ASTRONOMY CCD CAMERA REVIEWS

[KM 500si Super:Tamron 28-300:Promaster MC-UV: Fujifilm ISO200: F8 ~1/750s > Epson V300 > Gimp]

Now this one came out "sharp as a tack" right out of the scanner [the V300 driver defaults to "unsharp mask" but I always deselect it because I don't want it to arbitrarily sharpen the entire image...of course to be absolutely-sure of that I'd have to rescan the frame and do a comparison at 100% ;)]. With great exposure and gamma...nice white-balance...basically everything that you want from a digital camera, except for the dust, sure.

Cept it cost me $25 for the camera, $2 for the roll of film, $2 for the development of the film and $50 for the scanner. And at $25/hr and 10-20min to clean up the dust, align the image, crop it and run a USM mask on it, plus adjust contrast to suit? $8 worth of post-processing. I didn't even run a keystone-correction on it or change the exposure or white-balance and I only scanned it once.

Now sure, sometimes it doesn't work that well :)

but often it does

often the only thing your $2500 D700 is doing for you that a $25 N80 isn't is giving you exif data...and of course the opportunity to take 500 shots just like this

course I wouldn't rely on an N80 to get the exposure right on a sunny day like this...at least not *my* N80...but at $25 a pop you can buy a few N80s and see if you can find one that's reliable in evaluative mode. Mine simply tends to underexpose under bright skies. It might have been fine for this shot but I wouldn't trust it..especially not for scenes where the sun tends to wash-out the sky. The 500si (and the 500si Super, I have them both) almost *never* get the exposure wrong. If they have a weakness it's in the AF which will be slightly off at times (like with most SLRs and DSLRs with single-point AF you have to be careful where you put the focus-point, make sure it's nice and bright). Occasionally less than optimal, but not too bad to use, usually. Put it this way: I get almost 100% "keepers" with the 500si vs maybe 90% with the N80 -I am surprised when the 500si misses a shot while I know the N80 is going to underexpose at least one shot on a roll of film- and the N80 is really not all that bad for a 10-year-old "el-cheapo" consumer SLR. It rarely blows focus and the underexposure is predictable and easy to compensate for, just push a half-stop exposure when the sky is bright and the foreground is dark. I just don't have to worry about doing that with the 500si, and when it blows focus despite what I see in the viewfinder, it usually is to a fixable degree, certainly it will look ok in small format. There is just no way to really fix an underexposed film shot. With underexposed film (or parts of the frame that are underexposed) there's simply no image-data there to fix. A slightly misfocused shot can be sharpened back into decent shape, especially in small format...something that Canon banked on for years, on top of the similar effect you get from NR.

Just something that in this day and age of 14-bit DSLRs with 15 & 39-point focus matrices or ultra-fast multipoint contrast-detect AF systems, you usually don't have to worry about, unless it's a Canon LOL...there certainly are better SLRs than these two if that really worries you. But you can't shoot film in a DSLR.

Don't worry, when it gets dark enough or you need enough shots, you need to see the output right away or you don't need realistic color, you can happily go back to shooting digital without any guilt. I've shot half a roll of ISO1600 film in my lifetime. It's been in the N80 for 3 months now. ISO800, sure, not bad. That, I've actually shot a roll of, a few times. Faster film tends to not come out of the camera, it's too grainy for landscape shots (hell, ISO400 is too grainy for landscape shots much less ISO1600, unless it's really dark) and in low light I'd rather shoot low ISO off a rest. Fast film simply doesn't look good in shots taken with good light, and good light is when I take most of my shots.

This was one of the first pictures taken with my digital camera.

Before I got a personalized plate, I had the plate of R666SJ.

Then I was hit by a deer on the back door/driver side of my car.

I got rid of the "devil plate."

This is much easier to remember. ;)

And yes that is make in the car taking the picture. I'm fully clothed and wearing shorts.