[muglo] Re: Camera Zoom

> > > Of course, there's the problem that most (all?) of the lenses for
> > >digital SLRs are different from those for film SLRs.
> >Not All, Canon EF lenses work on a few models, but I am not up on others
> >as the cost is too high for me. The advantage of digital lens is the
> >weight.
> Hmm. I wonder if those are the very, very, _very_ expensive digital SLRs
> (the ones targeted at the audience for whom the difference between $1500
and
> $2500 is merely a trivial consideration).

Yeah, all the Canon EOS lenses work interchangeably on any and all of the
Canon SLR's to the best of my knowledge.  I can use my same lenses for both
my digicam and my film backs!  You can now get a Canon SLR camera brand new
on ebay for less than a grand.  ( Of course, they're often "very very"
expensive if you by them at full retail. )  However, if you own a film
camera with some lenses already, that will seem like a cheap way to get a
digicam with a pile of high quality optics.

The typical Canon CCD image sensor is about 2/3 the area of a 35mm film,
which has the effect of "cropping" your digital image slightly versus 35mm,
which translates to an effect of multiplying by a 1.6X factor on your lens
focal length.  So your 300mm EOS zoom lens when on your digicam makes
digital images that look like a 480mm lens would on 35mm film.  That can be
a really cool thing -- but means usually needing more wide-angle lenses for
your average assignments.

The fairly recent Canon Digital Rebel 300 brought in a new standard of lens
too -- the EOS-E I think?  It has a deeper back lens placement which
actually addresses the shifting focal length thing, but the lenses are tied
to the digicam only, and can't fit onto the film cameras.  They are crazy
cheap though.  Theres actually a huge list of features that replaceable
lenses and SLR construction bring to a photographer, but we worry a lot
about things like precision cotrolled  depth-of-field, variable interaction
with flash gear, seeing through the actual lens and choosing correct focal
lengths to minimize geometric distortion and all that junk that most casual
shooters don't care at all about.

One good reason to buy a camera like that?  You get out of having to ever
think about the Moore's law problem of having hardware which doubles in
quality every 18 months.  The current SLR cameras are _useful enough_ that
the standards are unlikely to warrant ever _needing_ to replace them.  If
the largest print you ever make is an 8x10, these cameras are all you'll
ever need, ever.  For example, they can accept a 4GB CF card, which can fit
approx 670 300dpi 8x10's on it in RAW mode, or 1200 8x10 as jpegs.

> The pro digital SLRs usually have a much
> larger CCD ("film") than on the consumer or prosumer digicams allowing for
> much larger lenses (more light, more control, better optics).

Yeah -- you're completely right.  I just spotted this nice article:

<http://www.thetechlounge.com/article.php?directory=beyond_megapixels_part_1
>

Summary: big lenses and sensors make much nicer quality image files than
small lenses and sensors, even though they may be quantitatively similar
sizes or megapixels.




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