Hasta La Gadget!

If you’re just joining us, I’ve been writing a series of entries for neophytes with DSLRs–mainly people who have been too scared to move their camera off “AUTO.” Think of me… think of us… as your online support group. We want you to succeed and start exploring what your camera can really do. Your knowledge is a whole lot more important than which specific camera you’re gripping.

If you’ve had your camera any length of time you’ve probably pondered buying a new lens or lenses and you’ve been floored by the choices available. A friend of mine who worked his way through college selling men’s suits says he used to bring them out one-at-a-time because with too many choices people would buy nothing at all! No one wants to make a mistake. It’s that way with lenses. It would be easier to make a purchase if there were fewer to choose from.

So, what’s it going to be? I’m not going to steer you toward a specific brand or size, but I do have some advice to help you narrow your choices. I can see this is going to take more than one entry to cover properly, so lets start with prime lenses versus zoom.

Are the built-in flash units on your DSLR (or any camera) awful? I’ll let Canon, which includes them on its cameras, answer that:

“We’ve all seen it in snapshots we’ve either taken ourselves, or been shown by others: the pupils of your subject’s eyes are lit up in a devilish bright red color, unlike anything we’re used to seeing in real life. And of course, you never saw it in your camera’s viewfinder when you took the picture.”

Red-eye! It’s the bane of amateur photographers worldwide. The pros don’t have the problem, because they move the flash away from the lens so a bolt of light doesn’t illuminate the very red back of your eyeball. But red-eye is only one of the many bad features built into every on-camera flash.

It’s a pretty sketchy rumor, but we’re hearing that Canon’s working on a pro video camera based on a 12.1 megapixel APS-C CMOS sensor similar to the one in the Rebel XSi. That makes perfect sense to us, actually — DSLRs with video capabilities like the 5D Mark II and the new Rebel T1i have definitely shaken up people’s expectations of prosumer video, and Canon’s sitting on a well-regarded camcorder division primed to pounce on a new market. According to CanonRumors, the new pro cam will look similar to the XL H1 pictured above with support for EF and EF-S lenses, sport fully manual controls as well as autofocus, and shoot 720p/30/60 and 1080p/24/30/60 to 56Mbit/s MPEG-4. Sounds pretty good, but aye, there’s a rub: word is that Canon’s DSLRs won’t ever get similar video features in order to protect this cam’s high-end $8,000 price tag — which sucks, but also makes perfect (if annoying) sense to us. It’s all rumor for now, but we’ll see how it pans out — the pro and prosumer video market are about to get crazy interesting.

Filed under: Digital Cameras

Canon working on DSLR-based pro video camera? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There’s a rumor afoot suggesting that Canon will be ditching CCD and adopting CMOS chips for a new pro-level camcorder. Digital cameras and camcorders never been so indistinguishable.

If the rumor is true, Canon will be adopting sub-35mm dSLR sensors (APS-C sized CMOS, or what you see in entry level dSLRs like the Rebel) into their elite camcorders. It’s not a completely new idea. The Red One has long used a CMOS chip to record 4k video, and Canon makes use of a CMOS in the $1000ish Vixia. But with Canon choosing CMOS for a pro-level camcorder, it pretty much means that CCD (the preferred video chip format of the last several decades) is dead. (Once we saw dSLRs shooting 1080p, we knew this day wasn’t far off.) As for the mystery cam itself:

The sub-$8,000 camcorder is said to resemble the XL-H1 (above), accepting EOS lenses and featuring a 12.1MP CMOS that can film 1080p video at 60fps/120hz—that’s MPEG4 encoded at a max rate of 56Mbps. We’re not sure how the camera will record this much data though the Red One offers CompactFlash, RAID and SSD options. There’s also word of a 12bit video RAW format that will require a $4,000ish IO box providing SDI and USB 3 output.

And for the first time in some time, Canon’s prosumer camcorders are exciting again. [canonrumors]

One thing’s for sure — the producers of Life sure know how to weave modern day technology into the storyline. Just a few weeks back we saw a Time Capsule with all sorts of sordid evidence, and this week we witnessed a Nikon D90 + SB-600 combo nearly being an accessory to murder. But look, if this thing is good enough to shoot dead people, it’s probably good enough to photograph your cousin’s bar mitzvah.

Filed under: Digital Cameras

Screen Grabs: Nikon’s D90 nearly an accessory to murder originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 27 Mar 2009 02:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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