Elliott’s Blog

The Canon XSi/450D is still a great camera!  But I have discovered a couple of little problems, due to the fact that I am used to using the all-manual cameras of my past, the Canon F1 and my father’s Leica M2 (rangefinder).

It is just too light

One of the criteria I had was to have a light camera, and the XSi is one of the lightest DSLR’s around!  Only the Panasonic G1 was lighter (but it is not an “R” camera–no mirror).  The problem is that the mass of the mirror moving out of the way is enough to shake the whole camera!  This is a real problem when you have a long-ish shutter speed.  I never had this problem with the F1 (which is actually quite heavy).  Even on a tripod, the camera shakes a bit when you snap the shutter.  

The work-around is easy enough: move the mirror out of the way before snapping.  But this effect comes into play even for a moderate sutter speed (say, 1/30 second).  It is really hard to get a truly sharp picture if you zoom in at all because of this!

I have adapted, but this is a moderate negative for me!

Also, the lightness makes the camera hard (for me) to hold steady.  The F1 was GREAT for this–I could, with reasonable reliability, hold a 1/15 exposure.  Not so, with the XSi.

The kit lens is not very wide

The other small problem is that the “kit” lens (the 18-55 mm) is really not very wide angle.  The low end, 18mm, translates to about 29 mm in the 35mm world (about 65-degrees angle of view).  This is not really all that wide.  I was taught as a teenager in Columbia that you work with factors of two in focal length: Start with a 50mm, then get a 25mm and a 100mm, then a 200mm.  Most people were satisfied with a 35mm as their “wide angle” lens.  In the day, 28 mm lenses were common (and I have a crappy one) but neither of these is NOTHING like the 24mm Canon FD lens I got  (about 74-degrees of view)!  That is a wonderful lens–I wish I had one like it now.  With 24mm, you can get ANY tight shot: in a room, a big crowd, anything!  The 18mm is just not wide enough for me.

(I have the FD-to-EOS adapter, so I can physically put my old 24mm FD on the XSi, but it is about the same angle of view, but not as nice, as the 50mm f1.8 lens I got.)

Very minor: 55-250mm second zoom is clunky

A third minor gripe is that the second zoom (55-250mm) is a little clunky–I can see and feel the stabilization working on this lens.  It often make a noise, “ka-CHINK”, when I half-press the shutter, engaging the stabilzation.  This is not at all a big deal–it is just wierd.

Conclusion

All-in-all, was the XSi a bad choice?  No way!  But if I were making the decision right now instead of last fall, I would seriously consider the Pentax 2000K.  It is heavier (reviewers say it is “very solid”), has a wide(r) variety of really small fixed lenses and has in-camera stabilization.

I’d like to post some comparitive pictures, to show what you can really do with the very-high-quality Canon XSi!  In my spare time …

For the first time since, basically, I bought my Volkswagen Jetta diesel, the price of diesel has dropped below the price of regular unleaded gas. Yesterday, at every station I saw in our little tour of “tourist Switzerland”, diesel was 1.53 to 1.54 (Swiss Francs per liter), and regular gasoline (”petrol” for you British readers out there) was 1.55 to 1.57 CHF/liter! To translate this for the American leaders, that is $5.35/gallon for Diesel, $5.42/gal for regular gas.

I am averaging 38 miles per gallon these days; 6.1 liters/100 km (I think)

There are a couple of points to be made by an Old Guy on the top three of Martin McCrory’s TNG Top Ten.

BoBW Full credit needs to be given to the TNG writers for exhuming the end-of-season cliff-hanger! This started with the “Who Shot JR” summertime cliffhanger of 1979/80 for the TV show Dallas. Nothing will ever touch THAT, but the hupla around this TNG cliffhanger was fanned, for the first time, by the Internet! Of course, http://www.starttrek.com, or any other web page, did not exist at that time (1990). So Usenet Newsgroups carried the buzz. And what a buzz it was! The rec.arts.startrek newsgroup was a full-time job to read! I spent way too many hours that summer reading it! (Please let me know if you can find the archives of this newsgroup from 1990. The Google version only goes back to 1992.) The anticipation of the conclusion was fantastic!

Of course, now we know that the writers actually didn’t know how to end this episode when they wrote it! But some of the suggestions of the possible resolution on Usenet were awesome. Many of these suggestions showed up later in the Star Trek universe. The one I remember best was that they should beam in hundreds of photon torpedoes and simultaneously detonate them, destroying the cube. This was done in an alternate timeline episode of Voyager.

Next time you watch BoBW part One, turn off the TV and wait for 3 months before you watch it again.

Yesterday’s Enterprise. I agree completely with Marty’s assessment, particularly the part that there are no holes in this time travel episode. Superlative!

The unique aspect of this episode is that they placed the time-travel action in the present!  In every other time traveler I know of, the hero travels backward or forward in time to get into some connundrum, which s/he barely escapes, with the timeline in tact. Think, Back to the Future and the classic TOS episode The City on the Edge of Forever.   Doctor Who has been time travelling on the BBC since the early 1960’s, but he always traveled to some other time.  This is the first time-travel plot line where we, in the “present”, have hosted time travelers. Ingenious! And the perfectly natural way in which Tasha Yar (Denise Crosby) returns is brilliant!