DSLR vs. P&S Smackdown -- the Answer

VernMichaels wrote:
"Douglas Johnson" wrote in message
...
savvo wrote:

On 2008-08-06, Douglas Johnson wrote:
"VernMichaels" wrote:


One of my P&S cameras can attain 550mm (35mm eq.) lens at F/2.4.
Another gets 1249mm at F/3.5
What models are they?
If you haven't the insight and skill that VernMichaels has and have
not
yet discovered the mythical cameras that he claims to own then you
do
not deserve an answer to your question.
He's already decided I'm incompetent and has told us so. But it's
(notice the
correct use of "it's") a simple question. If he give us some model
numbers,
we'll all learn something. If he doesn't answer it, or dodges it,
we'll all
learn something else.

-- Doug

You already have all the information in my first post to deduce what
cameras they are, minus that the 1359mm is attained with two 1.7x
extenders stacked. One of them is still presently available, the other
can only be obtained on the used-market, it originally sold for $400.
Worth every penny. Combined I found that they nicely cancelled out
each other's meager CA problems, and their larger diameters afforded
the full aperture at full-zoom. Now you have 100% of the information
that you need. You can work from focal-lengths and apertures to deduce
what cameras have them, or from the other features I mentioned.
Whichever way you approach it you can find out exactly what cameras
and lenses they are.

Why bother? You are an asshole, assholes aren't the sort of people who
have anything to offer in the way of expertise or honesty.


I fail to see why I'd want to willingly and freely help others be
better photographers and find better equipment for themselves at a
lower price. Did you all secretly take up a collection of $10,000 to
pay me for my purchasing department skills?

Yes, haven't you received it yet? Damn couriers, always losing things.

From the posts I read here
not one of you deserve anything from anyone and most certainly not for
free. I did more than I should just by giving you direct clues. The
rest you can figure out on your own.

That explains it!

You are in the habit of giving away clues. Now I understand everything.


Learn to fish. I did and I caught the exact cameras and lenses that I
need for quite some time. May you be so fortunate in all the months of
research that's ahead of you.

It's now your choice on what you want to learn from this post or not.
I can already predict that your learning experience will be no greater
than the rest of the trollish denizens here. I jump to no one's tune
but my own,

Which hand do you use? Still the wrong one?

and certainly not some Usenet trolls whose only lame skill
in life is trying to hit a target at their imaginary dunk-tank. Taunts
get them nowhere but more of the same self-induced ignorance that they
have had all their lives. It's quite entertaining to watch them post
the same misinformation and ignorance in every one of their replies.

You must really enjoy it - I see that you have joined right in.

Cal

John McWilliams wrote:

A perhaps truer test would be to get RAW files from each, but
unfortunately, a lot of compacts don't allow that. At least then, all
the sharpening, tweaks in exposure, color balance, etc. could be the
same, and chromatic aberration left alone or treated the same.

I suspect many users in the target market for P&S
consider the quality of the ob-board processing part
of the camera (or aggregate-camera-package if you like).

BugBear

VernMichaels wrote:
Please stop spreading misinformation, wive's-tales, myths, 10-year-old
drawbacks, and ignorance. Get some experience under your belt with any
of the newer top-shelf P&S cameras before you start making generalized
declarations about all P&S cameras. It appears that you know very
little, and have proved it.

Right back atcha'

You got a case to make - prove it, with verifiable
statements, facts and evidence.

I ain't going googling to make YOUR case.

Make your case, or stop cluttering the place.

BugBear

-hh wrote:
SMS wrote:
Once someone uses a D-SLR, even on a vacation, they're hooked. The
wide-angle and telephoto capability combined with the lack of shutter
lag are big pluses in many situations. For kids, the P&S was still very
much in evidence. They love taking videos.

I saw a similar trend on a Safari in Tanzania two years ago.

Where one of the major attractions is wildlife, those that want to
photograph it will bring an SLR.

And
ironically, it was a 'kid' that we helped out with recharging their
batteries.

My 11 year old really wants an SLR now. He's reached the limit of the
capability of a P&S.

One other thing I found on this trip was just how awful it is to use a
P&S with no optical viewfinder. My sister-in-law bought a new P&S to
replace the Canon S50 we bought her several years ago. Every time she
handed it to me to take a picture of her family it was a painful
experience, trying to shield the LCD from the sun in order to frame the
picture.

