Wednesday, December 20, 2006

More musings on the differences between digital SLRs and compact cameras

Sigh, my Canon PowerShot S3 IS is now off to Akron, Ohio, along with the two lovely converter lenses. Yep, sold it on eBay. I'm feeling very comfortable with the new Pentax K100D digital SLR, but I feel like I'm finally coming to a balanced appreciation of what the different cameras can do. Here are a few more random observations.

1. I mentioned in my last post that that digital SLR's glass viewfinder is much nicer to use than the LCD in a non-digital SLR camera. I failed to mention that the Pentax K100D also has a much higher resolution back-panel LCD than the Canon S3 has. According to the excellent site DPReview.com, the Canon S3 has a 2-inch, 115,000 pixel LCD, while the Pentax K100D has a 2.5-inch, 210,000 pixel LCD. What this means is that I am able to make much better judgments about how my pictures are coming out from looking at the back of the Pentax than I could with the Canon. Or, to put it very practically, I am better able to tell when I'm doing something badly wrong. ADVANTAGE: digital SLR.

2. The digital SLR has a mechanical shutter that makes a noise when it operates. You can't do anything about that noise. With the compact camera, whether it makes a noise or not is up to you; so is the kind of noise it makes. I was usually fond of it making a shutter noise, which is a good thing, because it's what I'm used to now. But I could have configured it to beep or do some other things, or be silent. I don't see the inevitability of the noise as a plus. I would like, say, when shooting in a church, to be able to be silent. ADVANTAGE: compact camera.

3. I bought the K100D rather than the cheaper K110D because the K100D has shake reduction, Pentax's version of optical image stabilization. I'm glad I did. But I am quite sure that shake reduction does not help as much on the Pentax when I'm using a telephoto lens as it did on the Canon S3. At first, I thought perhaps Canon's IS was simply superior technically to Pentax's SR. Now I see a more obvious explanation. It's a simple matter of focal lengths. The compact camera's lenses have much smaller focal lengths, even though they may achieve greater magnification. Now, the shorter the focal length, the less camera shake matters. If you hold a twelve-inch ruler in your hand and twitch it slightly at your end, it will move only slightly at the other end. Do the same thing with a yard stick - or a ten-foot pole - and the movement at the other end will be much more pronounced. So image stabilization in the Canon may not be any better than shake reduction in the Pentax, but the Canon has less of a problem to deal with in the first place, so it's not surprising that it seems to do a better job. My brother-in-law Tom told me a while back that he doubted image stabilization would be adequate for shooting with a 300mm lens; he suspected a tripod is de rigeur at that focal length. I responded that image stabilization in my S3 was working fine, even with the 12x lens fully zoomed, which is supposed to produce an effective focal length of something like 450mm. I wasn't wrong, but neither was Tom. I suspect that, to take clear shots with a 300mm or higher lens attached to a digital SLR, you'd want to shoot with a fast shutter, and that in turn means either shooting only in bright sunlight or spending beaucoup bucks for a fast lens (that is, one with a bigger aperture). ADVANTAGE: compact camera.

I could go on, but I won't.

It seems to me now that the digital SLR is a good camera for hobbyists who really are into how you take good pictures, where the compact superzoom is for people who are satisfied that the camera takes good pictures. I am enjoying working with my Pentax very much and I'm not displeased with the pictures I've taken so far. But then I like the challenge for its own sake.

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Superzoom vs DSLR, Revisited

A month ago, I tried to gather up my thoughts on the question of whether I should stick with the Canon S3 IS superzoom compact digital camera or consider purchasing one of the recently released, relatively low-price digital SLRS. In that earlier post I took a position that I suppose could fairly be called defensive. I had already purchased the S3. Now I was trying to persuade myself that I had made the right decision and at the same time talk myself out of the itch to get a digital SLR. The observations that I made in that earlier article were generally correct. In particular, I think I did a fair job describing both the advantages of the compact superzoom (cost, versatility, convenience) and the disadvantages of the digital SLR (cost, size, need for multiple lenses). But I think now that I failed then to appreciate the advantages or perhaps I should say the attractions of the digital SLR as well as I do now. What's changed? Well, in the last month, I've actually spent some time with two different digital SLR cameras: my brother-in-law's Canon Rebel XT, and my own brand new Pentax K100D. That's right, I changed my mind, or at least I've come to understand better than I did before the advantages of the digital SLR. I'm writing now not so much to correct what I said earlier, as to argue the other side of the case a little more fairly.

For me, the question now is, Should I keep the S3? What do I see now about the DSLR that I did not see earlier, or, if I saw it, did not regard as compelling?

