Monday Melissa had her first “day of work” if you can call it that. Her job requires her to hang out at the largest state park in Florida, which we all would complain about I am sure. Besides driving around in ATVs, hiking, canoeing, and other outdoor activities; she has to take money at the gate, set up and support and group activities, and assist with park maintenance.
So … on Monday I get a call, “come on down to the park after work … there is a orchestra playing … bring friends.” … and of course I had to find at least one person to go as she had the car. Maybe I should get a bike ??
We also got word that the Saunders can stay a little bit longer than originally planned … which is great. Now if I can just convince Sid and Jeff to come with me to the Barenaked Ladies concert on March 8th … “yea, come on out … fly 3500 miles to the southern states to watch a fantastic Canadian band play” … we are going to be in Orlando anyways 🙂
So, now, so we can record all these events we are looking at a digital camera. Time to spend some time on dpreview.com. We really like Krishen’s Canon PowerShot G3 and were looking at the G2 model – but that seems to be discontinued. What we want is a camera that allows us to buy the extra attachments (zoom lenses, etc) … but provides a decent zoom and quality right away. Think a 4 Megapixel with 3-4x zoom lens would be good. Standard accessories (battery, extra memory, tripods) are also nice. Oh … did we mention we did not want to spend over $400 if we could help it 🙂 Anyone have any comments for or against any particular brands or models ? Anything we should look at .. or stay away from ?
Follow
Stay away from the Powershot G5. It’s supposed to have some pretty bad artifacts when viewing a bright light on a mostly dark background (they’ll appear as purple halos around the light source). in digicam-speak, they’re called “chromatic aberations”, and the G5 is worse about them than the G3, which in turn is worse (but only slightly) than the G2.
a review of the G5:
http://hardwarecentral.dealtime.com/xPR-Canon_PowerShot_G5~RD-104580419204
“Both my friend and I were very impressed with the G5, however the newest member of the “G” family isn’t perfect, there are couple of annoying faults. First, the G5 has slightly above average chromatic aberration (purple fringing) in high contrast images. Chromatic aberration is a fact of digital camera life, especially at larger apertures in bright or high contrast scenes. Most digital camera lenses lose the purple fringing as soon as you stop down one f-stop from the maximum aperture, but the G5 still showed some purple fringing at f4.0.”
I would definitely recommend the Powershot G3, though. I’ve never had so much fun with toy. One caveat… and I’m not sure if it’s specific to my G3: the CCD seems to capture yellows with better saturation than blues, so sunsets, and pictures of oranges will look fantastic, but your skies, not so much. but you’d only notice if you were really looking hard. overall the picture quality is really quite good, especially in large areas of very similar colours (traditionally an area where compression artifacts are very noticeable in digital cameras — but not on the G3).
It doesn’t fit in your budget, but if you want a camera with interchangeable lenses, you can’t beat a Digital SLR. I’ve got a Canon Digital Rebel, and the image quality is outstanding. With the camera set on Large/Fine JPEG mode, you get 6.3 megapixel images with no visible compression artifacts.
The images are smooth as silk, especially when shooting at the lower ISO speeds. 100 ISO shows no visible noise. 200-400 start to show just a little, just as you would expect from film. 800 and 1600 ISO shows a little bit of it, but it is far less noisy than real 35 mm film ever could be.
It can take the entire line of Canon EF lenses, from their 15 mm fish-eye wide angle to the 1200 mm super-telephoto. I’ve borrowed Mike’s 100-300 mm telephoto on occasion to take a few distance shots, but the 18-55 mm lens included in the kit is great for a wide range of photos.
For only $999, it’s a steal, but unless you really want to get into photography as a hobby, it’ll probably be overkill for you.
Forgot to add:
If you want some examples photos, check out my gallery.