SMS wrote:
-hh wrote:
SMS wrote:
Once someone uses a D-SLR, even on a vacation, they're hooked. The
wide-angle and telephoto capability combined with the lack of
shutter lag are big pluses in many situations. For kids, the P&S
was still very much in evidence. They love taking videos.

I saw a similar trend on a Safari in Tanzania two years ago.

Where one of the major attractions is wildlife, those that want to
photograph it will bring an SLR.

And
ironically, it was a 'kid' that we helped out with recharging their
batteries.

My 11 year old really wants an SLR now. He's reached the limit of
the capability of a P&S.

One other thing I found on this trip was just how awful it is to
use a P&S with no optical viewfinder. My sister-in-law bought a new
P&S to replace the Canon S50 we bought her several years ago. Every
time she handed it to me to take a picture of her family it was a
painful experience, trying to shield the LCD from the sun in order
to frame the picture.

The part I hate is grabbing the P&S, whipping it up to my eye, and,
uh, trying to be subtle about moving it out to where I can focus on
the LCD. Blush.

I'm a little bit resigned to inaccurate framing because of the
invisible view on the LCD in certain circumstances. Maybe the world of
today and beyond will look different in family albums.

It took a little getting-used-to when I adopted my family's Kodak
Autographic. Now /there/ was a viewfinder experience. Every move was
counter-intuitive: a little motion to the left, and everything in the
'finder swooped the wrong way!

--
Frank ess

Douglas Johnson wrote:

He's already decided I'm incompetent and has told us so. But it's (notice the
correct use of "it's") a simple question. If he give us some model numbers,
we'll all learn something. If he doesn't answer it, or dodges it, we'll all
learn something else.

Actually 1248mm is easily attained with add-on lenses and teleconverters
stacked together. You can go even further with an Olympus SP-570 Ultra
Zoom which goes out to 520mm natively. Add on two 1.7x converters and
you're at 1532mm f/13.

The problems are many. First, the quality is horrific, with terrible
chromatic aberration because the add-on lenses for digital point and
shoot cameras are invariably of mediocre quality. Also, a 1.7x
teleconverter will turn an f/3.5 lens into a useless f/6 lens. I suspect
that Vern is referring to a Canon S5 IS which natively goes to 432mm
f/3.5, and he simply doesn't understand the math of teleconverters when
he claims 1249mm/f3.5 (as well as not knowing how to round!).

Adding two 1.7x converters causes a 432mm f/3.5 lens to turn into a
1248mm f/10 lens, which is useless. You might get something half-way
passable with manual focus (because auto-focus won't work properly), on
a tripod & using the self-timer (because you must absolutely eliminate
all camera shake), and as long as the subject is stationary.

If you have a fast prime lens then a teleconverter can make sense, i.e.
a 2x teleconverter on a 50mm f/1.8 lens. still yields a somewhat usable
100mm f/3.6 lens.

Vern can begin his education on teleconverters at this site:
"http://www.camerahacker.com/stacking_teleconverters/index.php".

bugbear wrote:
John McWilliams wrote:

A perhaps truer test would be to get RAW files from each, but
unfortunately, a lot of compacts don't allow that. At least then, all
the sharpening, tweaks in exposure, color balance, etc. could be the
same, and chromatic aberration left alone or treated the same.

I suspect many users in the target market for P&S
consider the quality of the ob-board processing part
of the camera (or aggregate-camera-package if you like).

Yes, probably the majority. But not for the likes of us'n here!

--
john mcwilliams

SMS wrote:
Douglas Johnson wrote:

I'd suggest that your average vacation and/or family
photographer will be very pleased with a modern P&S.

Apparently not as pleased as in the recent past. I was just in
Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons, and I was stunned at the huge number
of D-SLRs I saw compared to just a couple of years ago. I'd say that 30%
of the cameras I saw being used were D-SLRs. I got to handle quite a few
of them as groups would ask people to take pictures of them, and I think
they felt more comfortable handing their D-SLR to someone that had one
around their neck. Almost all of the D-SLRs were Canon and Nikon. I saw
maybe three Pentax D-SLRs, but no Olympus or Sony models. Someone
actually handed me a _film_ SLR, I had no idea any of those were still
around. Can you even buy film anymore?

