Nikon

Last night, I was doing my exercise on the couch in front of the TV, aka channel surfing and exercising my thumb on the remote. Suddenly I found a camera ad. Cameras? Let watch, It was an ad for Nikon with Ashton Kutcher. Nikon even has a full website, just for him: http://ashton.nikonusa.com/. Ashton Kutcher knows nothing about camera or photos but he has a Nikon camera.

I just printed this photo 20” by 30” or 50 centimeters by 76 centimeters.

You can't see it as a print, you can only view from the web. But… It looks great on the wall. Viewed even close, there's no pixilation, no visible noise with a naked eye even at 5 inch from the print. All the hairs and whiskers are sharp.

I was talking to Marg who, proudly, showed me that she just discovered that her lens was also a macro. It's one of these, wide angle to extra tele, all in one lens (no name mentioned). The “macro” is not a macro mode, I would call it a close-up mode and that's not even that close. Then I looked at her lens… so many acronyms

Canon

The mine's better than yours war has ready started. Nikon has finally announced their D4, almost 6 weeks after Canon announced their 1Dx.

• It looks like Nikon will ship first. 1 point for Canon announcing first and 1 point for Nikon shipping first.
• The prices are in the same range, the $6,000 range, 1 point Nikon and ¾ point for Canon because the announced price will be high end of the $6,000 range but I'm convinced that they will quickly match Nikon's.
• Photo side: technically, if you read the specs, they are pretty much equivalent on the photo side. Canon is a little bit more here, Nikon is a little bit more there. In the real world, the major difference is clock-wise (Canon) vs counter clock-wise (Nikon). I defy you to identify a photo taken with the 1Dx or by the D4. They both have 60 years of experience and it shows. Nikon has closed the megapixels gaps by going to 16 megapixels. So 1 point for Canon and 1½ point for Nikon.

Canon calls it Image Stabilization, Nikon calls it Vibration Reduction, Sony calls it SteadyShot, Pentax calls it Sensor-shift Image Stabilization, Sigma call it Optical Stabilization and so on.

It's very much black magic. It's based on between two to as many as six tiny gyroscopes that track the pitch and the yaw to compensate for the movements of the photographer either on the CMOS/CCD sensor or around one of the optical element of the lens.

This is an interesting book from Henry Horenstein. It's unusual. It's a book about the basics, like f/stops… as a technical introduction to photography. It's not like the “… for dummies”. This reminds me of a text book, it's structured, just like a course. It's not just for dSLRs but most of the book also applies to point and shoot cameras.

I like the “plain” English. The photos are excellent and are appropriate to the topic that they illustrate.

People have been asking me lately:

• What about the new Canon 1Dx?
• When is the 5DMk3 coming?
• What about the 7DMk2?
• …

So I took my crystal ball out from storage, removed some of the dust and polished it. Here's Canon's future:

By now, you must have heard that Canon has announced their new full frame camera, the 1Dx. It merges both the 1D and the 1Ds series, 12 frames per second, 18 megapixels and full videos.

Notice that Canon has dropped the pixel count from 21 megapixels to 18 megapixels. Is this a case of pay more and get less? People will say that it's to get a higher ISO. No it's not. Higher ISO is not a function of the size of the pixels (large photosites helps) but far more importantly than the sensor is the speed of the CPU, to process and reduce the noise.