Larry, I changed from Contax to Canon when I went digital. I bought a 10D with an assortment of lenses.
What I do miss is a good viewfinder. The viewfinder on the 10D is acceptable for most stuff, but it would be really nice with a focusing aid for manual focus. For wide angle photography I have to rely on auto focus as the contrast in the viewfinder makes accurate manual focus with wide-angle lenses a pain. The auto focus is pretty darn good, though!! Occasionally, it would be nice with a tighter spot meter. The 10D "blob meter" is fine for most uses. I'm not sure a 3 % meter would make that much of a difference. I can always use my Minolta Spotmeter F if I really want to... When I went digital, my thinking was as follows: Canon makes the best bodies. Both in terms of features but also in terms of variety (1x, 1.3x, 1.6x crop factors). With digital, the update cycle on the body suddenly becomes an issue - unlike with film cameras where it was the update cycle of the film that was important. I will certainly not buy a new body at every update cycle, but having a new body released every 18 months makes it possible to make a significant upgrade every 3-4 years or so. Canon is very much a "body" company. Most of their lenses are excellent, but they do have an ocasional "flop" lens. Nikon on the other hand, is not putting much effort into the bodies. They are out there. I'm sure they are great, but they don't seem to be updated very frequently. There also isn't a clear path to a full-frame sensor. The one thing the do have going for them is the three-color light meter. That works really well. It's something like 1024 pixels across the frame that are used to compute a histogram of the scene and expose accordingly. That sure beats Canon's 45-point evaluative system. But I suspect it's a matter of time before Nikon's patent (which I assume they have) expires. That said, I've never really felt limited by "normal" spot/partial meters, so I guess I can live without that feature. Nikon is much more of a "lens" company. They had their 12-24mm lens out long before Canon released their comparable lens. For me, the update cycle of the body was more important than that of the lenses. The lenses will get developed eventually. Either by Canon or by someone else... Thus, I went with Canon. Haven't looked back since. Tom On 8/28/05, Larry Kopitnik <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'm a lifelong Nikon user (well, since 1978). [...] > Given all of the above, the EOS 5D has really caught my eye. The full > frame sensor is what I want in a digital camera. * **** ******* *********************************************************** * For list instructions, including unsubscribe, see: * http://www.a1.nl/phomepag/markerink/eos_list.htm ***********************************************************
