A new camera
I bought myself a new camera on the weekend, a Canon PowerShot SX10 IS. I figured it’s time to upgrade, since I had my previous camera for over 3 years. It doesn’t seem like it, but it’s true. I bought it in November 2005.
This new one has 10 Megapixels, whereas the old one had 5. It has 20x optical zoom, where the old one had 12x. It has built-in image stabilization, so even at maximum zoom it stabilizes the image and prevents excessive blurring.
Since a lot of my photos are of scenery and I like to zoom in a lot, this is exactly the kind of thing I was happy to upgrade to. The old one gave me so many blurry shots like you wouldn’t believe.
The salesman really pissed me off when I was making a decision though. He wanted to sell me a more expensive digital SLR (DSLR) camera with detachable lenses, and thought that anyone who bought PowerShot instead of a DSLR wasn’t very smart. So I got him to tell me why his DSLR’s were better, so I could work out if I actually wasn’t very smart, like he suggested.
He took me through them, which was fine, but at the end of his demonstrations, I still wanted the PowerShot. He didn’t approve, and so I thought he was a tosser.
Anyway, the reason I chose the PowerShot over the DSLRs, even after the demo’s, was very simple. One of the two DSLRs had image stabilization and a nice display screen on the back, but didn’t have a lens with an equivalent zoom. The other DSLR had no image stabilization, and the display screen didn’t even show the viewfinder view, but it had an equivalent lens. They were both about $300 more expensive than the PowerShot (which was about $650), but to get what I wanted in a DSLR would cost 5 times as much as what the PowerShot would cost.
In the end, the PowerShot had more than the DSLRs, and for less than what they cost. But apparently I wasn’t very smart as a result. Oh well. At least I’m a happy dumbarse.
If you look in the Phot0 Albums, the photos from 25th January onwards were taken with the new camera. It was a busy weekend for photos, but very enjoyable…
As an example of the zoom quality, I present these three photos:
So there’s the normal view on the left, then it’s zoomed in on the boats just above the island in the middle, and then it’s zoomed in on a small group of the boats to the right. The water was still, there was no wind, and the reflection of the sails on the water was clear.
Very nice.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
I’ve ended up going the ‘all in one’ route most of the time myself, but there are sometimes advantages to the DSLR, mostly taking low light photos with my F1.8 50mm lens and very shallow depth of field photos. the larger DSLR sensor makes a big difference to noise at higher ISO levels in the evening.
For landscape photos during the daytime however, The photos from my A570 point and shoot are just as good as those from my 350D in most cases. (although the A570 does suffer from reasonably bad barrel distortion at wide angle)
The DSLR also allows easy use of polarising and graduated filters, again, no difference most of the time, but when the situation calls for it, indispensable.
Having said that however, i can never be bothered carrying the DSLR and lenses, so i take almost all my photos with a small point and shoot these days.