Life seen dimly
Take it as hyperbole if you like, but I see life through a camera’s viewfinder, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. We all have ways of structuring our reality. Some folks have religion. Some have Nascar. Others barbeque on their back deck every weekend. The viewfinder is my way, so it’s really dissapointing that they keep building these digital cameras with such crummy viewfinders.
The D80 is supposed to have a pretty good VF for a cropped frame DSLR, and from having used the competition, I’d say the D80 is pretty much the state of the art. But that’s not saying very much. Even the full frame 5D has a VF that would have never made it into a basic manual focus SLR from the late 70’s or early 80’s. Those were pretty good cameras in a lot of ways. Nice big viewfinders. Although not as big as something like an F2, they were pretty good. They still are pretty good. If you haven’t ever picked up a Canon AE-1, a Minolta X-something, a Nikon FE or best of all an Olympus OM-1, don’t do it. You’ll hate your DSLR viewfinder. Pick up a good rangefinder, and you’ll be seriously depressed.
How much difference does this make? It’s hard to say. On a psychological level, this is pretty big hurdle to get over. I’m used to the disconnect between vision and print coming at a much later stage of the photographic process. With film, if the end result doesn’t match my vision, it’s usually due to bad processing. It’s not something I’m aware of at the moment of taking the photo. With digital, the bad viewfinder puts the disconect right at the moment of photographing. Making the most of that disconnect is going to be the most challenging aspect of digital for me. The rest of the chain is cake by comparison.
At this rate we are going to have to merge our blogs. I’ve just finally decided that through a screen dimly is not what I want to do any more. M8 on order and MP in my hands. Review of CLE in draft.
Great minds think alike perhaps.
Congrats on the M8. I’ve heard there’s a waiting list. How long will it take for yours to arrive? In any event, I’m more than slightly jealous.
Since I am not a photographer, my camera features one of those inane 1.5 sq. in. miniature LCD screens that can’t be seen in bright light, rather than a proper viewfinder. I consider myself generally unqualified to comment on the substance of your post.
Therefore, I am reduced to commenting on your grammar and revoking your English degree (sigh) for the nth time.
Other’s? Other’s what?
http://www.angryflower.com/aposter.html
Andy, why should I edit my own work when I always have you around to make corrections?
Happier now, Mr. Smarty pants?
M8
The dealers have all been told to say ‘end of November’. Mine is in the first batch at a big dealer (well, big for Scotland anyway). Nobody has one with the finished firmware yet. Given how well Leica stage-managed the announcement there is a general feeling that at some point in mid-Nov there will be a large shipment to main dealers, rather than a slow dribble between now and then.
Given your various comments, I was wondering why you went for the D80 rather than the similarly priced Epson RD1?
And I hope you plan to go on using some film whatever the viewing system!
Actually, I was happy just to have a reason to post the link to the Bob the Angry Flower cartoon. You could have left your text as it was.
Now that you’ve fixed it, of course, that’ll be $49.95 for the editing.
$49.95 for editing! You’ve obviously never done copy editing for a living.
Colin, I hope you are right about M8 deliveries. Although I won’t be in the market for one antyime soon, I’ll be interested in seeing user reactions.
I considered the RD-1 pretty seriously, but it’s hard to come by in the states. None of the major retailers stock it, and given it’s kind of dodgy reliability reputation, I’d not want to buy it from a dodgy retailer.
I wouldn’t be surprised if an RD-2 with the same sensor as the D80 came along before long. If it does, and the price is right, I’ll probably bite.
I’m still shooting film through my hexars, and I don’t plan on stopping, although I might unload some of the lenses I don’t use very often. I just ordered another 20 rolls of Delta 400 and I’ll probably order some Neopan 1600 and TriX soon. In fact, I keep thinking of buying a medium format system. I enjoyed playing with the Mamiya 7 and their 645 system while I was in Japan. Oddly enough, I didn’t find the hassleblad all that appealing. The cheaper, lighter Mamiya 645 seemed to have better ergonomics and a better viewfinder. Buying an MF camera would mean buying another scanner though, and that isn’t in the budget until I land another job.
No AA filter makes me ponder some things about that camera…
The DMR has no AA filter. Same’s true of a lot of MF backs. In theory, you potentialy lose less detail this way.
More interesting than the lack of AA filter is the supposed higher dynamic range. When the DMR came out, there was a lot of talk about 16 bits meaning more dynamic range, but that just sounds to me like more bits showing 255, 255, 255. Any increase in dynamic range would have to be a property of the photosites. At 10MP and a 1.3 crop factor, those are pretty decent sized photosites, so maybe there is more dynamic range there for all those bits to represent.
Getting more film like dynamic range is more interesting to me than increased sharpness or even lower high iso noise.
Slightly OT, I’m thinking the D80 has a pretty agressive AA filter. It takes a lot of sharpening to make things look sharp.
I’ve been using the Phase One P20 back for some time. It is 16 bit and has no AA filter. There is defintiely more dynamic range than with my 12 bit Olympus cameras, but it is still sudden death at the edges.
Unless you are shooting fabrics or other things with close patterns, getting rid of the AA filter makes a big difference. I probably wouldn’t have ordered the M8 if it was filtered.
I had a brief 400 frame play with a DMR earlier this year. I wasn’t greatly impressed with the dynamic range, but the file detail was fantastic. The dynamic range question is much more complex than how many bits, even if more bits is generally considered better place to start from.
Robert White in the UK has been selling discounted Mamiya 7s for some time now. They have a good international reputation. They also discounted the last of the RD1 cameras before the RD1s model came out, but they are all gone now.
It’d be interesting to know which has more impact on the dynamic range, but I’m betting the extra bit depth would have no impact on dynamic range without the larger photosites.
I agree that the dynamic range question is pretty complex particularly when you take into account where all that range falls on the curve. Heck, people are still arguing about the curve and dynamic range differences between TMY and TriX, and that debate has been around for at least 15 years.
Dynamic range is independent of the A/D bit depth, and in this case, the 16-bit is the precision of what the A/D is offering from the sensor. That helps to decrease posterization but does not directly increase dynamic range.
(Their pre-photokina blurb alludes to this: “The development of the finest tonal value steps from the 16-bit picture delivered by the CCD sensor is comparable to the picture quality achieved by a professional combination of film and specialist laboratory development.”)
It is definitely an interesting camera, but unfortunately out of my range. Guess I’m stuck in CMOS land for now, relegated to AA filters and unsharp masks :p