> personally would be pretty upset when I take my award wininng
> shot to find a big speck right in the middle of it :-)
This subject is one that verges on "religion". Being a "Shaker"
I get pretty spoiled by the fact that my cameras remain sin free
with no evils contaminating the sensors.
One of the various pro forums that I participate in is populated
by almost exclusively Mamiya, Contax, Hassy, Nikon, Fuji, Kodak
and Canon folks. There might be an Olympus user or two in it,
but we keep quiet as it is pretty apparant that we're not
welcome to gloat. In fact, I've probably only made one post in
the past six months. Do you realize you tough it is for me to
not say anything about all of the blotchy sample pics that are
posted in that forum? We're talking pros in a heavily moderated
private forum. The subject of dust control comes up every once
in a while and the general concensus is that it's a fact of life
and anything below 10 or 15 huge goobers is acceptable. Almost
everybody has built Photoshop Actions to automatically whack the
majority of the spots and they don't like to clean too often
because it means they have to redo their Actions. A common
comment about dust is "oh, it's no big deal". Compared to
scanned film, I'd agree. And in almost every case these
guys/gals shooting DSLRs have migrated from Scanned Film and the
rest are still scanning film.
I'm not sure what people think they are accomplishing by buying
systems with geewiz performance and ultra-clean high-ISOs and IS
if the resulting images are being compromised by such a serious
design flaw. It's not very often that I miss a shot because of
the camera, although it does happen. Whenever I miss a shot
I've got to usually blame the operator. If I better anticipated
I'd have gotten it. As to high-ISO performance? Well, I use a
monopod a whole lot anyway, so I CAN shoot slower than my
chain-gun toting peers that think ISO 3200 is barely fast
enough.
A prolab I use now made a very interesting comment. I sent a
print order and paid extra for color tweeking of the portraits.
I didn't trust the calibration of my monitor yet and wanted them
to do the nitty gritty. Well, almost all of the photos received
NO changes. None. They said that I didn't have to tweek the
image ahead of time. I didn't. These were conversions done in
Viewer using the camera settings with only a slight exposure
offset. The only editing performed was zit removal.
The subject line of the thread is "Which Camera To Count on".
For me, the answer is easy. In February I had to finally pull
the trigger and a new DSLR purchase. I sweated it out
contemplating the pros/cons of each system. The final
determining factor was long-term reliability. I had decided on
the Minolta 7D, but then Olympus released the firmware update
that fixed the AF. And then I found a great deal where I could
buy the camera with 14-54 lens for $1000. Duh!
I've learned over this past year that specifications mean
nothing. The E-1 is "good enough" for almost everything I do.
Almost. Yes, there are times when I need "just a little more".
But the camera has never let me down, confused me or failed to
be "ready" when I wanted to take the shot. It has operated
flawlessly in cold and heat, sunny and rain and even survived a
small rockslide.
Guess what? I just found Sollie in one of my boxes. I just
need to try and get it to lock down one stop I'll see if those
dry bones can live. In a couple of weeks the eagles should be
congregating again! Ooo Ooo, Joel, let's get that 300/4.5 fired
up!
Where's Vert, where's Toky?
AG
__________________________________________
Yahoo! DSL ? Something to write home about.
Just $16.99/mo. or less.
dsl.yahoo.com
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