Went over on Friday to hang out with Kelora and Whitenight, which was fun. Played around with their Canon Digital Rebel. It was nice to actually play with it in a non-store situation, cause I didn’t feel guilty for handing it, or have a salesdroid hanging over me making sure I didn’t drop it or spit on it or steal it or something. The 28-200mm IS lense they put on it was pretty nice too 🙂 I took some test shots, and the thing that impressed me the most was the flexibility in ISO. It could go from 100-1600, and at 1600 you could take handheld shots at 1/80 @ F5.6 in a relatively poorly lit room. If I were to try the same I’d have to put it to ISO 400 and it’d be probably about a 1s shot. Of course, the IS lense also helped a lot, allowing me to handhold 1/4 second shots.
Still, that’s a huge bonus of a “real” DSLR that I’d never thought of before. The Digital Rebel is still pretty big, and I’m sure I could deal with it, but still, having Pentax lenses already still makes me lean towards the Pentax *ist Digital (caution, image heavy link). Given unlimited money of course. Since I don’t have unlimited money (yet, I’m still working on it) it’s all pretty irrelevant. Anyone care to donate to this worthy cause? I’ve accumulated about $150 US from people for bandwidth costs, I’m sure I can do just as well for the “Get Alan another camera” fund 🙂