30 AM and 9h PM… So Grant, I can relate 😉
That being said, I was at a MUG (Macintosh User Group) last week, and they were reviewing 3 digital cameras, Nikon D70 was one of them, and it was highly praised for its responsiveness (amongst other factors). I surely hope you liked the results!
….that you’ll post some soon 🙂
Ray
Grant, you’re a lot braver man than I, taking an expensive camera like that on a canoe trip. With my canoeing luck and lack of skill, I would have opted for a disposable 35 mm camera….
Chuck
Chuck, for a reasonably LARGE sum of money, you can buy a special camera bag like the Lowepro DRYZONE series. Totally waterproof, they even float completely loaded. Of course that doesn’t help if you tip while taking that spectacular shot of the rapids…
Chuck a camera is not worth having if you aren’t going to use it. That being said I normally carry my camera into the woods within a Pelican 1450 hard case. Not only is it water tight it is air tight and if I fly with it I have to open a valve to equalize the pressure. The show it in there ads with a car on top of the case to demonstrate how tough it is. It will hold two bodies and a hand full of lenses.
Grant
Grant and John, thanks for the tips on waterproof bags. Any more weather like we had today and I’ll need one just to go from the house to the truck…
This Nikon D70 is a 6 Mpx camera. Tonight when I was enhancing wedding images a colleague dropped by. He looked at some 16×20 prints I made a few days ago and he was surprised to see that the studio images of my Fuji S2 (6 real Mpx too, but interpolated to 12 Mpx) showed more detail than the images of his Canon D10 (6Mpx).
Probably this way of interpolation by Fuji isn’t that bad and the outcome is pretty close to 12 real Mpx.
Leen
Leen, I’ll bet the difference had more to do with your skill level and perhaps the quality of your lenses than the interpolation. Interpolation is mathematics; only 6 Mpx of real information has been recorded in either case.
Chuck, this is a colleague, a former pupil of mine, who is working at almost the same level as I do and he is an international award winning photographer. Next to that, he is quite an expert in Photoshop and has taught me quite a lot. He has helped me out several times when I had digital problems, especially when it comes to printing.
So there is hardly any difference in skill levels, and that’s why I have pretty good reasons to believe in the quality of the Fuji maths. The pixels in Fuji cameras have been arranged in a different (diagonal) way than the usual Bayern pattern and Fuji claims this allows a better form of interpolation.
Now I have pretty good reasons to believe their statement; although it is true it isnot the equal of a real 12Mpx camera, it might be better than most 6 Mpx cameras.
Leen
Leen, here’s a piece from a review in epinions.com that frames the ‘controversy’ a bit:
"Like its predecessor, the S2’s most notable feature is its proprietary CCD imager. Fuji’s third generation "Super CCD" uses octagonal sensors instead of the square image sensors used in other digital cameras. The octagonal sensors form a honeycomb-patterned array that is slightly more efficient and consequently able to record more image information than conventional sensor arrays. Like its competitors the S2 Pro is a six-megapixel camera, but the S2 can use on board software to double that resolution to twelve megapixels through interpolation. The interpolation process boosts picture resolution (the Camera’s CPU analyses the original image and adds an equal number of like color pixels) to create a denser image file—- sort of like packing a size twelve girl into a pair of size six jeans. Hypothetically (because individual picture elements are so tiny) the added pixels are invisible and improve detail in the image——in reality this isn’t always true. Consumers need to be aware that there is no magic way to actually double image resolution. However, photographers can use interpolation as one additional photographic tool; to improve color saturation, contrast, and apparent image sharpness, but it won’t work for every image or in every situation".
"Many photographers disapprove of interpolation, which is strange since ALL digital imaging devices use interpolation to boost color saturation, contrast, and image resolution…..The S2 Pro’s interpolation option allows photographers to make most of the decisions about boosting resolution, color, and contrast rather than having all those decisions made by camera designers and digital engineers."
"The most important fact to consider is that the S2’s Super CCD really does capture slightly more image detail than standard square CCD’s. The difference isn’t going to turn a poor image into a stellar photo, but in the hands of a skilled photographer, the extra image data can make a noticeable difference in image quality relative to a similar image recorded by a standard CCD. Simply put the interpolated images are not really 12 megapixel images, but they do contain a bit more image information than the 6-megapixel image files generated by the S2’s competition."
Chuck
Leen, one other factor worth considering: some references claim that CCD’s have inherently better image quality than CMOS. Fuji, I believe, uses a CCD; Canon’s 10D has a CMOS.
Chuck
"…they do contain a bit more image information than the 6-megapixel image files generated by the S2’s competition."
"…some references claim that CCD’s have inherently better image quality than CMOS"
Conclusion: my colleague might be right; the image quality of the S2 interpolated file MIGHT be better than by its competitors.
This pleases me as I seem to have made the right choice.
Now I’m waiting for this years’ Photokina to buy a 14 Mpx Kodak or anything better….;-)
Leen
Leen
The main reason for the interpolation of a Fuji camera is to change the diagonal matrix to a rectangle matrix. In doing so the data from each cell is used 4 times. This averaging seems to be an advantage but … not as much as Fuji claims. The consensus seems to be there is an improvement of about 25% – 40% so your 6 meg is probably behaving like an 8 meg camera. The down side is that the files generated are 12 meg and it takes time to do the math. In any event Fuji cameras do produce very good results.
The argument over CCD vs. CMOS (Nikon vs. Canon) was much more relevant a while back. CMOS in its infancy was a problem child but technology move forward. CMOS were used in most low end digitals due to cost but now they have improved to the point where they are used in cameras Kodak 14 meg the high end Canons and with a new technological hybrid twist the Nikon D2H (uses JFET rather than MOSFET technology).
Grant
