Doug Kerr
Well-known member
As you may know, I have planned to acquire a camera to be used for the preponderance of my shooting. Today, I mostly use a Canon EOS 40D equipped with a Canon EF 18-200 mm IS zoom lens.
This rig is too bulky and heavy to suit my current outlook. Among other things, Carla points out that:
• We can't keep it on the console in the front of the car.
• At a banquet, we have to reserve a separate place at the table for it to sit.
Our search for a successor rig followed our customary combination of intense technical study followed by intuitive and emotional choice. This time, the spinning bottle ended up pointing at the Panasonic DMC-FZ200. One is already on its way.
This is a "baby SLR-oid" package with a 7.7 mm, 12 M sensel sensor (maximum output resolution 4000 px × 3000 px). It looks like this:
Panasonic DMC-SZ200 (image from The Imaging Resource)
It is not a "pocket" machine.
Factors that led to this choice included:
• The camera has a non-interchangeable Leica-badged lens with a ff35 equivalent focal length range of 25-600 mm and a constant maximum aperture of f/2.8. (The long end there is perhaps more than we need, but hopefully is not too greatly at the expense of optical performance.)
• The camera is equipped with a 430 k pixel electronic viewfinder, which said to be superb. (For us, a viewfinder is a necessity, and I am a big fan of EVFs.)
• The time-to-fire from "half press" (prefocus) has been reported at 11 ms. (This is a very important factor to us.) Non-burst shot-to-shot time is reported at 850 ms, not too bad for a machine of this class. Burst rate with full AF and exposure update is 5 fr/sec; about 10 fr/sec with AF and exposure frozen.
We recognize that the fairly small sensor will likely lead to modest image performance. We do not see this as a disadvantage, as most of our work ends up in blogs or on other Web sites, or printed at perhaps 3.5" × 5". But this is the biggest gamble.
By the way, essentially this same camera is available as the Leica V-LUX 4, for those who want to spend USD 500 more for a red dot.
And in that regard, we ordered our camera from Amazon.com at USD 499.00 (shipping is free for us; we have a yearly "subscription" to that end).
We have no flash unit to collaborate with the new machine, and the civilized Panasonic units are pretty expensive. We may look into "third party" units. (The camera has a built-in "pop-up" flash, but it is of limited potency and is not too fast to recharge.)
We'll let you know how the new machine does.
Best regards,
Doug
This rig is too bulky and heavy to suit my current outlook. Among other things, Carla points out that:
• We can't keep it on the console in the front of the car.
• At a banquet, we have to reserve a separate place at the table for it to sit.
Our search for a successor rig followed our customary combination of intense technical study followed by intuitive and emotional choice. This time, the spinning bottle ended up pointing at the Panasonic DMC-FZ200. One is already on its way.
This is a "baby SLR-oid" package with a 7.7 mm, 12 M sensel sensor (maximum output resolution 4000 px × 3000 px). It looks like this:
Panasonic DMC-SZ200 (image from The Imaging Resource)
It is not a "pocket" machine.
Factors that led to this choice included:
• The camera has a non-interchangeable Leica-badged lens with a ff35 equivalent focal length range of 25-600 mm and a constant maximum aperture of f/2.8. (The long end there is perhaps more than we need, but hopefully is not too greatly at the expense of optical performance.)
• The camera is equipped with a 430 k pixel electronic viewfinder, which said to be superb. (For us, a viewfinder is a necessity, and I am a big fan of EVFs.)
• The time-to-fire from "half press" (prefocus) has been reported at 11 ms. (This is a very important factor to us.) Non-burst shot-to-shot time is reported at 850 ms, not too bad for a machine of this class. Burst rate with full AF and exposure update is 5 fr/sec; about 10 fr/sec with AF and exposure frozen.
We recognize that the fairly small sensor will likely lead to modest image performance. We do not see this as a disadvantage, as most of our work ends up in blogs or on other Web sites, or printed at perhaps 3.5" × 5". But this is the biggest gamble.
By the way, essentially this same camera is available as the Leica V-LUX 4, for those who want to spend USD 500 more for a red dot.
And in that regard, we ordered our camera from Amazon.com at USD 499.00 (shipping is free for us; we have a yearly "subscription" to that end).
We have no flash unit to collaborate with the new machine, and the civilized Panasonic units are pretty expensive. We may look into "third party" units. (The camera has a built-in "pop-up" flash, but it is of limited potency and is not too fast to recharge.)
We'll let you know how the new machine does.
Best regards,
Doug