Making the jump: pocket vs. prosumer vs. dSLR (1 Viewer)

[ManW_TheUncool]

For anyone interested, Nikon is now offering a rebate for the D70 also and has doubled the rebate on some of their lenses and flash -- although I'm not too sure how those doubled rebates work.

_Man_

 

[Sam Posten]

Oh, bump blast from the past!



For the record, I'm no longer on the fence and I put my money where my drool has been. So far I have the 20d, the CHEAP kit lens and Photoshop CS on order. I intend to get the 50 1.4 and the 100 2.8 Macro USM once my wallet recovers, and have a whole checklist of L waiting for me to save up for again.



I love the 20 big time. The only thing that has me off is that Canon lenses dont have an aperature ring, its taking a while to get used to doing that on camera. I love that about my Nikon.



I'll post some pics once I have Photoshop in hand, I'm shooting raw for the last week and I've been saving em up to convert em all at once with ACR. I know that the 20D has Canons DPP software bundled in, but I couldnt beat buying Photoshop for under $300 with the Canon/Adobe deal.



Sam

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

Congrats on the new camera. Guess you didn't want to bother w/ RAW+JPEG then.

$300 is a great deal for PS CS. I paid $375 recently for the complete CS Premium suite through my sister, who works for Parsons. Would've just gone w/ PS CS alone for $275, but figured the rest of that suite is worth the extra $100 even though I have no real plans to use them yet.



I guess you didn't want to wait and check out PS Elements v3 to see if that's good enough for you.



Don't know how PS CS ACR RAW converter performs by default for the Canon 20D, but it definitely needs some serious tweaking for Nikon D70. I get much better results from Nikon's RAW converter when leaving settings at default or using some basic adjustments -- heck, even the in-camera JPEGs look better. I just might end up using the Nikon converter as the RAW plug-in inside PS CS -- yes, the ACR RAW converter is just an interchangeable plug-in. I guess I need to do some research to see what people have found to be good default settings for ACR RAW converter. OR maybe Adobe will come out w/ better defaults for the D70.



Also, not sure if 20D offers custom tone curves, but they don't seem to be supported by the ACR RAW converter. There is another 3rd party startup that's churning out software specifically to take good advantage of Nikon's custom tone curves feature -- RAWMagick -- and I might end up adding that to my setup.



FWIW, nowadays, I'm starting to look more at lighting gear. I finally bought the pro flash for the D70 and am looking at AlienBees for potential studio-type lighting.



_Man_