No, it’s not mine yet… soon though. There was a thread on the dpreview forums which almost had me writing checks though 🙂
No, these are a store camera that I got my greasy paws on a little tighter today. I hit the local Lense & Shutter, where I’ve been trying to insert myself as a “regular” and get to know the guys and gals working there and talk, get advice and so forth. Anyway I went in with my own CF card, some half dead batteries and a couple of questions. The first is would they match prices from real stores (not web only places obviously) in Vancouver as Dunne and Rundle have the same model for $200 less than anyone else. They could. ay. I like the guys there, but that’s a lot of money to get off of the cost of a bigger ticket item and would be worth the gas to drive out to Vancouver.
The second was could I try out the camera a bit, take some shots with the kit lense at various apateurs and settings to look at for myself. Jerry was nice enough to let me go outside (with him of course) with the kit 18-35mm lense and a $600-700 28-135mm Tamron AF lense. Sure a bit out of my price range now but good to know what is available, and even better to see the quality of the images before you have to pay 🙂
Anyway, if anyone is interested, the shots are up here for your viewing pleasure. It’s raw and uncut, with no modifications done to any images other than the ones named “copy…” are rotated (and they are the only ones rotated). There’s really nothing artistic in there, more me taking random shots and playing with settings (mostly apateur and zoom) so I could see how good each one was. The images starting with this one were taken with the Tamron 24-135mm and the ones previous were with the kit 18-35mm lense.
Feel free to download the original images and look at them in detail, check out the EXIF info compare, contrast, etc. My initial impressions are yes, the kit lense is a bit soft. Blowing up this image (18mm at F4.0) and this one (18mm at F22) show it in the car detail in the bottom left; and this one (35mm at F5.6) and this one (35mm at F32) show it in the Remax sign in the middle left. Not a huge deal, and not a scientific test by any means. However, the Tamron also shows the same if you look at this (24mm at F6.7) or this (135mm at F22), so either it’s supposed to be like that or I’m just looking too hard. Personally just viewing at 100% (I was doing some 300% blow ups just to be a bastard) they all look pretty decent 🙂 Many thanks to the L&S folks for letting me check it out.
Oh, and don’t blame the ones with badly underexposed forgrounds on the camera, but the photographer 🙂