The Great Camera Review!

In importing this post from openoffice there were a number of formatting errors, as a result the following post is probably going to be all kinds of screwed up.  Sorry about that.

So in Japan there's a department store called Yodobashi camera. I don't know how to spell Yodobashi in Japanese, if I did I would write it here now. This begs the rather obvious question of how I know which store is Yodobashi, and which isn't. This is easily answered by a Japanese phenomenon I am going to call, 'jingle fever.'

It begins when you leave the airport on the first day, and continues until you leave the airport on your final day. I suspect however, that the jingles continue long into the memory. I know the final lines of the Yodobashi theme tune for example, and I've only been in there a few times to peruse their goods and buy a mouse.

Cute sells here, cute sells a lot of things. If porsche wrapped their latest hypercar in a fluffy hello kitty outfit and bought it here, they would sell out in seconds. 'It's okay dear, we can live in the car...' This barrage of cute doesn't stop at the visual and endorsement aspects of daily life, it also hits your eardrums. If eardrums could acquire plaque...

The train stations have a little jingle when a train is coming in, and when an announcement is being made. Every department store has its' own theme. The convenience stores here even have their own themes; seven 11s is particularly funny, as they manage to leverage the final three syllables of e-le-ven into a two syllable tune – becoming le-ven. Therefore, all Japanese people call se-ven e-le-ven, 'se-ven lev-en.' It makes me smile, no matter how many times I hear it.

So coming full circle to the beginning of this post; I can spot a Ydobashi from fifty paces, not by the visual cues, but because of the jingle that rings out around the shop.

I've taken a number of pictures of the business district around here, because there's some serious work going on. There are more department stores (presumably department stores) going up, and they are gargantuan. The Yodobashi is twelve storeys of shopping floors with a further four or five of storage (at a guess) with five floors below ground, two for shopping, three for parking. This sounds very tame height-wise, by Japanese standards; but the surface area is enormous. Everything here has an american influence, and their street design is no different; so everything is arranged in blocks. The Yodobashi takes up half a block in all directions. It's massive.

So now we arrive at the actual point of this post. Drumroll please... The great camera review!

I've wanted a DSLR for some time now, but haven't really had the need for one. (Need is subjective of course. I don't need a camera like I need, for example, air.) Coming to Japan has shown me that actually, having an exceptional camera would afford great picture taking opportunities; and I've steeled myself for some kind of DSLR purchase.

So Yodobashi camera, despite the name, aren't solely camera based. It is however in their origins, and they have an entire floor dedicated to photography equipment, so there's no better place to go in order to try them out bar perhaps being a camera reviewer of sorts.

Depending on your approach, the first choice is either make or model. If you go with Canon, you are stuck with a few 3rd party lenses and Canon lenses only. If you take the Nikon route you have a larger range of lenses in the Nikon range, and a large number of third party lense manufacturers. Having nosed around the lense section though, it seems Canon, despite having a smaller range, is still well catered for.

This is important for the simple reason that once you've got a couple of lenses for whichever model, switching to a different manufacturer is going to be far more costly. No one wants to replace lenses when they have perfectly good ones sitting on their desk.

This makes the manufacturer choice all the more important.

The Nikon D3000 caught my eye; so I tried that out. From the top down, both Canon and Nikon (the two I narrowed it down to) have an identical menu system from the top of their range through to the bottom. This means if you've picked up one of their other cameras, you're immediately familiar with the one you're holding now. This is extremely good in theory, and works particularly well for Canon. Not for Nikon however, as their menu system is not very intuitive. After finding the setting for 'change me to English,'(日本語) (Japanese I think) navigating is easy enough, but changing settings can prove to be a pain in the backside. And finding them was a little tricky too. That's not to say this system is impossible to use; with a little practice, and some custom menu settings in place I'm sure changing what needs to be changed would be easy enough.  I believe the Canon does have the advantage here though.

I think this is primarily due to the Canons' menu layout. The Canon has a two menu system, where half a dozen different menus are selectable at the top, then depending on which has been chosen, a number of options are displayed. The Nikon seems to just throw everything at you all at once.

Both have customisable menus, which means you can put the settings you change most often right at the top of the menu list, for immediate access. I think overall Canon gets the nod here, but after a little practice they'd both be usable.

The D3000 was pretty light, and easy to use overall. The body was a little small, but that's probably good in the long run. One complaint I have about all the Nikon lenses I tested was the fuzziness of the focus ring. It felt like it'd been oiled one too many times, it slid around with no effort and required a more delicate touch than the Canon equivalents; I don't do delicate.

The D3000 was pretty solid overall; but then I moved from there onto the big daddy. The D3. This is the camera for professionals, and has the professional price tag. It's heavy, and big, and generally feels great to hold. This is where I move on to complain about the Nikon cameras a little more. All the cameras have a large number of focus points to choose from; but being able to choose which the camera should use is a pain in the backside with the Nikon, where it's simply a single button press with the Canon models.

The Nikon has so many buttons and things to press and twiddle that I spent five minutes figuring out how to get it to autofocus on what I wanted; when I managed to set this up however, it was amazing. I don't know how many fps it shoots, but it was too fast to review them all. Obviously I can't talk about image quality, but they seemed sharp when I reviewed them on the screen, and the focus worked perfectly every time. Of course it's indoors and the conditions are perfect, but the cheaper Canon SLR's missed a trick every now and again when continuous shooting; one would turn up a little blurred. Maybe it's just because it's in the shop and has probably been brutalised by the customers.

Overall, I think the D3000 is a little too whimpy. The D3 is probably out of my price range, considering it costs as much as a car...

The big daddy Canon offering wasn't available on the shop floor, but the next best thing, the D7 was available.

In a nutshell. I want this camera. It's brilliant. The menu is a piece of cake to run through, the settings are easy to change on the fly, even for a complete beginner like myself. The focus options are intuitive to use, being mapped to a single button on the body, instead of being buried inside the menus like the Nikons. The zoom and manual focus of the lenses were a treat, while the autofocus was damned near instant. I want this camera! It's a shame about the price though... Another car would sit on the forecourt if I bought this camera.

If a millionaire is reading this, please buy me the D1 mk4 when it comes out. If Jesus is reading this, please buy me the D7 or the D5 mk2. I can't afford either, but one can dream, right?

In light of the entire post being about cameras, and not my travels, it is worth pointing out that Osaka is not very nice. It doesn't have as many big attractions as the other areas (it has a zoo and stuff like that) besides the Osaka castle, which is fantastic, there's not a lot else to do other than shop, eat and drink. (Well, to this untrained eye it seems this is all Osaka has to offer. (Of course there will be more under the surface)

Maybe that's why it's hedonistic?

On a separate note, I'm back to Kyoto tomorrow.  Yay!