Pixelpuffin wrote:
... there was much better detail...
That was my experience with the 450D when I tried out RAW after a few weeks of using it with JPG. I´ve never looked back. Shot RAW and lately CRAW since. On DPP, with the sometimes big benefits of lens specific corrections. No, not only by the lenses that use correction by design where the benefits are obvious. All images with Canon lenses benefit to at least some degree, a degree I choose.
I started a still ongoing project to make high quality JPGs of all my RAWs for The Future when Canons RAW format might be an unknown with the available software. But my enthusiasm is fading in the back streets of Who cares...
mborozny wrote:
I shot almost exclusively RAW on my 450D. As long as I wasn’t shooting at twilight without a tripod or in dim places, the files were mostly usable.
Well I’ve realised I’m probably limited to 400 iso max, unless I’m after that mosaic look!!
Which tbh, back in the film era woukd have been the norm I guess - and we seemed to manage back then.
For me it’s the modern lenses with IS that’s a lifesaver. I tried my ef 100-400Lii yesterday and honestly I was expecting massive disappointment, yet the damn thing constantly nailed focus…constantly??
The issue was the JPEG setting was set to landscape so everything was maxed out… contrast, sharpness and it all seemed fine viewed small but the minute you zoomed in…ugh!!
So, having won my confidence I’ve fitted the EF 24mm 2.8IS and switched over to raw.
Hoping to grab a hour or so after work today.
The laugh is, the 400d is by far my oldest canon dslr and yet I’m loving this, I guess partly because I’m surprised and that’s it’s practically worthless yet it still manages to get a half decent snap.
With the grip fitted it’s so darn comfortable, I could quite happily wander around with this on a wrist strap all day. The shut off at 30seconds means I’m not wasting battery power. Incidentally the batteries were still charged up!! I haven’t had this out in well over a year and after 4/5days of snapping wildly at anything and everything it’s still showing FULL ??
Z250SA wrote:
That was my experience with the 450D when I tried out RAW after a few weeks of using it with JPG. I´ve never looked back. Shot RAW and lately CRAW since. On DPP, with the sometimes big benefits of lens specific corrections. No, not only by the lenses that use correction by design where the benefits are obvious. All images with Canon lenses benefit to at least some degree, a degree I choose.
I started a still ongoing project to make high quality JPGs of all my RAWs for The Future when Canons RAW format might be an unknown with the available software. But my enthusiasm is fading in the back streets of Who cares......Show more →
Convert to TIFFs if you want a 16-bit standard format with a long future and not to lose IQ like jpegs.
CRAW is one of the least likely to be supported formats in the long run.
Pixelpuffin wrote:
Well I’ve realised I’m probably limited to 400 iso max, unless I’m after that mosaic look!!
Which tbh, back in the film era woukd have been the norm I guess - and we seemed to manage back then.
Cameras like this one came from an era when, in my view, the pluses of digital were overall arguably just surpassing those of film. There were pluses and minuses, and one of the minuses was that even ISO 400 was pushing it when it came to noise — there was quite a bit of it, and, more problematic, the chroma (color) noise was pretty significant.
My second DSLR (after a previous cropped sensor model and, before that, a string of what I regard as early experimental cameras) was the 5D. At the time is seemed (and was!) remarkable, but it was quite ISO-limited. Basically I always shot at base 100 ISO unless I had no other choice, and there was enough noise at 200 to make a difference and enough at 400 to be a (often manageable) problem. Shooting above that was not a great idea…
Z250SA wrote:
That was my experience with the 450D when I tried out RAW after a few weeks of using it with JPG. I´ve never looked back. Shot RAW and lately CRAW since. On DPP, with the sometimes big benefits of lens specific corrections. No, not only by the lenses that use correction by design where the benefits are obvious. All images with Canon lenses benefit to at least some degree, a degree I choose.
I started a still ongoing project to make high quality JPGs of all my RAWs for The Future when Canons RAW format might be an unknown with the available software. But my enthusiasm is fading in the back streets of Who cares......Show more →
I just save a compatible copy of DPP. Hopefully I can find it if needed I had an iso of the disk, if I can ever find it, and the 3.15 updater for really old bodies. Even windows 95 computers still readily available, and you can apparently get ilder operating systems in a shell, if needed, as well
I like to use DLO on the 18-55, picks up performance, even though it doesn't have the massive distortion or vignetting. Not sure if you can use that going back to the 400D or not, though.
Even on the Rebel XT, 800 almost certainly my most used iso. The noise wasn't bad at all compared to grain from 8x12 film print. Personally I dont consider the difference between 20D and later aps bodies to be too great at 1600
I owned the Rebel XTi a lifetime ago. Was a fine camera for its time. It was my travel cam and I used it so much the finish wore off the grip and turned to sticky goo. I still have many thousands of RAW images from the XTi and, with modern software—Lightroom—they clean up well. But, yeah, mainly shot it at ISO100 and only used ISO400 for emergencies.
