VERY DARK IMAGES

Having been a Nikon CP990 user and prior to that a Canon EOS3 user the move to a D30 was an expected progression.

The camera is all that I expected to be but what I did get which was not expected was a large number (the majority) of very dark images. Probably under exposed by about 1 stop or more.

Images are repairable using Auto adjust in Photoshop 5.5 but my question is: Do I have a problem camera?

Hap on the DPreview Canon SLR forum beat me to asking this question by minutes as he also has just taken ownership of a D30 and has exactly the same problem.

He says that it appears to be OK if he does not use evaluative or spot metering.

Any comments, help, or advice would be most welcome. Apart from this problem I am very happy with the camera.

Bryan

You *may* have a camera that needs to be adjusted... or you may not. :>

Nice thing about digital is that it costs almost nothing to find out. I *love* the learning tool that my D30 is for that very reason.

Take the camera out into the sunlight and shoot a frame filling shot of an 18% gray card. Then look at the histogram of that shot. I'd expect a pretty narrow peak right around the center of the range. I'll try to shoot one myself tomorrow with my D30 - I'm quite happy with the exposure, and I'm pretty critical.

I suspect, but am not 100% sure that you should also get the same results if you shoot a plain white sheet of paper. I would expect the camera to try to turn this to a middle gray shade.

I don't think metering mode should matter in this case, because the whole frame would be filled with gray. Be sure that the light on the card is totally even - no shadows, etc.

In a perfect world, I'd expect you could load the image into Photoshop and see a brightness value right in the center of the range.

By the way, for digital pics, I'd rather have a slight underexposure than an overexposure. With an overexposure, there's no data there - full whites are unrecoverable. But shadow detail, ***ESPECIALLY IF YOU SHOOT IN RAW MODE***, may be recoverable using Photoshop or other image manipulation program.

On the www.dpreview.com forum, I recall seeing a procedure from a Canon rep for testing your exposure, but I'd expect this simpler method to work fine.

Some people have reported this with their cameras. They've returned them to Canon, and gotten them back adjusted in about a week. I've read several people say that they are happy with the adjustment. I don't recall any that were unhappy. So...bad news, 1 week sans D30. Good news - fully adjustable and fixable.

Good shooting!

-lee-

Hi Lee,

I spoke to canon UK and my dealer. My dealer did an excellent one for on exchange by courier and I ma glad to say that the new D30 is much closer to what I expected.

With such a camera I would be surprised if I was ever happy with image straight out of camera knowing, as we do, that we can do so much with it.

Been out today in our Derbyshire Dales and more than happy with the results.

Thanks for the contact and the advice.

Bryan

Hi Bryan,

Glad to hear that the new D30 is working better for you. It seems like for an expensive camera like this one, Canon needs to do a better job of final QA

Good shooting,
-lee-

I had lots of exposure flucutations until I switched the metering mode from it's default. (evaluative) the center weighted full frame. After making this change in the menu my exposures are all pretty much right on (slightly under - but it's better for digital images to be under than over) so I'm very pleased with the meter after making this change.

try it.