Ramlings-RG is your friend

Well i had planned to have a few days near the NC coast shooting Snow Geese, Tundra Swans and Bears before the birds migrate in the next couple of weeks but my wife has kindly passed on her cold and now i have sat here for a couple of days sweating and sneezing and have a nose like a piece of raw steak, So i have had plenty of time to read up and play with the flashguns as i said in my last post and luckily for me Rob Galbraith has done his review on the Canon 1D MK4 AF system, Its not the review that i look forward to but the upraw from the Canon fanboys who see RG as the devil when in fact he is a Canon users best friend-Why? Well who was it that made Canon sit up and look at the MK3 AF system, It was only after his extensive tests that he proved that the MK3 AF system was troubled, Without his written word Canon would have buried their heads and kept stumm and the MK4 system would have been as troubled as the MK3, Most of the people who complain that RG doesn't say that Canon are the best have never used/owned a MK3 or MK4 and are purely fanboys, I see people on forums saying that they will only ever use one brand-always have and always will-how sad is that, Its a camera-a tool and you use the right one for the job,What happens if the company folds like Minolta, Do you stop shooting?There are those who have never seen a problem with the MK3 and refuse that there was ever a problem-well Canon didnt have 2 recalls and various firmware upgrades for nothing, Now you have to read between the lines with the RG MK4 review, Firstly even though he caused Canon (not Canon users) a hard time Canon sat up and listened, they worked along side him with the MK3 so they must take him seriously and even after his last MK3 review where he said it still wasn't up to scratch they supplied him with the MK4 for testing-so if he says something good or bad Canon listen, Now as a sports shooter he is shooting wide open i.e F2.8 and this is the biggest test for any AF system, I don't shoot at F2.8 or extremely rarely, His test shows that the MK4 struggles with red-ok so that's something that Canon can tweek, He also says that the MK4 is worlds apart from the MK3-Fantatsic, So Canon have worked hard and made huge improvements, What the Canon fanboys don't like is that he says that the MK4 lags behind the Nikon D3s in consistency but excels in many of his tests over the D3s, They seemed to have only read the first part, This was something i first noticed when i changed over to Nikon, The MK3 AF system is very fast to acquire the target but then got confused and the Nikon D3 that i use is slower to grab the target (but still not slow) but once it locks on thats it-sharp shot time after time, RG said in the MK3 test that the AF was fast but got confused and would front or back focus thinking too much how it thought the subject would react, The MK4 sounds similar but much better, There will never be a perfect AF system and both Canon and Nikon have strengths and weaknesses, For the MK4 to excel in places over the D3s shows just how far Canon have come and at the end of the day its sounds like a great system, I am sure Canon will take RGs findings and will be working on those results, The Olympics are starting and this info along with what the Canon shooters will find there will give Canon lots of valuable info,I personally don't understand all this fanboy stuff, most people who complain or wont hear anything bad about their kit have never used anything else, I am lucky to say that i have extensive knowledge of both Canon and Nikon systems and can see both sides of the story, I though RGs review was well written and informative, He shot with 5 different cameras-some supplied by Canon and am sure he had Canon techs working with him as he did with the MK3, He has hundreds of test shots for download for people to analyse his findings and make their own conclusions and he shoots more images per year than many people do in a lifetime-i think he is as good a guy to test any AF system, He does mention the Nikon system and says that its not perfect and that he will come to that in the future,We can then hear the Nikon fanboys bemoaning him, He puts it on the line and if people don't like that then don't read it, You must also realise that he tests kit in his own everyday shooting situations which are probably different to yours and mine, i know as much as anybody else that when you switch systems there are certain childish people who for some reason take it personally as if you are having a go at their system-its not good enough or whatever, I have had people have a pop at me about it-so did Andy Rouse and RG, Well the thing is some people need kit that works for them, Most people have too much money tied up in lenses etc to make the swap but if they could would they?, I know people who shoot both systems and if i could afford to i would as well as both have strong points and weak points, We all have 1 thing in common-photography-why be small minded and have this them against us business
Any way back to the lem sip and hot water bottle and continue to enjoy the battles on Dpreview

Dave

Rob Galbraith Tests the Canon 1D MK4

The first of what i imagine to be a few articles on Canons new flagship, Its shows comparisons to Nikons New baby the D3s as well-read on

Dave

Reviews - Digital Film

Digital Film comes in various forms, the most common or popular being CF or compact flash cards and the SD or secure digital cards. These have replaced the old microdrives which were the cheap CF card of its day but as they had moving parts they were unreliable (and slow) and with the drop in price of CF/SD cards its days were numbered. It wasn't that long ago when you could say that you would pay about £100+ per 1GB but these days cards are much cheaper and there is no reason to not have sufficient for at least a full days shooting. I now carry around 30GB of CF cards on me (My Nikon bodies only take CF) so this means that even on the 'best' days I wont run short.
I remember going abroad to shoot and having to carry in excess of 100 rolls of slide film with me- but now a handful of cards and a downloader and you are set. One thing that you must be careful of is when inserting your card into the camera, if it is not 100% straight it can and will bend the pins inside the camera body meaning a trip to the repairers.When downloading you can simply plug the camera body into your PC and do a direct download, but I prefer to take the card out and download from a CF card reader (readers are available for all types of card) Using a firewire downloader you can download your images straight into the PC very fast, USB2 downloaders are excellent if you have a camera under 10MP but once you are over 10MP and the file sizes are very large a firewire downloader is the fastest way, There are various manufacturers of cards Sandisk and Lexar are probably the biggest names followed by Kingston and various others, I would advise to go with a good make and not penny pinch on some cheap card that nobody has heard of. I have used Sandisk from the start and with their lifetime guarantee and free recovery software I cant see that changing soon. Most bodies will take 1 card but some pro bodies take 2 - either 2 CF or 1 CF and 1 SD card,

This can be a bonus as you can either use the 2nd card as a back up, shooting RAW files to 1 card and Jpegs to the other or have the second card for over spill so if you have 2x4GB cards in, you can shoot 8 GB of images without having to swap cards over-Great! With cards now up to 32 GB that means you could have 64GB of cards in one camera body-Now I wouldn't advise anybody to do this as that a lot of images and if a card get corrupted in any way you could lose an awful lot of shots. I keep my cards down to a max. of 4GB in a 12 MP body. If I was using a body over 20MP I may go to 8GB cards.

CF/SD cards can be confusing- so which one to buy and what are the numbers on them? As I have said I buy Sandisk, but there are many in the range from the Ultra range to the Extreme range. At this moment in time, the Sandisk Extreme 111 is by far the best value card around in my opinion, I would recommend this card to anybody no matter what camera they use.

The original Extreme 111 was rated at 20MB/S but the new ones are rated at 30MB/S whilst the Extreme IV's are rated at 45MB/s. What does that mean? - well its the speed that the images could be uploaded and downloaded to and from your camera. Some card manufacturers rate their cards but X speed, Lexar for example rate theres at 133x or 300x. If you have a 10 year old digital body you wont need the fastest cards and will be wasting your money if you buy them as there will limitations on the uploading speed of an old or budget camera, however if you have a fast PC/Mac and a fast card reader you will still be able to upload to the PC/MAC quickly. Rob Galbraith has spent some time doing charts that show the downloading speeds of the current range of cards and his site is well worth a vist if you need more info on what cards to use.
See Perfomance Chart here

Dave