DSLR Pics: Neighborhood people with the Canon EOS-1D Mark IV

Although it's not marketed that way, Canon's EF 24-105mm f/4L IS zoom lens is not terrible for portraits.

Especially on the older pro bodies with the APS-H sensors, the 1.3X crop factor means your effective focal length range of 31-136mm encloses the trinity of standard portrait focal lengths: 85mm, 105mm, and 135mm. (Here's me lamenting again that Canon abandoned the APS-H sensor size with the launch of the EOS-1D X.)

While f/4 isn't a screamingly fast aperture, it's big enough to get a reasonable amount of subject separation from the background. You're not going to blow the surroundings out in a creamy blur of bokeh, but at the same time you won't be worrying as much about not having enough depth of field to get both eyes in focus, either, so there's that.

Random Old Camera Notes

One thing about using older cameras is that even if the camera is sold as "includes battery and charger", that doesn't necessarily mean the battery is worth a damn. 

The original Canon Digital Rebel I gave Bobbi six or seven years ago has spent most of the intervening years sitting on a shelf on her desk behind her computer monitor. Over that time, the BP511 battery pack in it has quietly gone (mostly) toes up. You can power up the camera, it shows a full charge, and by the time you've set the date and time and taken a single photo, it's down to one bar on the little segmented battery icon. 

The irony is that this is the battery pack on which someone had scrawled "NEW" on in Sharpie at sometime in the past. The EN-EL4 that came with my Nikon D2X was in the same shape. Being fair, these batteries are probably at least a dozen years old. Fortunately, both are still in production and available thanks to huge installed user bases. Canon used the BP511 and BP511a in probably a dozen models, up to 2010 or so, and the EN-EL4 and -EL4a powered Nikon's top-of-the-line pro bodies for eight years, as well as its final film camera, the F6.

I've also noted that the original Digital Rebel is wonky when writing RAW files even if you don't turn it off in the middle of the process. It seems to do fine with JPEGs, though.

SOOC large, fine JPEG

The thing with a digicam like this is that it's entered its disposable days. Use it, have fun, but don't plan on repairing it or anything when it finally grinds to a halt. In perfect working order and top-notch cosmetic condition, this is a fifty dollar camera body. In the shape this one's in cosmetically, its real street value couldn't buy lunch for two at Chick-fil-A.

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Writing Time

So, if you're out shooting with an original EOS Digital Rebel, a creaky silver plastic 300D, and it has only, like one bar of battery left so you're turning it off after each shot to conserve juice...you should probably remember to wait for a solid five- or six-Mississippi to flick the switch to "OFF" because it takes that thing FOREVER to write a RAW file and if you turn it off in the middle of the save process it just corrupts the data.

Just throwing that out there. No particular reason.

Have a colorful photo shot in RAW...after I noticed that glitch.

That was shot in RAW and processed in Adobe Photoshop Bridge, just hitting "Adobe Vivid" and the "Auto" correction button.

For contrast, I switched the camera over to the Large Fine JPEG setting and shot the same scene...

It only takes about two seconds to record the highest quality JPEG, since it only takes up a little over 2MB on the card rather than the 6.6MB of a RAW file.

These days it's easy to forget that in the early days of higher-resolution digital photography, recording speed was a limiting factor; so much of one that Digital Photography Review measured how long it took to write files to the card.

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Question Answered?

So a couple posts ago we asked this question regarding the Nikon D1X:

But can a 5.3 megapixel CCD sensor take good photos still?

Personally, I think the answer is "Yes".

As you near the six megapixel mark, you're getting resolution equal to or better than all but the best 35mm films.

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Walking on its Fins

If you pick up a DSLR from, say, about 2005 or 2006, and one made this year, you'll find surprisingly few major differences in the way they operate. Sure, there are a few more buttons on the newer camera for things like Live View and other features that weren't present in the older camera, but the labeling conventions and such had been pretty well worked out by Dubya's second term.

Not so much with one made in 2001. They were still kinda winging it.

Looking at the front or top of a 2001 Nikon D1X, it would seem that the controls had already been figured out by then, but that's because those controls don't really differ from those of a Nikon film SLR. A Nikon F5 or N80 user would feel right at home. 

