Hi, my name is Steve,
looking for advice about a good camera for birdwatching. Would like digital. Probably SLR but open to other equivalent. Relatively easy to use, but not compact. Maybe semi- professional camera, with potential to easily vary F stop, shutter speed & iso. Zoom lens. Fast set up with repeat photo function. 8 - 10 Mega pixel screen. I also have a telescope & if camera could also be used on telescope with adapter all the better. My telescope is: Kowa (prominar), fluorite lens TSN-824, (with a Kowa lens, 20 -60). Any thoughts and advise i would be most grateful,
Steve
[QUOTE=stevenuthatch;1200310]Hi, my name is Steve,
looking for advice about a good camera for birdwatching. Would like digital. Probably SLR but open to other equivalent. Relatively easy to use, but not compact. Maybe semi- professional camera, with potential to easily vary F stop, shutter speed & iso. Zoom lens. Fast set up with repeat photo function. 8 - 10 Mega pixel screen. I also have a telescope & if camera could also be used on telescope with adapter all the better. My telescope is: Kowa (prominar), fluorite lens TSN-824, (with a Kowa lens, 20 -60). Any thoughts and advise i would be most grateful,
Steve[/QUOTE]
I think you will have a hard time finding one camera that will be great for both stand alone bird photos and digiscoping. The digiscoping experience is often good with a camera that is a point and shoot with 3-4x zoom lens: this http://www.birdforum.net/forumdisplay.php?f=305 forum discusses that kind of cameras. Occasionally, someone identifies a dSLR lens that can be adapted for the same use.
For the stand alone camera you would normally want a lens that is a zoom lens or prime lens in the 400+ mm equivalent range. For the words semi-pro to apply I would guess you should be looking at a dSLR + a prime lens. Most dSLR has a crop factor, so a 300 mm lens will be equivalent to the old 35mm designation of 400mm. My own esperience is that I dont want to go back to a SLR (I used to have a film SLR setup) because I dont want to carry both the scope and the camera equipment.
Therefore, I have gone the way of the P&S camera with an extended zoom range. For years, I have used a Nikon coolpix 4500 + a teleconverter, which offered digiscoping and some ability to do stand alone bird photography, limited by only being able to use the LCD for finding the bird. This package weighed in at about the same as the camera body in a SLR. I now am purchasing a superzoom camera (panasonic DMC-FZ18, 500 mm equivalent) to gain an (electronic which is less great than what the SLR have) viewfinder. Again, about 1 lbs = ½ kg. (A second reason for looking at a new camera is that I am fast approaching the 10000 images on the cp4500, and I therefore expect it would fail one of these years. It will still serve as my digiscoping camera until it does fail).
If you want something in between the FZ18 and the SLR, you could look at the fuji s100fs: larger sensor should result in less noise (and does according to reviews) with better high iso performance. Has a shorter lens to 400mm equivalent, but more pixels probably will result in about the same number of pixels on the bird from the same distance. Weighs about 3x what the FZ18 comes in at.
There are some cameras similar to the FZ18 including a new announcement from Nikon; I suspect that there are not that many just like the Fuji mentioned above. In the SLR range, the Olympus cameras with a 2x crop factor probably could make a package with punch weighing less than what Nikon/Canon would do. (2x crop factor meaning that a 200 mm lens becomes a 400 eq lens).
Hope this helps.
Niels
Hi Steve,
I would second what Niels said. It really depends on your budget, what sort of quality results you are looking for and how much weight you are prepared to carry around. I use a Panasonic FZ18 which is really lightweight and have managed to get some really nice photos with it. See my sig for details. You can extend the range with a 1.7x teleconverter (I use an Olympus TCON17). Expect to pay around £250 for the camera and another £50 for a TCON plus about £25 for an adapter to marry the two. The benefits other than it being so portable are that you can go from 28mm wide angle all the way up to 500 mm (and even further with the TCON and using the extended zoom options). It does have a burst mode (though nothing compared to a good DSLR), video recording, heaps of scene modes and creative functions like different aspect ratios, and its macro capability isn't half bad either (you can get add on lenses for supermacro work too). The main downside to these cameras is the noisy sensor, which means you should try as far as possible to shoot in good light and at 100 ISO whenever you can. That said, I have taken many shots at higher ISO speed and printed them out and the results have been quite passable.
I also digiscope with a fuji Finepix F31FD and a kowa scope when I need more range (but this doesn't happen very often these days!).
The fuji that Niels mentioned probably outdoes the FZ18 in terms of the noise, but I hear it has a lot of chromatic abberation problems (something which Panasonic seem to reduce in camera during Jpeg processing).
Hope this helps
Jo