Been thinking of getting a DSLR, and then today my company gets me (as a good-performance reward) a DSLR.

Nikon D5100 with an AF-S DX Nikkor 18-55mm lens. (Came together in a box).

Any thoughts?

And what's the "VR" mean on the lens again? It's a little switch, on or off.

Vibration reduction. It's getting good reviews.

Ah! Awesome.

Battery charging, looking forward to trying it out.

Very good camera. Not the greatest lens but something reasonable to get you started. At some point, you'll want additional features (faster autofocus, more wide-angle, more telephoto, brighter low-light aperture, etc.) Selecting better lenses is all about what you want to do and what budget you're prepared to spend.

If nothing else, Nikon just announced a brand new 50mm f/1.8G lens which is compatible with your camera for just north of $200. (The older f/1.8D lens requires an in-body focus motor, which your camera lacks.) That lens would be a fantastic toy for you to play with shallow depth of field, low-light photography, etc.

The other thing I'd consider getting yourself is a decent flash. The built-in flash can't do cool tricks like bounce off the ceiling.

Congrats on the performance award!

Hey thanks!

Next question: The DPReview site says this thing will do in-camera HDR. In other words, take a bracketed set of three exposures and, automatically in-camera, combine them into a single high dynamic range picture.

The problem is that I can't find the option in the menus to activate that mode. It's not in the "Scene" or "Effects" modes.

A few bits of advice:

- Get yourself a decent raw-processing program (Adobe Lightroom, Apple Aperture, Bibble Labs' Bibble, etc.) and do all your shooting in raw. This gives you more post-processing options.

- If you want to shoot HDR, consider using the regular bracketing feature to shoot standard raw images and do the merging in your computer. There are many different tools for this, including built into recent Photoshop versions. They give you lots of knobs to turn, which you really need to be doing in your computer, not your camera. You can even do HDR tricks on a single raw image. (Giant tutorial)

Since you're just starting out, save yourself some software licensing costs (spend it on a lens, instead), and give Darkroom a try.

If you're in the market for buying lenses I'd have a look at Ken Rockwell's website. He's not to everyone's tastes, but I find his pages on what lenses to buy quite interesting.

And Thom Hogan's site, http://bythom.com - I used to read both Tom and Ken's sites quite regularly. And as Andy says, Ken's POV is somewhat of an acquired taste.

I was happy to see his review of the lens that came bundled with my camera. He liked it, said that it might be the only lens one would ever need. I don't believe that for a second, but at least it means it's a good all-around lens and I'll only need other lenses for specialty work.

Generally I'm happy with the D5100 camera and the lens. Feels good, photo results are quite good, a ton of control over everything, tons of options for doing what I want to do.

Found the in-camera HDR setting. You have to be in one of the manual shooting modes first, then it ungrays in the configuration/settings menus, then it only activates for the next shutter press and deactivates itself again... blech. But the results are pretty.

Mostly I'm happy with the low-noise sensor in this camera. Even at very high ISO settings I'm hard pressed to find noise (or NR artifacts) in the resulting images. There are some ultra high ISO settings that don't even have ISO numbers associated with them that show noise, but the more reasonable ranges are practically noise free. This, of course, is the thing I always wanted to see in the small cameras I've owned, but it's still not possible at those small sizes.

This camera might actually get me to start uploading pictures to my flickr account.

Excellent.

There are two things about my DSLR vs. my compact cameras that still motivate me to go for the weight/bulk:

1) instantaneous operation: push the button, it takes the photo, and is immediately prepared to do it again, indefinitely.

2) excellent behaviour in dim light.

There are lots of other lessor advantages, but for me, those two are the biggies.

Cheers

What's interesting there, of course, is that #1 is in no real sense an inherent difference between DSLRs and compacts: there's no reason not to put the DSLR electronics and firmware in a compact, and in fact I bet they do, just with a bunch of sleep() calls enabled, or a slower main crystal or PLL. In fact, I also wonder how much of #2 is inherent: the sensor is bigger (but it also has more pixels), and the lens is bigger (and thus probably brighter), but do those make up the whole difference in low-light performance, or is part of that also artificial product differentiation?

Peter

Yes, Canon at least shares the same chips between DSLR and smaller models. But one difference, is that the DSLRs often have multiple such chips in parallel, compared with a single chip in the compact models. This improves throughput, making the DSLR much faster.

My DSLR has 10 (or is it 12?) megapixels. So do many "compact" cameras. Given the sensor is massively larger in the DSLR, the pixels end up being much larger, and therefore more sensitive.

But even when comparing different pixel counts, the pixels in the DSLRs always end up being huge compared with the compact camera sensors.

Cheers

Oh, but there are inherent differences: DSLRs are larger, giving them more space internally for electronics, and have larger batteries to power those extra electronics.