The little focus mode selector dial (Manual, Single-servo, Continuous-servo) is right there next to the lens mount where it can be operated by the left hand, on the opposite side of the mount is the depth-of-field preview button. The sub-command dial is on the top front of the handgrip, just below the power switch and shutter release, waiting for your index finger. The three position metering selector switch (3D Matrix metering, Center-weighted, Spot) is on the side of the pentaprism housing, with a lock button, just like on the F5.

It's when we get to the back of the camera and start running into digital-specific controls that things seem weird to our modern conventions.

The button labeled "MONITOR" at the top left is still there on newer Nikons...in the same place, and performing the same function...but it now has the more familiar "play" arrow-in-a-rectangle icon.

The monitor screen is tiny. Under that rubber DIGITAL I/O flap is an IEEE 1394 Firewire connector. Very 2001.

Buttons for white balance, and various menu controls are rubber chiclets hidden under a little magnetically-latched fold-down trap door, emulating the placement of some of the more obscure controls on the F5. In succeeding versions of Nikon's pro DSLR bodies, these would migrate out to normal buttons on the back of the camera and the trap door would go away.

The weirdest thing about the D1X is how it gets its high (for the era) resolution.

The bottleneck at the time was processing all the data from the sensor and getting it written to memory. So with the D1X, Nikon kept the number of horizontal rows the same as on the original D1's sensor (1324) but went to 4028 vertical columns*. Since the sensor data is read row-by-row, this allowed a maximum frame rate of 3fps to be maintained. 

The buffer still fills up in six shots when shooting at that speed, giving you a quick two-Mississippi of continuous shooting before you have to sit and wait for it to write everything to the card. This is not a camera for spray-and-pray action photography.

The downside to the weird sensor arrangement is that the NEF files may not be understandable to some newer 3rd party RAW converters from smaller companies. Adobe Photoshop Bridge still supports them, of course.

By comparison to some of the weirder features of the D1X, its replacement is utterly conventional.

*You can see how this works on the first page of DPReview's original D1X review.

The Deal With DX

When Nikon launched the original D1 in 1999, the big attraction was that it would seamlessly use any existing F-mount lenses a photographer already had. For a pro photographer, the biggest investment is in the glass.

During the autofocus revolution of the Eighties and Nineties, when Minolta and Canon left existing users behind by adopting entirely new mounts, Nikon stubbornly engineered an autofocus system that would allow the new cameras to retain backwards compatibility with older manual-focus lenses. With the transition to digital, they retained that same lens mount.

The thing is, CCD sensor technology was obscenely expensive. Elsewhere I looked at Canon's 1D, with an APS-H sensor, and its 1Ds, with a full frame 35mm sensor, and the price difference between these two otherwise very similar cameras:

To give an idea of how much the price of the sensor affected the price of the camera, the APS-H 4MP EOS 1D dropped in 2001 for $6500, and a year later the full frame 11MP EOS 1Ds joined it in Canon's lineup for a whopping eight grand. That's better than $200/MP or, looked at another way, seven dollars per square millimeter of additional sensor size. At seven bucks a square millimeter, the head of a pin would be $28 and a penny would be almost two grand.

Nikon went with a sensor size called "APS-C", which has 1/3rd less field of view than a standard 35mm negative, but is close enough to it in size to still be able to functionally use Nikon's existing library of F-mount lenses, although the practical result would be to give them a 1.5x focal length modifier.

For instance, I spent a day wandering around with a 35-105mm f/3.5-4.5 lens on the D1X. On a regular Nikon film SLR, this was a common enough walkabout lens in the Nineties; it covered a useful range of focal lengths from a wide-ish angle for street photography to a short telephoto for portraiture.

On the smaller sensor of the D1X, it was effectively a 53-158mm lens, however.

What does this mean in real life? Well, I saw this yellow house with an orange tree in the front yard and thought it was so colorful in the afternoon light that it warranted a picture...but there was literally no way to get it all in frame like I could have if it had been on a full frame camera, even by taking a step into the neighbor's lawn across the street.

