Nikon D50 & Canon EOS Rebel XT Digital SLRs??

Sorry - I only have the Nikon D200

I would suggest spending a little time at

which is one of the very best digital photography sites with great revues, forums for every camera brand and very helpful people. Lots of factors involved in picking a digital camera in the mid to upper ranges.

Jack G. (brokenhearted Minolta user)

Curt wrote: : Can anyone offer an opinion on these cameras? : Have you played with them yet? "Hand feel", I believe, is important, and you may find that one feels better than the other. : : Specifically, for model photography and real aircraft work. : Real aircraft work *where*? While 18mm may sound like a real wide angle lens, the Rebel, I believe, is a 1.6x camera, unless the lens is specifically for digital SLRs. That means around 27mm effective, which is not so wide in many museums, where you now, literally, have your back to a wall.

Bruce

I can only answer for the D50- I have never used a Canon Digital XT.

I had a point & shoot digital for several years, but that was not good enough for my model photography. For model work (so-called macro photography) one really needs an optical through-the-lens view, which is what an SLR has. I used a film SLR for all model work.

Early this year my wife was taking a trip to China and wanted a digital camera for the trip. Since she already has a film Nikon we decided on the D50. As soon as she got back, I tried it on my model stuff. It works fine, just as good as my film SLR. I doubt if I will be using my film camera much now.

Now, I cannot say whether it is better than the Canon or not. All I know is that it does excellent model photography.

For my model work I usually use a focal length in the 40-50 mm range.

Even in museums I never go shorter than 28mm. I personally do not like the odd perspective, and one cannot use anything narrower for accurate scaling because of the perspective.

iI doubt that digital will ever produce the same kind of quality as film cameras especially at close range (macro). I personally would have a very hard time spending $1000 on a digital camera to take photos of models. I use a Minolta Maxxum with a wide angle lens and a macro lens for close work. The results are spectacular. Have you ever tried to use a digital camera to photographs things in motion (like a car race for example). The results are not very good at all. You can't match high speed film in a good SLR camera. That said, if I am going on vacation and had to choose one, I would take my Sony Digital with through lens viewfinder. I use Microsofts Digital Imaging Studio to edit my pictures and take them to King Soopers (Krogers) for their 19 cent processing. It is hard to beat............

Hmmm... Only if you don't know what you're doing with it. EVERY photo you've seen published, of a car race, or pretty much ANY given sporting event, in the last 3 or 4 years, has been digital.

I've seen some pretty outstanding macro work by a digital - I've SHOT some pretty outstanding macro stuff, with a digital Point & Shoot, for crying out loud!

High speed film??? I'll stack the resolution & performance of the chip in my 30D up against any film you care to use, excepting perhaps 50 speed Velvia & 64 speed Kodachrome, which, in case you didn't notice are SLOW films....and even then, unless you're printing poster-sized prints, you're eyes don't have the resolution to tell the difference.

The only 2 things film still does better than digital, is for extraordinarily LARGE prints - for which I'd be reaching for my Medium Format camera, anyway....and in swallowing money on processing.

If you shoot a measly 100 rolls of film a year - that processing cost alone will pay for that $1000 DSLR. Doubly so by the end of the year when you sit back & figure you just shot 5 times that many exposures with the digital. I've had my 30D for just over a month - and already shot more frames than I had in the last 6 months with my old Minolta - because I'm not stopping to think just how much it's going to cost me to get all these rolls developed.

Film is not going to go away, Count - but it is very rapidly dropping to a very small niche market, mostly because digital is more versatile, more immediate, and significantly less expensive. Once you go digital, you'll shoot more - and that alone will make you a better photographer. You will also miss a lot fewer shots, because you know right away if you got what you wanted - tough to go back to last week's airshow & re-shoot something, once you get the film back & see you blew that one shot.

-Kevin in Indy, who resisted digital for FAR too long, but who has finally given up on 35mm & gone whole-hog to Canon 30D land.

I doubt the average person takes a hundred rolls of film in their life time let alone a hundred in one year. If your a photo geek then by all means spend a few thousand dollars on cameras. I know a guy who took so many digital pictures on his vacation to Yellowstone that he didn't see anything that wasn't through a lens. He missed a lot (:>

Therein is another difference.

With a film camera I doubut the average person would take 100 rolls in their life as well, but with digital cameras the average user will take far more pictures than they would have with a film camera because of the overhead of taking the pictures to be processed and the processing costs themselves.

I have been an early adapter of digital cameras, and have taken 10,000 digital photos over the last 10 years, from my original 1Mp Kodak camera all the way up to my Nikon D200 10Mp

I would rather have 9 inch needles driven into my eyes than go back to film.

