A70 Zoom lens

[mlazlo]

I own a Canon A70. Does anyone have a suggestion on a 'next step up' from what came with the camera, zoom lens?
Thanks in advance

[Jon]

There's not a lot you can do to boost an A70, if that's what you're asking. Canon has a lens adapter which replaces the lens bezel and will hold wide or telephoto lens adapters, or filters.

If you want to move to a more advanced camera, what areas of the A70 experience do you find lacking? Resolution? Do you want wider angle or more telephoto lenses? Is the flash weaker than you'd like? Is it too slow to react when you press the shutter? Do you want to use multiple flash lighting setups? Do you like to take pictures in fairly dark conditions? Do you want to take longer, or higher-resolution, movies? Depending on which of these (if any) describe your concerns (and, without meaning to denigrate the A70, all are areas where someone has expressed concerns), there may be several possible solutions, at several different price.

[mlazlo]

All that you mention seem to be weaknesses that I have come across with this camera. Even with these weaknesses I still think that I got a lot of camera for the money. I by no means am I camera expert but I started to play around with setting different features that are configurable to get better pictures than using 'Auto'. The one thing that bothers me and I cannot seem to figure out how to set this camera, is when I am shooting at, say 9.6 zoom in low light. It's not dark but let's say the light is about what would be used in a school cafeteria. I mention that becuase I was attempting to take pictures at that 9.6 zoom of my son in a school band, but the pictures turn up very 'nosiey'. I figured a better lens, maybe telephoto would help.
Thanks.

[Don Schaeffer]

When you buy a telephoto auxillary or wide angle auxillary you still have a zoom lens. I use a .6x wide angle which gives me from 21 mm to 63 mm equivalence.

These lenses do not "stop down" in auto mode. The image you see is with the lens wide open. It stops down only during exposure. If you want to be able to see more exactly what the camera sees, use the manual mode. It works very much like a manual stop down lens (with auto focus).

[J___]

u can get a telephoto lense.

i'm selling my a70 witht he lense, i can part out the lense and adpater if ur interested.

to see what it looks like go here: http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=39063

[Jon]

If you're using 9.6x zoom, you're using the "digital zoom" function, and that's going to give you a really blocky picture, since all digital zoom does is take the central part of the picture and enlarge it (same as you would do in PhotoShop, for instance). And when you're shooting in low light, with a high ISO setting, you'll also get a lot of noise because small sensors (like in the PowerShot A & S series) are generally noisier than large (as in the Eos DSLRs) sensors.

A telephoto adapter will help with the first part of this problem, by freeing you from digital zoom, but can't do much about the second. Depending on what instrument your son plays, you might be able to work with a lower ISO speed setting if you mount the camera on a tripod, which would help the sensor noise problem.

[mlazlo]

Thanks for all the feed back. If I can eliminate some of my problem with a telephoto lens, does anyone have any recommendations on a telephoto lens?

[Jon]

There's a little Japanese company called Canon that makes some pretty good optics. You'll need to get their lens holder anyway.