Replacing the camera

[Chris Devers]

On Thu, 23 Feb 2006, Dave Cross wrote:

> Jason Tang wrote:
> 
> > £429 for a Nikon D50 with 18-55mm lens. It is a dSLR tho. Not
> > everyone's cup of tea
> > 
> > http://www.warehouseexpress.com/
> 
> Oooh. See, now you've got me looking at the body-only version for £350 
> and wondering if my old F70 lenses will work ok.
> 
> And wondering how much I can get for an F70 body on Ebay.

I got a D50 a couple weeks ago, and tried a couple of my parents' old 
Nikkor lenses from the late 60s / early 70s. They fit just fine, and the 
camera was able to take photos with them when set to manual mode, but it 
was a pain to get any kind of recognizable image to come out. 

The lenses in question were used with pre-auto-anything SLRs, but the 
glass should still be fairly good quality. I'm sure it would be possible 
to get good pictures with them with one of the current cameras, but 
you'd have to use all manual settings, compensate appropriately for the 
fact that the DSLRs have sensors smaller than a 35mm film frame, and 
figure out how to override the built-in light meter, as everything I 
tried was coming out way underexposed when using what the camera thought 
were useful settings. 

That said, these are 30 or 40 year old lenses I'm talking about. If you 
have anything slightly newer, and it's at all capable of auto-anything, 
then you should more easily be able to get decent quality results.



-- 
Chris Devers