1. The DSLR feels better

For starters, shooting with the Pentax feels better. I think there are four reasons for this.

First, the DSLR is bigger, and in some important respects, bigger is definitely better. The Pentax is easier to hold properly. I noticed with the Canon S3 that, until I put the converter tube on the base and left it there, it was almost impossible to hold it properly, with my left hand under the lens, partly because the lens kept moving in and out and partly because the whole thing was too small. Even with the converter tube attached, it was too small. The Pentax, on the other hand, fits my left and right hands nicely.

Second, the controls on the Pentax are more conveniently distributed on the body of the camera. The Canon S3 has a lot of very similar buttons plopped all over the case. When your eyes are on the subject rather than the camera, it's a bit tricky to tell the ISO button from the Fn button, or the Menu button from the Set button. It's very easy to hit Set or Menu by accident with your right hand, because there's really no place for the ball of the thumb or the thumb itself to sit on the camera comfortably. Nearly everything is done on the S3 with the right hand - zooming, touching control buttons, pressing the shutter - and this makes gripping the camera firmly a little more difficult. On the Pentax, there's empty space on the back of the camera on the right where my right thumb can lie safely. Zooming is done by the left hand. The other buttons are shared by the hands - Menu is a left-hand button, Fn is a right-hand button.

Third, the sharpness of the DSLR's optical viewfinder is simply much more satisfying than composing it on an LCD. I want to be honest here. This is not such a huge practical difference. After all, even the Pentax's digital viewfinder is a pretty small screen, so to a good extent, you are doing on the Pentax the same thing you do on the Canon S3: composing the shot, and counting on the various meters to get the focus and exposure exactly right. But gosh, seeing what you're photographing so clearly, so realistically, is great. It's tactile. I've gotten used to it very quickly on the Pentax, so much so that the LCD on the S3 strikes me not just as crude, but clumsy. The clarity of the optical viewfinder seems to go hand-in-hand with the fact that you must put your eye right up to the viewfinder and look at the subject straight on. Taking photos with the DSLR is straight shooting.

Fourth, the DSLR's shutter is more immediately responsive. I had gotten used to the "shutter lag" on the Canon S3, in fact, I was pretty good at anticipating facial expressions or poses so that I could depress the shutter a fraction of a second ahead of the shot I wanted to capture. Nonetheless, shooting on the Pentax, where shutter lag is comparatively absent, is like looking through the sharp optical viewfinder - a fact that makes working with the Pentax seem more natural, more direct.

Note that none of the advantages above means that the Pentax necessarily takes better photos. In fact, shooting under "normal" conditions - good lighting and reasonable proximity to a cooperative subject - I suspect that a competent S3 user will be able to take photos that were every bit as good as those taken by a low-end digital SLR. I have seen a fair amount of DSLR chauvinism on certain internet forums; it's ignorant and wrong.

2. The DSLR has some technical advantages

But the next two features do affect the quality of at least some photos.

The bigger CCD in the Pentax doesn't mean that the pictures it takes are sharper or that their color is better. But it does mean that the camera can do more with less light. Now, I have not yet had a chance to give this a real test, by shooting some more photos of my daughter's basketball team playing in the school gym, where the light is lousy and I can't use a flash. Nevertheless, my tests at home in low-light conditions give me confidence that I will be able to get less noisy, equally well-focused action shots.

Perhaps the clearest advantage of the DSLR is in the greater control it gives you over depth of field. The shorter lenses and smaller CCDs of the compact cameras inevitably provide lots of depth of field. The problem on a compact camera is reducing depth of field for artistic reasons. There's just not a lot you can do. To get control over the depth of field in a shot with the Canon S3, you may have to step twenty feet away from your subject and use the zoom lens, and, well, this is not always possible and a hassle even when it is. For a pretty clear demonstration of the superiority of the Pentax here, compare this photo taken by the Pentax K100D with this photo taken by the Canon S3. The goal of the shot was to get the middle ground in focus and have the foreground and background out of focus. It was easy to do on the Pentax; impossible to do on the S3.

In short, shooting with the DSLR feels better, to me, at least. And the DSLR can be pushed harder than the compact camera. The technical limitations of the compact superzoom are more obvious and there's not much you can do about them, besides wait until Canon releases the S4 next year with a handful of minor improvements.

The bottom line

If your budget maxxes out at around $500, then by all means, buy the Canon S3. It's a heckuva camera for the money, more camera than most amateurs need or know what to do with. But what if you have more than that to spend? Then the matter is not so easily decided.

About Me

I am an event photographer living in Dallas, Texas.