This results in more processing power in the DSLR, speeding up target acquisition, capture, and storage of photos, which makes the handling much more responsive. For now, at least.

Oh, and most DSLRs still use CompactFlash cards for storage, which are way faster than the smaller cards typically used in compact cameras. This reduces buffering requirements, and makes the DSLRs faster again.

DSLRs have fundamentally different autofocus technology (phase-detection vs. contrast-detection), which radically speeds up the process of what happens when you press the button. With point-and-shoot cameras, you have to the whole half-press-wait-wait-focus-lock dance if you want to have low latency when you actually want to take the picture.

DSLRs also tend to be more willing to pipeline data from sensor to memory card, with bigger RAM buffers along the way. However, in the absolute newest generation of point-and-shoot cameras, the vendors seem to have decided that "fast response" is an important selling feature, so they're putting more effort into these very issues. It helps that Moore's Law has caught up with the processing needs of a compact camera. It also helps that the low end of the market has been obliterated by smartphones, so the only people buying point-and-shoots are the ones who want "quality" versus the ones who just want something that takes pictures.

(And don't get me started on how the 8 megapixel camera in my Droid X is notably worse than the 2 megapixel camera in my old iPhone 3G.)

I was curious earlier about how long the actual shutter lag on the iPhone 4 camera was. So I did a quick test. I used this website to run a stop watch and then released* the shutter when I given second rolled over.

http://www.online-stopwatch.com/

The result was a little surprising, the shutter lag appears to be just a tiny bit less than zero seconds

Either I am anticipating the roll over (which what I am seeing suggests is not true, but then the whole brain vision system can be tricky) or the iPhone is actually taking the picture the whole time you have your finger on the button and saves the image that was there just before you released the shutter.

Even if I stab at the button as it rolls over the apparent lag is less than a couple of hundred milliseconds.

* I rarely press and release the shutter in one movement on the iPhone, you get much better results by pressing the shutter and then sliding your finger off it

The shutter lag on the iPhone and many point and shoot cameras might as well be 30 minutes. That's how it feels sometimes, especially when compared to an SLR.

I'm not aware of a DSLR with a shutter lag of less than zero seconds

Considering that everything that we can take a picture of has already been taken, some shutters were fired years before we bought our cameras.

Don't forget #3. A DSLR has a bigger sensor and thus has less depth of field naturally. This is great if you like shots with boken (out of focus areas). If you don't then it's actually a disadvantage.

...actually true. The iPhone 3GS/4 preview at full resolution. When you hit the button, you get exactly what was last on the screen - the 3/5MP image was already in RAM, it just got scaled down for the on-screen preview.

Not sure which other phones do that, but it's one of my favorite features. In comparison, any other camera (including a DSLR) is technically slower

That's certainly not my experience with the iPhone4 and the stock camera app. In fact I note quite often how it's just about the most pathetic camera I've ever used. Not counting $5 keychain VGA cameras of course.

When you press the shutter button the screen continues to update as it closes its virtual (and needless graphical) "shutter" (which are actually aperture blades of a lens and not a shutter at all) and i'm usually left with an image that's definitely not what was on the screen as I pressed the button. Usually something blurry, since it's impossible to take an in-focus shot with that camera without a tripod. But if your subject has any natural motion itself, you never know what you're going to get because the disconnect from pressing the shutter to what actually gets recorded feels makes it feel like an eon is passing by.

I really hope the new hardware and software make some big moves. SImply being better than all the rest of the junk out there at the same price point isn't good enough in my books. If it wasn't for all the third-party alternatives to the iPhone's stock software we'd be in a sorry state indeed. And that goes double for the camera app.

I wonder what you are doing differently then Bruno ?

When pre-pressing the shutter button and sliding off, I really was getting less than zero seconds shutter lag measured. Even taking into account that I might have been anticipating the counter roll over that would still leave the shutter lag very, very close to zero seconds.

It has much, much less shutter lag than any other digital compact camera I've ever used.

Same here. I think it's pretty good as a camera phone !!!

http://crismatthews.com/blog/2010/08/06/iphone-fashion-studio-shoot-for-videojunkie-co-uk/

Cheers

Cris

That's probably what I'm doing differently. I've never tried activating the shutter this way. I'm not sure why I hadn't tried though. Maybe because it auto-focuses without having to touch the screen, I expected it to capture immediately when pressed for the first time.

The quality of images still sucks compared to every compact I've used, but if I can speed up the acquisition time that will at the very least help alleviate subject blur as I'll be able to better anticipate what will be captured.

Ok, I've tried the slide method and it works quite well. But it doesn't really do much to improve the delay when using flash.

I'm glad there's a camera on the phone and I find it indispensable, allowing me to take pictures of things I'd never be prepared for with any other camera, including a P&S. Coupled with apps on the phone it's a fantastic documentation tool as well.

But it could be dramatically improved, even if only at the application level.