It’s all in the ISO

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 🙂