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1/8/2011 3:22:19 AM
 
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Section 20: Outdoor Photography Subject: Digital Cameras Msg# 762451
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I confess I'm not familiar with Miranda. But like everyone else, slowly but surely I gave in to all-dancing electronics, as one photo reviewer some twenty-plus years ago so quaintly described the current cameras overtaking the older cameras of those days. However, before digital I didn't even get into autofocus. The early systems were not good. I finally had to get autofocus when I couldn't take snapshots anymore because my eyes took too long to focus on non-standard subjects, and by then it was time to get a digital camera as well. Today I find modern autofocus systems very good, but I still use manual focus at times, and even for fine focus override, fortunately my DSLR lenses let me manually adjust them without damaging motors, and with a nice diopter arrangement I get nice sharp pix. |
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For reference, the above message is a reply to a message where: I've long been aware of gray market and fortunately never been burned. I knew about the gray market, too, and that's why the sales guy had to lie to me to sell me the camera. It isn't worth saving $50-100to lose your warranty. I knew that Nikon didn't honor the warranty on gray market stuff but it never occurred to me that the company wouldn't fix any out-of-warranty camera they made and still had parts for at a factory service center at the owner's expense. I don't know how the gray market cameras actually get distributed to the U.S., but Nikon does, and it could stop the practice if it wanted to. I don't see gray market cameras made by any other company advertised here. I think Pentax, Minolta, Miranda and later on, Olympus film cameras have always fit into niche markets and all of them have made models that took good pictures. I bought my first 35mm camera while I was in the Air Force, a Nikkorex F that I think was actually made by Miranda. It was completely manual and I learned to set the shutter speed and aperture by reading the recommendations for "bright sunlight", "cloudy bright with distinct shadows" and "overcast with no shadows" that used to come printed in the instructions that came with each roll of Kodak film. I had already pretty well calibrated my eyeballs by the time I bought my first light meter (a Sekonic II as I recall). |
My first camera was a Brownie box camera that used 620 roll film, but my first "thinking" camera was rangefinder my dad bought at the Army PX in Germany around 1951. It wasn't anything expensive but I learned how to estimate distances and estimate light, as it also had no meter. Today's photographers have heard of the F16 Sunny day rule and couldn't estimate light if their light depended on it.