Bonzai: Thoughts and Expressions

New Arrival: Canon EOS 20D

The camera is in. I ordered my new camera online last week and it showed up on Wednesday of this week. Although I had originally looked at the Canon Rebel XT, I made decision to go ahead and save for a more robust model. My father-in-law had recently purchased a Canon EOS 20D and I was very impressed with its capabilities. It does everything and more that the Rebel XT does but isn’t quite as small. After shooting a few shots with the D20, I’m glad I made the choice.

I purchased the camera from a company online, a discount warehouse type outfit and was a little nervous at first. After checking them out as good as I could, I had enough confidence to go ahead and order the unit. It was part of a package that had several items outside of the camera body, including: Canon EF-S 18-55mm lens, Sigma 18-50mm lens, Sigma 70-300mm lens, 0.5x wide angle lens, lens filter sets, 4 GB Microdrive, aluminum hard case, nylon soft case, tripod, digital flash kit, lens cleaning kit, and a card reader. Total cost: about $2000 (shipping included). I couldn’t find another store that would come anywhere close to this price. In fact, most places I contacted sold the camera body and the EF-S 18-55mm lens for about the same price as these guys had the whole kit for. Cool.
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So, how does it work? Awesome! One of my favorite features is the continuous shooting feature. It can shoot up to 5 frames per second in bursts of 23 shots in the highest resolution (it’s an 8 mega-pixel camera). At lower resolutions, you can actually continuously shoot for much longer. Below is an example of this type of shooting from Duncan’s last Taekwondo testing where he was breaking a board:

The photos were taken by my father-in-law with the same type of camera shooting continuously. One of the cool sub-features is that the focus points actually follow the subject and readjust while you are shooting. For instance, as Duncan came forward with his strike, the camera focus automatically compensated for his movement and refocused. Way cool. There are actually 9 focus points that the camera tracks with. I’m loving this thing.

There are a bunch of other features too, but there is one other thing I highly recommend now that I have some experience with it: the Hitachi Microdrive. The one that came with this kit is a 4GB capacity, and the highest I have seen on the market so far is 6GB. With the 4GB, I can shoot up to 990+ high resolution pics on the camera before it’s full. For this model, “high resolution” is 8 megapixels (3504 x 2336) for each picture. I can’t tell you how liberating this is when you are shooting several pictures! It’s also the difference of carrying additional CF cards with you and trying to keep track of them. Imagine shooting almost 1000 shots on a roll of film… that’s sort of what it’s like. I love it.
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I’m sure you will see some more pics coming soon as I learn the intricacies of this camera. Stay tuned. In the mean time, I highly recommend the camera and send kudos to the company that sold it for such a great price – Sunshine Electronics out of Brooklyn, NY.

posted by Bonzai @ 7:50 AM