Peenie Wallie: The truth about Digital SLR's

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December 30, 2005

The truth about Digital SLR's

Here's a few things that you won't hear about the digital SLR cameras. It's seldom mentioned, but I'll mention it here because I feel these dirty little secrets should be exposed. If you're wondering if I'm qualified to make assements of digital cameras, I've purchased over a dozen of them, so I have a better idea than most of their differences.

1) With a digital SLR camera, you can't use the LCD display on the back to see the image. You have to look through the viewfinder. Sony is currently the only one trying to tackle this problem, and, I can assure you, it's a problem. A big one.

2) When you look through the viewfinder, which you have to to take a photo (see 1 above), what you see is not what you get. No digital SLR shows the true photo when you look through the viewfinder. For instance, with my EOS 20D camera, I have to make a mental note that about 15% of the image outside of the top of my field of vision will show up in the photo. Makes cropping and composition a total crap-shoot.

3)The aspect ration is 3:2 instead of 4:3. This means that the images you take are wider and shorter than with most digital cameras. It means you can take some nice landscape shots, but it also means you'll almost never shoot vertical again.

4)It's a horrible investment. With the old film cameras, you could spend a lot of jack and get a professional Canon camera, use it for 5 years, and then resell it if you needed the cash. They held their value, at least the high-end professional cameras anyway. That's not true any more. With digital cameras, they depreciate rapidly. A professional digital SLR camera depreciates as rapidly as a big-screen television.

Technorati tags: SLR, Digital SLR, EOS 20D