We came across some bears and people were taking pictures of them, and
without a D-SLR and a long telephoto lens you could forget about it, as
was the case with much of the wildlife (same thing in Alaska). There
were people with $7000 Canon 500mm lenses, and my wife said, "you need
one of those!" Actually I used the wide angle lens a lot more than the
telephoto, since we had a group of 12 people that I often took pictures
of. The EF-S 10-22 is a great lens.

Once someone uses a D-SLR, even on a vacation, they're hooked. The
wide-angle and telephoto capability combined with the lack of shutter
lag are big pluses in many situations. For kids, the P&S was still very
much in evidence. They love taking videos.

Now it's true that the type of person that vacations in a National Park
is very different than the type of person that goes to Walt Disney World
or Maui, so the relatively high number of SLRs in use was almost
certainly skewed by the location.

I walked through SF's Chinatown & North Beach the other day and noticed
a lot of DSLRs, even an Oly.

I do with that Canon had a lens similar to the Nikon 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6
G ED-IF AF-S VR DX.


--
Paul Furman
www.edgehill.net
www.baynatives.com

all google groups messages filtered due to spam

-hh wrote:
SMS wrote:
[ Canon S5 IS ]
Adding two 1.7x converters causes
a 432mm f/3.5 lens to turn into a
1248mm f/10 lens, which is useless.

If we try to believe the claim at face value and run the numbers to
make it work, the same P&S sensor (a 72mm lens equivalent to 432mm:
72mm/20mm = f/3.5) after the two 1.7x converters would have to have
originally been ~3x larger in diameter -- growing from ~20mm to ~60mm
-- in order to have the claim obey the basic laws of physics.

Coincidentally, another implication of this is that the camera's
original lens wouldn't have been an f/3.5 before the addition of the
converters: at zoom, it would have been 72mm/60mm = f/1.2 ... and at

"VernMichaels" wouldn't be the first person that didn't understand the
how conversion lenses work!

Douglas Johnson wrote:
It may be kind of anti-climactic by now, but I've updated the website at
http://www.classtech.com/DSLR_PS_Smackdown

to show the original out-of-the-camera JPEG's. A summary of the EXIF data is
under the mid resolution original pictures and the full EXIF data is embedded in
the originals.

Navigation help:
You can click on a thumbnail to get a medium resolution view. Then you can get
a full resolution view by clicking in the lower center of the picture or the
download icon in the lower right of the screen

As most folks figured out, A is the DSLR picture, and B is from the P&S. I
thought the one who figured it out from a tiny bit of dust was particularly
insightful.

It is clear to me that a current model P&S can produce excellent pictures when
it is operating in it's sweet spot. These pictures are right in the P&S sweet
spot. There is more than adequate light, so high ISO noise not a problem. The
subject is static, so shutter and focus lag are not an issue.

As several people have pointed out, the P&S does have more chromatic aberration
and noise even in this "easy" picture. But until you get to pretty large
prints, that's pixel peeping. Don't get me wrong, this comparison invited, even
required pixel peeping.

As you move away from the sweet spot, the DSLR starts to come into it's own. The
lack of shutter lag and high speed focus is a real asset when you are dealing
with fast moving subjects, such as 2 year olds. More difficult lighting,
macro,or long telephoto turns the P&S into a paper weight. The DSLR with it's
interchangeable lens, manual controls, and post processing of raw files will
allow a photographer to keep making pictures.

Of course, the DSLR costs more, weighs more, and bulks bigger. So the world is
full of trade offs. What's new?

This smack down has also highlighted one difference between the two that I
hadn't considered. It seems the P&S manufacturer expects most users won't do
any post processing on their pictures, while the DSLR manufacturer expect that
they will.

The P&S image is sharpened in the camera to the point of losing much of the
texture in the stonework. There doesn't appear to be a camera setting to reduce
this. The DSLR image has little sharpening in camera. There are camera
settings to increase this, but I want the camera to give me a minimally
processed image so I can get it the way I want.

For the record, I've owned both an SLR and a P&S for over 20 years. They both
have their place. I'd suggest that your average vacation and/or family
photographer will be very pleased with a modern P&S.

This has been fun. Thanks.

-- Doug

That was fun, Doug.
As a follow up I'd like to see you take a similar set of pictures......
Same cameras, same or similar exposure, but each camera on a tripod.
Then process each in Photoshop or similar to get the best image you can
from each camera. It may demonstrate the wider exposure range possible
with DSLRs shooting RAW......or not.
It introduces a bit of subjectiveness into the equation, but that is
what happens in the real world.
Bob Williams