OoF (and no, it's not a sound effect)
Mar. 21st, 2003 03:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tugrikSoooOOOooOoo... I did a bad thing.
I found a Canon 10D in stock locally. This is rare, considering the waiting lists online to get one. Heck, Revar's still another week and a half out from getting one through CDW mailorder, and they're considered fast. But here it was, right in front of me... nice shiny candy-like box. I really shouldn't have... but I did indeed find a way to scrape the dough together and run cackling off into the night with it. This was last Saturday, BTW. Yeah, I felt guilty enough I didn't put this info into LJ back then.
Through the weekend I took pictures at Hakone and around town. I toted it in to work and took the board-pics for the engineers. I also took the eye-shots and such. Throughout it all, though, I wasn't terribly impressed with the images vs. what I had been led to believe about 6Mpix. They were good... and when scaled to the same resolution as the D30, were slightly better. But... only slightly?
The camera body itself is wonderful. Metal, not plastic. Much better UI layout. Everything is where it's supposed to be. It's responsive as all get-out, with vastly improved focus speed and less shutterlag than even my nice-and-quick D30. 5 minute exposures with no hot pixels even at room temperature. It was all mmm, mmm good... except the images really just weren't all that better. In certain conditions they were worse. This was puzzling me quite a bit.
One of the other new 10D owners on the forum I frequent for such things is a pro photographer. He had the same feeling -- but he knew how to quantitatively prove it. He did a series of focussing tests with various lenses, backdrop guides, tripods, lights, etc. As it turns out, the 'back focus' of his camera was off. This is something set in the factory; it has to do with the distance between the lens mount and the image plane. The only way to fix it is to ship it off to Canon and let them have it for 10-14 business days (2 to 3 weeks) and the user has to pay shipping both ways, even though it's a warranty repair. He swapped it for another one from the vendor he purchased it from, and THAT camera worked flawlwessly.
I followed his guide and did similar tests... albeit with the simpler equipment of a ruler at 45 degress and the good tripod at work. I found the same results. The depth of field vs. the focus point was all out of wack and the things the camera thought were in focus were slightly closer than the focal plane. In manual, when things would look A-OK in the viewfinder they were also ahead of the focal point. I called Canon and they had me run a few tests and email them images. Yup, sure enough... it's got a back-focus problem. "Send it in or get a replacement" was the response. (Note: I repeated these tests later with Revar over my shoulder and Revar agrees: the 10D is just barely out of whack enough that my D30's images look better, pixel for pixel)
Not wanting to ship off a 4 day old camera for a few weeks and pay shipping, I toted it back to the vendor. They are of course out of them; the 10D is a hot item. I'm now on the 'hot list' to get one when the next batch comes in and they have me holding on to the OoF (out of focus) one until it shows. I made the mistake of paying in cash so if I just wanted a refund it'd take their accounting dept 7-10 days to mail me a check as they have a $500 cash-refund limit. My bad: I should have pumped it through a credit card like a Good American. :/ Their next batch could be anywhere from a week to a month away.
Meanwhile, the OoF 10D sits in its little box, silently mocking me. When Revar's shows up in a week or so we'll put it to the test head to head vs. this one since I'll most likely still have it. It'll be nice to compare apples to apples to see the true extent of the problem... and even more nice to finally see what kind of images a properly working 10D can produce.
*sits there, grumbling at the little 10D box as it mocks him*
I found a Canon 10D in stock locally. This is rare, considering the waiting lists online to get one. Heck, Revar's still another week and a half out from getting one through CDW mailorder, and they're considered fast. But here it was, right in front of me... nice shiny candy-like box. I really shouldn't have... but I did indeed find a way to scrape the dough together and run cackling off into the night with it. This was last Saturday, BTW. Yeah, I felt guilty enough I didn't put this info into LJ back then.
Through the weekend I took pictures at Hakone and around town. I toted it in to work and took the board-pics for the engineers. I also took the eye-shots and such. Throughout it all, though, I wasn't terribly impressed with the images vs. what I had been led to believe about 6Mpix. They were good... and when scaled to the same resolution as the D30, were slightly better. But... only slightly?
The camera body itself is wonderful. Metal, not plastic. Much better UI layout. Everything is where it's supposed to be. It's responsive as all get-out, with vastly improved focus speed and less shutterlag than even my nice-and-quick D30. 5 minute exposures with no hot pixels even at room temperature. It was all mmm, mmm good... except the images really just weren't all that better. In certain conditions they were worse. This was puzzling me quite a bit.
One of the other new 10D owners on the forum I frequent for such things is a pro photographer. He had the same feeling -- but he knew how to quantitatively prove it. He did a series of focussing tests with various lenses, backdrop guides, tripods, lights, etc. As it turns out, the 'back focus' of his camera was off. This is something set in the factory; it has to do with the distance between the lens mount and the image plane. The only way to fix it is to ship it off to Canon and let them have it for 10-14 business days (2 to 3 weeks) and the user has to pay shipping both ways, even though it's a warranty repair. He swapped it for another one from the vendor he purchased it from, and THAT camera worked flawlwessly.
I followed his guide and did similar tests... albeit with the simpler equipment of a ruler at 45 degress and the good tripod at work. I found the same results. The depth of field vs. the focus point was all out of wack and the things the camera thought were in focus were slightly closer than the focal plane. In manual, when things would look A-OK in the viewfinder they were also ahead of the focal point. I called Canon and they had me run a few tests and email them images. Yup, sure enough... it's got a back-focus problem. "Send it in or get a replacement" was the response. (Note: I repeated these tests later with Revar over my shoulder and Revar agrees: the 10D is just barely out of whack enough that my D30's images look better, pixel for pixel)
Not wanting to ship off a 4 day old camera for a few weeks and pay shipping, I toted it back to the vendor. They are of course out of them; the 10D is a hot item. I'm now on the 'hot list' to get one when the next batch comes in and they have me holding on to the OoF (out of focus) one until it shows. I made the mistake of paying in cash so if I just wanted a refund it'd take their accounting dept 7-10 days to mail me a check as they have a $500 cash-refund limit. My bad: I should have pumped it through a credit card like a Good American. :/ Their next batch could be anywhere from a week to a month away.
Meanwhile, the OoF 10D sits in its little box, silently mocking me. When Revar's shows up in a week or so we'll put it to the test head to head vs. this one since I'll most likely still have it. It'll be nice to compare apples to apples to see the true extent of the problem... and even more nice to finally see what kind of images a properly working 10D can produce.
*sits there, grumbling at the little 10D box as it mocks him*
