Price: $450

Excellent prints at a price

The low-down: This little printer (32cm long by 18.5cm deep and 62cm thick and weighing 2kg) is designed to go anywhere with a laptop computer. It comes with a rechargeable battery. There are two small ink cartridges, one black and one four-colour. Paper up to A4 can be used. There are USB, infrared and PictBridge connections but no memory card slots. Bluetooth is an option. Setup is easy and head alignment is a one-step process. Canon’s excellent automated Easy-Photo Print is included.

Like: The output from the printer is consistently good after some fiddling with the print parameters. Images printed tended to be a little darker than on screen. Print speed is good, faster than some standard photo printers. The black ink is pigment and the colours are Chromalife 100, so print fade should not be an issue.

Dislike: The price is inexplicably high. In the US this machine sells for AUD $258. Why does it cost $200 more here? Neither GST nor market size will justify this difference. And American reviewers are critical of what they consider a high price in their shops!

Verdict: The combination of small size and light weight, together with the respectable print speed, make this printer an ideal companion for a business laptop. Because it doesn’t hang around when printing it is possible to turn out printed pages from a presentation without making participants wait impatiently. The ink cartridges (black $15, colour $30) are minuscule, so we expect that it will not be an economical printer to use, but Canon do provide advice on settings that reduce ink usage without affecting print quality too badly. If only the price were more reasonable – after all there are printer/scanner/copier combined units that cost half as much and produce prints of equal or better quality. But, of course, they are not portable. It seems we must expect to pay more for less.

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MOTOR CAR ROAD TESTERS, as we know, pretty much confine their assessments to German cars that cost more than $120,000. And why not? They only have space to review a few of the hundreds of new models released every year, so why not indulge yourself with the best?

Just so with camera reviewers. You may be forgiven for concluding, on the evidence of Imaging, that digital cameras are all single lens reflex and cost more than $2000. Our excuse is that they are so nice. And trying them out for a week or two is as near as we are going to get to luxury in this life.

Anyway, we are mindful of the fact that for most happy snappers the digital point-and-shoot is the camera de jour. And we doubt that the photographer has yet been born who has fully exploited the potential of the pocket digicam.

Straight out of the box the compacts are set to just about the worst possible shooting parameters, and the way to improve pictures is by changing the default settings.

First, switch the camera from Auto to a setting – perhaps Manual or Program – that gives control of the functions to the user. Left on Auto the camera will choose ISO speed, shutter speed, aperture, auto focus method, metering and flash use. Not good enough. You need to show the camera who is boss.

Generally speaking it is best to keep the ISO as low as possible, which on most compacts means ISO 80 or 100. The lower the ISO the lower the image noise. The trade off, of course, is that shutter speeds are going to be longer or apertures wider. Here, chez Imaging, we cut our photographic teeth on Kodachrome which had an ISO of 16. When it was increased to 32 we thought all our Christmases had come at once. So don’t whinge to us about the problems with ISO100. Just get on with it.

Then you should fix the auto focusing method. By default all new digicams are set to “face recognition”. This is beguilingly clever but not the best way to focus. Plunge into the menus and set the focus to centre spot. Then, when taking a photo of the Adored Offspring, centre the focus spot on an eye, half depress the shutter button and hold it there and then reframe.

Flash should be turned off all the time, except for dimly lit parties and strongly backlit faces, where a bit of flash fill can do wonders. On-camera flash has the subtle illumination qualities of a nearby nuclear explosion, turning subjects’ eyes a hellish red. Also turn off Digital Zoom. This is a nasty feature that produces ghastly results.

Exposure metering should be reset to either Centre Weighted or Spot. Spot metering measures the light from a small area in the centre of the viewfinder, which makes it easier to follow the golden rule of digital camera metering – measure the light from the brightest spot in the image. This doesn’t always work, but in general it is better to have dark shadows than blown highlights.

And never forget Golden Rule Number 2 – digi snaps are free, so just keep firing away until you get it right.

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Price: $800

Outstanding

The low-down: This wide angle zoom lens, with a film equivalent focal length range of 15 to 30mm, is one of Sigma’s superior line of zooms. The HSM refers to the hypersonic focus motor, which is indeed very fast and very quiet. The lens construction is superb and typical of Sigma’s better lenses. The crinkle finish on exterior surfaces feels pleasant and the mechanics are absolutely outstanding. Both the zoom and focus ring are smooth and well damped. The maximum aperture of f4 is not fast, but it is par for this type of lens. At 20mm it drops to f5.6. It is threaded for a 77mm filter.

Like: The lens is remarkably free of objectionable distortions. In fact at 10mm distortion is only extreme and noticeable in the corners, if you look hard. Resolution and general sharpness are excellent. And the auto focus is a delight. Third party lenses are usually a little noisy in the auto focus mechanism, but not this one.

Dislike: There is little to criticise about the lens. Vignetting is apparent, but that is also par for the type. And it is easy enough to remove in Photoshop.

