OLD Camera Advice

[Pat Profile Private message]

I'm not much of a camera buff, my current camera is an older Olympus 3.2 megapixel... A friend has offered to sell me his older Canon EOS Digital Rebel DS6041. Researching this camera on the internet is a little confusing as many different opinions exist as to exactly which camera this is. Some say it is the same camera as the 300D, some say it is not... and finding a good review/info is not easy.

Has anyone used this camera in the past and is it a good camera for jus the normal person who enjoy creating slideshows for family and friends? If you could point out good/bad features I would appreciate it. He has not mentioned a price yet, so what might you think it would be worth?

Thanks in advance!
Pat

[moehler Profile Private message]

What is your current camera not doing that would be done by a new camera? I'm not knocking getting a new camera, but I wouldn't get one just to get one especially if you're not sure what the new camera will bring to the table.

[Pat Profile Private message]

My main complaint with my existing camera is that it is so extremely slow to focus. Also it seems to save slowly and does not do well inside using the flash.

[DickK Profile Private messageWebsite]

Don't know that camera but the Canon brand and their DSLR line is a good one. Before making a decision I'd strongly recommend you get it for a day or three and shoot some pictures. See if you like it or not. And check out the lenses that come with it, those are just as important as the camera.

One issue to think of carefully is that this is a big leap upward and over, especially if what you have isn't a DSLR. Is that really what you want?

Lastly, whatever the price, look carefully at what you could buy new for the same money. Cameras have evolved so rapidly that you might well find something you'd like more for the same money.

Dick

[VernonRobinson Profile Private message]

The Canon EOS Digital Rebel DS6041 is indeed the Digital Rebel also called the 300D. I am not sure why one camera needs so many names. The 300D is a great camera. I have and still use the Canon 10D, the bigger brother to the 300D. A lot of the features in the 10D are in the 300D, but locked out via software. A Russian guy came up with a firmware hack that unlocks a lot of the features of the 10D within the 300D. Google 300D firmware hack.

The 300D is a great camera. Compared to today's cameras, the LCD display is a little small, but it is still crisp and sharp. The shutter mechanism is very quiet with little mirror slap. Great for taking pictures in quiet areas discretely. The auto focus is a little challenged in the dark, but is improved if you use one of the Canon Speedlite flashes. I would be a little concerned about the number of shutter actuations. We used the 10D to photograph our kids sports teams and have replaced the shutter mechanism. So if you trust the person to give you an honest answer, get a feel for how many acutations. It is not possible to see the actuations because Canon never published how to get the info out of the firmware and the counter rolls over after 10,000 shots. The shutter count would get even more screwed up if someone put a memory card in from a Canon camera with a higher shutter count. The Camera would then adopt this higher shutter count as the basis and continuing incrementing from there. The idea was to prevent creating pictures with duplicate image numbers.

Finally, Dick gave you some good advice when he said to really look at the lenses that come with the camera. The kit lens is ok in bright outside light when you can get the shutter stopped down to F5.6 or F8.0. But if you want to use it indoors to take pictures of groups and kids, you will need a faster lense. One that will go preferably to F2.8. I would recommend the Canon 17-55 F2.8 IS. This lens gives excellent image quality and is Image Stabilized. Unfortunately, brand new, it costs more than the 300D. However, I must emphasize, the lens is what creates the image, so that is where to put your money.

Sorry for the overly long post, but I hope it helps.

Regards,
-Vernon

[Aida Profile Private message]

Hi Pat,
The other posters have given you good suggestions & advice. You say that you're "not much of a camera buff." Thus, I fully agree with Dick's comment: "One issue to think of carefully is that this is a big leap upward and over, especially if what you have isn't a DSLR. Is that really what you want? "

Ultimately, what really matters are your objectives, purposes & intentions. What kind of photos do you intend to take? Is portability important to you? You can easily & unobtrusively take a compact camera anywhere you go. It's very handy, small, & weighs practically nothing. Do you really need a DSLR with all the bells & whistles? There's a learning curve there before one can take full advantage of everything a DSLR camera offers. But if that's what you want, & if you intend to become a serious amateur photographer, GO FOR IT!!!

Now, to reply more specifically to what you said here:

My main complaint with my existing camera is that it is so extremely slow to focus. Also it seems to save slowly and does not do well inside using the flash.

