Re: 350d vs. d70s

David J. Littleboy wrote:

"J. Clarke" <jclarke.usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Because it's so illogical and arbitrary.

It's necessarily arbitrary, there isn't any Divine Writ that states what
control should be located where. Dial on top for shutter and ring on
lens for aperture works and is logical but takes up real estate that may
be needed for other purposes.

Well, no. Ring on lens for aperture requires a mechanical ring (plus
position sensor plus another set of wires/contacts) on every lens, making
the lenses more expensive.

If you routinely use several brands of camera that have the controls
reversed then I can see where it's a problem, but if you use one body or
family of bodies and shoot regularly then it's not hard to remember, in
fact it doesn't take long before you don't even think about it.

It's _only_ a problem if someone tells me that the 2-control camera is an
improvement over the one-control camera.

One would think two would be better than one, but it turns out it's not
that simple; the 300D was very easy to use, and the 10D/20D/30D/5D
interface takes a lot of getting used to.

(I'll take people's word for it that Canon succeeded in making things
worse on the 350D.)

The important point here is that I really don't see any payoff for putting
up with that "getting used to" effort; the "shift" button on the 300D
falls nicely under my thumb, making adjusting the other parameter
completely trivial. There isn't any problem with a reasonably designed
1-dial interface.

Coming from a Leica M, the "shift" button on the 300D would take "getting
used to" for me just as the setup on the 30D has. Humans did not evolve
using cameras, there is no "instinctive" configuration. If you started out
with a given setup it seems "natural" and changing to anything else takes
"getting used to". That's just the way it is. But it doesn't make any
given setup inherently more "natural". From a time-motion viewpoint one
might be "better" than another but that depends on the assumptions made by
the engineer before he started counting therbligs.


--
--John
to email, dial "usenet" and validate
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)
.