Review: Billingham Hadley Digital camera bag
My shiny new Canon 30D dSLR body just arrived in the mail today. Naturally it’s raining cats and dogs here in SF, so I must amuse myself with taking pictures of household items and my cats (who are rather tired of the bright flashy thing going off in their face by this point! :).
My initial impressions are:
– wayyyyyyy faster in pretty much every way compared to my Digital Rebel/300D. Startup is a fraction of a second, and the compact flash card interface is obviously much improved from the 300D as well. Browsing through shots on the camera is nearly instantaneous, compared to about 3 seconds to load each image on my 300D
– focus seems faster with some lenses (17-85 EF-S, 70-200 f/4L, 17-40 f/4L) but about the same with others (50mm f/1.4, 100mm f/2.8 macro), but the not-faster ones are fairly slow-focussing lenses anyhow. Focus seems more accurate more often than previously.
– flash exposures (with an external Canon 420EX flash) are coming out better, with less need for fiddling with FEC (not even available on the 300D unless you install a hacked firmware, which I installed a couple of years ago).
– I’m quite liking having ISO settable in 1/3 EV increments, and the high-ISO performance completely blows away my 300D. Most of the cat photos I’ve taken were at ISO 640 or 800, and on only a few did I feel any need to perform noise reduction in PP.
– although Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) does not yet support the 30D, <a href=”http://akhater.wordpress.com/2006/03/24/early-support-for-photoshop-cs2-for-canon-30d-raw/”>this site</a> has easy instructions for hacking it together, and it works well (especially if you read the last comment on Antoine’s blog, which gives instructions for making Adobe Bridge use the modified RAW plugin!).
– the controls, while fairly different from the 300D, are reasonably intuitive and don’t seem like they’ll take long to get used to (a good thing, as I’m taking this camera on vacation to Istanbul in a few weeks!).
So far, it’s looking like a wonderful upgrade, and I can’t wait for nicer weather so I can go birding with it!.
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