Sunday, July 10, 2005

Rebel XT II

Ergonomics
I found that to use the camera I supported the weight of the camera with my left hand under the lens (update: oops forgot this was way you are supposed to hold it). This meant that the buttons on the left side required a grip change to use although for most part these buttons aren't the most important for shooting. The image size and shooting parameters are accessed through these left hand buttons. More importantly it meant that using the zoom required a grip change because my hand was normally on the zoom ring.
Shooting vertically was even worse. This moves the camera a bit higher which makes it difficult to brace with the left arm. The buttons also became more difficult to use. The best example of this was when I jabbed my finger into my nose while trying to reach one. Unconsciously I stopped using portrait mode.

Software
Canon software.
For browsing there are the ImageBrowser, Digital Photo Professional and File Viewer Utility. There is no distinction made in the manual for when to use each and since they each have some functions that the others don't there are reasons to bounce between these programs that aren't integrated, have different interfaces, and no online help. ImageBrowser was best for viewing images because it allowed side-by-side viewing and seeing the exposure info. The problem with Side-by-side is that the info is done in a separate window which often gets hidden. It has options for cropping and color adjustment.
DPP has a few image adjustments- cropping, rotation, brightness, white balance, and something called ckick. The manual refers to this as click and it shades an image with a single color (like sepia toning but adjustable).
Image browser also has editing and trimming options as well as a method for rating the photos which DPP doesn't have. The shooting info it provides gets cut 0ff (as in: Camera Model Name: Canon Po...)
Finally file viewer utility has no editing options but does have a useful button which shows you where the camera auto-focused.
There is the EOS capture program which allows the camera to directly send images to the computer via USB. This program will not launch if you click on it. It must be started from within DPP. It will also not start if the camera is in playback mode. Once beyond this it allows a nice degree of control of the camera - ISO, exposure, white balance, and image size. The other options can be adjusted on the camera.
This is not the program my Powershot uses. It uses Remote Capture and it only has a size option and no adjustments can be made on the camera.
There are also the Photo Stitch and Camera Window programs, Arcsoft Photostudio. This is 8 programs for 2 cameras.

Speed
In general, all of the software is very slow and I ended up doing quite a bit of waiting moving between images. The software doesn't seem to share thumbnails between apps.

Help
DPP and File Viewer Utility have no online help. There are two PDFs- one for DPP and one cryptically named EDS_M_E which contains help for the EOS capture, camera window, ImageBrowser, RAW and Photostich programs. The inclusion of EOS Capture in the EDS documents is strange seeing as it can only be launched by DPP. It took me a while to figure this out, I would launch the Capture program and then it would disappear.

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