Sensor Sweep

Interestingly, I happened to get photos of the same subject at the same time of day, albeit about a month apart, with two different cameras of broadly similar vintage and capabilities.

It's midafternoon, I'm sitting out front of Fat Dan's on College Avenue, and here comes that gorgeous Elm Green Volkswagen Karmann Ghia!

The first time is August 31st, and I've got the Nikon D700 wearing the compact 28-200mm f/3.5-5.6G super zoom.

The D700 came out in 2008 and packed the 12MP full-frame CMOS sensor and EXPEED processor of the previous year's pro D3 camera into a smaller body. Priced at $2999, two grand less than the D3, it lost some features, like the vertical grip and larger battery, the second card slot, and was downgraded from 9fps to 5fps, but it was still ruggedized and weather sealed. 

The 28-200 lens mounted on it favors compactness and focal length range over ultimate optical performance, but it's a Nikon and still does a pretty good job.

This was shot at a focal length of 95mm in Program mode with the camera set at its base ISO of 200, and the camera went with 1/400th of a second at f/10.

About a month later, early October, I'm sitting the same place around the same time when here comes the Karmann Ghia again!

This time I had a Canon EOS-1D Mark IV with the excellent EF 24-105mm f/4L IS general purpose zoom lens mounted.

Released in 2009, the $4999 EOS-1D Mark IV was Canon's top-of-the-line pro camera aimed at sports and wildlife photographers and photojournalists. It had a 16MP APS-H sensor, slightly smaller than the full frame one the company used in its studio & landscape oriented -1Ds series. This is because it prioritized frame rate; the Mark IV could blaze away at 10fps until the buffer filled.

The 24-105/4 "L"-series lens has a field of view equivalent to a 31-137mm lens on the 1D, due to the 1.3x crop factor of the APS-H sensor.

I was shooting in Aperture Priority mode at f/5.6 to ensure reasonably fast shutter speeds at the base ISO of 100 in the late afternoon sunlight.

Both images were shot in RAW and minimally processed through Photoshop's Camera RAW convertor.

It's interesting that a decade and a half on, the prices of the cameras have decreased dramatically, but the relative price gap remains fairly consistent. Nice used D700s are running around $300-400, while a 1D4 is still going to set you back six or seven hundred bucks.

Both lenses are discontinued. The 24-105mm f/4L IS has been replaced with a "Mark II" version. The handy little 28-200mm f/3.5-5.6G, a marvel when it was released, lacks an internal focusing motor or any kind of stabilization, and is therefore not amenable to being used on mirrorless cameras or most Nikon DX DSLRs.

It's fun to use these old pro cameras I never could have afforded when they were new. They were built to last and plenty were traded in with a lot of life left in them. There are D700s running out there with a million documented shutter actuations; if you run across a used one with only a few thousand on the clock, it's barely broken in.

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Two is one and one is none...

So what do you do with dual card slots in a camera, you ask?

Well, it depends.

Back in the day, when you had the one SD slot and one Compact Flash slot, it was common to record a JPEG to the SD and the much larger RAW file to the CF, since read and write speeds on Compact Flash were higher.

It's as common these days to have both cards of the same type, but some folks still use them like that. Others will have the second slot set up as an overflow when the first one fills.

I shoot everything in RAW these days, and so I record simultaneously to both cards, using one as a backup in case a corrupted card is unable to be read. That way if I shot a whole day's worth of photos at a class or event or something, all is not lost if a card craps the bed.

The only time I do differently is in the Fuji X-T2. I love Fujifilm's JPEG film emulations, and so I'll record RAW to one SD card for post-processing in Photoshop or Lightroom, and then a film emulation JPEG of Velvia or the like on the other card.

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Grumble...

Here's a gripe...

Olympus's E-3 DSLR came out in late '07 and was roughly comparable to the Nikon D300 and Canon 40D. It had two card slots: A CF card slot like a normal camera and a slot for Olympus's almost-proprietary xD card. It couldn't record to both simultaneously, and you couldn't even set it to switch over automatically when whichever one you were using filled up. Oly was just clinging to xD like grim death and wanted to sell cards, I guess.

