Luminous Landscape Forum
Site & Board Matters => About This Site => Topic started by: David Sutton on July 12, 2012, 05:25:52 pm
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Nice review and nice socks Michael.
Funny you should mention the Rollei. It was the theft of my Rollei 35 that forced me into digital, and I've never found the digital equivalent.
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When I got a GF1 with the little 20mm lens, I thought it was a pretty good facsimile of several old compact 35mm film cameras that I used. But it's not really pocketable since the lens doesn't retract, so the new Sony looks like a great option.
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No picture of the real camera? How about a side-by-side picture with that Rollei 35, Michael?
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I saw a photo of the Queen (of England) holding a Rollei 35 once. I wonder if she'll get herself one of these. :)
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Thanks for the review! I've ordered one!
Finally a shirt pocket camera to fill the last gap in the arsenal. Man, this type of camera took a long time to arrive in the marketplace...
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The Rollei 35 had a viewfinder.......
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How did you get around the lack of a viewfinder?
Dave S
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Your mention of the Rollei 35 sure brought back memories. Long ago I was in Wales using my Rollei 6008, when a terrific wind blew up, seemingly out of nowhere. It blew the tripod with the Rollei over before I could grab it, and the only thing that saved that trip was the sweet little Rollie 35 that had come along for the ride. It’s amazing how much nostalgia dwells up at the memory of some of these wonderful old cameras.
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The Rollei 35 had a viewfinder.......
Quite, and it's absurd that anyone accepts a digital camera without one.
My experiences with my cellpix machine has convinced me that, today, there ¡s a buyer for anything that a manufacturer deigns to put out there. In other words, not only one is born every minute, but enough ones to maintain a friggin' industry!
Of course, this all comes from the idea that old is inevitably flawed and therefore something different has to be introduced both to discredit the old and clothe the new emperor in more of his Sunday best. Holding a 'camera' at arm's length is about as dumb a way of doing it as I've ever encountered.
Caveat emptor, indeed.
Rob C
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I think of LCD screens as the modern day incarnation of ground glass finders, and EVFs as the modern day incarnation of optical viewfinders. Plenty of people shot happily with ground glass in the past. I happen to prefer the viewfinder approach most of the time, but, for a true pocket cam in particular, I think the LCD is an acceptable method.
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Nice review, pretty much matches my findings.
Sony has obviously defined a very clear strategy - stuff the largest possible sensor in the smallest possible body. Pretty amazingly, they seem to be the only ones having tried to do this real bad, meaning that all the other guys were either unable or unwilling to do it...
The only question is when is Sony going to apply this to 35mm sensors!
Cheers,
Bernard
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I think of LCD screens as the modern day incarnation of ground glass finders, and EVFs as the modern day incarnation of optical viewfinders. Plenty of people shot happily with ground glass in the past. I happen to prefer the viewfinder approach most of the time, but, for a true pocket cam in particular, I think the LCD is an acceptable method.
I suffered few frustrations with the ground glass screens of MPP, Sinar, Rolleiflex, Mamiya and Hasselblad, Exakta and Nikon products. Of course plenty of us shot happily with such screens in the past - it's my point: you held them to your face, not cantilevered a mile in front of you, and they had either pentaprisms or hoods to keep the ambient light off them. Simply deciding to make a mental comparison between the two systems (LCD and ground glass) doesn't at all mean that it's a valid one.
Like you, I too prefer a viewfinder; obviously that's why I made the post, and it's an insult to the buyer to make him accept lousy substitutes and compromises.
Cellphones should be for speaking, and tiny cameras for shooting pictures via the normal, efficient and well-established methods of yore, but with the digital advantages of size and cost. I assume that digital does bring such advantages?
Rob C
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The problem with my Hasselblad was that I couldn't fit it into my pocket, so I'll happily accept the lack of a viewfinder.
Have a nice weekend everyone!
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I will accept no VF as a trade-off to get true pocketability. The OVFs on the older Canon ELFs were useless for accurate framing; to achieve that you need an OVF or EVF of sufficient size to make the RX100 form factor impossible.
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Just ordered one; looks tickety boo on paper and the review, hoping it will be good enough for serious work. A lot of earlier shirt-pocket pretenders almost hit the spot, but I ended up struggling with that powdery noise that affects the ultra-small sensor cameras.
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Umm ... maybe this is a dumb question, but can any of the RX100 owners point me to a user manual to download? ???
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Umm ... maybe this is a dumb question, but can any of the RX100 owners point me to a user manual to download? ???
Haven't needed one yet ... One hour of exploring the menus and I was on my way ...
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Haven't needed one yet ... One hour of exploring the menus and I was on my way ...
Hum... same here. The out of the box settings are mostly fine. I was operational in less than 10 mins.
A mode, auto ISO. I will need to change the AF settings one of these days though. :)
Cheers,
Bernard
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I believe that you can download it here - http://www.fotoez.net/sony-cyber-shot-dsc-rx100-compact-digital-camera-users-manual-owners-instruction-13951 (http://www.fotoez.net/sony-cyber-shot-dsc-rx100-compact-digital-camera-users-manual-owners-instruction-13951)
Otherwise I found mine after someone on DPReview posted a link - http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1009&message=41959390 (http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1009&message=41959390)
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I believe that you can download it here - http://www.fotoez.net/sony-cyber-shot-dsc-rx100-compact-digital-camera-users-manual-owners-instruction-13951 (http://www.fotoez.net/sony-cyber-shot-dsc-rx100-compact-digital-camera-users-manual-owners-instruction-13951)
Otherwise I found mine after someone on DPReview posted a link - http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1009&message=41959390 (http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1009&message=41959390)
Great -the second link works perfectly - many thanks :-)
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In film days I had a small collection of fixed lens rangefinder cameras. Never had a Rollei, but did have an Olympus XA that spent a lot of time traveling in my pockets. Often I didn't need something THAT small, and would use one of the other fixed lens rangefinders. Excellent lenses.
