Posts Tagged ‘Digital SLR autofocus’

Why dSLRs Are Better

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Point-and-shoot digital cameras are ballyhooed as great close-up gear because the LCD display makes it easy to frame your photo accurately without fear of accidentally clipping off part of the image due to the parallax error difference between what the optical viewfinder sees and what the sensor actually captures. Yet, can you really view an image and check focus on an LCD with a 1.5-inch diagonal measurement?

I’ve used non-SLR digital cameras with generous 2.5- inch LCDs and worked with EVF cameras with decent-sized internal LCD viewfinders, and none of them were as good as the least expensive dSLR when it comes to framing and viewing an image.

If it seems as if shutter lag and other features of digital cameras were designed to make action photography difficult, the reverse is true for the macrophotographic realm. Many features built into every digital camera make these image grabbers ideal for taking close-up pictures. If you’ve been doing macrophotography with film cameras, a few sessions with a digital camera will convince you that digital technology is exactly what you’ve been waiting for.

Back panel LCDs are no picnic to use outdoors in bright sunlight, either. The image is often washed out and difficult to see. Although an increasing number of point-and-shoot cameras boast close focusing capabilities down to less than one inch, they really aren’t the ideal camera you’d choose for macrophotography.

On the other hand, dSLRs not only provide a big, bright look at what you’re shooting, you can press the depth-of-field preview to gauge the sharpness, too. Their zoom lenses focus close even at telephoto positions—something lacking in many snapshooter-oriented digital cameras, which work in macro mode only at the wide-angle setting.

Digital SLR autofocus is faster, and the lack of shutter lag means you can snap off a picture  the instant your dragonfly hovers into the field-of-view—not a second or two later. A dSLR is more likely to have an external flash connection than a non-dSLR, so your close-up lighting setups can be more sophisticated. There are special macro lenses and other close-up accessories like ringlights for digital SLRs that aren’t readily available for fixedlens cameras.