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The Rebel

December 18th, 2007

1207-Canonxti-01

I probably shouldn’t have, but I did. And today it got here. Well, part of it, anyway. It cost a lot more than I had figured on, and frankly, I don’t really think that I need it that much. No, I don’t have buyer’s remorse. It is such a nice toy, and I know that I will enjoy it and use it for quite a while. It’s just that I have a bit of sticker shock.

Here are the elements that I’m getting:

The 28-105 lens is lower-end, but has a better range and better quality than the much-maligned 18-55mm kit lens. The 70-300mm IS Zoom lens is the centerpiece of the set, in a way–it’s the lens I’ll be using outdoors most. One down point I discovered: the image stabilization kind of eats up battery life. Therefore, the two extra batteries. Not Canon OEMs, which are pretty expensive, at least $40 apiece or so, but cheap under-$10 alternatives which people on Canon photography boards say work as well or sometimes even better. The Flash card is not as big as they get–that would be 8 GB nowadays–but the Ultimate IV is supposed to be the speediest, which could make more of a difference.

1207-Canonxti-02

Like I said, such a nice toy. It takes pictures so easily. Point and shoot, much more so than the actual point-and-shoots. The autofocus is very nice, the zoom lens is great to use… it’s like graduating from a beat-up chevy wagon clunker to a nice mid-range BMW.

Not that there haven’t been a few kinks along the way. The biggest one had me in a bit of a panic, made me think that I had gotten a lemon and faced a vacation that would consist of waiting to see if the camera could be returned from the repair center before I had to leave for Japan. It turned out all right (I’m pretty sure, at least), but had me scared for an hour or so.

When I got the camera, the first thing I checked was whether it would be necessary to charge the battery first. I hate it when you have to do that–toys should, after all, work right out of the box. But the instructions said nothing about it. I slid the battery into place, and the camera worked. Swell! I ran out and started testing it. Unfortunately, it was delivered late in the afternoon on an overcast day, so there wasn’t much chance to get anything blogworthy on film. Furthermore, I had not run through the instructions yet, so could still not figure out how to make it work best. But I practiced some, took dozens of shots, and then took it back inside to see the results. Pretty good.

Throughout the evening I experimented further, and eventually sat down to go through the manual, trying each new thing I learned by snapping a few more photos. I got to the part about manual control and depth-of-field, and figured that I’d try some comparative shots. After one shot that I took, the camera shut down.

Now, had it simply lost all power, I’d have concluded that the battery had died and I hadn’t noticed the indicator. But the power lamp, the “on” light, remained lit. That suggested that the camera was still powered. But the LCD screen wouldn’t light, none of the buttons worked, and even if you switched the power toggle off, the power lamp remained lit. It had all the earmarks of the camera’s computer crashing, freezing, hanging. The only thing that would bring it back was to remove the battery and then slide it back in. Then it would start up again, I could review pictures, and could see the battery indicator showed half-full. But when I took another picture… it froze again. Removing the battery would always fix it, but the next photo taken–no matter what setting, no matter how I did it–would always freeze the camera in the same way. I tried erasing the flash card, pushing all the buttons, but whatever I tried, it froze and crashed and hung again.

At this point, I was pretty upset. I figured it was a lemon of a camera, broken almost right out of the box, and envisioned spending the rest of my vacation on hold with Canon customer support, shipping my toy away for weeks and maybe even suffering problems after that. An alternative of returning it to the seller and getting a new one in exchange still meant that I’d miss at least a week of photography, the time I had set aside for birdwatching.

Just to be sure, I started recharging the battery, and as I did so, I started Googling possible keywords that might lead me to discussions where people spoke of the same problem, perhaps with a cure. Eventually, I found the answer: this discussion thread, describing more or less exactly my problem. The cause: the battery ran out.

Sure enough, after my battery recharged (it takes a little under 2 hours), I found that the camera worked just fine again. Of course, that struck me as a rather glaring oversight in Canon’s otherwise very nice design–to allow a battery to run out and present symptoms that mimic a terrible mechanical failure… not good. Of course, there were extenuating circumstances. As it turned out, I was using a battery that was not fully-charged to begin with, and at the time the camera seemed to freeze, I was eating up power enormously: I was using the built-in flash, image-stabilization was on, and the camera was in continuous autofocus-and-metering mode. So perhaps that egregious power usage sent the camera over some limit or threshold, and caused the seeming malfunction. Still, that’s a bit of a bug that Canon should have looked at.

