Flights are confirmed (but not booked), camera will be ordered soon. At this point, over the next month and a half, I’ll probably be through:
- Melbourne
- Sydney
- Canberra
- Brisbane
- Wellington
- Auckland
- Hawaii
- North Carolina
Looking forward to things calming down a little, to be honest. All I need is Perth, Adelaide, and Darwin, and I’d have the ANZ royal flush. At least I’m not going to Singapore / London as well (which was on the cards at one point).
Anyway, I’ve definitely settled on the Nikon D80. The Canon 400D just felt too cramped in my hands. I really wanted to go with the Canon - I’ve owned an A70 for ages, and it’s been a good camera to me. I wanted to like the 400D. I really did. In the end though, it was just too small - I couldn’t get a comfortable enough grip on it to think I’d enjoy using it.
I also thought long and hard about the Pentax K10D - feature for feature, it beats the Nikon D80. Dust-sealed joints, anti-shake, and so on. It’s even a little bit cheaper (assuming you go through one of the grey-market importers). The single biggest killer for me was concern about the investment I’d make into lenses. I’ve been told by a few people that while finding Pentax compatible lenses in Australia can be a bit difficult, they’re still very high quality. My main issue was that given how difficult it is to find lenses right now, what does that mean for the future? The glass manufacturers chase the biggest markets, and at the moment, that’s Canon and Nikon. It seems that you can get specialist lenses for all the cameras, but “specialist” doesn’t normally mean “cheap”. Both Canon and Nikon have massive lens support, and to be honest, I doubt that’s going to drop off in the forseeable future. Pentax, on the other hand, seems to have somewhat limited investment in their digital cameras. So, I’m not quite sure how committed they are to the market - they could easily just slide back into point and shoots or scale back into pure consumer digital SLRS, focusing on super zoom lenses and little else.
I’d probably get the Pentax over the Canon 400D (given that they’re in roughly the same price range), but I’d rather the D80 overall. Given I want to get one or two primes at some stage, I’d really rather a wide selection of options, ranging from the cheap to expensive. And, I’d also rather have strong first-party lens support rather than just a third-party lens focus.
So there we are. I’ve also decided to get the 18-135mm kit lens instead of the 18-70mm - that should give me more than enough range for normal shooting (27-200mm equivalent) without too much apparent loss in image quality. Not as fast at the 18-70mm, but everything’s a trade-off. And, I won’t bother with the 70-300mm cheapie - I’d rather save up and get the 70-300mm VR later instead. Really looking forward to having a working camera again.
Latest updates:
- Finished the review of Command and Conquer 3. Not such a great game. A good game, but not a great one.
- Eminence was good fun. Far more impressive than I was expecting, to be honest.
- Still haven’t bottled my beer. Really need to do it soon.
- No general writing lately - haven’t had the time, to be honest. Planning to catch up this Thursday. Would be doing it tonight, but I’m too stuffed - got up at 5:00am to catch the flight this morning, and didn’t get to sleep last night until around midnight.