Back to DSLRs

Hello all.

Today I made a rather big decision in my photography endeavors. I bought a Canon 650d today with the 40mm f/2.8 STM lens.


If you didn't know, I started out as a Pentax user with the K100d then K20d, and slowly revolved around this system until a few months ago when I sold me K20d camera to fund the acquisition of the Fujifilm X100. I kept a couple of lenses for when a decent Pentax DSLR is released. I was contemplating on getting the K-5, however, with the discontinuation of Pentax by its owners, Ricoh, I became uncertain with the brand and where it will go. Being such a smaller market compared to other brands did not paint a good picture for the future.
So I decided to go for one of the big players in Canon.

40mm f/2.8 STM lens on the 650D.

I choose this because I wanted a small body with small lenses which was why I considered getting the K-5 before. 40mm also seemed like a good length to compliment my X100 when I need a more tighter frame. A few of my friends shoot with canon so I can swap lenses with them from time to time. I also wanted to try video recording with an SLR and thought this would be good as the camera cans shoot 1080p and the lens is silent when focusing. Maybe I'll get a mic later. I managed to get a bit of a discount on this set up. I might have gone with a 60D but I learned that it is a bit bigger and heavier which is not good for me as I have very shaky hands.

Construction suddenly became more rapid recently.

The instruction manual is palm sized! They must be really intent on helping the environment.

I'm sorry. There was not much to photograph around here.

I took this handheld. Came out alright.

My baby. The X100.

The image quality is quite good, even when the lens is wide open. I can't get the best out of the raw files as the program I use (Dxo Optics 7) doesn't want to read the files for some reason. I have the same problem with my old K100 files. The 650D and 40mm lens are not yet supported by the program so there are no auto-corrections for the images. The schedule says the program will update to include them next month.

When playing with the video, I found that it was very slow to autofocus. When you select to track something, it is a little bit better but still a bit slow.

Other than these hiccups, the camera should be quite good to use. The swivel touch-screen makes accessing settings quicker and easier while the ability to focus and take pictures with the touch-screen should make for some stealthy shots, which reminds me of the Olympus E-P3. I don't know if there will be a day when a micro-four thirds is as good or better than an SLR in terms of image quality (The Om-d em-5 is close!) but for now, I am happy to hold an DSLR again. The size and weight reminds me of the Pentax K100d.

Oh and I recovered this picture from my old photos when I went to Japan. Hopefully I can recover more later or make more of them.