Z250SA wrote:
I remember liking the grain in the 450D at ISO 800. Remained me of the grain in Kodachrome 200. Perhaps just some dust of nostalgia.
My first DSLR was the XT. It was a fine little camera for its time and its price. (One of its pluses was that it had the same sensor as the more expensive APS-C cameras from Canon.) I got it basically to test out whether DSLR technology had legs — e.g. was it good enough to replace 35m film.
The overall verdict, in my view, was yes. But it wasn’t a case of being better in all ways, more of being a bit better on balance — things like not having to commit to a particular film (black and white or color without changing film!), make more images without having to buy or carry film, get photographs with less “grain” (noise) at base ISO and with post-processing NR (anyone else remember the lengths we went to back then to deal with noise?), and all of the other power of digital post-processing. Even with the relatively crude printer and paper technology of the very early 2000s, individuals could produce pretty good color prints (BW less so) at lower cost and with more creative processing power.
What wasn’t so great by the standards of today’s camera technology two decades later? Noise was a serious issue. (Again, all of those third party plug-ins to deal with it in post, and crazy techniques to handle it as well.) And the noise wasn’t just luminosity noise (which is what most of us deal with today) but also quite significant chroma (color) noise in the form of random color shifts in individual pixels.This was reasonably managable at base ISO, but it was quite an issue at even ISO 400, and 800 was pretty bad, even after cleaning up in post. (Pointing out that you kind of liked it because it reminded you of film is fine, but that confirms that it was there and it was an issue.)
There wasn’t much exposure latitude, and you had to be much more careful than today about dealing with blown highlights and blocked shadows. (Today we have remarkable leeway to recover the shadows in post, so it is a lot easier to deal with those highlight issues.)
One plus today: As the post-processing software has improved and added features, it has become possible to go back an rescue some (though definitively not all) of the files that were marginal back then, files that would be fine if shot today with a more modern camera.
I’m not for or against the cameras of that era, but it is important to be clear-eyed about how much improvement we’ve seen in the last two decades.
gdanmitchell wrote:
My first DSLR was the XT. It was a fine little camera for its time and its price. (One of its pluses was that it had the same sensor as the more expensive APS-C cameras from Canon.) I got it basically to test out whether DSLR technology had legs — e.g. was it good enough to replace 35m film.
By the time the XT was out the 1Ds II had already been around for about 6 months. The 16.7MP 1Ds II was FF and had more than double the amount of pixels. It was good enough to replace film for most purposes though at 4FPS there were some limitations. I'm kinda surprised you did not get one for your landscapes, though maybe you were on medium or large format films at the time.
EB-1 wrote:
By the time the XT was out the 1Ds II had already been around for about 6 months. The 16.7MP 1Ds II was FF and had more than double the amount of pixels. It was good enough to replace film for most purposes though at 4FPS there were some limitations. I'm kinda surprised you did not get one for your landscapes, though maybe you were on medium or large format films at the time.
EBH
I can understand that question, given that the XT was not great for landscape photography. I ended up with several excellent photographs, in one case of a conjunction of elements that I’m unlikely to ever see again, that a very limited in potential print size due to the shortcomings of the 8MP APS-C XT… and the weak lenses I initially got for it.
How did I end up in that situation? It is a long story, but here’s a brief(-ish) version.
By the early 1990s I had almost stopped going serious photography. I came to regard camera-toting as an intrusion on my back-country adventures, and I reduced my gear from multiple 35mm systems and multiple lenses down to a single hand-held 35mm film P&S. It was great for my freedom to move in the high country, but it essentially killed my serious photography.
In the mid-1990s I had a relationship with Apple — I was not an employee, but through my work as an educator they identified me as someone who was using technology in higher eduction in forward-thinking ways. Among other things, this gave me very early access to their QuickTake cameras. By today’s standards these were horribly crude devices, but I put one to work generating images for some then-experimental websites, and the potential of digital imaging started to be interesting.
Continuing the experiment I got a high-end Olympus digital point-and-shoot camera just before 2000, and I carried it on a couple of trips to Alaska. Then I picked up the old Canon Pro 1 (an interesting camera, if you haven’t heard about it) and soon decided it was time to see what DSLRs could do.
So I got the XT, primarily as a cheap way to try out the DSLR concept and decide whether it was going to work for me. I only got a few lenses — a prime or two (pretty decent) and a cheap zoom lens designed only for APS-C cameras. Using this gear persuaded me that DSLRs were “for real” and to soon get a 5D and much better lenses.
Unfortunately, as you suggest, the XT was not really suitable for the kind of landscape photography that I have done since that time with much better cameras and lenses. And to this day I remain disappointed that I wasn’t able to fully take advantage of some wonderful (and unrepeatable) photographic opportunities as they deserved. As a consequence, photographs I made with that early gear can’t really be printed much larger than what I can do on 13” x 19” paper, and it some cases that is a stretch.