So-called compact cameras [aka point & shoot cameras] have come a long way in the last 6 or 8 years. In fact, one can take amazingly good pictures with them. Below is a link to a recent NY Times article that evaluates the best compact cameras under US$300. The author is David Pogue, who writes a weekly column in the New York Times. You might find the article useful in helping you decide what kind of camera best suits you:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/techn ... pogue.html

Happy camera shopping!
-aida

[Pat Profile Private message]

As usual, what wonderful information from this group! It has certainly given me some valuable information and things to think about. I have been watching some bids on e-bay and these cameras are typically going for around $300 - $400. I don't know what he will want for it, as it has been sitting in his closet since he upgraded to a newer model a year or so ago, but I don't think I would want to go that high. There seems to be a lot of them for sale and they are obviously worth that amount, since that's what everyone is paying...

Once again, thanks all for you input...
Pat

[Pat Profile Private message]

Well I was able to play around with the camera this weekend. I was disappointed in the fact that in order to obtain an image of 7 MB, you have to shoot in RAW format and it takes some time to save. Otherwise, images are around 3 MB. It is quick to focus though. The pictues that it does take are quite nice though...

UPDATE - well I have just now looked at a few of my pictures taken this weekend at a classic car show. I have always equated file size to picture clairity, as least that is how things seemed to have worked with my older Olympus. However, even though the JPG size of these photos are around 3MB, the same as with my Olympus, zooming in on them reveals a much clearer picture than what I am used to.

[VernonRobinson Profile Private message]

Pat,
I think there may be a bit of misundertanding here. The 300D is a 6.3 Megapixel camera. All of the images it produces will be 6.3 megapixels (3072 x 2048 ) when shot at full resolution. As you have discovered, the camera will produce a Jpg image which takes the 6.3 megapixels, runs them through a compression algorhythm that reduces the amount of space requried to store the image on your compact flash storage card. The Jpg compression standard is what we call a lossy compression method. It means that some information captured originally can not be fully restored when the file is slightly modified and stored again. So each time a Jpg is stored, some information is lost.

On to the Raw format. The Raw format contains all of the information that was originally captured by the camera sensor. Think of it as what the negative was to a film camera, this is what Raw is to the digital camera. So the Raw file is your unprocessed (o.k. lightly processed) digital negative. But just like a negative, it needs to be processed in order to give you the rich vibrant colors in your final image. A raw file will typically look very flat and unappealing. The Raw file is not as compressed as the Jpg file and thus takes up more storage space. However, I recommend that you shoot in raw. The reason being is that this is your digital negative and it has more information stored inside it than what typically makes it into the final Jpg. Depending on how the sensor information is processed will influence the look of the final Jpg. Have you ever taken film to the corner drug store and the images came back yellow? You had them reprinted and they came back green the next time? Well, this is due to how the film was processed. The Raw/Jpg discussion is slightly different, but the analogy holds. The most information that you have to work with is in the Raw file. The Jpg is a processed version of that information and depending on how you want your prints to look, you can reprocess the information to emphasis exposure differences, light balance, etc.

The 300D is a great camera. As you have discovered, the shutter lag plagueing your point and wait and shoot is virtually eliminated. When you get to the later models, you will find that they have virtually eliminated the start-up times. This is the time it takes from when you turn the camera on to when you can take the first picture. This is ideal if you se something that is happening this instant and want to get a picture of it. Sometimes the 1 - 2 second start up time will cause you to miss that picture.

But to your recent comments, the size of the Jpg is designed to balance image quality and storage requirements. The Raw file gives you everything the camera captured and leaves it up to "the new processing lab" to determine what the final image will look like. I forgot to mention that the Raw file is processed and then typically stored as a Jpg, Tiff, or some other format. There are some programs that will read a Raw file, but they are just using their own "lab processing" algorhytms, where they have the control instead of you. Understand that writing a Raw file to the storage card will take more time since it is a much larger file. But unless you are shooting rapid fire sports pictures, it is usually not much of an issue.

Regards,
-Vernon

[Pat Profile Private message]

Thanks Vernon and I will revisit this when I get home today after work. BUT... I am almost certain all images were around 3 MB in size and I selected Large/Fine as the file option. It was the top of the list on options for file size and JPEG was the format. I was using a ScanDisk of 256 MB and it should I could take around 70 photos. So that would figure out about right, wouldn't it? Maybe there was another setting that was changing things which I was not aware.

