I'll Never Go Back!

[Tom Nolle]

OK, I admit to being a gadgeteer, but when I finally started getting serious about photographing animals in the wild, I immediately thought of using digital images. The only thing is that I was thinking of scanning slides. I got a Nikon LS-2000, slide feeder, and the whole thing, and started shooting trips at a rate of about 15 rolls a week. I'd get back and my wife and I would disappear from the human scene for two months while we tried to get the pictures sorted, selected, scanned, and (worst of all) fixed. Every dust mote, dye cluster, scratch, or whatever had to be stamped out in Photoshop, and the color on most had to be corrected. After an Alaskan bear trip that generated about 63 rolls, I gave up. I'd tried to find a digital camera earlier, but the S2 came out right after the Alaska scan-and-fix cycle so I was ready at that point.

I've done two major trips with the S2 now, and have one more scheduled for this year and three for next. Sure I've had a few minor glitches, but I stress "minor". I've never lost a picture, and I've cut my processing time enormously even though I shoot in RAW and convert to TIFF. I love this camera. Everything that's gone wrong has either been my fault or a small thing no different from the gotchas I used to get with film (bear hair stuck in the shutter curtain, for example).

Nothing could induce me to go back to film. I'm selling all my old stuff off now. The S2 was the smartest thing I ever bought in the photo space.

Tom

[S_Leeper]

Bear hair in the shutter curtain???

Seems like an extreme close-up!
====================
My experience with S2.
Very happy. It is worth investing the time to read the manual (& ocassionally rereading some items).

Having never been a real wide angle type I don't have much of an issue with the crop factor.

If asked to recommend on whether to get the S2 or wait for new releases. The new is unknown to me, may be full frame, better flash sync, more dynamic range, etc. which would be nice, but I am not too concerned (at least for the next several years) as the S2 does what I want it to do & does it well for me now.

To put another way I doubt that I will trade/upgrade my S2 for an S3. May be ready to consider when S4 or S5 comes out in 3-6 years...

[Tom Nolle]

I did get very close to some Alaskan browns, but the hair came about because I had to do a quick film change and there was bear hair blowing about and stuck to my parka, and apparently one got sucked into the N80. I saw these wierd little optical jiggles at one edge of the frame after that, and when I examined the curtain with a magnifier, there was a bear hair stuck in it! I carefully removed it, but I'm selling my film stuff anyway.

I've kind of determined that "improvements" to the S2 to create the S3 might not be improvements to me. A full-sized CCD is good for wide-angle work but bad for those like me who shoot five or six telephotos for every normal or wide-angle. Depth of field on the smaller CCD is a bit better according to the online formulas, and if they go to higher resolution than the S2 you'll get about 40 shots to a 1 Gig microdrive, which means you'll be popping those expensive litter buggers like rolls of film.

I'm taking a breather in the digital race!

Tom

[S_Leeper]

One point about the dof...
A while back I did the math on the dof formulas. Most of the formulas use a factor of (I believe I remember to be) the sensor size diagonal ÷ 1700...

In doing the math the circle of confusion for my small 3mp Epson was about 20 pixels & only about 4 (interpolated) pixels for our S2's (and about 1/2 that for the Nikon & Canon).

In doing a limited amount for further research I found that the 1700 factor was based on observations...
As near as I can tell/figure the factor in essence represented the minimum observable resolution of fine grain film, which is why it could be applied across all sizes of film.

What I did not do was to relate the size of the silver grains to the size of the pixels. At present there are obstacles regarding the ability to make well functioning pixels smaller. However, I believe that in two to three generations solutions will continue to evolve, like the current starts by fuji, sigma, etc. & that data interpolation resolutions will begin to accompany those solutions.

[Tom Nolle]

There's a bunch of stuff on the Internet on the issue of the circle of confusion and its impact on depth of field. I checked one site at the following url:

http://dfleming.ameranet.com/digital_coc.html#coccalulator

and they list the c-of-c for the S2 as 0.020 mm. You can plug this into the formulas on the same site for depth of field on various lenses.

Tom

[S_Leeper]

To clarify (sort of) the coc formula has a static factor that was "determined" by observation...

The real gist of what I am saying is that I believe the dof for any camera that uses standard 35mm lenses is the same as for a film 35mm. The fact that the S2 only uses the center of the image should have no impact on the dof, unless the dof is dfferent for the center of the image than it is for the sides...
not that it really matters all that much, as I find that what people tend to consider as acceptable sharpness is often subjective...
I say this as one who has about 95% of my shots between f1.4-f4.0.

The below site has a brief discussion on the coc function/(dof subfunction), but not the one that gave a bit of the history around the origin of the formulas, which I found a bit interesting...
http://www.nikonlinks.com/unklbil/dof.htm#method

[Tom Nolle]

In a tip I was writing about lens behavior on the S2, I ran some numbers through the dof formulas, using the one I cited which has specific S2 parameters available. My result was roughly this, when applied to a 500mm lens; the S2 dof with that lens was slightly shallower than the dof of the same 500mm lens on a 35mm camera, but considerably wider than the dof of the 750mm lens that would have been needed on the 35mm to produce the same relative subject size.

That would suggest that the smaller CCDs will produce a larger dof relative to image size, which is subjectively what appears to happen with the prosumer digicams whose CCDs are typically really small.

It would appear that the "smaller" CCD requires more precise focusing of a given lens, but because of the image cropping that occurs the effect is more than offset by the ability to use a shorter focal length to achieve the same image.

Tom