Just thought I would share the fun. The first 4 pictures are at a dog demo we did tonight. A bit of action for Dave. They were shot with the 77mm in dummy mode, set to ISO 800. I was shooting in jpeg mode, ending up with 1 mb 2000x3000 pixel files. The camera would shoot 4 of these and then kack until the buffer was emptied, I wasn't counting, but it took several seconds.
http://users.accesscomm.ca/wrobb/temp/IMGP0024.jpg http://users.accesscomm.ca/wrobb/temp/IMGP0025.jpg http://users.accesscomm.ca/wrobb/temp/IMGP0026.jpg http://users.accesscomm.ca/wrobb/temp/IMGP0027.jpg These three are shot into the sun with the 18-35 in whatever the thing defaulted to out of the box. The files are from 5mb tiffs. http://users.accesscomm.ca/wrobb/temp/IMGP0005small.jpg http://users.accesscomm.ca/wrobb/temp/IMGP0006small.jpg http://users.accesscomm.ca/wrobb/temp/IMGP0007small.jpg This is shot from my car window while my wife was spending money at Wal-Mart, douwnsized , from a 2000x3000 pixel jpeg. This one shows a couple of hot pixels. I am told it is pretty normal to get a few on a ccd. http://users.accesscomm.ca/wrobb/temp/IMGP0092small.jpg This camera is WAY COOL. Even the chrome 77 looks good on it. The A 50mm f/1.2 is great on it, interestingly enough. So, what do I like about it so far? It is quite a heavy instrument with the battery pack on, but .lighter than an LX with the winder attached It is not large, heightwise, it is close to the same as an LX with a winder, its a little narrower, but more bulbous, and is somewhat fatter. This is with the battery pack on. With the pack off, it is positively tiny, and quite light, somewhat lighter than an LX, though this was without batteries in the built in chamber. The built in battery compartment is almost a third of the camera. It takes 2 CR2V lithioids, if you choose to go that route. It is quite easy to use, the control layout surprised me by being easy to figure out, and the camera is quite easy to use. I managed to lock it up a once, where it just became totally unresponsive. Shutting it off and popping the battery door open, then closed seemed to cure the problem though. I expect I managed to do something that caused it to crash. For those who want to shoot in highest quality mode, I would advice that you buy lots of memory, either off camera storage or cards. Probably both. A 256mb card will hold 16 RAW files, or 14 highest quality tiffs. It is ready to go about 1 second after the power is turned on. An interesting feature is on the battery grip. It has a set of basic operation controls on it, mimicking the body placement of the on/off/dof switch, shtter button and control wheels. It even has an AE lock under the thumbwheel. This makes for cool vertical operation, since the camera is not at all comrotable to hold vertically and be using the body controls with the grip on. The flash card is almost impossible to remove without forceps once it is in. This is frightfully bad design, and shouldn't have made it to market like this. It is a battery pig. I just killed the first set of batteries. I have 100 saved files, and probably about 50 nuked ones as well as significant playtime to show for it. I am using Ni-MH AA cells in it. The auto focus is very quick, and seems to work quite well in dim light. It makes a somewhat high pitched, but very business like noise when actuated. The business of using the pre A series lenses is as bad as I thought it would be. The camera can be left in program mode and the lens can be partially rotated off. The exposure will be relatively correct (I won't go near defining what correct really is) at any given aperture. Note this method is really not overly handy, and not really feasable at all with tripod mounted lenses. At least I don't think so, anyway. You certainly can't do production shooting in this fashion, anyway. Thats all for now folks, gotta sleep. William Robb