Don't get me wrong I like digital cameras and I have 2 myself plus a digital camcorder. That being said, what in thw world would you do with 10,000 pictures? Surely you didn't print all that? Is quantity more important than quality? That seems to be where this whold digital phenomina is going. Lets go on vacation and see how many memory cards we can fill up. People are so busy snapping pix they forget to relax and enjoy...... (:>

Well lets see -

The model, airplane, and armor photos are for my own archives but eventually will be used to launch at least 1 web site (figure 7-8,000 of those)

I have a couple thousand animal photos posted at

as well as several hundred used in feature articles on the main sites

and I have personally set a goal of 5000 concert photos for 2006 for our music site at

but I will have to take a crapload in the next 6 months to do that

If I had to pay the processing on the images I create it would have been a real burden on our business

I only have 1 memory card, it's 6 Gb and I don't take the cameras on vacation with me.

The only quality issue for digital these days is that some films have a slightly higher dynamic range. But indoor shots of models do not need such a high range.

The shutter lag on P & S cameras is real, but it is true for film P & S as well as digitals. SLRs, whether digital or film, do not have this problem. Even if it did, I do ALL my model shots on a tripod, so shutter lag would not be a problem anyway. Why the tripod? Macro work like model photography needs the depth of field only obtainable by shooting at maximum f/# (smallest aperture). That brings the shutter speed way down, so tripod is needed.

Since I use a tripod anyway, ISO speed is not a problem. In fact, for model photography I load in fine-grained ISO 100 or 200 in my film camera.

The advantage of a digital SLR is that I do not need to scan the prints to get it into my computer. Transferring from a flash card is faster than scanning a print. And I get it right away, not the next day after processing place does my print.

in article r0zjg.9$ snipped-for-privacy@news.uswest.net, Don Stauffer at snipped-for-privacy@usfamily.net wrote on 6/13/06 9:24 AM:

And let's not forget white balance correction. When I was using film for the club model photography, I always included a gray card exposure so the film lab could get a more accurate white balance. It was still hit-or-miss, and I was never really satisfied with the color values of the prints. With my point-and-click digital, I still make a gray card exposure, but now it goes right into PhotoShop and becomes a saved white balance correction that I can pull up for any other shots and then tweak to my heart's content. There's no way you're gonna have that kind of control over your color with film unless you spend a whole lot more money for custom processing and enlargment.

Pip Moss

FWIW One place where film will continue to reign supreme is police photography. I am told by a lawyer acquaintance that it is too easy to "photoshop" evidentiary photos in digital so for court evidence you must have film.

Bill Shuey

that is true and is what is keeping polaroid film packs in production

"Count DeMoney" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@c74g2000cwc.googlegroups.com:

Eh?

Have you ever used a serious digital camera? I don't think so.

RobG

Jeff Barringer wrote

That, and passport photos. But it ain't that hard to doctor film, either.

Rob

Curt,

I have both the Canon Digital Rebel and Rebel XT- both produce superlative results. My work as an editor for a trade magazine required me to use digital images for publication (as well I had been an air show photographer at a local air show for over 10 years and had been requested to make the switch to a digital format four years ago. I reluctantly put aside my Canon Elan systems but have been extremely impressed with the quality of the 8 megapixel Canon XT.)

When my son had to buy a high-resolution digital camera for his work as a media coordinator at the local university, he chose the Nikon D50. Both systems are excellent but some of the deciding factors for me were the use of existing Canon EOS lenses that were scooped off my older Canon Elans and the cost factor.

It may not make a difference to you but in a head-to-head comparison, the Canon XT was approximately one-half the cost of the Nikon system, especially when you add a basic zoom lens (75- 300 mm) and a motor drive (really a beefed up- battery pack).

Dear Count:

A recent check on just the last three months of shooting revealed 14,050 images stored. My last foray into Oshkosh for the annual Air Venture America produced 3,600 images over a three-day period. The standard for my earlier still photography was a 4-to-one shooting ratio (mainly because of the cost of film and when on assignment, I did try to stay on task and work for the ideal image). My counterparts in the newspaper world, shot approximately

20-to-one, which usually amounted to one useable image out of a roll of film. All that has gone by the wayside now, as most photographers shoot 20-to-one in a kind of shotgun approach wherein the photo is there somewhere, let¹s keep blasting till one works. I am a victim of this phenomenon but it does tend to eliminate the inevitable telephone poles out of heads, eyes shut and mouth open pics.