New shiney(sic)

I’ve bought myself a Canon 5D digital SLR. I’ve only been out to use it once so far, but photos are at my new gallery-thing, at http://gallery.nothovel.net/ (and an RSS feed of my favourite images is available at http://gallery.nothovel.net/rss/favourites ).

I’m incredibly impressed with the camera. It’s a bit smaller than my film SLR, but a bit heavier (well, of course it is - a film camera is an empty box, whereas a digital camera is stuffed full of electronics). Other than that, they operate in an almost identical manner - other than that the DSLR can change ISO on the fly! hurrah!

Now, I’ve been scanning (mostly self-developed b&w) film for a couple of years; my Nikon film scanner turns out images that are almost 9 megapixels in size, while the DSLR has almost 13 megapixels. The difference in quality, is /much/ huger than a mere 20% jump in horizontal resolution would suggest.

9 mpix is high-enough resolution to see individual grain clusters at iso 400 or above, and even at iso 100, non-grainy, well-focused bits didn’t look /sharp/ when viewed at 1:1. This weekend, with the DSLR, and using my two crappiest lenses, I was able to achieve sharpness at iso 400 that almost cut your eyeballs to ribbons when compared with the output from the film scanner.

Not only that, but there’s /colour/. Lots and lots and /lots/ of it. In fact, perhaps a bit too much - I’d read that Canon’s higer-end DSLRs tended to produce rather flat colour, because that provides a better base for later post-processing work. I wasn’t really wanting to spend hours on each image in the Gimp, so I set contrast and saturation to one level above their default values (and therefore matched the setup in the 350D and 30D cameras). On a bright sunny morning, this made everything look like it had come from a crappy holiday brochure, which I’m not really sure I like.

Ah well, at least I’ve got plenty of new things to learn about :)