DSLR eye for the RF guy?

[Peter Klein]

Peter, I'm slightly surprised to hear you can only see the 50mm framelines with glasses. I wear glasses and I can see both the 50 an 35mm lines perfectly well. The 28 lines are a bit out of my view but not by much.

Yes, I seem to need more eye relief than many other people. It has to do with the shape of my face (I have a prominent eybrow ridge) and my eyeglass prescription. I have the same problem on a .72x Leica. I can see about 4/5 of the 35mm frame. My compositions with a 35mm lens improved when I started wearing contact lenses some of the time. But when I'm traveling or on weekends, I prefer not to wear contacts. I keep my glasses on a neck cord so I can quickly take them off after focusing. This works for landscapes, but not so well for moving people! 🙂

Some great comments and suggestions by everyone, by the way. Thanks! I'll be re-reading them a few times and see what would work best for me.

It's an imperfect world out there, so I'll just have to see what suits me best. I deliberately did not buy any extra lenses or accessories for the E-1, so if I have to bail out, I can. But bailing out is a hassle, and you do lose money. The upcomng Sigma 4/3 30/1.4 is indeed a possibility, though pricey and heavy.

--Peter

 

[KEH]

Pentax has some wonderful glass, new and vintage. And it all will work with the istDS2 body. Viewfinder is excellent, permitting manual focusing. Small and light and good ergonomics. This is my 'alternative rangefinder.'

Photos here - mostly snapshots, and quality is hard to judge with little jpg's.

Cheers,
Kirk

 

[amateriat]

Well, SLRs are now a niche category in my photography – there's an Olympus OM2n that gets pressed into service whenever I need to do extreme close-up work, but other than that I use RFs and the occasional pocket 35. The only digicam I can tolerate happens to be an Olympus: the Camedia C8080. I had high hopes for the E-1 when it came out, but they've largely been dashed by the dearth of decent primes, the overemphasis on outsized (and outpriced...have you seen what they're asking for some of their newest numbers?) zooms., and the E-1's underwhelming low-light performance. Provided they aren't eaten alive by Canon and/or Nikon by this time next year, maybe they'll bring out a decent prime or two, along with a reworked flagship model.

If I were buying a dSLR right now, Pentax seems to have the right idea: small body, better than fair-to-middling sensor performance, and a lens mount and adaptor system that lets you go as far back in the Pentax catalog as you like. But if I'm doing anything digital, it'll be with just the 8080, which handles just about anything I'd care to do via digital capture.


- Barrett

 

[Dougg]

...The Oly body is thinner than the other DSLRs, so it has the ability to mount lenses from many other manufacturers - fun if you have a collection of older primes or zooms from another system that you want to put to use.

I presume you have seen this, but just in case:

http://www.cameraquest.com/adapt_olyE1.htm

I'm very surprised that at least the Olympus-to-Olympus adaptor doesn't transfer auto-diaphragm action from the body to lens. True for all other lens mounts too: "All 4/3 adapters operate at shooting aperture -- you manually open or close the lens aperture using the lens aperture ring" and "Stop down TTL ambient light or flash metering, as well as stop down AE priority at shooting aperture." Hard to imagine putting up with this inconvenience these days, and this lack is a "killer" of the adapting idea for me. I have used a similar adaptor to mount Pentax M42 lenses on an Olympus Pen F; fine for some special purpose lens but not for everyday use, IMHO. Advantage to Pentax *istD...

 

[RObert Budding]

I bought a Nikon D200 - it's too difficult to shoot my kid's soccer games with a RF! Nice camera, and you can use the older Nikon primes and still get matrix metering (nice for sports and rapidly changing light). Another bonus is the older Nikon primes are very good lenses and very cheap. And the pre-AI lenses can be adapted for $25.