[VernonRobinson Profile Private message]

Pat,
The fact that the images are around 2 -3 megs is not important. The maximum recording resolution of the camera sensor is 6.3 megapixels. Depending on what you are taking a picture of will affect how much the image can be compressed. For instance, if you take a picture of a city skyline at night, most of the image is dark and can be readily compressed, where as the same picture in daylight will be larger in size. Both are shot with the same camera, same picture, but the size is different due to compression. Memory cards are cheap these days. I would recommend getting a 4 gig card and shoot both Large/Raw and take lots of pictures.

The camera appears to be functioning properly. It will give you great images that can be printed or used in ProShow. Go forth and have fun.

Regards,
-Vernon

[DickK Profile Private messageWebsite]

Vernon's explanation is a good one -- JPEG files will almost never be anything like the rated megapixels for the camera. If you're getting images of roughly 3000x2000 pixels in size then that's full size and the image file size then is determined by the amount of compression that's possible for the "quality" setting selected. My camera is a 9 megapixel sensor and JPEG images at max settings are typically 3 - 4.5 MB in size depending on the scene. What you're seeing is what would be expected.

Shooting RAW format will get no no more pixels, per se, but it gets more information about those pixels and no compression. RAW is simple to understand and complex to deal with. Essentially it's just the raw, almost unprocessed data taken off the sensor. It's a bunch of not-very-meaningful data until some software interprets it--that can be done inside the camera (in which case it gets saved as a JPEG) or it can get done externally (in which case you need such software on the PC, often a function in an image editor).

Dick

[Pat Profile Private message]

Vernon - Man I'm slow... what you have been saying has just now clicked in the old noggin! I have been confusing MegaBytes with MegaPixels! And the two are totally unrelated I guess. I have been watching these on eBay and see them going from $150 - $300 for basically the same setup as being offered to me. Guess I'll throw $150 his way and see if he will bite.

[VernonRobinson Profile Private message]

Hey, we all have "those kind of days". Glad it clicked with you. The 300D is a great camera. Don't forget to find the 300D Hack. This changes a lot of the firmware that Canon locked out and turns it into a mini 10D . I have the 10D and still use it. Image quality is great. It is also quieter than my 30D. But I appreciate the faster startup times on the 30D. No matter though. Both cameras are great and you will enjoy it immensely without the shutter lag issue.

Regards,
-Vernon

[gpsmikey Profile Private message]

Correct - "megabytes" and "megapixels" are only somewhat related. Just for entertainment, take one picture of a scene that has lots of detail (leaves, colors etc - the more detail the better) and another picture of a subject that is a flat single color with the same camera. Look at the resulting jpg image sizes for the two shots. I keep thinking I want to shoot RAW (not in the raw - different topic ) but find that in general, I am perfectly happy with the images I get from my Nikon in Large/Fine jpeg mode. Raw does have a couple of advantages though - there is more shadow highlight detail available in raw and color correction (daylight, tungsten etc) has not been applied yet so if you forgot and were set on tungsten and were shooting outside, the correction is easier with raw. On the other hand, the raw files are not as easy to work with in all applications as the jpeg files are. Probably why the raw vs jpg discussions go back and forth and usually end with both sides going their separate ways

As far as the number of megapixels goes, a number that people often overlook that in many ways is just as important is the sensor size (actually the size of each pixel). There has been LOTS of progress in the last few years on developing sensors that work well in lower light conditions. One factor that affects how much "noise" you get in low light images is the sensor size - the larger the sensor (actually individual pixels), the better it tends to be in low light conditions. The newer sensors are also much better in low light/high ISO conditions than they were even just a couple of years ago. I shoot Nikons, but the Canons are pretty much the same as far as the camera bodies (with sensors and features) keep improving, but good glass typically holds it's resale value while the bodies drop fairly fast in resale value.

One very important consideration which several people have somewhat addressed is DSLR vs the point and shoot - while in many ways a DSLR is superior to a point and shoot, the best camera for you is the one you will carry with you and use. If the DSLR is too big/awkward for you to be comfortable carrying around, then is isn't a useful camera for you. I love my Nikons (D300s) with a good telephoto lens, but many times, the best camera is my wife or daughter's Canon P&S cameras to drag around to some event or another because it is so handy and you can drop it in your pocket. A camera sitting at home on the table is of no use when you see that great shot

mikey