Richard Jones' Log: New camera

I've been wanting to get a Digital SLR for a very long time now. I even had one on my Amazon wishlist for a while there ;)

Thanks to a variety of factors - not the least of which was the price being AU$900 - I finally bought a Canon EOS 400D. And boy is it nice.

It's the third generation of their consumer digital SLR line, and it really does show. It has a bunch of "prosumer" features that I'd always thought would be nice to have some day, like the old 30D's 9-point AF, or the depth-of-field preview that the older non-digital prosumer models had. Unlike even my old film SLR this thing can shoot photos as quickly as I can focus them from power-on (under a second if I'm lucky). And the "basic" modes are so much more useful now than they were in the old SLR. For example, the Portrait mode doesn't just set a preference for wide aperature, it also isn't afraid to use fill-in flash (really, really well-exposed), sets the camera to continuous shot mode (to compensate for blinking ;) and tweaks the colour model slightly to emphasise flesh tones. And it can take 17 shots (3 per second) in continuous mode before it needs to push data to the memory card (presumably it can do more if I reduce resolution, but I've not tested).

I've got some new photos up on Flickr taken with the new camera.