Peter's Blog

Recently taking photos with my Canon Powershot S1 IS I had become frustrated at how long it took to focus on fast moving toddler daughter. I felt I was missing lots of good pictures. Also there is an imminent arrival that I want to take pictures of.

Latest overindulgence: Nikon D80 camera with 18-135mm lens. This is a DSLR, a cut above the powershot.

I spent a while torn between this and the cheaper Canon EOS400D. My research told me:

• Canon was cheaper
• the Nikon had more things to fiddle with
• it came with better lenses in the kit
• Nikon has better build quality
• the canon had better windows software but since I can just plug the SD card into my monitor and get the photos with Picasa I'm not sure I need it anyway.

Final clincher for me was looking at the two in the shop: the canon reminded me of the powershot, the Nikon was more sexy.

Good things:

• Very fast: focuses and takes photo so fast you wonder what has happened
• Very easy to use: wife took photo of me and daughter with no assistance. It focuses and takes the photo before your fake smile has time to harden (NOT uploading it here: makes me look old). End up taking endless photo's, all very good.
• 10 Megapixels: fine quality jpegs come out at about 3Mb. High resolution, crisp photos. Can see every hair.
• something I never appreciated about DSLR's: because they have real lenses, you zoom and focus manually by twisting the rings on the lens. This is MUCH better than fiddling with +/- buttons. Your left hand is holding it by the zoom ring. UPDATE: clarification, it does have auto focus but you can set it to manual and adjust it with a ring on the lens. The 'in-focus' status light even comes on when you have it right.

Bad things:

• big
• didn't buy a camera bag, now feel it needs something soft to carry it around in as it is so precious.
• it has a light to help auto-focus in the dark but it is obscured by the lens which sticks out about six inches most of the time
• no video: DSLR's don't do this. It was handy on the powershot.
• When I say easy to use, that's in the default auto mode. Everything can be overridden. The manual is not very explicit, it doesn't explain things very well. Still this makes it interesting, it's a challenge and a learning curve.
• Lens when zoomed is too phallic. Ok when set to wide angle.
• To my eye the flash shots seem a bit dark. Easily fixed in Picasa, in camera I think it can only be fixed in manual mode but not sure. UPDATE: in manual mode you can adjust the brightness, you can even set it to bracket, e.g. take three pictures at three different flash levels (it doesn't take the three automatically, bang-bang-bang, you have to trigger it three times and it alters the level each time).

See following examples for:

• dull flash
• capturing toddler in mid-cuteness.

Conclusion: very good camera.