Reasons for preferring the D5000 over the 500D

David Kilpatrick wrote:
Geoff Berrow wrote:

It's good, but I'd like to see what you could do using the kit most
people have ie, a Windows PC.

I have a review copy of Serif Movie Plus just arrived, along with with
Serif Photo Plus. I've loaded them up on my PC (2.5GHZ Pentium Dell
running Windows XP, but I can't justify replacing it yet). The Photo
program looks like a fair copy of early Photoshop and opens raw files
without any process control.

I'll try the Movie Plus program with my next D5000 experiments.

Pro wind shields use what looks like long fake fur to slow the air
down. I'd try a bit of that.

I'm thinking of some kind of tube to eliminate the venturi effect over
the tiny mic holes, which is causing the blustery wind sound.

WHAT!!! No external mike socket!! What on earth were they thinking?

Same as Canon with the 500D, and Nikon before with the D90 - only the 5D
MkII has a half-decent built in stereo mic and an external mic socket.

The D5000 has a GPS socket though. Figure that - embedded GPS data but
no mic input... maybe they could firmware-fix the GPS socket to become a
mic input with a special adaptor.

David
I'd stick with XP. The Vista user interface (is that even the correct
term?) is different enough to be quite annoying and insufficiently
different to be useful. They've fixed something which wasn't broken.

spacecadet wrote:
[]
I'd stick with XP. The Vista user interface (is that even the correct
term?) is different enough to be quite annoying and insufficiently
different to be useful. They've fixed something which wasn't broken.

You can probably configure Vista to look like XP, just like you can
configure XP to look like 2000! I think you will find that Vista and
Windows-7 are better OSes than XP, particularly given enough memory and a
multi-core CPU.

David

In rec.photo.digital.slr-systems David Kilpatrick wrote:
Geoff Berrow wrote:

Pro wind shields use what looks like long fake fur to slow the air
down. I'd try a bit of that.

I'm thinking of some kind of tube to eliminate the venturi effect over
the tiny mic holes, which is causing the blustery wind sound.

I've spent nearly as much time becoming a good amateur sound man as I
have becoming a good amateur photographer, and until my last couple of
lens purchases, probably spent as much money on it :-)

Wind noise is caused by turbulent vortices which form as it passes
over what to the wind is a sharp edge, and the wind is quite crude
about what constitutes a vortice forming sharp edge. I doubt that the
mic holes and venturi effect are causing much noise. Even if they are,
a huge amount of the noise will be due to vortices formed as the wind
passes over the hard edges of the camera in general, especially those
produced by earlier hard edges and whose votices are now passing over
the microphone inlet.

Your tube, even if soft plastic foam, will cause vortices over the
mouth amplified by tube resonances.

All animals which want to fly at night without making any noise use
the same method -- being covered in very soft fluffy hair or feathers
which not only soften boundaries, but have mechanical chararacterists
of how they bend and soak up acoustic sized vortical vibrations. Think
of moths and owls.

As Geoff says, the pros use a very hairy muff with very long hair over
their outdoor mics. There really is nothing else nearly as good as
that for stopping the formation of vortices, and damping down
acoustically troublesome gust buffetting from elsewhere, such as the
huge vortice trails from nearby buildings, people, and cameras, and
yet still letting most of the sound, especially the critical higher
frequency sound, through to the microphone.

If you're stuck with the daft internal mic with its body holes I'd try
sticking a big patch of long haired furry material over the mic holes,
with a little hole in the base material cut out for the mic hole. It
would also help to wrap as much as the camera structure as possible,
especially the nearby structures, in soft hairy stuff, such as a
cashmere scarf. If you can put up with some HF loss, which for speech
interviews is often fine, e.g. the HF loss of telephones, you can try
putting things like a crumpled cashmere scarf over your ears or
loosely knitted soft thick woolly pullover, and if that's not too bad
in HF loss, try wrapping it over the mic's sound holes.

Not having a remote mic socket in an expensive camera is a transparent
bit of marketing to force you expensively up the model scale to
acquire a trivially cheap but critically important feature. I find
that so disgusting and immoral that I want to boycott every single
product of a manufacturer who does that kind of crippling of their
less than top of the range models.

