Equipment reviews

[Stressball]

Item: 300 F4L IS Lens

Brand: Canon

Price: $1,600

Good points/strengths: Long, and SHARP. Sharpest lens I have ever used when stopped to f6.3-f8, and wide open it's still sharper than my 70-200 f2.8.

Bad points/weaknesses: Pricey for some, max aperture of f4 leaves a little to be desired, but for the price it's no problem.

Review: Brilliant lens, sharp as anything, lightweight for such a long lens at about 1.1Kg. The image stabiliser is handy, I have been comfortable hand-holding it at 1/160sec and could probably go lower if I wanted to. Oldish technology IS, capable of reducing shake by 2 stops. Has a panning mode, where it will disable IS in the direction you are panning the lens.

Review Score out of 10: 8.5

Recommendation score out of 10: 8

Similar models (if known):

Reason for choosing this model: Length for track racing

Examples of work:

Resized full image + 100% crop of same image. Straight off camera, no editing:

Action shots

 

[ucwepn]

Item: sx130is

Brand: Canon

Price: $200

Good points/strengths: Easy Point and shoot with some manual features (including manual focus, apperture, shutter speed (can open for 15 secs), iso), 12mp, 12x optical, 720p movies with 12x optical zoom and stereo mics. Solid feel (for cheap plastic crap lol), decent PAS photos.

Bad points/weaknesses: Battery life is awful uses 2x AA about every hour lol (with alkalines, going to upgrade to 2500mah nimh rechargables), slow zoom and sketchy autofocus on movies, slow pic to pic speed (decent with no flash 1 pic per second continuous).

Review: I wanted a decent but cheap arsed point and shoot, I had my eye on Olympus sz10 and pentax optio RZ18, but found out their not all they're cracked up to be video wise (neither can use optical zoom with sound on 720p filming), video was a big part of this purchase for me and so were decent budget photos so I can have a play around with very amateur photography, had a little play today and its just as decent as i thought it would be haha, hopefully my knowledge of how it works will all improve but manual modes got me lost lol F stops and shutter speeds are all greek to me, lucky it can be flicked to auto for better than what I can do with manual.

Review Score out of 10: 7/10 (with nimh batteries would give it an 8/10)

Recommendation score out of 10: 7/10

Similar models (if known): Pentax optio rz18, olympus sz10, (any other travel zooms over 10x lol)

Reason for choosing this model: price, 720p video with stereo sound and 12x optical zoom.

Examples: (taken on first day with full auto) waiting for tripod and will update...

stupid Indian mynah birds at 12x from about 25m

IMG_0133 by ucwepn, on Flickr
Monaro the cat

IMG_0077 by ucwepn, on Flickr
Mt cooper (manual focus)

IMG_0263 by ucwepn, on Flickr

Train moving along quickly 1/1000 shutter speed, auto app. Overcast day

IMG_0661 by ucwepn, on Flickr

 

[morgan143]

great result