So, why had my battery indicator shown half-full? In my experience, when a battery runs out of juice, turing the device off and then on again usually results in a slight burst of life, and the battery reads higher for a moment. It happens in my cell phone that way, for example. Must have happened here. Also, it seems that SLR’s don’t give the blinking-red-empty-battery warning, nor the “You have to change the batteries now” sign-off message, something that also caught me off-guard, being a newbie.

Soon after, I ordered the two backup batteries. Natch.

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  1. December 19th, 2007 at 02:45 | #1

    So, why the name? What’s it rebelling against?

  2. Luis
    December 19th, 2007 at 03:38 | #2

    The Evil Nikon Empire?

  3. ykw
    December 19th, 2007 at 05:34 | #3

    This is a sweet machine !!! I think you’ll very much enjoy working with it.

    I think several things can be happening w/ the battery:

    * the battery voltage may drop when it tries to do more things (display on, auto-focus), and if it goes below some threshold, it might react in some way.

    * reacting could mean turning off things that consume power, so that the thing “limps along”. Customers may prefer to get more use w/o the display before it fully turns off, for example

    * it might not be able to detect how much energy is in the battery very well. For example, it might not know when the battery is 10% full.

    * there is a display illumination control. reducing display intensity helps one go further on one charge.

    * another thing is to tell it to turn off the display within 10secs of non-use

    This is a sweet machine !!!

  4. Luis
    December 19th, 2007 at 06:43 | #4

    Well, I spoke to a Canon tech support guy, and he said that this is one of several kinds of “adverse” states the camera can take if the battery runs down. After explaining the situation in detail, he confidently assured me that the camera was not defective, and sending it in for repairs would not be necessary.

    So, what’s up with the design handling the battery rundown?

  5. Paul
    December 20th, 2007 at 14:20 | #5

    The 28-105 lens has been around a lonnnng time. It’s probably the mainstay of the Canon line, since it’s the natural lens to sell as the starter with an SLR. I’ve got it.

    Don’t be fooled by the low price; it’s one of the cheapest ones they sell for what it costs, but the quality is still just as good as any of their other non-IS zoom lenses. Well, any that aren’t the “L” series (the white ones) that you see the pros using- but those babies are all a couple grand each.

    Probably the neatest lens they sell if you wanted to try and get by with just ONE lens would be the 28-300 L IS lens. Best range for zooms, the L series, and image stabilization. Unfortunately, that one is 2100 bucks. But man, what a lens.

    One thing to remember- at the higher zoom settings, doing birding, you’re effectively getting more because of the not-full-frame sensor size. That might be part of what’s affecting your autofocus. Canon has had some issues with focus as well but they have worked hard to put out updates to get it fixed.

    There’s a great blog by a Seattle Times photographer where he talks about getting blurry shots from his top-of-the-line, brand-new camera. He’s mostly a sports photographer, hence the name of his blog:
    http://blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com/bestseatinthehouse/

  6. Hachi Gatsu
    January 6th, 2008 at 00:33 | #6

    I guess that makes me part of the Evil Nikon Empire then
    I also have a 70-300mm lens (if you remember, it was the one me and you went “head to head” with at the BBQ trying to figure out how to translate 10X zoom into mm). I also have a Tamron Wide Angle 28-80mm lens. Plus, I just recently picked up a Sigma 135-400mm lens yesterday off e-bay.

    Thats my way of shopping. I do reasearch, I look around through the online stores, such as adorama.com, check prices, compare…and then go to e-bay to see if anyone has the same thing for a much cheaper price.

    On the blurry shots thing, what setting do you have it in? If its like my Nikon, you have a few different settings (regulated on mine by a circular switch at the top). A good 2/3’s of them are auto to semi-auto type features that pretty much leave you to shoot the photo and the camera adjusts itself to what it thinks is best (and a good number of times it gets it wrong). So breaking into the manual features (if you have them) is always a good thing. I read up on how to set my manual settings and went off and experimented (mainly with shutter speed, which was my main problem).

    Also, certain types of lenses have their own speeds they can operate at. Telephoto’s tend to be slower (and really cheap ones are the slowest…not even good enough to get still shots of the moon). So do you’re research and ask a lot of questions before you buy lenses unless you really know it is what you need (I got 135-400mm Sigma because I needed some extra reach, but wanted a quality lens without dishing out a good $3,000 for a lens I’m only going to use a few times a year). Also, most telephoto’s tend to be a little finiky when it comes to lower light (covercast skys, dawn, dusk), so being able to adjust the shutter speed to compensate for that helps.

    There are a whole bunch of other things, but those I’m still working on myself. I guess the only other thing I can say is (though it’s a bit late) Welcome to the world of DSLR’s! The sports cars of the camera world.

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