Eye-AF?
Tested a Nikon Z6 mirrorless camera yesterday. First thing I did was upgrade it to version 2.0 firmware. The one that introduced eye-autofocus. (more…)
Archive for the ‘EVIL cameras’ Category
Sturdy Pixels
June 13, 2019Mirrorlessless
October 8, 2018
Vanilla ice cream, Apfelstrudel and a 45.7 megapixel beast
I’m being ungrateful and have been replacing the Nikon D800 that served me so well shooting the wedding with a new body. Ten days ago at Photokina, mirrorless system cameras were all the rage. I had a look through a Nikon Z7 and found the electronic viewfinder straining to my still blissfully good eyesight. Same with the other manufacturer’s EVIL (electronic viewfinder, interchangeable lens, that moniker should be standard!) camera proposals. Only the Leica SL stood out, but that one is a bit out of my price range, especially it’s autofocus lenses.
I kept the Sony alpha 7RIII for last and had a salesman at a big camera store in Nuremberg demonstrate it to me last Saturday. But when neither he nor his colleagues (more…)
It’s a Kind of Magic
April 30, 2018
“There are fields, Neo, endless fields where plants are no longer born …”
A photographer I know and trust recommended mirrorlesss system cameras and criticized Nikon and Canon harshly for not being on top of their game. The two DSLR giants are lacking attractive offers in this market segment dominated by Sony, Olympus, Fujifilm and Panasonic. Even Leica and Hasselblad have interesting, though expensive EVIL cameras (electronic viewfinder, interchangeable lens) on offer!
On the other hand, (more…)
Second Shooter
April 8, 2018
Autofocus sensors right to the edge of the frame
My main DSLR, a Nikon D 800, is 4 years old and has 80000 actuations. Should I trust it to work flawlessly during this year’s photo projects (especially my son’s wedding)? Not without a backup body, no, I won’t.
Is One Inch Enough?
October 26, 2014
Damaged beauty in bed… 😉
Got myself a Sony RX100 Mark 3 compact digital camera. Read all about it here. It is compact enough to stick into a jacket pocket while motorcycling. Still, it has many advanced features. First to mention among them is the pop-up EVF (electronic viewfinder) that allows proper framing, not this holding-at-arms-length nonsense. They found place for a little (minuscule, actually) pop-up flash on the upper deck, too, that is good for fill-in. It does RAW as well as JPEGs, and the color space can be set to Adobe RGB. It has a 24-70 equivalent mm Carl Zeiss designed zoom lens (a feature I’m missing with the Ricoh GR) that deploys in a PG18-rated fashion from a pancake size.
So far, so good. But it has a one inch sensor. See if you can spot the results in the following screenshots from the RAWs being developed in Apple Aperture. We start with the lead photo. As always, pictures are clickable for full-size.
Fill-in flash at 800 ISO. With a beauty like that, you don’t look for eyelash sharpness, but for string sharpness (focus lies between the two pickups). It is there, in a good compromise with shadow noise.
And a photo 100 ISO lower:
“Glass of wine, bottle of red”… Yeah, Billy Joel…
At 400 ISO, not bad, but not devoid of shadow noise, either.
ISO 200 works fine, ISO 125 and 80 show compression artifacts, take my word for it. I’ve excluded the latter two settings from the Auto-ISO range. What about high ISO?
This crab-like object is my motorbike at night on a thoroughfare.
That’s actually not bad for a 6400 ISO night shot from a 1″ sensor!
So, the verdict: The Sony RX100 Mark 3 is surprisingly useable for a lot of subjects, brilliant at high ISO and good enough “in between” if you’re not viewing everything at 100% and counting ants.
Another Dimension
May 5, 2012
The Nikon 1 V1 camera body pales in comparison to the huge 1 Nikkor VR 10-100mm f/4.5-5.6 PD-Zoom lens. And yes, I black out all my cameras with a sharpie pen. Didn’t stick on the “1” though 😉
The second lens I got for my Nikon 1 V1 EVIL camera was the Nikkor VR 10-100mm f/4.5-5.6 PD-Zoom lens. As you can see, this is no longer a compact camera system now, (more…)
Pocket Rocket*
March 23, 2012
The Nikon 1 V1 really is much smaller than it looks here. That's a mini bottle of mineral water behind it.
Ok, another photographic gadget that has to prove it’s worthiness. First impressions: I think it will! (more…)
GUIs, Cycle Touring and Photography
June 20, 2011
Apple’s Blue Man Group
September 11, 2010
Christian, Workshop Instructor at the Hamburg Apple Store
Out of sheer curiosity, I visited an Apple Store for the first time today. The Apple Store in Hamburg is located in a mall at the northern outskirts of the city. It’s not so large and flashy as Apple’s latest openings, but right from the start it was brimming with customers and employees in blue t-shirts. They quickly found each other using a ticket system for sessions that needed a lot of advice. Off the shelf purchases were quickly accounted for by blue men (and women) prowling the store with mobile terminals.
But I didn’t come to buy something (originally …), (more…)
Amusement Park
July 23, 2010
In the Queue
Some things you got to do. For example, visit an amusement park with your youngest daughter when on holiday. Took the opportunity to try out ART filter 3 some more on my Olympus E-PL1. So here are some results: (more…)