Verdict: Extreme wide angle lenses are a lot of fun because they provide a new perspective on the world. Even for portraits, where the rule of thumb is telephoto-is-better, the wide angle can integrate the subjects with their environment in a way that creates a pictorial biography in a flash. And for architectural photography, such as the inside of a cathedral, a very wide angle is indispensable. The Sigma excels in such situations. What’s more the price of this lens makes it a winner. The Canon equivalent costs $1400. The serious competitor for the Sigma in this configuration is the excellent Tokina 12-24mm zoom. The Sigma’s HSM focussing gives it a slight edge. It pained us to send it back.

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If you fancy yourself as Ernest Hemingway with a camera and you are looking for photo opportunities of the big game kind, then you could hardly do better than pop over to Tanzania and take a safari in the Ngorong Goro crater.

On the other hand, if your green conscience won’t come at the enormous carbon footprint created by taking the heavier-than-air flying machine to Africa then you might consider the Werribee Open Range zoo.

We went on Werribee safari last week and had a good time making friends with rhinos, hippos and giraffes. And taking their photos with the newest Olympus digital SLR, the E-520. (A full review is coming soon) And this little camera has some features that suit it well to wildlife photography.

The lens we used was a 70–300mm Zuiko zoom. On the Olympus, with its Four Thirds sensor, this is equivalent to 140–600mm on a film camera, and that is an impressive reach. On a camera with an APS sized sensor 600mm would mean a heavy lens. On the Olympus it is compact and light.

Still, hand holding a camera-lens combination at 600mm when standing on the back of a vibrating truck on a freezing, shivery morning, is impossible. Or so we thought until we saw how effective the Olympus in-camera vibration reduction is. Shots that should have been blurred were pin sharp. This is just about the most effective image stabilisation we have seen.

The charming thing about the Werribee zoo is that the humans are kept in the cages and the animals roam around, gawking at the intruding truck load of dangerous predators. This meant that there were times when the 70–300 was not wide enough. When Tony, the giraffe, stuck his head under the canopy to get a closer look at the visitors we needed a very quick change to a wide angle lens.

The whole experience made us reflect on the matter of depth of field. This expression, DOF, refers to the distance between the spot in focus closest to the camera to the spot in focus furthest from the camera. When an awe-inspiring rhino comes rumbling up to the truck you want to get everything, from the tip of his horn to his scaly rump, in focus. But at the same time we like to keep distracting background stuff blurred.

DOF is related to aperture diameter – the smaller the aperture the deeper the focus and the larger the aperture the shallower the focus. But aperture diameter is also related to the size of the sensor. It is difficult to achieve a shallow DOF with a compact camera because of the relative sizes of the sensor and the lens diaphragm. Conversely, with a full frame sensor (35mm film area) it can sometimes be hard to get the desired depth of field in low light.

The Four Thirds sensor, as used by Olympus, Panasonic and Leica, gives a little less DOF compared with a compact and a little more compared with other DSLRs – assuming light, focal length and exposure are equal. This little extra latitude in focussing can be a bonus.

All in all nearly as good as Ngorong Goro. Now if only they would throw in some lions with the zebras and giraffes, for the sake of safari verisimilitude…

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THERE ARE SOME PEOPLE WE HAVE HEARD OF who claim to know the meaning of E=MC² Unfortunately we don’t know enough to be able to tell if this is an idle boast. There are also a few persons who skite about their comprehensive understanding of the working of Adobe Photoshop. We do know enough about this subject to take their bragging with a grain of salt.

Photoshop is an intimidating piece of software. After using it in its various incarnations for the past ten years we admit to still skating around on the surface. And that, frankly, is not good enough. We needed to brace ourselves and get to grips with this astonishing industry standard application.

So we enrolled for the Adobe online eSeminars for Photoshop users. (www.adobeeseminars.com.au) Each seminar last 60 minutes. They are free.

Adobe has assembled a cast of eTeachers, made up of talented photographers from Australia and New Zealand. You will need a broadband connection to take part because they are streamed “live”. Past seminars are also available at tinyurl.com/5cp9vo, but they are also streaming, so they must be watched in real time.

Things don’t always go smoothly with these narrowcasts. There are occasional sound and image dropouts and, inexplicably, the foul-ups are preserved in the stored versions. And you can’t fast forward through the bad bits. However, this is a small price to pay for the usefulness of the online seminar form.

There is another, more serious, drawback with this style of teaching. The presenters do things very quickly, making it difficult to grasp the concept being demonstrated and then being able to replicate it later. Last week the teacher showed a nifty way of getting a photo of a busy intersection in which the final image has no cars or people in sight. To follow his rapid fire demonstration you needed to know about Stack, Auto Align, Smart Objects and Median. Oh dear, back to “Photoshop for Dummies”.

