New Canon 40D
I picked up one of the new Canon 40D cameras yesterday. People have been going nuts about this new model, and they are pretty hard to get a hold of. Fortunately they started showing up at Best Buy and I was able to land one before they were sold out, so lucky me.
I took some photos of the frogs in Baxter pond, with my 100mm macro lens. I also tried out the 28-135mm IS lens that came with the camera - getting the body-only package is going to be nearly impossible for a while - and as expected, I really don’t like the lens. I will have to get a wide-angle EF-S lens later on, and hopefully unload that 28-135mm lens relatively quickly.
Overall I am pretty happy with the camera so far. It has some nice features, and the camera is faster and more responsive than my old 20D. Also, the 40D LCD display is significantly larger than the 20D LCD, which makes it easier to review what you’ve just done. The only thing I am a little concerned about is that the noise becomes noticeable pretty quickly at ISO400 and up, but this seems to be what happens when sensors get larger and larger.
I will have to give this camera a try with the ol’ telescope and see how it goes. The 40D has this new LiveView feature that will hopefully facilitate getting sharp focus. I expect that the camera will work well for photographing the planets. A question in my mind is how it will do with deep-sky objects where you must take multiple long exposures at low ISO settings. If the noise still shows up at ISO100 then it’s going to be annoying, but the beauty of stacking multiple images is that the signal-to-noise ratio improves pretty quickly as you combine more images together, so it isn’t too big a deal.
Of course, the real solution for astrophotography is to get a dedicated CCD imager from a company like SBIG, but the ones I want all cost at least $5000, and I can’t get to dark-sky sites frequently enough to make it worth the price. I think that is one of those “when I retire” things.
September 9th, 2007 at 8:00 pm
Hey Donnie,
Yeah, the 28-135 is a bit of a dog. The other problem you have is that you’re comparing everything to what is traditionally a very, very sharp lens. If that is the Canon 100mm macro, you’ll have a hard time finding more than handful of other lenses that match it in sharpness, contrast, or bokeh.
As for the “larger sensor” thing, I think you meant “sensors get smaller and smaller.” A really large sensor would be much better with noise. Either in the individual or the aggregate sense.
September 9th, 2007 at 8:09 pm
Yes, to clarify - as each individual sensing element gets smaller, the noise issue becomes worse. This is most important in astrophotography; a lot of those imaging sensors are significantly lower resolution than what we are used to in normal digital cameras, specifically to avoid noise. (They also frequently have sophisticated cooling systems, the other way to reduce noise.) To create large images of, say, a galaxy, you take many exposures and mosaic them together. I guess mainly because you know the galaxy or nebula will still be there in a few hours!