When I was at Photokina I was using quite a lot of high-end professional DSLRs and I was really impressed. A few nights ago I visited my parents and discovered about thirty films that I had to bin as they were out of date. I also picked up my camera, a Canon EOS 300, for the first time in at least a year. I was reminded how much I miss photography, I have a compact digital camera (Konica Minolta KD400z) as well as my phone that are fine for snaps every now and then but useless for any “proper” photography. I had also been on a fact finding mission at Photokina, I visited both the Canon and Nikon stands and played with the 400D and the D80, taking away my body weight in brochures.

Lately I’ve been comparing prices online and although the D80 is about £200 more than the 400D in my opinion the build quality is worth it as the 400D just felt cheap. It turned out that Curry’s were offering the best deal I could find, a bundle of camera, standard lens, zoom lens, memory card and bag for a decent price. I took Graeme to Bluewater yesterday and thought I’d have a look in Currys.digital (Dixons) to see if they offered credit and could match the online price. However on the way there I stopped into Jessops as a friend of mine works there, with her staff discount, no deposit and twelve months interest free I walked away with the camera and two far better lenses.

I’m so impressed with the camera! I was driving Chris and Graeme mad last night as I kept taking photos in the living room. It’s a 10 megapixel camera, which means when you shoot in RAW it generates an 8Mb file which prints to roughly A3 at 240dpi, and the lenses are astounding. The Tamron 70-300mm is by far the best lens I’ve ever used. I just can’t wait to go out and photograph stuff. I went out briefly this morning and the results can be seen on flickr but when I have better light I’ll do some more interesting shots.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 21st, 2006 at 2:38 pm and is filed under My Life in my Words, Geek Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.