Still, even though the teaching style leaves something to be desired, these seminars are an eye opener for those of us who have hitherto scratched the surface of Photoshop. The demonstration of digitally creating a group photograph from two images so that the dopey expressions in one are replaced with the beatific smiles in another was a revelation.

There were only 55 participants in last week’s eSeminar. You can’t interrupt the teacher while he’s in full flow but you can post questions as the session proceeds, which the presenter answers at the end. It’s a sort of delayed interaction.

However, if you’re the sort of person who prefers learning from a book, twe came across a beauty in the newsagent last week. It is in the Focus Photoshop Guide series and the current issue is “The complete guide to perfect portraits”, with attached CD-ROM.

The digital camera is a merciless recording device and, frankly, most of us have a few warts, wrinkles and pimples we would rather not have preserved for posterity in the family photo album. And some of us can benefit from a bit of glamorous fogging of the facial features. Now, for $20, you can find out how the pros make their models look gorgeous, even on bad hair days.

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Price: $200

You press the button, Kodak does the rest

The low-down: This combined printer/scanner/copier uses Kodak’s unique paper recognition system. The paper has a code printed on the back which is read by the printer and paper type is automatically selected. Print size is up to A4. There are two pigment ink cartridges, a black and a five colour tank. One of the “colours” appears to be a clear layer that gives protection and eliminates annoying “bronzing” which can be a problem with pigment printers. Kodak claim low running costs – 20 cents for a 10 by 15cm print. The scanner is an average quality domestic unit. There are slots for printing from most memory cards and there is a Bluetooth option. There is a small LCD and some image enhancements can be done in the printer.

Like: The output from the printer is a revelation. The prints are sharp, accurately coloured and long lasting. Wilhelm Imaging Research says prints set new standards for longevity with permanence ratings of more than 125 years. Even prints on refrigerator doors withstand the ravages of kitchen gases better than any other. The ease of use of the ESP 5 makes all other printers seem antediluvian in their finicky and unpredictable behaviour.

Dislike: There is no provision for printing on CD/DVD blanks. The setup process demands that the computer be set to “small fonts” – ridiculous! The scanner lid doesn’t work well with books.

Verdict: This printer is the latest implementation of technology that Kodak first showed in the 5000 series all-in-ones. Here’s the unbelievable bit – if your monitor is properly calibrated then every print you make will look exactly like the picture on the screen. No fiddling with mysterious parameters in Photoshop. No need to choose paper type or ICC profile or colour management – the Kodak driver doesn’t even know about these things. Just choose paper size and output quality from draft, normal or best and press the print button and what you see on the screen is what you get. Consistently. In our experience this is without precedent in domestic printers. We love it!

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Are you in the market for a digital single lens reflex? If you are then, according to the market research department at Canon you are not on your own. Forty-three per cent of potential digital customers are thinking of an SLR. So what’s keeping the credit card in the wallet?

Several things – price, weight and complexity. Well, price is no longer a valid reason for avoiding the SLR. Entry level SLRs are about the same price as the better quality compacts. And weight has come right down with both Canon and Olympus boasting about their feather-light models, the Canon 1000D and the Olympus E-420.

Olympus say their potential customers want an SLR that works just like the compact they are accustomed to using. That means that it will have “live view” in which the LCD is the viewfinder, and an all-in-one, wide-angle to extreme telephoto lens. These putative buyers can’t be fussed with a bag full of lenses when they have found that one 10X zoom on their compact is quite good enough.

There are good reasons for opting for a wide ranging zoom. First, it obviates the need to change lenses in dusty conditions. If you are on the Serengeti stalking a cheetah and the Land Rover is churning up the dust then changing a lens will let that dust into the camera. That is always bad, even with automatic dust removal.

Second, a super zoom is cheaper than the combination of shorter lenses needed to cover the same range.

However there are penalties, which we have harped on before in this space. Distortions at the zoom limits are usually extreme. Resolution is not as good as with primes or short range zooms. The lenses are slower – for instance, the Tamron 28-300 lens (RRP $900) we have been testing has an aperture of f3.5 at the wide end, which is acceptable, but not fast, to f6.3 at the long end. f6.3 is a smaller maximum aperture than some cameras need for their auto focus to work reliably.

We tried the Tamron on a Nikon D300, which has a sensitive auto focus system. When the lens is extended to 300mm the camera has difficulty focussing. Most of the time we relied on manual focus. Fortunately the focus mechanism is smooth and well damped.

Tamron’s approach is to go for maximum extension at the long end and for a modest short end – not wide-angle at all.

The Nikkor 18-200mm, (RRP $1200) is wider than the Tamron and less ambitious at the long end. Its aperture range f3.5 to f5.6 and it auto focuses quickly, precisely and quietly. The Tamron also works well enough at the 200mm point, so perhaps that should be regarded as its normal limit. Both lenses have image stabilisation.

If you wouldn’t know barrel and pincushion distortion if you saw it and you have no idea what vignetting is then you could love either of these lenses. And, in any case, these effects are absent at intermediate focal lengths.

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