It wouldn't be until 2003 that Nikon introduced lenses specifically designed to work with APS-C sized sensors, which Nikon called "DX". Where a typical all-in-one Nikon zoom for the film era had been a 24-120mm, the DX equivalent was a 16-80mm.

So, while a pro photog in 2001 who'd been using the F5 35mm film camera on the left could theoretically transition straight over to the D1X with all his kit*, he'd suddenly find himself short of wide angle lenses (but blessed with an abundance of super telephotos.)

*And the D1X is a camera that marked a lot of pros seriously transitioning. The original 2.7MP D1 was fine for newspaper photography, but the 5.7MP D1X could pretty much print anywhere 35mm film was used.

The current fossil...

I thought I was going to be reviewing the Sony Mavica MVC-CD300 next, but it looks like I'm spared having to drag out my cheap little USB-powered CD-ROM drive for a while longer.

I'm trying to move forward through time based on when the cameras were announced, using Digital Photography Review's camera database as the guide. According to it, the CD300 was announced near the end of February 2001, while the Nikon D1X was announced earlier that month, so the Nikon it is.

The serial number on my D1X, which I bought well-used back in 2015, marks it as one of the first 500 to leave Nikon's factory. It was already quite obsolete in 2015 and by 2021 standards, it's downright quirky.

But can a 5.3 megapixel CCD sensor take good photos still? Let's find out!

State of the Experiment Address.

I'm typing this on my iBook, sitting on the front porch. For the last three weeks or so, I've been doing all my computing on Macs, none newer than eight years old. Not being much of a power gamer any more, this is all blogging, web surfing, writing, emailing, iPodding, and what-have-you. Here's how it's going:

The iBook, a G3/466 Firewire machine, was no great stretch. It's been my de facto portable all along. It's running the latest version of Panther, and has been for about a year. With my recent Firefox woes, I've started using Safari on it and will download Camino as soon as I get around to it. It connects to the network with its internal AirPort card.

My G3/250 WallStreet is in use as a "bridge" machine, running OS 9.2. It stays more-or-less permanently plugged-in in a corner of the living room with a Farallon WiFi PCMCIA card and an AppleTalk dongle hanging off it. Should I do some writing on one of my "lap savers", a 2400c or a Duo 280c, I'll AppleTalk the file to the WallStreet and email it to myself.

A G4/500 Sawtooth tower is my main machine. Browsing the web with Camino, it's also using Panther because the old Matshita LP-2 DVD drive won't read my Tiger install. Because it's still on Panther, and with its two USB ports clogged by the Logitech mouse and keyboard, it provides a job for the last computer.

Sitting next to the Sawtooth on the desk is a slot-loading G3/400 iMac DV SE. I have Tiger up and running on it. Thanks to the magic of a powered USB hub, it has a Hawking USB WiFi connection, as well as serving as the dock for my iPod Nano and my card reader for the Compact Flash cards from my Nikon Coolpix digital camera. Using the iMac as basically a media server lets me rip CDs or download Firefly episodes without tying up the Sawtooth. As the internal drive fills up, I'll just go ahead and get an external FireWire drive for all the media crap. Since both the iBook and the G4 tower are (barely) just new enough to have FireWire ports, this will pay bonus dividends down the road.

Am I missing my trusty P4/2.4 yet? Nope. Not really. So far, these old machines are doing everything I need them to do. What I can't get over is the fact that I have a very capable, complet, four-computer wireless network, with two laptops and two desktops that could be had off eBay for much less than $1,000. Neat! :)

The bedroom iMac finds another use...

It's a stereo, too!

Rather than having to turn on one of the stereos in the next room or drift off to the crappy Sony clock radio, my bedroom DVD player/web browser is lulling me to sleep with Tangerine Dream's Atem.

This "living in the future" stuff is cool.

What do you need a computer to do?

How many people out there use a computer for one simple task?

Let's say, just writing and printing documents in a word processing program. You can go out and pay a hojillion dollars for a dual core Xeon loaded with Windows Vista and a gig of RAM and only ever use it for word processing, but is that really efficient?

One guy took a stopwatch to a 3 GHz P4 and a couple of "obsolete" machines. He put MS Word in the startup files of each and held the stopwatch while booting the machines.

The results may surprise you.