Re: *ist-D: a report from the field

[Paul Stenquist]

Nice John. I agree that the battery gauge is almost useless. I've had 
equally good experiences with framing and the viewfinder. It's quite 
adequate. Have you considered shooting RAW and sharpening in the 
conversion? I've had better luck in terms of the final result when 
working that way. Less sharpening artifacts and a sharper image.
Paul
On Apr 17, 2004, at 2:58 AM, John Francis wrote:

I've just completed my first day's serious motorsports shooting with 
the
*ist-D.  First, the complaints:

 o  That stupid eyepiece rubber eyecup - it's vanished somewhere.

 o  The battery meter needs finer granularity - Full/Half/None is
    nowhere near enough to tell you if you've got enough power left
    for the next session.
The autofocus is plenty fast enough, even if left in fully-automatic
mode.  That's not a good idea, though; there's a tendency for it not
to track a car coming straight towards you as long as something is
in focus, so you end up with shots where the plane of sharpest focus
is on the rear wing of the car.   Examples (full & detail) at
    <http://panix.com/~johnf/temp/LBGP2A.jpg>
    <http://panix.com/~johnf/temp/LBGP2B.jpg>
Admittedly today I'm only using a small, light lens (the 80-320);
I expect the autofocus will slow down slightly when I drag out the
larger, heavier lenses.  But I definitely felt it was at least as
fast, and probably slightly faster, than my MZ-S.
The viewfinder coverage is nice: it lets you get shots like this:

    <http://panix.com/~johnf/temp/LBGP1A.jpg>
    <http://panix.com/~johnf/temp/LBGP1B.jpg>
or even this:

    <http://panix.com/~johnf/temp/LBGP3.jpg>

That's full-frame coverage, not a cropped image.
At well over 100 mph, with the 80-320 at 108mm.  Pan fast!
None of the images has been sharpened or manipulated in any way
other than resizing.  For real use I'd sharpen and colour balance.
These images were shot as best-quality JPEG images.