Sony do a LOT of it! Unfortunately the quality of their engineering,
including their high quality sound recording kit, is often so good,
and often enough the best, that I do sometimes find I'm forced to
swallow my principles and buy their stuff :-(

--
Chris Malcolm

Chris Malcolm wrote:
[]
Not having a remote mic socket in an expensive camera is a transparent
bit of marketing to force you expensively up the model scale to
acquire a trivially cheap but critically important feature. I find
that so disgusting and immoral that I want to boycott every single
product of a manufacturer who does that kind of crippling of their
less than top of the range models.

Chris,

Thanks for the information on "hairy mics". I had often wondered.

I think that lack of a mic socket in this particular case is simply it
being the first model (or almost), and I would expect to see it rectified
as soon as the D5050 (or whatever) is released.

Cheers,
David

On 5 Jun 2009 09:27:59 GMT, Chris Malcolm
wrote:

Not having a remote mic socket in an expensive camera is a transparent
bit of marketing to force you expensively up the model scale to
acquire a trivially cheap but critically important feature. I find
that so disgusting and immoral that I want to boycott every single
product of a manufacturer who does that kind of crippling of their
less than top of the range models.

Well said. Couldn't believe it when I found out that my Nikon didn't
even have an external flash socket or cable release, stuff we used to
take for granted on film cameras.

Sony do a LOT of it! Unfortunately the quality of their engineering,
including their high quality sound recording kit, is often so good,
and often enough the best, that I do sometimes find I'm forced to
swallow my principles and buy their stuff :-(

You may find this article useful

http://www.gadgetmadness.com/archive...input_jack.php

On Fri, 05 Jun 2009 11:07:44 +0100, Geoff Berrow
wrote:



You may find this article useful

http://www.gadgetmadness.com/archive...input_jack.php

Oops, should have read the whole thing.

Sony have discontinued the adapter. *******s.

In article , Geoff Berrow
wrote:

Couldn't believe it when I found out that my Nikon didn't
even have an external flash socket or cable release, stuff we used to
take for granted on film cameras.

it has a hotshoe and for less than $10 you can get a hotshoe-pc adapter
for studio flashes. unless it's a low end camera, it also has the
capability for wireless sync to multiple flashes.

as for cable release, it has an infrared remote and/or an electronic
wired remote, both of which are *far* more useful than a cable release.

On Fri, 05 Jun 2009 06:48:42 -0400, nospam
wrote:

Couldn't believe it when I found out that my Nikon didn't
even have an external flash socket or cable release, stuff we used to
take for granted on film cameras.

it has a hotshoe and for less than $10 you can get a hotshoe-pc adapter
for studio flashes. unless it's a low end camera, it also has the
capability for wireless sync to multiple flashes.

It's a D70 and the adapter was a lot more than $10 when I bought it.
More like £18 if I remember correctly

*******s...

In article , Geoff Berrow
wrote:

Couldn't believe it when I found out that my Nikon didn't
even have an external flash socket or cable release, stuff we used to
take for granted on film cameras.

it has a hotshoe and for less than $10 you can get a hotshoe-pc adapter
for studio flashes. unless it's a low end camera, it also has the
capability for wireless sync to multiple flashes.

It's a D70 and the adapter was a lot more than $10 when I bought it.
More like £18 if I remember correctly

the nikon brand as-15 might be more but a no-name hotshoe adapter works
fine. it's just two wires and some plastic.

On Fri, 05 Jun 2009 08:11:15 -0400, nospam
wrote:

It's a D70 and the adapter was a lot more than $10 when I bought it.
More like £18 if I remember correctly

the nikon brand as-15 might be more but a no-name hotshoe adapter works
fine. it's just two wires and some plastic.

Yeah, that's what I thought, but it does have a Nikon logo ;-)

I think the manual warns of dire consequences and the immediate
collapse of western civilisation if one dares disgrace the Nikon
hotshoe with such a thing.

*******s...