Er, is this thing still on?
January 25th, 2007
I’m running low on film, so it’s time to check in on the D80. Flick the power switch. SD card, still plenty of shots left. Battery, nearly full. Nearly full charge? Really? When’s the last time I used this thing? Thinking, thinking, thinking. Sometime before Christmas, and I’m fairly certain that the battery hasn’t been charged since Thanksgiving.
That’s quite an improvement since the days of my 10D or even worse the KM 7D, both of which could drain their battery if you looked at them wrong. A battery that stays charged even when sitting goes a long way towards replicating the ever-readiness of the older manual fiml SLR’s. Not a bad thing.
But, why, might you ask, has that D80 been sitting on the shelf for a couple of months? Well, that’s complicated. Three points:
- The quirks of the D80’s metering combined with the somewhat limited dynamic range of it’s 10MP sensor, require constant attention and a good measure of manual control.
- As with nearly every post AF, multi-function control wheel sprouting, tehcno wonder camera of doom, the D80 provides tons of manual control but no physical feedback as to the settings. The wheels just spin and spin. See some of the recent comments on the K10D over at theonlinephotographer.blogspot.com for more on this.
- Although the VF is fairly large and fairly bright and not entirely useless for manual focussing, it’s got no eye relief. Yes, I know all the cool kids are wearing contacts or have got that fancy new lasiks surgery that can turn your field of vision upside down - no, really it can - but some of us still wear glasses. When wearing glasses, I can’t see all the metering info at the bottom of the vf unless I consciously look at it, in which case I lose about the top third of the frame.
Taken individually, none of these issue would be that bad. So the metering is hinky. No problem, I’ll work in manual. Oh wait, the controls give no feedback. No problem, I’ll check the meter readings in the VF. Uh, now I can’t see the picture. Damn, it’s gone. I should have bought a 30D.
January 25th, 2007
Joking, or would you say that Canon’s better at feedback? I don’t have experience with either the 30D or D80, but every review I’ve seen seems to say that the Nikon has the best handling in its price range (same for the D200).
2007 should be an interesting year for DSLRs because everybody will be refreshing their products. Sony is expected to come out with several new models, which might be of interest to you if you still have your Minolta lenses. And Canon will have the 40D and who knows what else (reportedly a lower-spec’ed $1,999 full-frame 7D). There are enough pixels, now the manufacturers are going for dynamic range and color fidelity.
January 25th, 2007
It’s not that the Canon has any better control, it’s actually the smaller VF that helps (a minus is a plus apparently). On the Canon’s the VF is small enough that I can still see the metering info even with the limited eye relief. Combine that with what I perceive as better metering/dynamic-range/lower noise on the canon, and you’ve got better usability. I’d probably find something equally distasteful about the Canon though. I’m enormously picky.
Although I’m sure that we will see improved dynamic range, higher pixel counts, bigger buffers, lower prices etc, I’m not hopeful that we are going to see any digital with really well implemented manual controls unless Cosina/Zeiss/Epson introduces another digital RF.
January 25th, 2007
The battery in my XT lasts for quite awhile, but I’ve turned off auto-review and think its auto turn off is set to a minute or two.
I’m not buying another DSLR until I can take HDR pictures natively with the camera. Although then I would need a monitor that could display HDR images without downsampling too… oh and some way to print them… ah well, maybe I’ll just get the 40D then.
January 25th, 2007
HDR eh? I’m not buying another digital camera until I eventually lose money selling this one, then regret it when I get sick of developing film, and then again latch onto whatever is the newest DSLR as the solution to all my photographic problems.
No, really that’s the plan.
January 25th, 2007
I agree with what you are saying. I shoot with a Hexar RF and a Nikon D80 too. I too wear glasses I just can’t seem to focus manually in low light on the D80. And it is noisier at iso 1600 than I expected. Were it not for the workflow I would still be shooting neopan 1600. But I got tired of developing and scanning.
Have you tried out the Leica R8? I can’t afford one, but it sounds like it solves some of these problems.
One thing that makes the D80 wonderful is to shoot multi-image panoramas. PTGui and AutoPano make the process almost completely automatic.
January 26th, 2007
After years of mucking about, my film workflow is now fairly refined. I can develop a batch of two rolls in about 35-40 from the time I load the reels to the time I finish hanging the negs to dry. Scanning takes me about 45 minutes a roll, but most of that time is actually just waiting for the scanner to do its thing, so I often read a book while I’m waiting. Once the scans are done, post processing doesn’t take me long at all.
In any event, I’ve slowly come to accept that convenience is not always a great reason to choose one particular process over another.
The R8 and M8 are way out of my price range.
January 26th, 2007
Maybe you should just get those contacts….
March 7th, 2007
Stick with the glasses. They have saved my eyes from 60mph Bumble bees on motorbikes (I was on the motorbikes not the bees) when my visor was up (twice) and I preferred cleaning mashed bumble bee off spectacles lens than have eye surgeon pick said bee bits out of eye crater!
Also from a bottle in the eye when one bounced off my shatterproof glasses in a pub one time. (I was on the periphery of a nasty fight and the bottle flew out of it and straight off my glasses.) I ended up with a slight bruise where my eyebrow is and a gouge in the lens plastic and no other damage.
Laser surgery is 99.99 something or other reliable. So some poor sod is always ‘Mr 0.01 Percent’ and no way is it going to be me!
And don’t let your much photographed missus have laser either. The internet is woefully short of photogenic young ladies in glasses.
My wife and I and our eldest daughter all wear glasses (like family of owls).
Nikon should make a digital FM3A with FF. (Thats it)
March 7th, 2007
Oh, it’s worse than .01 perecent since supposedly all they measure is the what percentage of people end up with 20/20 or better vision. What they leave out are things like ghosting, inversion and other weird visual anomalies. No one is getting anywhere near Kate or my eyes with a laser.