D7 or Olympus E-20n

So this is a comment from someone who does
not own a E20 or D7?

Dr. Gonzo said:

The Man said:

Even looking through
the Olympus forum, I see E10 owners who love their cameras and were
waiting for the next model very disappointed in the E20 - not
enough upgrade to bother AND twice as expensive and all other 5.2
MP models. At the regular price of $1299 the Dimage is a great
camera but with Minolta's new $300 rebate, at $999 it's an even
better camera and value.

Click to expand...

That's a distortion. E-10 owners are not disappointed because the
E20 is a disappointing camera. It's because the E-10 is a VERY
tough act to follow and few of us can justify the expense in the
upgrade, which isn't all that much from the E-10 to the E-20 (in
our opinions). Most of us E-10ers already consider them superior to
Dimages so the E-20 is only building upon that superiority. This is
not intended as a flame, but rather a clarification of a
misrepresentation of what is being said.

Dr G.

Click to expand...

Dave in Houston said:

That's great! I didn't know you was frum da hood?

Click to expand...

Well I do have a big black monster.

Mike Roberts

Pete said:

The combined range of shutter
and aperture settings on the D7 allows an incredible range of
normalization - the ability to take two extremely different
intensities of light and make them equivalent for capture purposes.
Assume I set the shutter to its longest (240 seconds)

Click to expand...

I was back visiting the D7 specs and see that I gave it a very long 4 minute max shutter in this thread. Sorry - - - that's four seconds max (30 seconds in bulb) - - not four minutes. I think I have that right now (I hope).

Pete

from the D7 specs:

Shutter Priority 4, 3, 2, 1.5, 1, 0.7, 0.5, 1/3, 1/4, 1/6, 1/8, 1/10, 1/15, 1/20, 1/30, 1/45, 1/60, 1/90, 1/125, 1/180, 1/250, 1/350, 1/500, 1/750, 1/1000, 1/1500, 1/2000 sec

Min shutter 4 secs + Bulb in Manual Exposure mode; max 30 secs

Mark H wrote:
(Incorrectly - he admits!)

Mark H said:

It's worth pointing out that the exposure preview capability is
done entirely in the electronics (signal gain) and does not adjust
the aperture, so there is no 'depth of field preview' capabilty.
This would be of limited use given the low resolution of the
viewfinder, although having said that; I'm sure a Nikon 880, I was
playing with recently, did do this when half-pressing the shutter,
so it might have been nice on the D7 particularly for macros.

Click to expand...

Hi Pete (& Co.),

I wasn't going to bother, but as I see you're still checking this thread I'll just correct some slight misinformation in the preceding message of mine.

I have subsequently noticed that the D7 does stop down the aperture while in the exposure preview phase. If you alternate pointing the camera at something bright/dark (sky/shadow) you can both hear the click of the aperture opening and closing, and see the darkening plus change in depth of focus of the view.

I am certain this is only done to limit the light level at the CCD and avoid saturation/charge overflow accross the sensor, NOT to act as a depth of field preview.

I can see one downside to this behaviour. In bright lighting situations the camera will have the aperture stopped down whilst focussing (auto or manual) and the resulting increased depth of field/focus will make it more difficult to discriminate the point of best focus.

Of course this shouldn't normally matter because of the very wide depth of focus available, but probably explains why (as described on page 31 of the manual) the camera's autofocus may fail to lock if "The subject is near a very bright object or area". When the aperture is stopped down during autofocus the focus search will sometimes find everything is in focus and won't know where to stop.

As you may know, in the above circumstances the camera will set focus at infinity and you can still shoot, alternatively switch to manual focus mode and use the distance indication.

Great detective game this digital photography!

Cheers.

Mark H.

Mark H said:

Hi Pete (& Co.),

I wasn't going to bother, but as I see you're still checking this
thread I'll just correct some slight misinformation in the
preceding message of mine.

Click to expand...

Good to hear from you Mark - and thanks for updating with your recent observation. I hadn't considered it before but perhaps your last post says something about how much the sensor can tolerate as the f stop range only affords a factor of eight reduction in illumination. Maybe this is enough for the sensor - or, if not, could there be other factors.

I had always wondered about the intimate details of the "shutter". I had assumed it was electronic and that it sort of worked by setting the amount of time that charge could build up on some "capacitor" connected to each pixel location (photodiode). I had imagined the capacitor able to store charge for the shutter interval and then the sites being all read out followed by a reset - maybe shorting the capacitor out - and the whole thing starting again. Maybe there would have to be multiple operations to figure out the colors. But I had assumed it was all electronic. And that when the exposure was finally made, the information read out was copied to a file (with processing in-between).

Along with this, I had further assumed that in preview, there was a maximum length of time that the shutter would allow charge to build up and this time had to do with visible flicker of the image. When the exposure was actually made, then the shutter could actually stay open longer - if need be.

