Hi, did some shooting as I belong with a local club and we have a theme each month.
I found that a ultra wide lens is useful as well as a fisheye.
One can just buy more digital only lenses or just shoot film.
What are your opinions?
Being a Nikon guy, the 12-24 is $900 or $500 for 3rd party like Sigma or Tokina. Which are aperture f/4 or 3.5-4.5 which is a bit $$ for that.
The fisheye is $600
A proper mid zoom at a fast aperture is like $1,000 or more for social, events or low light like indoors with lights on.
A digital compact travel lens which is $750.
These lenses add quite a bit of dent in one's wallet.
This is assuming that future SLRs will remain at the cropped sensor design.
Being a film user gone are the days when we could get:
$400 18-35/3.5-4.5
$500 35-70/2.8
$600 16mm/2.8 fisheye
Or better yet get them all used for under half price.
The travel lens is like $250-300 without AFS or VR but its still heaps lesser than $750 (both being new)
You can shoot a lot of film instead or would purchasing a few digital lenses be the way through and have 2 sets of lenses one that you may already have for film and get another set for digital?
I don't do social that much so I can live with a 18-35 on digital than a 17-55 regardless of its fast aperture.
But it appears I am a bit restricted without a ultra wide lens and a fisheye.
Don't know about the need for two sets of lenses. When you move from "full frame" 35mm to an APS sensor you do need to add a wider lens to get the angle of view that you had with your widest full frame lens.
OTOH, your teles now become ~1.5x longer. More reach with less weight.
Depending on what you're shooting you always have the option of shooting overlapping frames and stitching them together into a very wide pano. Doesn't work with moving subjects, but can make some impressive landscape/architectural photos.
There is a need of a ultra wide, and a fisheye as they are both pretty wide.
And also the proper mid. My 18-35 gets to 27-50, so something like a 17-55 but the thing is that all the digital lenses are new flash gizmo's who has a price premiums, you are unable to get hold of a AF push pull f/2.8 things anymore. I don't do social stuff that much so that's not major issue but I have adapted and accept not having a mid zoom.
With 2 that's still $1400 or $1100 if the wide angle is a 3rd party lens.
If I get a mid zoom its even more. No wonder why some Canon users get the 5D.
If one shoot film as well there are 3 or 2 duplicated lenses.
I don't know why but a f/4 aperture lens by Nikon and they charge $900 for that I think, not even sure if that is in stock right now or not.. And it's a DX form factor lens ..
I did some maths before, I think.
If a person had a entry SLR like a D70 or 400D and purchased 3 digital lenses its the same price as a FF 5D. That is the body + $2500US of extra digital lenses.
If a person shot film, they would just use their present lenses and get the 5D and have a better camera body to boot.
Or they could do like I did and buy the Pentax K100D, 10-17, 18-55, and 50-200 and be out around $1500US.
And get in-body IS and auto ISO as well.
Shooting film is always an option. Just figure in the cost of film over a few years and the cost of a scanner.
(It's all cheap compared to owning a sailboat.... ;o)
Well I refused to buy into digital until there was an 'afforable' 35mm digital camera.
I guess I was lucky being a Canon shooter, the 5D is my first and only digital camera. This camera also suits me as I do a lot of low light work, and that's where digital comes into it's own.
However I just bought a secondhand mint condition EOS3, digital is good, but a year of digital has convinced me to make the effort and shoot more film this year.
As for lenses, and I've got a fair collection now. Somedays I'll take just about the lot, particulary if it's paid work, but other days I'll just take a lens or two out with me and make do. My favourite lens is my 16-35.
I'm with Bob.
Too many people think the only options are Canon and Nikon.
Truth is they make very good cameras but so do Pentax, Olympus and Sony.
The features set on Pentax and Olympus cameras usually are alot more extensive than anything on the equivalent Nikon or Canon cameras.
But people feel they need to have a pro camera in the lineup and pro lenses etc etc. Very few people ever need them.
Being a film user gone are the days when we could get:
$400 18-35/3.5-4.5
$500 35-70/2.8
$600 16mm/2.8 fisheye
True enough, but during those days a beer cost 1$ in a pub, now it's 2.5-3$...
Sooner or later larger sensors will be in most mid-range dSLR's. I'm waiting for that. I the meantime I bought a slide scanner and scan my slides...plenty of them in the archives that deserve to be scanned!
If there would be a 5D equivalent in Nikons arsenal then I would have gone digi already. But with Nikon one always has to wait a little longer than with Canon.
Those to brands have a good 'backwards compatibility' and I still used my manual focus AI lens 50mm 1.4 until very recently - same lens mount makes it possible albeit only some light metering choices available, not all.
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<hr>Sooner or later larger sensors will be in most mid-range dSLR's. <hr></blockquote>
I just don't see that. You may be right, but that's not what is in my crystal ball.
The major reason for moving to "full frame" sensors was to recover wide angle/FOV ability. That's been solved with the release of wide angles for smaller sensors.
I don't see any significant demand for larger sensors among the greater market. People are getting enough pixels with APS-sized sensors and both the cost of the sensor and the very large market share is going to keep prices low compared to full frame.
Pixel count is going to increase for both APS- and full-sized dSLRs. Lots of people realize that the don't need more than 6/8/10 megs. The full frame sensor dSLRs are going to continue to chip away at the bottom end of traditional MF film territory and are going to be primarily purchased by those who want to print quite large.
My crystal ball is a bit fuzzy anyway but:
- Canon shows us that full format senors are possible to do in medium price range now. That means they can be even cheaper in the future.
- Image quality - there are two ways to get better images: bigger pixels and sensors or better smaller pixels and sensors. Now if you try to get best image quality out of smallest sensor that will cost a lot of money to develop those sensors. Same goes for real big sensors with super-superb image quality. So somewhere in between is the cost/quality efficient; currently this is 2/3rd sensor. Tomorrow this is full size sensor (says my fuzzy crystal ball).
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<hr>Pixel count is going to increase for both APS- and full-sized dSLRs. <hr></blockquote>
For a while this is true; but there will be a point where increasing the size of the sensor is cheaper than making pixels smaller - especailly if those smaller pixels should be as powerful in terms of image quality as their bigger counterparts.
- There might be no significant demand for larger sensors, because as you said a decent 10MP 2/3rd size sensor does the trick for most - I would even go further, most people won't need 10MP, they can do with 4-5-6MP as they don't do enlargements anyway and their pictures won't improve with more pixels...just more pixels doesn't mean your ability of getting better pics increases, no? But camera manufacturers like people thinking that way, and a lot of people do...this way camera manufacturers will create a demand to sell more cameras. They already do. 6MP on dSLR starts to dissappear already...
Digital camera development has been fast. I remember one fellow in the nineties showing around his digi camera in my friends pub in Manila. Was a solid 1.2MP camera, with a floppy drive(!) to store images. Big thing too.
Things have changed a lot.
And they will continue to change. Cheap dSLR might stay with the 2/3rds sensor. Pro-level they are already disapperaing in Canons arsenal... Nikon will follow (at least I hope and rumours regarding the D3 go that way).
And maybe one day they might replace the 2/3rd sensors in cheap dSLR's as well, but that sure will take a while.
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