Like a digital slr camera?
I'm looking to buy a new camera, and i've been looking into them.
But what exactly is it that makes it different? SLRs are what professionals and serious amateurs use. It stands for "Single Lens Reflex", as opposed to what casual photographers use, which are called point-and-shoot cameras.
SLRs are unqiue in that they have a sepcial prism/mirror system that allows you compose images accurately, and use interchangable lenses. With point-and-shoots (especially the old 35mm ones), you don't get what you see. Looking through the viewfinder shows a slightly different image than what the camera sees. This isn't true so much in digital point-and-shoots, but there is a difference.
Interchangable lenses gives the photographer much more control over the image. With point-and-shoots, each camera has a zoom zone - for example, my old Panasonic Lumix DMC FZ-5 had a maximum optical zoom of 12x. (Ignore the digital zoom range - it isn't zooming up on the real thing, but enlarging the image.) SLRs use a different system, called focal lengths. Standard focal length on a 35mm (film) camera would be 50mm - that is what the human eye sees. A telephoto lens would get you closer to the image, as if looking through binoculars. 70mm and higher are normally considered telephoto. A wide-angle lens gets you the effect of backing up. It makes things look smaller, as if you took several steps back. Typically this is around 35mm or smaller.
In digital SLRs there is a shift in numbers. I can't remember what that number is, but a 50mm lens on a dSLR would act as if it were a telephoto.
Pros of SLRs:
More control over images. More control over composition and what is inside the frame. Almost an infinite number of possibilities in terms of zoom and macro (depending on brand).
Cons:
The camera "body" is expensive, and the lenses even more so. Each lens can cost from a hundred dollars to several thousand.
Edit: Oh, I forgot. SLRs giev you total control over the manual settings. You can control the zoom (for zoom lenses), the shutter speed, the aperture and the focus. Most point-and-shoots have limited manual settings and no manual focus. My next camera! A++++ Report It
an SLR is an exotic Mercedes lol. Report It
Point and shoot cameras do indeed have focal lengths. P&S cameras perform optical zooming by adjusting their focal length. Their focal lengths just do not correspond to the traditional fields of view associated with those focal lengths. You are correct about digital zoom, though. Report It
Not all DSLRs have a field of view crop factor. The Canon 5D, 1Ds series, and Nikon D3 are all examples of digital SLRs whose fields of view correspond to those of traditional 35mm film cameras. Report It
Thumbs up - great answer! I work for Panasonic and I support both the point-and-shoot and the SLR cameras. None of this was explained to us in training as it is kind of a "need-to-know" deal. Report It
I wasn't even looking for this but saw it as I was about to pose a question about something else entirely. Helpful--thanks! Report It
http://www.urbandictionary.com... Report It
nice answer. great full to you. Report It
Ok in the old days there were a few major types of camera, the only ones we will talk about here are rangefinder and Single Lens Reflex Cameras. Rangefinders have a completely separate viewfinder. Little piece of glass on the back looks through a little piece of glass on the front. This viewfinder is technically a lens too. So the lens that takes the shot and the view finder are both lenses making this type of camera a "twin lens" cameras. There were also triple lens cameras as well with one shooting lens one viewfinder for landscape orientation and one for portrait orientation (camera on its side).
The problem with a rangefinder or twin lens camera is that the Lens does not necessarily see what the viewfinder does. For instance in close up you needed to remember that the viewfinder was slightly off to one side of the shooting lens. Also if the shot was out of focus, there was no way to tell.
So along came a type of camera where the light came in the shooting lens but never hit the shutter, because instead it hit a mirror first which reflected light up into the viewfinder of the camera. So for one you get to see what the shooting lens is really seeing and for two this camera now only has a single lens on the front.
Once you had composed and focused your shot, you press the shutter. This flips (or "reflexes") the mirror up out of the way whilst the shot was taken. Light now falls on the shutter and the shutter lets it through to the film.
So the combination means that it is a single lens camera with a mirror that reflexes out of the way, or a single lens reflex camera.
In fact this has nothing to do with being able to remove the shooting lens from the camera.
Modern "point and shoot" cameras are slightly different. Most have a system where light enters the shooting lens and travels to the digital sensor. You then look on your live preview screen at the back to view the image about to be shot. THere is often no shutter, instead an electronic circuit simply takes a timed reading of the sensor and processes this into an image.
So this is a great system right? Well not quite. There are two major problems, one with focus and one with low light.
Modern camera sensors have at least 6 million dots (pixels) that make up an image. On the review screen you are typically seeing an representation made up of around 230 000 dots. This means for every dot of review screen there are over 26 dots on the sensor. This means that if the shot is to be blurred by 26 pixels (A big blur) it still looks perfect on the review screen no matter how perfect your eyes are! This makes focusing via a review screen vvery much a hit and miss idea. It also makes you totally reliant on the camera's autofocus system. This is OK for average users, but not so cool when you want to do really creative things like focus on one point in an image, or focus under really bright light or really dark light.
Speaking of light when you take photos at night, the review screen cannot see dark images as well as your eyes can. This can be frustrating when you are required to manually focus and yet you can't see anything on screen when you can clearly see the scene with your eyes!
For this reason when taking a step forward in photography it is far better to have a real "optical" viewfinder for full creative control, you can sometimes make better decisions than the camera about focus etc, when you can see properly.
SLR cameras are a step forward! Enjoy!
Regards, teef_au in short
what you see is what you get. Single lens Reflex. | 