YAFYE picture of the day
Today I bicycled down into the center city instead instead of riding my regular route out towards Gresham. I turned around just south of Union Station because a Yellow Menace transfer freight was about to block my route further north.
At least I got a picture out of it (though I wonder just what these bike rides are doing to the pentaprism alignment in my *istDS? And I’m certainly not keen on replacing the pentaprism with a pentamirror OR replacing the tiny(ish) *istDS with a big old K20 that doesn’t even take AA batteries. Ugh. If I had US$2k lying around, I’d buy a VoigtlanderEpson RD1 as a walkaround camera, because the ancestral Vito BL has worked out nicely except for the tiny detail that it uses film. It’s a pity that nobody else [well, except for Leica, and the M8 would have been too rich for my blood even when I was making a mid-six figure income in the late 1990s] ever wanted to sell a digital rangefinder camera.)
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The problem with the proprietary batteries isn’t really helped by the number of photos the K20 can take. I get somewhere in the ballpark of 1000 photos out of a set of AAs (I’m not sure, because I tend to recharge them every other week no matter what) but the thing that wins with the AAs is that it’s not just the *istDS that uses them, but the AF280 uses them, the little blood pressure gauge I own uses them (something suggested by the doctor when my blood pressure was in the 160/110 range, so I wasn’t going to quibble,) the lego electric motors we’ve got use them, and a few other electronic things use them, so we’ve got spares floating around so when the *istDS runs low, I can throw in some shortterm substitutes while the primary set are (slowly) recharging.
I’m really annoyed that the K-m is a pentamirror, because it’s been a while since PentaxHoya has released a SLR as small as the *istDS. But even then it’s kind of big; my *istDS is my all-the-time walkaround camera (I almost never leave the house without it in my purse) and after I’ve been walking around with it for a while it gets really heavy.
I strongly suspect that the μ4/3rds cameras will be “prosumer” (a horrid horrid name) ones that have live view and no viewfinder, because there’s not much market for rangefinders (or viewfinders) out there. (And, after having an A60 and A70 die in the span of a week because of lens failure, there’s no way I’d use a modern fixed-lens camera as a walkaround, because about the time I’d get used to it it would fail.)
Heavy, well, the difference between everything in a shoulder bag and slightly larger values of everything in the big belt bag, both from ThinkTank, is really noticeable. Any chance you can go to something with better skeletal support than the purse?
I don’t own anything, other than some secondary and tertiary backup flashlights, that takes AAs. It’s all custom fixed rechargeable with it its very own wall wart. (Or USB, or a crank.) So I haven’t got the logistical advantage of a common battery type.
I’m not at all sure the “market level” approach to camera design is a good one; I suspect they’d do better looking at what people want to do and going there, which would probably include the physically smallest possible camera that still did interchangeable lenses and a good viewfinder. I know a lot of my impulse toward the K20D was looking through one, and there appear to be a lot of people who want a very small DSLR with a good viewfinder.
Heck, I’d want a very small DSLR with a good viewfinder, and then tend to carry five or six lenses with it…
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Well, the big ol' K20D gets something better than 700 shots per charge; this doesn’t make it not-big, but one battery goes a long way. (Though I’ve never yet shot above 600 pictures in one day, so I may have a serious shooting-habits bias affecting my opinions about what’s a lot of shots.)
The Km is a pentamirror; I suppose you can always hope that there will be a Micro 4/3 camera you don’t hate, or that the similar format Samsung talks about (but with an APS-C sensor) will show up early in 2010, and that your *istDS lasts that long.
Carry-everywhere is full of awful tradeoffs; I use an LX2 for that, but while it’s a very cool camera design, the sensor is small and has all manner of noise issues. I’m finding I either take the K20D or don’t take pictures.