My first grown-up camera

Kind of sad how the last picture you take with your old camera is a picture of your new camera.

So today I got my new Nikon D5000, and retired the Canon PowerShot IS3, which served me faithfully for about 4 years. I think. Seems like every new camera costs about $1000 by the time you get your accessories sorted out, and it’s a huge leap over the previous one. This is my first DSLR, which I got because it can shoot HD video (well, 720p) (and, uh, only about 5 minutes at a time, but that’s enough for my purposes), and because it’s 12 megapixels instead of 6 and should take better pictures in low light than the point-n-shoot. I have two main needs for my camera: (1) shoot pictures of people, especially fast-moving kids, in low light, and (2) take better pictures of my artwork.

Well, I expected the images to be better, but I didn’t think they’d be THIS much better. This is a view of the difference. Both of these images were shot under the same light, with basically default settings. The d5000 is on the left, obviously, and it’s not even a high-quality image; just standard quality, auto everything. The difference is staggering.

It can do neat tricks like rattle off up to 999 pictures at regular intervals, keep an moving object as the focal point even if it moves within the field of view, and tons of things I haven’t discovered yet. I probably know 1% of what this camera can do. Already, I’m amazed by it.

The one downer is that I discovered tonight that it has a “hot pixel” which is red just off the center. Although this dot is too small to see under normal conditions, and is trivially fixed with a single click of a spot-heal brush in Photoshop or Lightroom (really, it’s effortless, just one oink and it’s gone), I know it’s there, so it’s like a splinter on my glorious new device. However, it seems like this is a very common issue with DSLRs; they just have so many pixels that one is bound to go bad, and one out of 12,000,000 is not something to worry about. In fact, you could argue that about every fifth pixel on the other camera was bad. Look closely at all the red junk in there. When only one is wrong, it stands out. Apparently it can be quickly fixed by Nikon, in software, but many people don’t even bother to do that. I haven’t decided yet. If it means shipping my camera off for a few weeks, it’s probably not worth it. We’ll see.

I think of the 1280×720 video mode as a 24-frames-per-second continuous shooting that can go on for 5 minutes, by the way, out of which you can select stills for drawing from. It’s too bad they’re limited to 5 minutes because of file size (2gb), and I expect this will not be a limitation on my next $1000 camera in 2014 or so. We’ll see. For now, it’ll do me fine.