I was on the forum this afternoon and followed a link to one of Phil's pages that talked about the shutter. It sounds like higher end cameras have mechanical shutters. I was thinking about this and was wondering why. And then even if I believed it. Back in the film days I remembered, a good leaf shutter could only do 1/500 th. You would need a focal plane shutter to get the kind of shutter speeds in the specs of the 707. And then I had to admit to myself that none I'd ever played with had memory cards in them - so for all I knew, they did. And then I thought more about the process of getting information from the sensor. If it had some speed restriction that was below the fastest claimed shutter speed, wouldn't the capture have problems with freezing fast moving objects if the mechanical shutter went faster then the image refreshed? It seems like there would only be a portion of the possible image available or that some portion would be blurred by motion and some would be sharp.

As you can plainly see, I've reached a stumbling point in my thought process and would appreciate any insight you can provide about the mechanical shutter and how it fits in with overall shutter behavior.

And to jump back a few paragraphs, is it possible that the 8:1 range afforded by the aperture is not enough and the shutter also comes in to play in preview?

Pete

Is minolta giving a #300.00 rebate? How do i find out about this, i just bought one (D7) ....

Dr. Gonzo said:

The Man said:

Even looking through
the Olympus forum, I see E10 owners who love their cameras and were
waiting for the next model very disappointed in the E20 - not
enough upgrade to bother AND twice as expensive and all other 5.2
MP models. At the regular price of $1299 the Dimage is a great
camera but with Minolta's new $300 rebate, at $999 it's an even
better camera and value.

Click to expand...

That's a distortion. E-10 owners are not disappointed because the
E20 is a disappointing camera. It's because the E-10 is a VERY
tough act to follow and few of us can justify the expense in the
upgrade, which isn't all that much from the E-10 to the E-20 (in
our opinions). Most of us E-10ers already consider them superior to
Dimages so the E-20 is only building upon that superiority. This is
not intended as a flame, but rather a clarification of a
misrepresentation of what is being said.

Dr G.

Click to expand...

Even most of the lower cost cameras use both a mechanical and
an electronic shutter. In the G-1, the aperture and shutter are
the same mechanism, and that limits it to f-8 at anything over
1/500th, as it isn't fast enough at the larger apertures for those
speeds. Most of cameras even 2 generations back could handle
1/1000th wide open. The play between the electronic shutter and
the mechanical one has never been explained that I know of.

Pete said:

Mark H said:

Hi Pete (& Co.),

I wasn't going to bother, but as I see you're still checking this
thread I'll just correct some slight misinformation in the
preceding message of mine.

Click to expand...

Good to hear from you Mark - and thanks for updating with your
recent observation. I hadn't considered it before but perhaps your
last post says something about how much the sensor can tolerate as
the f stop range only affords a factor of eight reduction in
illumination. Maybe this is enough for the sensor - or, if not,
could there be other factors.

I had always wondered about the intimate details of the "shutter".
I had assumed it was electronic and that it sort of worked by
setting the amount of time that charge could build up on some
"capacitor" connected to each pixel location (photodiode). I had
imagined the capacitor able to store charge for the shutter
interval and then the sites being all read out followed by a reset

• maybe shorting the capacitor out - and the whole thing starting

again. Maybe there would have to be multiple operations to figure
out the colors. But I had assumed it was all electronic. And that
when the exposure was finally made, the information read out was
copied to a file (with processing in-between).

Along with this, I had further assumed that in preview, there was a
maximum length of time that the shutter would allow charge to build
up and this time had to do with visible flicker of the image. When
the exposure was actually made, then the shutter could actually
stay open longer - if need be.

I was on the forum this afternoon and followed a link to one of
Phil's pages that talked about the shutter. It sounds like higher
end cameras have mechanical shutters. I was thinking about this and
was wondering why. And then even if I believed it. Back in the film
days I remembered, a good leaf shutter could only do 1/500 th. You
would need a focal plane shutter to get the kind of shutter speeds
in the specs of the 707. And then I had to admit to myself that
none I'd ever played with had memory cards in them - so for all I
knew, they did. And then I thought more about the process of
getting information from the sensor. If it had some speed
restriction that was below the fastest claimed shutter speed,
wouldn't the capture have problems with freezing fast moving
objects if the mechanical shutter went faster then the image
refreshed? It seems like there would only be a portion of the
possible image available or that some portion would be blurred by
motion and some would be sharp.

As you can plainly see, I've reached a stumbling point in my
thought process and would appreciate any insight you can provide
about the mechanical shutter and how it fits in with overall
shutter behavior.

And to jump back a few paragraphs, is it possible that the 8:1
range afforded by the aperture is not enough and the shutter also
comes in to play in preview?

Pete

Click to expand...

Bob Williams said:

Even most of the lower cost cameras use both a mechanical and
an electronic shutter.

Click to expand...

I guess dark noise subtraction would be one reason for some cameras to have a mechanical shutter. But I'm not sure how many cameras do this.

Member said:

Most of cameras even 2 generations back could handle
1/1000th wide open.

Click to expand...

I knew focal plane shutters got faster with the use of metal curtains and other design improvements. I hadn't realized diaphragm shutters had improved.

Pete