Anyway, a couple years later the E-5 came out. An updated E-3 with HD video, 2MP more resolution, and some other tweaks, it was the last gasp of Olympus's Four Thirds DSLR system, and the closest to a true pro body they'd yet made. They even bowed to the inevitable and replaced the xD slot with an SD slot like a normal camera.

Guess what? You still can't write to both slots simultaneously.

WTF, Olympus?

Project Evolution...

Sometimes I get a little carried away with a project idea...

Nikon F5 > D1X > D2X > D3

The need for speed...

One thing I noticed when I was shooting the D1X last month was how quickly the buffer filled up. I popped off several shots at that Caddy as it rolled by and the camera made me stop and let it catch up at something like seven or eight.

This confused me as all the media about the camera, even when it was new, claimed the D1X could shoot three frames per second for 21 consecutive shots before the buffer filled. 

The sports-oriented D1H had less resolution but could blaze away at 5 FPS for forty shots before it bogged down. That's a full eight seconds with the shutter button mashed; enough time to cover an NFL play from the snap.

The disconnect, as I soon figured out, was that I was shooting in RAW, which was not as often done in the earliest days of digital. That buffer that held twenty-some JPEGs only holds six or seven .NEF files (Nikon's proprietary RAW format.) You can count "two Mississippi" and then you're done until the buffer's flushed out, or has room for another image.

From a retrospective on the D1X's predecessor, the original D1:

The super fast speed was partially hindered by the settings. While JPEG processing was really fast and almost instantenious, switching to RAW cause the camera to crawl. Storage time went sky high, 45 secs per photo not uncommon. People complaining today about slow CF/SD cards shoud respect that a microdrive could only deliver 0.5 MB/sec and the D1 electronics limited the fastest CF Cards (12x Lexar) to data rates well below 1 MB/sec.

I was using a 133x Transcend 2GB card, probably capable of receiving data a lot faster than the old D1X could send it, so at least the buffer probably cleared faster.

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Built like a tank...

I had my Nikon D1X out yesterday. I'm not sure of the shutter count on my example, but it's an old one. D1X serial numbers started out in 2001 at 5100001, and mine's number 5100496. The 17-55mm f/2.8 DX glass on the camera wasn't much newer. The serial number would indicate it was an early one, too, probably made in 2003.

Still takes a decent photo...

This would have been top flight pro kit in 2003. Six grand worth of body and next thing to two more of lens. 

I got the lens, cosmetically well-worn but functionally fine, for a bit less than five bills at Roberts. For use on crop-sensor Nikon DSLRs, the 17-55/2.8 has largely been supplanted by the excellent 16-80mm f/2.8-4E. The latter has a greater focal length range, spiffy new nano crystal coating, and vibration reduction to more than make up for the stop of aperture it gives up at longer focal lengths. Thing is, it uses an electronically-controlled diaphragm that the D1X is too old to communicate with.

I don't know if a camera store or pawn shop would even give you any money at all for a D1X these days. Used ones are bringing about a hundred bucks or thereabouts.

Still takes an okay photo. Nikon builds their pro bodies like tanks; you could bludgeon a dude to death with one of these and then take pictures of the crime scene with it.

Practical Pixels

In 2004, digital cameras had become mainstream, but sensors were still expensive. Digital SLRs with 35mm-sized "full-frame" sensors were exotically expensive, being limited to the Canon EOS 1Ds and some Kodak hybrids.

Point 'n' Shoot compacts, now commonplace and offered by every manufacturer, were still generally a couple hundred bucks. Most were in the 5-6 megapixel range and had built in zoom lenses, video recording ability, and other gimmicks to offset their physically tiny sensors.

The interchangeable-lens DSLR had just dropped below the thousand-dollar mark with Canon's 6.3MP Digital Rebel (aka the 300D) and there was something of a format war in the category.

Canon and Nikon were constrained by the need to woo customers who already had substantial investments in their 35mm film camera systems. In order to allow the film camera lenses to be usefully ported over, the sensors couldn't be too small, or else they'd not work well. This also allowed the two makers to essentially convert existing film camera technology to digital; indeed, their early DSLRs were based on 35mm film camera bodies.

