Here’s a side-by-side comparison of Fujifilm’s Finepix X100 and the classic Leica M3. Needless to say, the X100 is one classy looking digital camera. It just started shipping this past weekend in Japan, and should begin arriving elsewhere in the very near future. If you want a closer look at the camera’s features, check out the 124 page owners manual that recently found its way online.
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The people behind camera comparison and recommendation website snapsort have just launched lenshero, a site designed to recommend the lens you need at the price you want. After telling the application your camera and what you’re looking for in a lens (e.g. type, focal range, price), the site will spit out some recommendations of lenses that fit your criteria, ordering them by their pros and cons. It’s a neat little app that you might want to bookmark if you’re in the market for some new gear.
If you’re looking into buying a certain lens, you might be interested in seeing what kind of photography other people have done with that lens. Flickriver’s Lens Explorer page is a pretty easy way to quickly look through example photographs on Flickr that were captured with a specific lens. Just choose a brand and model, and begin browsing the river!
FindTheBest is the latest startup founded by Kevin O’Connor, the guy who started the online ad company DoubleClick and sold it to Google for over $3 billion. It’s a human-powered comparison engine consisting of “comparison apps” in which various things of the same category are compared side by side with comparison points specific to that category. For example, the camera lenses comparison app allows you to browse lenses from a number of manufacturers, filtering and ordering them by things such as focal length, minimum aperture, and weight.
The site needs to gain a lot more traction before other photography-related apps turn up (e.g. tripods, photo labs, etc…), but the site could potentially be very useful for browsing camera gear and other photography-related categories in the future.
Photographer Mike Collins created this simple video that gives you a visual look at the difference between full frame sensors and crop frame sensors when using the same lens. The video uses a Canon 5D Mark II for the full frame shots, and a Canon 7D (1.6x crop factor) for the crop shots.
This is a short test with the tripod in the same spot switching between prime lenses to show how the crop affects the 7D. The subject, ace stand in Chris Clement, was roughly five feet from the camera. This isn’t meant to be an aesthetic test to show the difference in image quality between the two cameras. It’s a down and dirty field guide for myself and the other shooters we work with so we can quickly figure what lens we want to use on each camera.
We go from 20mm all the way to 100mm with a Lensbaby composer thrown in at the very end.
You might be surprised at how different the lens are, especially if you’ve never used both full frame and crop frame before.
(via planet5D)
The mystery of the Ansel Adams garage sale negatives keeps taking on new twists, but the latest twist might have solved it once and for all.
KTVU in Oakland is reporting that a Bay Area woman named Mariam l. Walton has come forward with apparently solid proof that the photographs were not taken by Ansel Adams but her Uncle Earl. She was watching KTVU report on the story Tuesday when she suddenly saw a photograph of the Jeffrey Pine on Sentinal Dome and recognized it as a print her uncle Earl Brooks made back in 1923.
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We wrote about Snapsort at the beginning of this year, when it was still a newly-launched, bare-bones website for comparing digital cameras. Though it was spartan, the service was useful for comparing the specs of cameras and seeing how they stack up against each other.
The service has gotten even more useful in the past few days, with a massively updated website taking the place of the first version. In addition to the sweet new design, the service now offers much more than simple comparisons. New features include detailed camera pages, customized advice (i.e. by budget), and a learning section filled with bookmarkable material. You can even compare cameras that haven’t hit the market yet.
If you’re currently in the market for a digital camera, you’ll definitely want to give this page a peek.
Here’s an interesting video by Take Zero Productions that compares the footage of the same scene recorded by both an iPhone 4 and a Canon 7D. You can also head on over to the Vimeo page to compare the footage in HD, since HD is disabled in this embedding.
Note that in the description, they write,
I was mainly focusing on the iPhone video here and didn’t have intentions of making this a comparison video so some of the 7D shots aren’t properly exposed and some aren’t even focused. But here it is regardless.
What do you think of the iPhone’s video capabilities compared to the Canon 7D?
(via Imaging Insider)
DxOMark has expanded their website to include lenses in addition to camera bodies. They’ve tested a good number of lenses from quite a few manufacturers, with each lenses tested on a large number of camera bodies. You can then compare how certain camera and lens combinations perform against one another.
Nikon has a couple neat interactive tools that make it easy to explore and compare lenses. Their lens simulator lets you see what resulting photographs might look like with any lens and camera combination, while their new lens positioning map displays the NIKKOR lineup on a grid with aperture and focal length as the two axes.
Once you’ve found lenses or combinations you like, you can save them for future reference.
