New Camera: Canon EOS 400D
This week I decided to get myself a new camera, and to step up into the world of dSLR’s.
The problem with our existing camera (Powershot S3 IS) was that despite being a high-ish end Point and Shoot, it suffered from what nearly all P&S’s do….a noisy sensor. That is, a grainy appearance to the image, unless the lighting was absolutely perfect.
Since I enjoyed the S3 IS, I decided to stick with Canon. Well, that and Will offered me one of his Canon lenses :D
I ended up picking up
- Canon 400D with 18-55mm EF-S kit
- Spare battery
- 1gb Sandisk Ultra II CompactFlash card
- 50mm f/1.8 Prime II
I know I could have waited for the 450D which has a few improvements, but I wasn’t all that interested in a $200->300 premium. I did consider Nikon’s D40x/60 and the 80 (mostly because of Long Zheng‘s choice), but the offer of a lens from Will was really all I needed to put Nikon into an unrecoverable spot!
I must point out, the day I bought the camera, I waited until my wife got home from her Uni classes so she could unbox it. Much to our disappointment, we discovered that the camera was used and than the 18-55mm lens wasn’t in the box, and the spare battery I’d asked for wasn’t even the right type! I didn’t sleep well that night, but we went down to CameraHouse the next day and they fixed it up. Phew.
A day or so later I went over to my mothers house to fix up her HTPC (well, to install Free*EPG), and discovered she had a 35mm film SLR, a very old model from Olympus – OM-1. Along with her camera, were two prime lenses (28mm f/2.8 and 50mm…f/1.8!) and a rather chunky 80-250mm f/4.5 lens. Being Olympus (or OM mount) lenses, they obviously aren’t compatible with my 400D….until it turns out one of the employees at CameraHouse had an adapter! It set me back $80, but thse three lenses are pretty cool, even if they don’t have auto-focus capability.
Next on the list is a 8gb Sandisk Extreme III CF card (has double the read/write speed of the Ultra II), and a hotshoe flash with E-TTL/E-TTL II… I just haven’t decided which flash yet – the cheapest Canon doesn’t swivel and they just get very expensive after that.