The solution was a sensor size that became known as APS-C. Canon & Nikon used slightly different sensor sizes, with Canon's offering an effective 1.6X focal length multiplier to existing lenses, and Nikon's multiplying by 1.5X.

Olympus and Panasonic, on the other hand, went with a clean sheet of paper: an all-new sensor format called Four Thirds. About the same size as an old 110 Instamatic film negative, these small sensors were cheaper than APS-C to make, and had a 2X crop factor relative to a "full frame" camera. In other words, a 50mm lens, which is a standard mid-focal length on traditional film cameras, would act like a 100mm lens on a Four Thirds camera.

In 2004, the super coolest most ultra APS-C camera was probably Nikon's D2X pro camera. Boasting a 12MP sensor and a $5,000 price tag, this would be the camera used by photojournalists everywhere from NFL sidelines to the war zones of the Middle East.

Meanwhile, Olympus had just launched their second Four Thirds camera, and their first one targeted at consumers rather than pros and enthusiasts. The E-300 used a Kodak-manufactured CCD sensor, and it had two-thirds the megapixels of the top-of-the-line Nikon, and could be had for a fifth of the money; while five grand got you a Nikon D2X with no lens, just a box and a battery charger, the Olympus EVOLT E-300 could be had for $999 with a 14-45mm zoom lens included in the kit.

With more and more people viewing pictures on screens, what was the practical difference? Here are some pics shot with an E-300 and the 14-45mm kit zoom, compared to ones shot with a D2X and the 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G VR II.

E-300

D2X

E-300

D2X

E-300

D2X

Truthfully the biggest visual difference to me, after accounting for the mangling effects of compression, is actually one of sensor technology, more than size or megapixel count.

The Nikon D2X uses a Sony-sourced CMOS sensor, while the Olympus E-300 uses a Kodak-made CCD sensor. While CCD sensors have been more or less completely replaced by CMOS ones, there are holdouts who insist that the CCD had "more pleasing" images, sometimes providing facts, but often with a level of hand-waving woo reminiscent of vinyl discs and vacuum tube amps.

You can embigennate the pics and judge for yourselves.

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Premature Fossilization

I don't really have a hard & fast rule about what makes a piece of electronica a "fossil". Generally, ten years is enough in the world of computers to make something pretty thoroughly obsolete.

At this point only the very oldest of Canon's EF-M crop sensor mirrorless cameras meets that definition, Canon having been slow off the blocks in the mirrorless fad. The original EOS M, with its 18MP sensor lifted from the Rebel T4i DSLR, didn't launch until the middle of 2012.

The M6 in the photo above launched in 2017 and its 24MP sensor and DIGIC 7 processor makes it one of the most modern cameras I have, but the latest news from Canon would seem to indicate that the days of the EF-M series are truly numbered, which would prematurely fossilize a five year old camera.

While the body of the M6 is marked Made in Japan, Canon is coy about marking cheaper lenses with where they're manufactured. Given that the now-shuttered Zhuhai plant made millions of lenses a year, and the fact that pretty much all EF-M lenses are cheaper lenses, this probably signals the looming end for the EF-M crop sensor cameras.

The final nail in the coffin will be the launch announcement of a crop-sensor body using Canon's newer RF lens mount from their full-frame mirrorless line.

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Big in Japan...

I feel like I'm ahead of a trend for once in my life! Old digital cameras are getting popular, especially in Japan...

Alright, it’s a valid question. Why would I want to spend my precious time using an old digital camera that takes subjectively poor-quality photos? Why use a camera that’s painfully slow, gives an unnatural front pocket bulge, and makes you look even more like the geek-a-zoid you already know you are? Yeah, many reasons to toss the old digicam in the recycle bin. (Please remove the battery, thanks). Yet, before you toss the digicam away forever, ask yourself “Wouldn’t it be cool to take pictures with your grandfather’s camera?” “Oh, how grand it would be to hold an object that so many memories were taken with?” This is, after all, what many of us said about film cameras not long ago.