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April |
More on the Powershot G2
If you get a Canon Powershot G2, you will want some of these things for wide-angle, macro, tele, infrared, filters and other fancy photographic enhancements.
Canon makes an adapter, too, but Lensmate's is cheaper in the long run because it accepts the smaller, cheaper 49mm attachments instead of Canon's 58mm attachments. Also, the 58mm Canon adapter is big enough to partially obstruct the flash, AF assist light, and optical viewfinder.
So, I recommend the LensMate, but the Canon is an option.
Let's talk digital cameras...
Unfortunately, the trip updates may be delayed a day or two, or may appear out of order, because I'm still waiting for the film processing of the photos.
I took my Nikon SLR with me because my new digital camera, a Canon Powershot G2, doesn't have much capacity with the supplied 32mb CF card. It's more than the typical 8mb or 16mb cards you get with most digicams, but still nothing compared to the 1gb Microdrive I am anxiously awaiting. I tend to burn a lot of film, so that Microdrive is a definite necessity. Esp[ecially with a 4-megapixel camera that produces huge RAW image files.
So, let's talk digital cameras. There are full reviews of the G2 all over the place, including here at DP Review. I'm going to focus on my personal impressions that haven't been reported elsewhere.
The G2 is in that category known as the "prosumer" camera, on the high end of consumer cameras, just before you get to the nifty but expensive digital SLRs.
In an ideal world, I would have got the upcoming Nikon D100, which is compatible with all of my Nikon lenses. But I've decided to hold out on buying a digital SLR until the following critera are met:
Until then, a digital SLR doesn't make much sense, since my primary goal with my 35mm-format / medium format / large format photography is producing a fine print.
So, I chose a prosumer camera that would give me the image control I'm used to and acceptable print quality at smaller sizes, but will primarily be used for making digital images I don't intend to print and exhibit. Online exhibition on this site will be their ultimate destination.
So, why the Powershot G2?
Here's what I like about it:
These are all things I am accustomed to having in my 35mm and MF cameras. Point and shoot-style cameras drive me up the wall because I can't make choices. This one, like most modern pro/prosumer cameras, has a dummy mode for handing the camera to someone else, but also provides a great degree of flexibility.
In short, it's a good digital camera for point-and-shooters who want 4-megapixel resolution, but it's a great camera for the advanced shooter who wants a good balance of image quality, creative control, and reasonable street price (about $650).
But here's the meat of this post, because after tinkering with the thing for a while, I have found some annoying flaws, and you should bear these in mind if you're considering this camera.
If you are the sort of person who, like me, views a zoom lens as "a bag full of fixed lenses in a small package" rather than an "instant cropper", you may also find this annoying.
Also, the slow sync is only available through one of the built-in Program AE "dummy" modes, meaning many of the other features cannot be manually adjusted when using this mode. Strange thing to do for such an advanced feature.
Granted, you can do all of these modes by post-processing in Photoshop, but it would be really exciting if you had real-time control of the color saturation of the image. The real-time visualization of grey levels for B/W photography would be a major godsend for B/W photographers, who have always had to rely on a combination of intuition, experience, and kludgey viewing filters for imagining a scene in its colorless state.
Overall, in spite of these annoyances, I consider this a brilliant piece of camera worksmanship which I would recommend to anyone. I just wish they had had that extra bit of vision that would have made this camera truly revolutionary.
I think at least some of my issues could be addressed by an after-market firmware update, so maybe the revolution will still come. Vive la revolution!