PDA

View Full Version : Upgrade D60 => 1D, first impressions (long)


colorblind
30th of March 2003 (Sun), 02:12
I just upgraded my D60 to a 1D. These are my impressions:


1. Wow!
Beautiful, heavy, indestructible. All the buttons feel right. I love this camera.


2. It just works.
None of the quirks of the D60.

* AF is incredible, especially on my 200mm 1:2,8 L

* WB is perfect.

* Never lets you down: If you fill up your buffer on a D60 and take your finger from the trigger you can´t shoot for about 20 sec. On the 1D the velocity just gradually slows down to 3 fps which it can maintain indefinitely.

* The 1D battery lasts all day, lenses with IS can suck a D60 battery dry pretty fast.


3. Very minor complaints

* When the camera shoots AdobeRGB, why doesn´t it embed the AdobeRGB profile?

* The camera doesn´t like my Voigtländer 400mm. (Ok, it´s not an Canon L, but my D60 wasn´t that picky).


4. UI is brain damaged.

* I wrote my thesis on computer human interaction and came across some pretty bad UIs. However I never saw something as counter-intuitive as the 1D menu logic. For a start you select something by stopping pushing a button.

* For the most common tasks you have to push and hold two buttons while turning a dial. This dial can´t even be reached if you have your hand in the wrist strap. If your camera isn´t on a tripod you have a problem.

* On the other hand completely uncommon tasks have dedicated buttons. The FEL button (???) even exists twice on the camera.

* Unfriendly software: For example the color matrices are labelled 1 through 5 instead of sRGB, AdobeRGB,…

* There are some features intentionally left out.
For example Presets: Let´s say I´m shooting landscape and suddenly I spot some fast animal. I change the AF to servo. I change the shooting mode to continuous. I change the exposure mode to Av and the aperture to widest. I change WB to auto. (Each one of these actions is two-handed). On my D60 I would have just turned the main dial to “sport”.

Why have they left this out? “There are too many buttons already” can´t be the answer, because the camera DOES have useless buttons & features. Voice recording anyone? If I need a voice memo to remind me what this picture was about I guess it is doomed anyway ;-)

I guess this is the same reason Ferrari will never build a car with automatic transmission. “real men don´t need this”. Grrr.

Okay, enough of the rant.

5. Conclusion: It took me just a few days to get used to the UI, but now I have a much more powerful camera. I´m very glad I made the transition. 8fps!

Slow
30th of March 2003 (Sun), 02:40
The only annoying thing to me with the 1D is that the zoom feature is missing (My D30 has it and I understand the D60(does the 10D?))....wish the 1D had!!

colorblind
30th of March 2003 (Sun), 02:53
I only used the LCD zoom feature to see whether the focus was ok. I guess this is less an issue with 1d. :-)