To date I've convinced myself that m4/3 is as small as it gets for the kind of image quality I want from my anyplace anytime camera. A nice three lens kit fits in a small belt bag. I arrived at that situation via too many compact cameras bought and then sold with few activations. There was always something that disappointed enough to make me unwilling to trust them for anything beyond birthday party snapshots. The closest I came with compact cameras was the Canon G10-G12, and that's not so compact.
Hoping against hope, I broke my rule of "borrow for a few weeks before buying" and placed an order yesterday.
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Sony has obviously defined a very clear strategy - stuff the largest possible sensor in the smallest possible body. ...
The only question is when is Sony going to apply this to 35mm sensors!
The big constraint of course is what Michael already said about the f/4.9 lens speed at the long end: to keep the camera compact while offering the sort of telephoto reach that most people want (say to at least twice normal?), the bigger format needs a longer focal length but is limited to the same maximum effective aperture diameter, so the minimum f-stop at the long end has to go up in proportion to the focal length and the (linear) sensor size. The sensor size factor of 2.7x would turn a lens this compact into about a f/13 ... which is indeed about what the compact 35mm film cameras with zoom to 100mm+ offered, making ISO 800 film the standard recommendation for them.
Of course, the camera (and aperture) could be somewhat bigger than in the RX 100, but so long as you keep the camera size and zoom range the same as in a smaller format, the speed and shallow DOF advantages over a smaller format are lost towards the long end of the focal length range.
On the other hand, the shorter focal lengths can gain: for example, the f/1.8 wide end of the RX 100 should outperform the wide end of smaller format cameras. One has to accept that a compact 35mm camera (or any "big sensor small camera") is best suited to not going much into the telephoto range, and probably working mostly with prime lenses. That makes it a specialty product, but at least Fujifilm is going a bit in that direction with the X-1 Pro X-Pro 1.
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But! the Rollei 35 was a "full frame" 35mm compact, physics has not changed, computer design has gotten better so why not a full frame or apsc compact lens?
Marc
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Question for owners: unless I'm doing it wrong, it seems that the control ring changes the focus VERY slowly, so that to go from near to far would take ages. What is your actual procedure for focussing? Use AF first and then fine-tune?
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Marc,
But! the Rollei 35 was a "full frame" 35mm compact ...
Did you miss my comments about focal lengths desires and maximum effective aperture diameters? The Rollei 35 models had only a fixed 40mm, of at best a rather sluggish f/2.8 or in other cases an even worse f/3.5. So at biggest a 14mm effective aperture diameter: that measure along with actual focal length is probably the iron constraint on lens size, and thus on overall camera size. And it get far worse with zoom lenses than with primes.
... physics has not changed, computer design has gotten better so why not a full frame or apsc compact lens?
One thing that has changed dramatically is sensor cost comparisons between formats: 36x24mm format film and processing was about as cheap as or cheaper than smaller formats, thanks in part to its economies of scale, and printing costs dominating over film and processing costs for most photographers. So it made economic sense to achieve a compact camera with the combination of slow lenses and fast 35mm film in competition with smaller formats. (That is how 35mm film compacts eventually killed the smaller format Kodak Instamatic 110 and disk cameras.) With electronic sensors instead, there is a huge cost disadvantage to 36x24mm format compared to smaller formats, for reasons that are debated perpetually in this forum and elsewhere. Also, the IQ differences between 35mm and smaller formats are far less with today's sensors than they were with film: a far greater proportion of photographers are satisfied with the IQ of digital formats like "APS-C" or 4/3" or even 1" than ever were with film formats that small, so the demand and willingness to pay the price and size premiums for 36x24mm format is less now that it was with film.
And to repeat yet again because it keeps being ignored: the size issue with making good use of a larger format is mostly about _lens size_ far more than body size, as soon as the user wants focal lengths significantly longer than normal. I agree that it should be technologically easy enough to fit a 36x24mm sensor into a very small camera body, since for one thing the standard 3" rear LCD is far larger than that sensor (about 60x45mm), but to keep the complete working camera compact, focal lengths are severely limited, unless pointlessly slow zoom lenses are used in order to keep the maximum effective aperture diameter small and so keep the front lens elements small and light.
I agree that if enough people were wiling to pay about $2000-3000 for the combination of a relatively expensive 36x24mm sensor with either
- a single focal length (like the 40mm of the Rollei 35) or
- a very limited telephoto zoom range, or
- a zoom lens that is ridiculously slow at the long end (like the f/8 to f/13 at the long end in the compact 35mm film cameras with wider ranging zoom lenses)
it would be _technologically_ feasible to make a compact 35mm format digital camera.
But I suspect that the demand would be so small that the price would be pushed even higher, to $3000 or beyond, in turn reducing demand ... The pricing of Fujifilm X-Pro 1 body and lenses compared to other systems with the same sensor size illustrates the price premium for non-mainstream options.
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Also, the IQ differences between 35mm and smaller formats are far less with today's sensors than they were with film
As anyone who ever shot with a Minox B or C can attest.
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But I'd buy a Rollei-like fixed focal length full-frame camera. It's not going to happen though, & that Fuji x100 looks more attractive as time goes by
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Just like in those good old days: the RX100 fits perfectly in my beloved Rollei 35's original leather pouch..