The great dSLR revolution

When they first made themselves obvious, I owned a Powershot A70. Although curious to switch, I was a little too much in love with Powershot's light compact aluminium frame, bright LCD and soft whirring servos. I took it everywhere. Sometimes I did not need to take pictures but still toyed with the LCD viewfinder and the servo zoom. Whirr..whirr. It was very pleasing. The pictures I took seldom failed my expectations. Maybe I needed to blow them up larger than my desktop to feel dissatisfied. This I never did. Very recently, I became interested in making the move, with a view to getting serious publication quality pictures and with a view to learning more about video cameragraphy. This was past my 7th year of casual digital photography. The transition was not smooth. Actually very frustrating with a Canon 500D kit lens and a wide angle apater. I was quite impressed by the added resolution of the 500D's indoor shots but the outdoor results were nothing short of disastrous. I first blamed it on myself. Maybe I did not know enough about the manual exposure settings or maybe I snapped at the wrong time of the day. Maybe the lens shipped with the camera was super bad. But something seemed sorely out of whack. When I zoomed into my old 3.1 MP powershot images, I could go very deep and not see a single red or white spot standing out. Here, despite the 5x improvement in resolution, the landscapes were quite bad when magnified. After a brief pause in my experimentation, I bought a relatively inexpensive zoom lens, a 70-300 canon telephoto. I could get some rather good bird images impromptu with the same minimal photography knowledge. All else equal, I could blame the bad wide angle shots on the default plastic lens and rushed to buy a superior Canon 15-85 lens. This improved the images but the depth of field was not impressive even at high f stops. I concluded something might be special about the small digital cameras in outdoor wide angle situations and embarked on a google search, eventually to conclude that it was very likely the case. The smaller cheaper compacts had a depth of field advantage. They used much wider lenses, 5-7 mm at the widest, and use only a small, in fact very small, about 1/36'th of the image that focal length would create on a DSLR sensor. This small focal length translates into a much higher light intensity and needs a proportionately smaller actual aperture to give the same signal. That meant that the same actual aperture size or DOF would correspond to a fast F/2.8 instead of a rather slow F/15 on DSLR. Besides it is also possible to get large F stops at this wide focal length. Wow, the small format has a lower resolution, higher noise but here is a big and bright silver lining, you can get the same DOF with F/2.8 as you might with F/15 on a DSLR and F/30 on a large format. If this argument holds you probably never really need to go beyond the widest aperture which is a disappointment when you feel like fidgeting with that dial. Obviously magnifying a small image is not always without errors. Besides wide angle lenses can be more error prone. Besides, ISO compensation is probably a big problem with the compacts. At the moment, it is hard to dump dSLRs. Especially if you need to blow your images beyond a 32 inch LCD screen or frequently need high zoom or do indoor or macro photography. Though, I would look into the bridge prosumer range of cameras (Powershot G, Lumix FZ, Finepix Fujifilm ) since they use rather good lens systems, small sensors and allow some manual fiddling. Maybe in future, they will let you swap lenses. I would not think it worth buying a DSLR without a repertoire of fine lenses and filters. The question in my mind is what professional photographers think of small sensor optics. Why exactly are they trying to make a full frame DSLR. Sure, you get much better sensitivity on each pixel but unless you use a tripod, you are likely to get much lower shutter speed distortion in a smaller sensor. What is not clear is what exactly is the trade off - or rather how large would an image have to be for the compact sensor to be a handicap.