t2i

[daq7]

I got tired of waiting for Amazon to get some stock in of body-only t2i's. Best buy had a sale where with the kit lens it was only $50 more than Amazon's price for body only. So I went and got that. I will not be posting a full review until I have had a chance to use it, but I will start flagging the shots I do with it so you guys can check out the image quality. Of course a lot of that will depend on the lens... Any type of shots I should try to expose its weaknesses?

[Franglais]

I got tired of waiting for Amazon to get some stock in of body-only t2i's. Best buy had a sale where with the kit lens it was only $50 more than Amazon's price for body only. So I went and got that. I will not be posting a full review until I have had a chance to use it, but I will start flagging the shots I do with it so you guys can check out the image quality. Of course a lot of that will depend on the lens... Any type of shots I should try to expose its weaknesses?

- Tree branches against a clear sky. Check out the violet fringe at the border between the sky and the branch
- Try to do a photo of a brick wall, with the camera perfectly parallel to it and check out if the lines look curved (distortion). Or a seascape, see if the horizon is curved (difficult in Colorado?)

I wouldn't worry about it. I use the plastic 18-55 kit lens on my D60 for all my holiday shots and it's fine. But I wouldn't use it for anything professional.

[daq7]

Oh, I have no intention of using the kit lens. I don't have any prime glass yet, but I have some lenses that are better than that.

[Franglais]

Oh, I have no intention of using the kit lens. I don't have any prime glass yet, but I have some lenses that are better than that.

Which lenses?

An interesting test of the body would be to use the T2i normally - without a tripod - and see if you can actually see an improvement in resolution compared with your current DSLR (Rebel XT?). Do the same shot hand-held with your two cameras and post a same-size picture here and see if we can tell which is which.

The French magazines have been saying that the definition on the T2i/7D is so fine that you have to use it with a tripod and the very best lenses (60mm Macro) to get the full resolution out of it. Plus downsizing a 18Mpix image to 800x600 to fit on this site would probably eliminate any visible improvement. Or would it?

[daq7]

I will do that Franglais. It's a good idea. I will not be surprised if it is hard to tell the difference. I may do it at different ISO levels as well.

[daq7]

I have a Canon 70-300mm usm lens, a 100mm macro , and a 28-135 mm. All medium quality lenses I think.

[Anbesol]

The 100mm macro is definitely a couple notches above 'medium quality'.

[daq7]

How do you tell what the really good quality lenses are?

[Anbesol]

by their optical qualities. The canon 100mm macro has excellent resolution, probably one of the highest res Canon lens' available.

[daq7]

Yeah, but I mean when you are buying, do you just have to read a lot of reviews? I think I want to get a high quality wide angle zoom. I would like to get a good one. I may or may not eventually buy a really good quality long lens. I guess I should start doing all my portrait work with the 100mm macro...

[Anbesol]

First have to consider how it will be used, then consider the optical qualities that matter most. The 100mm f/2.8 is an excellent resolution champion, but the huge focus range makes for a very slow AF. It has a uniquely excellent ability for still-life, but not quite so good for action and portraiture, a 70-200 f/2.8 is much better there.

As for the 'wide angle zoom', that depends entirely on what you want the widest to be, 10, 15, 18, 20, 24?

I'm also in need of a wide angle zoom (as of now the widest I have is 24-50 f/4, and 28-75 f/2.8), and with all the research I have done, and in view of being economic without sacrificing optial quality - it will be the Tamron 17-50 f/2.8. I've tried it and like it, I've seen it produce excellent images. Canon has some in wider ranges, but slower variable apertures like the 15-85. For me, the 2.8 wide is important, for some, the wider range is more important.

[Franglais]

How do you tell what the really good quality lenses are?

I read the reviews in magazines. Chasseurs d'Images is particularly good, I've been following them for years.

I look at sites like Photozone.de. Their results are pretty much in line with the Chasseurs d'Images

I read the reviews in this site. The user reviews are not as technical as the others but they're interesting, real-life experience.

And finally I do my own testing with my stuff. That's what counts - what I can actually achieve.

[daq7]

I am not sure what I need really, but I think lower than the 28 I have. Plus I want to have some good glass for landscape work. Not sure I am in a super hurry on that lens. I need to do some work this summer with what I have.

[Anbesol]

I am not sure what I need really, but I think lower than the 28 I have. Plus I want to have some good glass for landscape work. Not sure I am in a super hurry on that lens. I need to do some work this summer with what I have.

Anything wider than ~16mm would be an exclusively super-wide angle lens. 24-28mm has taken care of my wide angle use for a while, but I definitely feel its limitations in my shooting. 18mm is a much more comfortable wide on an APS body, but not a mandatory width.

[daq7]

This is all very preliminary, but I learned a couple things from shooting with the t2i last night or at least I think I did.

I have been tone mapping for years, because I really like it, but I always had issues with tone mapping really dark images, like cities at night, because photmatix amplifies noise, since it sees it as local contrast I think. It always annoyed me, but you can deal with it if you work at it enough. But since I am doing tons of flash photography, I have become increasingly dissatisfied with tone mapping software, because it is a pain to get multiple shots of the same scene, because I think you have to adjust the flash exposure and the camera exposure independently. Maybe I am wrong about that, but anyway I have been taking my exposures for tone mapping flash photography from a single raw file. This makes the noise problem WAY worse, since you don't have any randomization, and the tone mapping software sees exactly the same noise in each shot, which makes it think even more that it is legitimate image information.

Tone maps made in this way are almost useless if they have any dark areas in them, since you get really bright splashes of hot pixels that make the dark areas ugly. I still use tone maps but blend them with non tone mapped layers partly to deal with this noise problem. The only way to avoid that is to have little or no noise in the source.

Well, I took a couple shots with the T2i, and did hyper-aggressive tone mapping, and to my surprise I saw NO hot pixels. Zero. I was stunned. Admittedly the shots I took did not have huge dark areas, but the Van Gogh one in the critique forum has some areas that I am certain would have been filled with noise pixels on either the original Rebes XT or the Powershot G11. It looks to me like the T2i may be almost absolutely noise free at ISO 100. I was so stunned I could not stop using the word stunned when I posted the images. If this is true it is going to make my investment in the camera body one of the best things I have ever done for myself in photography.

The second thing that I THINK I learned is that more megapixels matter a LOT for tone mapping. People almost scared me away from it with warnings that more megapixels will make taking good quality pictures harder, and it may very well for normal photography, but I think higher resolution makes extreme tone mapping look less grungy. It makes some sense to me. Extreme tone mapping increases local contrast. I am not sure how to describe what I mean, but I think that at lower resolutions, the chunkiness gets amplified and looks very artificial. I think the higher resolution helps the increases in local contrast look less coarse. I am not yet certain of this either, but the two pictures I took and posted in the critique forum cause me to think it is true.

If these two things actually are true, then I am quite excited about the prospects for what I can do with this camera body. Here is hoping!

[Photo-John]

Oh, I have no intention of using the kit lens. I don't have any prime glass yet, but I have some lenses that are better than that.

Not sure what lenses you have, but don't discount the current kit lens too quickly. It's surprisingly good. No, it's not L glass. But I've happily used it plenty of times because it's so small and light. It's really pretty good.

[Frog]

Wide angle....I suggest Tokina 11-16 f/2.8