awesome! thats made it worse lol ,
any ideas how i can make 800 quid really quickly??
the flip out screen is awesome, the amount of times i have been crouched into some position a yoga master would be proud of trying to see through the viewfinder is bordering painful !
how good (or bad) is the video mode ?
thanks
Do what I do... Grow your hair long and stand provocatively on shady street corners offering oral pleasure to passers by, obviously.
The video is fantastic, the same as it is on any of the new DSLR's to be honest. You can quite see why it is making waves on the DV scene.
You have manual control over all the usual bits including white balance. You can only use the screen to record video which is no big deal and you have a nice array of options when it comes to frame-rates and sizes etc...
1920 x 1080 (29.97, 25, 23.976 fps) - Full HD video. Make sure you get a decent class 10 SD card otherwise your buffer will flood and the video will stop every few seconds.
1280 x 720 (59.94, 50 fps) - Great for half speed/slow motion video, especially when you use it with a plugin like Twixtor.
640 x 480 (59.94, 50 fps) - You get the option in this mode to crop the image to full digital zoom with reasonable quality. Great little feature for recording stuff that's a long way off without having the pull of a big zoom lens. Combined with a decent zoom lens you can get some really impressive results with the crop feature.
The only thing you'll have trouble with is focus/DOF. You just need to remember that it's not a handy cam so you can't just wander around with it and expect excellent results.
The auto focus is slow and requires the AF button to be pressed every time you change subject if you wish to use it. You are better off using manual focus but this can be difficult on the small screen if you are just wandering around filming.
I have found that planning the shot is the only real way of getting excellent results out of a video DSLR without spending money on things like external monitors (so you can get a better feel for focus) or one of the autofocus systems.
If you have, or know someone that has a portable TV with HDMI you can use that as an external monitor for video.
Obviously aperture is one of the main factors when it comes to DOF. The smaller the aperture, the more extensive the depth of field, so take your lens choice into consideration if you are looking to use video pretty extensively.
UrbanX and I have been talking about video on DSLR's recently, and the real issue, with exploring anyway is usually light. Most of the places are either pitch black or dim and noise can be a real problem unless you spend time planning your shot and adjusting your settings accordingly.
Just prepare for some pissing around to get what you really want.
I'm still trying to get my head around a lot of it, mainly decent results in low light, so if anyone has some PROTIP's I'd like to see them please!
Keep your eye on canonrumors.com if you are scraping the money together over time.
A lot of the time Canon bring out a new lower end model that incorporates it's bigger brothers features. It's always going to be a compromise but you could end up save yourself some money towards a lens or something if you can do without the features in a higher end camera like I did.
