Canon 17-85mm f/4-5.6 EF-S USM Review

Another week another lens review. Having owned and used this lens for around 2 years this will be a very personal review.

This is your "standard" zoom lens for Canon cropped bodies, the 17-85mm translates to 27~136 on standard 35mm full frame. This gives you reasonably wide angle and not too bad telephoto. The aperture goes from 4 at 17mm to 5.6 at 85mm. The price is around 600AUD/450USD. Everything about this lens is "standard" or just very average. Now this isn't necessarily a bad thing as this is one of the best standard (read:walk around) lenses for cropped bodies.

The lens is light and quite compact which means you won't be too worried about carrying it around with you all day. It is focuses fast enough to catch most types of action if thats your thing. Nothing about this lens stands out about the crowd but nothing about it is particularly bad.

Now lets talk image quality. Well thats average too... Looking at the photo from 30D it looks great when your zoomed out or printed normal size but at the pixel level it isn't very sharp. If we look at image quality towards the edges well that kinda gets a bit worse but still reasonable if your not pixel peeping. Towards the edge we also run into CA issues especially when using a higher aperture number (ie. anything over 16). Other things to be mindful of is the distortion and vignetting at 17mm.

What about macro work? Well this lens is not to bad for that since it can focus quite close at around 30cm. Flowers and insects won't fill the full frame but you will be able to crop a bit and get a reasonable sized bug. So I guess thats another average point in its favor.

Lets rap up here... This is a lens that I would recommend to anyone just starting out in the digital world and need to have a reasonable lens to try different things. It is and average lens that delivers average results at an average price. In this case being average might not be a bad thing. Oh and the images that you take will be anything you can make of it and some of them will be anything but average.

Pros.

1. Lightweight and reasonable size
2. Good range (27~136mm)
3. IS works well
4. Good starter lens and walk around lens

Cons.

1. Contrast isn't quite as good
2. Plastic body
3. Image quality could be better

The above image is pixel level look at the quality and you can see it is reasonably sharp. Note: This was center frame so it should be the sharpest it can be.

Canon 50mm f/1.4 USM Review

This is probably one of the most popular primes ever sold. It is inexpensive, light and quite a sharp when stepped down a little. This lens is also about a quarter the price of the f/1.2.

I have owned a copy of this lens since May of last year and it has opened up a whole new dimension of photography that just wouldn't not have been possible on a standard zoom.

The DoF effect is very very shallow, in fact so shallow that I had trouble at the beginning locking focus on what I wanted. You will be using this lens in Manual focus mode much of the time simply because the AF won't always pick the correct thing to be in focus.

Another benefit is how fast this lens is, I was able to get usable shots at f/1.4 while taking photos during the night safari in Singapore. You are talking about very very low light environments.

Usually it will focus quite fast but there are the occasional issues focusing but it's not very common.

Build quality is good but it's still plastic body with a metal mount.

Pros

• Fast 1.4 aperture which means excellent low light performance
• Excellent DoF effect
• Excellent bokeh when focusing on close objects
• Light and inexpensive
• Metal Mount

Cons

• 50mm on a cropped body is... well weird
• Shallow DoF means hard to focus at times
• Plastic body

Click here to see some sample photos

Getting the most out of your iLiad Reader - Part 2

This post we will look at installing a modified content lister as well as a full screen PDF reader. Again like the last post all details are from the MobileRead forums.

The default content lister that comes with your iLiad only supports very few items on a single page before requiring you to turn the page for more items. With the modified content lister you can have more items 8, 12 or 20 items listed on a page. This wonderful modification is thanks to Hansel from MobileRead. The version we will be installing is 1.0.5 which is the current latest version.

1. Download newContentLister
2. Unzip on to CF or MMC card
3. Navigation to your media card and select the newLister-1.0.5 folder
4. Select the install option "Install NewLister"
5. Select the number of items per page you require
6. Select the "Reboot" option
7. Your iLiad should reboot with new settings

Next up we want to install the full screen PDF reader by jharker. This gives you the ability to fullscreen a PDF file and hide the button and things that are down the bottom. There are a number of other PDF reader modifications but we are only interested in this one for this post.

1. Download the iPDF installer package
2. Unzip on to CF or MMC card
3. Navigation to your media card and select the ipdf_installers folder
4. Select "Install jharker's fullscreen ipdf"
5. Select "Run me to identify the current ipdf"
6. If you have installed correctly it should display "This looks like the jharker's fullscreen version"
7. Shutdown and restart you iLiad

Now that the fullscreen PDF is installed how do we use it? Well it only works for PDF files so remember that. Here are some instructions:

1. Everything works as they do normally
2. You would probably want to zoom the page first before engaging fullscreen mode
3. Pressing and holding the UP arrow (not the squiggly one on the top) will start fullscreen mode.
4. Short press of the squiggly up arrow on the top of the device will exit fullscreen mode(when in fullscreen mode)
5. Another press of that arrow will exit the PDF reader

Getting the most out of your iLiad Reader - Part 1

I have had my iLiad reader for about a year and I want to share some tips for new users to the platform. None of this can be possible without the hard work of many individuals from the MobileRead forums. I am only taking credit for putting everything together for first time users.

Before we start make sure you have the following:

1. iRex iLiad either editions
2. A MMC or CF card
3. A card reader for the card of your choice
4. Wireless or wired net access setup on your device

First thing you will want to do is to register you device with iRex for shell access. You do this by registering on the iRex developer site.

1. Register at iRex
2. Enter your MAC address. This is the code on the back of your iLiad on the sticker, it will look something like 00-16-7C-00-45-22
3. Click send developer package
4. Connect to iDS by pushing and holding the connect button (top right button)
5. Your iLiad will restart when done

The next thing you will want to do is to install FBReader to expand the list of supported document types. This is an integrated version of FBReader created by Adam. B. version 0.8.14

1. Download FBReader
2. Unzip into a folder on your MMC or CF card
3. On you iLiad go to the card and select "Install FBReader"
4. Restart your device after you see the Title of the item change to "FBReader has been Installed"

Optional step is to install my modified FBReader settings package. This will change the default FBReader font to something much nicer and it also changes the margins so the text isn't pushed all the way to the edges.

1. Download the settings package
2. Unzip into a folder on your MMC or CF card
3. Select "Update FBReader 0.8.14 settings"
4. No need to restart

More to come in the following weeks

28-300mm f3.5-5.6L Canon IS EF Review - Week 3

Well here is my second review after owning the lens for 3 full weeks.

This is what the lens looks like fully extended on my Canon 30D

I am really enjoying the benefits of the push/pull design for composing my shots however it is causing a lot more dust to enter the camera as it is not a sealed body. However, I am happy to put up with it because this lens delivers very good results. Dust on the sensor can be cleaned easily by using a lens cleaning pen, sensors are not as fragile as most people think. HINT: To see if you have sensor dust select the highest aperture number i.e. 32 or 40 and take a photo of a white wall or sky and you will see dust as clearly as you need

Overall the contrast of this lens is better than both the 17-85mm Canon EF-S and the Canon 50mm 1.4 wide open. At 300mm sharpness does drop a bit as expected but at f8 they are fine again. The 1.7kg weight of the lens is now becoming normal for me to carry around however the size is still not great if I were on a holiday and wanted to pack light. i.e going snowboarding I would leave this at home and carry a P&S

I have included some shots from the lens below. They have had some adjustments but nothing too major. Click through the images to see other sizes and more photos.