8×10Gallery.com

Archive for July 30th, 2007

Since I’m so hell bent on an 18-200mm lens with stabilization I checked into some other lenses. The Tamron 18-200mm gets quite a bit of praise for how it handles, although it has no stabilization:

I found the AF18-200mm to be a terrific general-purpose lens, able to handle everything from scenic vistas and portraits to close-ups, sports-action and distant wildlife shots. Sharpness, contrast and color reproduction were excellent, and autofocusing performance on my midrange Canon D-SLRs was quick and accurate, albeit not as silent as with Canon’s USM lenses.

And

Other nice touches include a zoom lock, which keeps the lens at its shortest physical length for easy on-camera carrying and a flower-shaped lens hood that provides flare protection without vignetting. Speaking of vignetting, you can’t use this (or other Tamron Di II lenses) on 35mm SLRs or full-frame D-SLRS, or vignetting will occur-a by-product of optimizing a lens specifically for the smaller-sensor D-SLRs.

But the main point is, this does seem to be what a lot of people are starting to use for their “walk around” lens. Many reviews site it as the lens to take for trips, hiking, etc, when weight is an issue. I haven’t really seen reviews or articles saying this type of lens is a bad. Many come with comments saying there may be some softness as the long and short ends of the focal length. Considering the prices, size and weight, that seems to be a fair tradeoff.

The more I keep reading about this range of lens the more I like the idea. Although I’m still waying for stabilization.

We all want one. We all want to be on the sideline holding this piece of gear. With all the news and speculation of the Canon 40D, here is something grounded in reality. The EOS 1D Mark III, the top of the line Canon with all the speed precision the rest of us wish we could afford.

This model lives up to the hype. Perhaps some of the goodies will trickle down to the rest of us.

Since Canon announced their new flagship 10.1 megapixel high-speed professional DSLR, the Canon EOS 1D Mark III (street: $4500) back in March, we’ve been itching to put it through our battery of lab tests. Photojournalists, sports photographers and hardcore enthusiasts, among others, have been chattering about this camera online, eagerly awaiting delivery of a promised unit, or complaining about being stuck in back-order hell.

Perhaps you’ve already heard about the feature set of this camera: ISO 50-6400, 1.3x conversion factor, 10 frames per second with a JPEG burst of up to 110 full-resolution shots (or 22 RAW plus JPEG), Dual Digic III processors, 14-bit analog-to-digital conversion, live preview shooting on the 230,000 pixel 3 inch LCD, sensor-shake dust removal, and a host of other upgrades big and small.

Our impressions with a late pre-production working sample left us on the edge of our seats waiting for a fully testable unit to see if it lives up to the hype. Now that we’ve run the Canon EOS 1D Mark III through our battery of tests, we can now say we’re very impressed with both the features, and the performance, of this new high-speed champ.

http://www.popphoto.com/cameras/4314/camera-test-canon-eos-1d-mark-iii.html

Have you ever been at a party and had someone pick up your camera and unintentionally delete your priceless party memories? Or maybe you accidentally deleted those important documents on your thumb drive. Assuming you didn’t continue using your storage device, there’s still hope of retrieving your lost images and files. We tested three of the biggest names in image recovery software to search for the best way to recover lost images and other files.

We only tested software available for both Macintosh and Windows-based PCs. For our test, we used JPEG images shot with a digital camera, though all three programs we tested can recovery other file types as well. Each program was tested using three series of five images shot with a Casio EX-Z1050 and Lexar Professional SD card. All three programs, DataRescue’s PhotoRescue 3.0, Lexar’s Image Rescue 3 and SanDisk’s RescuePro 3.2, were tested in both Macintosh and Windows-based computing environments and offered similar results though additional features and graphical user interfaces varied from program to program.

http://www.popphoto.com/photosoftware/4397/how-to-recover-lost-images-and-other-files.html

Personally, I’ve only used O&O Undelete and FormatRecovery to get files back. In that particular case it was an entire hard drive of RAW (CR2) files from a Canon Digital Rebel. It worked exceptionally well, but is certainly more effort than going after a single lost file. O&O also has a MediaRecovery tool designed specifically for this circumstance, but again, I haven’t used that one.

http://www.oo-software.com/home/en/datarecovery/

Considering the reality that losing pictures from a memory card is just as bad as losing them from a hard drive, everyone needs to have some recovery tools at their disposal.

Technorati : file recovery, recover deleted files, undelete