Nice review of the new Canon digital SLR
Michael Reichmann has written the most refreshing, practical and actually useful review of the new Canon 350D - and the rest of his site is good reading too… This is something I enjoyed reading: not just the usual endless masturbating over specs and test images, but actually something a photographer can find useful.
Sometimes you wonder what happened to the photography itself, everyone seems so focused on the technical details on their cameras.. Do people remember to take any real photos anymore?
Thanks Michael!
March 16th, 2005 at 12:59
hm, well, I understand the pain you have with dpreview, but whoever tried to write compareable reviews knows that it’s a reasonable aproach to fall back on technical specs. That’s what I like dpreview for - comparison.
For everything else we have Michael and the Steinmuellers
March 16th, 2005 at 16:50
[…] les/canoneos350d/ the usual dpreview. Though Tigert doesn’t like it too much, mostly find it too boring. He seems to prefer this one, […]
March 17th, 2005 at 09:32
neri: Yeah, comparison, but do you really need to compare cameras per spec? It sure is harder to compare by practice in real world tasks, and you risk of being subjective.
It’s still more useful in my opinion to see that “the viewfinder on the 350 feels pretty small” than “Pentamirror, 95% frame coverage, Magnification: 0.8x (-1 diopter with 50 mm lens at infinity), Eyepoint: 21 mm, Dioptric adjustment: -3.0 to +1.0 diopter, Fixed laser matte screen”.
The point I am trying to make is, all these new SLR digicams are good. They all have more or less the same stuff, what I am interested is in the differences, the design of the user interface and the practical usability. You cannot see usability problems or strong points from those lists of specs.
March 17th, 2005 at 10:55
tigert: unfortunately, you have choosen a bad example … I wear classes
and thus I wanna know about eypoint and dioptric adjustment. Surely, these are not the primary criterias for choosing a camera, but indeed it’s good to know.
To tell my point of view, when someone is looking for a new camera s/he should look at more than one review. dpreviews is doing just one of the possible approaches. Not necessarily the most suitable one for a device which is mostly used for emotionally driven tasks like photography. But from some perspectives, its still useful. IMHO, the only way to know if a camera suits for you is to get your hands on it and take a couple of pictures with it.
PS. I have an Oly E-1 which is not the feature monster and definately not the king of specs
March 17th, 2005 at 11:50
neri: yeah, but well, what matters is: “This camera does have dioptric adjustment” - not the rest of the crap. Or mention it if it is not good enough. Most of them do have it anyway, and such a subjective review would mention if it is lacking of course.
I agree, dpreview is good if you just want to know specs. But for a photographer who wants to know how the tool works in real life, it is becoming increasingly frustrating trying to find useful information on the internet because all the reviews seem to be the same.
What I am after is the kind of a review, where someone else who also does photography, laid her hands on the camera, and wrote about it. Then there are at least some insight on the real features. I might not agree with some, but at least I know someone who does photography a lot did find certain features good and others sub-par. Then its good to go to the store too to see if those things actually are a problem for me
I mean, I found a gem in that review, I know where to go when I need specs. But gems are important
March 17th, 2005 at 14:53
tigert: well I think we agree on the most point, most prominently on gems, btw
To explain that dioptric adjustment issue, to let you see how things matter:
) which is mostly the limit, mostly and not always, and thus this damn stupid number which means nothing to most people is somewhat important to me, and I learned it the hard way.
I have exactly -3.0 (on left, and yes, I should use the right, but have never been really good at this cross focus thing
Once I bought an Nikon FM2 which I liked a lot, but hardly used it, cuz:
- the eypoint is to low, so I couldn’t comfortably use it with glasses
- a fix dioptirc lens for the view finder turned out to be a terrible unflexible thing because you don’t know where to put your glasses to when you take pictures or need to replace the lens when using contact lenses
… but still I’m a sucker for the feeling of using that totally mechanical gem
April 21st, 2005 at 11:59
It’s definetly a fine camera. There’s been a “pretest” in a German photo magazine which sounds really good. This was not a technical test yet but some report by a photographer using this camera (the technical test will follow in the next edition).
But one of the biggest problems I have yet with digital cameras is, that they’re pretty expensive to comparable analog models and that they’re outdated pretty soon too. Even if there’re successors to the Canon EOS 300 (which I use), I’m pretty sure that there’s no technical need for me to buy an analog successor the next years (but if I decide to switch to a “higher” class); with the 350D I expect there’ll be a succcessor in one and half year at the latest which has so many new/better features that I’d be tempted to buy…