I currently have a Canon Rebel 2000 film camera and a Vivitar 100 - 400 mm zoom lens and would like a digital camera and zoom lens with similar quality. I use my camera for taking pictures of birds and other animals, so I need a good telephoto lens. I feel overwhelmed by all the brands and do not understand the difference between digital and optical zoom. Any information is greatly appreciated. Thanks! Since you have a 100-400mm lens for your Rebel 2000, I'd recommend getting a Rebel XT body as the most economical solution. You could use your existing Canon-mount lenses on it with an extra bonus - all lense focal lengths would effectively be multiplied by a factor of 1.6x. That would make your 100-400mm a 160-640mm! The Sony CyberShot
Its takes great pictures and is easy to use Canon Rebel XT is a good choice since you already have the lens that can be used with it.
As for optical vs digital zoom, you won't have to worry about that if you're using an SLR camera. With SLR, you're always getting optical zoom, which is all you should be using anyways. Digital zoom in cameras is the same as using your photo editing program in your computer (like photoshop) to crop the image. You lose resolution and quality of the image when this is done, hence you should never use the digital zoom feature of a point and shoot camera. But like I said, if you're going with the SLR, you don't need to worry about this. my suggestion
go to yahoo shopping
digital cameras
digital camera GUIDE
be sure to check titles on the left side
the guide should answer your questions Should you have a limited budget, perhaps consider a digicamera with image stabilization such as the Canon PowerShot S2-IS [5.0 mp] [$300] or the S3-IS [6.0 mp] [$350] with a 12X optical zoome [39-435mm] along with built-in stereo microphones for recording sound video [i.e., live piano recording is quite good]. They operate on a set of four rechargeable AA which provides at least 200 shots per charge and uses inexpensive SD memory cards. The sales prices are from amazon.com or samys.com.
Good luck! It's so nice to hear a question from the other end. Meaning, usually the questions are like "what mm is equal to a 10x zoom" which is a stupid question to begin with since mm has nothing to do with a certain x zoom factor.
Being that you already understand your mm focal ranges, the answer is really simple. On just about every camera on the market, dpreview has the camera's equivalent 35mm zoom ratings listed on their website.
Being that you want something that is equivalent to a 400mm zoom, you just have to make sure whatever camera you're looking matches that rating at dpreview.
Say that you want to stay within the Canon family and are interested in the Canon PowerShot S5 IS. If you go to www.dpreview.com and look up this camera, you'll see that they have the 35mm equivalent zoom range listed as 36mm-432mm. This camera would more than cover the range that your 100-400 lens gave you, plus on this particular camera, it has Image Stabilization, which is useful when you're zoomed in that much using a small handheld camera (harder to keep still than your SLR).
BUT, being a Canon DSLR owner myself, I would recommend that you stick with DSLR's since you already understand SLR's and that you can interchange lenses between your film camera and your DSLR.
If you don't want to pay the high entry price of the models on the market currently, I suggest buying a used older model off of eBay. For example, the Canon Digital Rebel (not XT nor XTi, just plain Digital Rebel) is a 6.3 MP camera that can be had on eBay for about $400. If you want to go a little fancier, you could look for the Canon 10D which is about $450 or the 20D which climbs up quite a bit in price.
However, if you're looking for pocketability, DSLR's will be completely out of the question. So yeah, any camera you want to consider, check www.dpreview.com to see what their 35mm equivalent range is and you should get the answer you're looking for. |
