darthdavid wrote:I wish I had a D-SLR
. How does it compare, in your opinion, to a high end Film SLR or a regular, non SLR, digital camera?
Well, there are advantages and disadvantages to D-SLR, SLR, or regular cameras. I'm not an expert, but an amateur, but here's some of what I know.
Lets start right off the bat with saying this: Digital cameras are for point-and-shoot photography, no hassles, no "setting up the scene" work. Film SLRs and DSLRs are all about creativity and control. There's a good "DSLR or regular digital. What's right for you?" flash animation
here.
A Digital SLR camera typically has a far larger CMOS sensor than a regular digital camera. This means you get a far higher dynamic range, i.e. how bright is the brightest white and how dark is the darkest black, meaning that trying to photograph Batman on a nice, partly-cloudy day at the beach will reveal somewhat more details in the white clouds and the batsuit and reduce the "washed out" effect than a regular camera (but not much more in this extreme example). Basically, it's how much detail can bee seen in deep shadows before bright areas start to lose texture.
Another benefit is less noise due to the larger sensor size. A typical digital camera can give you choices on varying ISO speeds (adjusting the sensor's sensitivity to light), say, between 40 to 200.
My Digital Rebel, with hacked firmware that borrows a few features from the higher-end-but-same-CMOS-sensor Canon EOS-10D, goes from ISO 100 to ISO 3200. It gives far greater light-sensitivity control, giving you the ability to increase shutter speed and get the same amount of light in the picture, while combating a blurry image due to the higher shutter speed. Canon's sensors are regarded for their low noise levels (sort of like film grain) at high ISO speeds.
What I love about bigger sensor sizes in DSLRs is that an 8mp image taken with a DSLR can look great even on a large 16x20 print, while the same 8mp image from a regular digital camera with a small sensor size would start to look bad at those sizes.
You might have trouble with a high-depth-of-field shot with a DSLR compared to a high-end regular digital camera. In other words, in some circumstances a regular digital camera can be far, far better at keeping focus on that bird in a few feet in front of you and the entire park scene as well. On the offset, DSLRs usually have far superior performance in the shallow-field-of-depth performance, like the first image in my OP. For a good illustration of the difference in depth-of-field performance between DSLRs and regular digitals, click
here and click on the image.
The nice thing about a Canon or a Nikon DSLR camera is the literally hundreds of different types of lenses you can attatch to them (from a paltry $150 to thousands of dollars), from a macro lens, to a 14mm wide-angle lens, the stock 28mm-55mm lens for the Digital Rebel, a 75-300mm longer-range lens with built-in Image Stabilization (IS is a VERY expensive feature for many lenses), some tele-photo lenses at 800mm or 1200mm, UV filter or polarizer caps for the lenses, 2x teleconverter lenses, the list goes on. A typical digital camera does not have such a selection like that, but then again, neither will the user of those cameras be willing to invest the time, effort, and money associated with such equipment.
One interesting aspect of DSLR compared to regular 35mm film SLR is the focal length multiplier. This means that a DSLR (like mine) with a 1.6x focal length multiplier and a 28-55mm zoom lens would give the same image as a 45-88mm zoom lens on a 35mm SLR.
To see more differences between DSLRs and the regular digitals, you can read
this guide.