Why didn’t I jump straight to that 1Ds model? it was extremely expensive and also quite large. The cost didn’t make sense at all stage when I was still trying to decide if I wanted to “go there.” The large size and weight were far from ideal for back-country travel. For me, the 5D was the seminal camera, the one that turned this whole digital photography thing into a realistic, serious endeavor. That was rue for a lot of us doing landscape photography, and that camera quickly became ubiquitous among “my people.”
gdanmitchell wrote:
My first DSLR was the XT. It was a fine little camera for its time and its price. (One of its pluses was that it had the same sensor as the more expensive APS-C cameras from Canon.) I got it basically to test out whether DSLR technology had legs — e.g. was it good enough to replace 35m film.
The overall verdict, in my view, was yes. But it wasn’t a case of being better in all ways, more of being a bit better on balance — things like not having to commit to a particular film (black and white or color without changing film!), make more images without having to buy or carry film, get photographs with less “grain” (noise) at base ISO and with post-processing NR (anyone else remember the lengths we went to back then to deal with noise?), and all of the other power of digital post-processing. Even with the relatively crude printer and paper technology of the very early 2000s, individuals could produce pretty good color prints (BW less so) at lower cost and with more creative processing power.
What wasn’t so great by the standards of today’s camera technology two decades later? Noise was a serious issue. (Again, all of those third party plug-ins to deal with it in post, and crazy techniques to handle it as well.) And the noise wasn’t just luminosity noise (which is what most of us deal with today) but also quite significant chroma (color) noise in the form of random color shifts in individual pixels.This was reasonably managable at base ISO, but it was quite an issue at even ISO 400, and 800 was pretty bad, even after cleaning up in post. (Pointing out that you kind of liked it because it reminded you of film is fine, but that confirms that it was there and it was an issue.)
There wasn’t much exposure latitude, and you had to be much more careful than today about dealing with blown highlights and blocked shadows. (Today we have remarkable leeway to recover the shadows in post, so it is a lot easier to deal with those highlight issues.)
One plus today: As the post-processing software has improved and added features, it has become possible to go back an rescue some (though definitively not all) of the files that were marginal back then, files that would be fine if shot today with a more modern camera.
I’m not for or against the cameras of that era, but it is important to be clear-eyed about how much improvement we’ve seen in the last two decades....Show more →
IIRC I posted 3200+ iso photo off a 20D on the Canon summer board, last year. The subject matter helped a lot, and I dont think i even used NR!
Now that I've figured out high iso pp pretty well, I dont really hesitate to use 1600 on older 20D and 30D, and probably posted to the seasonal thread recently at 1600.
I'm not sure what was going wrong, for you, but yes 8mp aps did a nice job of replacing 35mm film. I remember reading one guy's article saying his 10D about equal to 6x7 using print film, and being impressed 3mp p&s had no grain. 1DsII cost $6-8k or some such thing, and very heavy
While working on some much more recent photographs this morning, I decided to open up some of those early landscape photographs that I made with the XT back in 2005. (I may have gotten my dates slightly wrong in an earlier post.)
Leaving aside for a moment the much smaller pixel dimensions of those 8MB images, the noise level in a well-exposed photograph at the base ISO 100 is seems to me to be about the same as what I'd get from a 800 or 1600 ISO on a more modern APS-C camera. Because DR was considerably smaller, it would take more shadow recovery to get luminance levels tho where I would wan them, creating more problematic noise in those dark areas that would easily be recovered today.
On one hand, those early cameras were a marvel in their day, and they changed how many of us approach photography. On the other hand, it is remarkable how much improvement there has been in the past two decades. (I'm thinking of the latter point as I go directly from one of those 2005 files to working with 50MP files from a camera released a decade or so later, and then to 40MP APS-C files from a very recent camera.)
It was fun to go back and look at those twenty-year-old files.
Certainly by 2006 or 07, and even before then, I got nice prints out of these little printer/fax/scanners. One Epson ink/paper combo on those got >100years on the Wilhelm tests, better than UltraChrome. And I had access to a large format printer and printed poster size and larger using Rebel xt files, which I put a lot of effort into perfect focus on.
I'm sure the 5DsR is better (at least, I'd hope so, given its ff, much later, etc) but when I started a thread years ago asking if I needed to upgrade from 8mp (I believe to 7D,) pretty much nobody seemed to think so. I resisted testing 8mp vs 18 & 24mp, because if it wasn't much, I might not want to use the newer cameras, which probably ought to be using
Ive never really used the DR much, one time shot an alpine lake using a polarizer, picked up one frame about a stop and blended with layers, no problem on a 30D even. You really didn't lose any resolution up to 800, even then, i shot jpegs a lot on the XT, which to some degree covered it, but I've shot 20D and 30D over the past year and dont currently consider 1600 to be much of a problem. It's not a pronounced difference between that and the newer bodies there imo, besides you'd usually use NR
I had an iso of the disk, if I can ever find it, and the 3.15 updater for really old bodies. Even windows 95 computers still readily available, and you can apparently get ilder operating systems in a shell, if needed, as well