#canon 30D

Phottix Grip vs. Canon BG-E2

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I did some research and didn’t find any­thing too neg­a­tive towards get­ting this Phot­tix BP-40D vs a Canon BG-E2/BG-E2N as a grip for my 30D other than the make. The pro-point is that its only $75 shipped from Hong Kong to San Fran­cisco. It has the same fea­tures as its Canon coun­ter­part but for less. Here are some points from the eBay seller, ete­fore (aka. HK Sup­plies), of whom I got it from:

  • The Ver­ti­cal Grip/Battery Holder adds a ver­ti­cal shut­ter release, and is com­pat­i­ble with up to two BP-511, BP-511A Lithium-ion bat­tery packs, or six AA bat­ter­ies with included bat­tery holder. It pro­vides addi­tional shut­ter release, main dial, AE lock/FE lock and AF point selec­tion con­trols for eas­ier ver­ti­cal shooting.
  • The bat­tery holder works with one or two BP-511/BP-511A batteries.
  • Bat­tery Holder for six AA batteries
  • Instruc­tion in Chinese/English/Netherlands/French/Germany/Italian/Spanish
  • It also has a tri­pod socket.
  • The bat­tery grip and the bat­ter­ies are NOT Canon made.
  • These high qual­ity prod­uct with big dis­count from the orig­i­nal one.
  • Made of top qual­ity mate­ri­als and the best qual­ity you can find in the market.

To add to that, based on Phot­tix’ web­site, the grip can be used on the fol­low­ing dSLR bodies:

  • Canon 300D, 350D/XT, 400D/XTi, 10D, 20D, 30D, 40D, and 5D
  • Nikon D200, D70s, D80, D40, and D40x

Here’s some pho­tos of it (by Flick­rite presspix):

Mean­while, I’m hop­ing to receive it by either later this week, or early next week. I’ve bought from ete­fore before and they ship pretty fast. I’ll update when I have received it and have given it a test run.

The New Canon 30D

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Canon 30D

As I was doing my late-night news roundup, I stum­bled upon some inter­est­ing new Web 2.0 apps. The top two that are on my list to beta-test are Fold­era and Fly­spy. I can’t wait to see how Fold­era works, it seems that it’ll be use­ful at work and at home. As for Fly­spy, this thing should make it eas­ier for those of us “remotely” work­ing from home. I hope it saves me a ton of cash so I may have some left for some other good­ies later this year. Not to men­tion, a cou­ple of expenses dur­ing my big trips (Hawaii, Japan and P.I.).

Any­ways, a lit­tle birdie that a new toy has just been unveiled, Canon’s 30D. It seems that it is using the same sen­sor as the 20D. But a cou­ple of more intrigu­ing changes can be high­lighted as stated by Rob Gail­braith:

a 2.5-inch (diag­o­nal) rear LCD, increased burst depth, Pic­ture Styles, a shut­ter with a higher duty cycle rat­ing and a long list of other cam­era usabil­ity changes.

A cou­ple of things that I did like with the new 30D fea­tures are:

  • Canon’s more flex­i­ble Pic­ture Style menu, which replaces the Para­me­ters menu of the 20D
  • ISO 100‑1600 is now selec­table in 1/3 stop increments
  • Increased burst depth: 11 frames for RAW CR2 shoot­ing, 30 for Large Fine JPEG and 9 for RAW+JPEG
  • Switch­able High-Speed Con­tin­u­ous (5 fps) and Low-Speed Con­tin­u­ous (3 fps) frame rate set­tings are now included
  • An Auto set­ting in the Long Expo­sure Noise Reduc­tion Cus­tom Function
  • The abil­ity, like sev­eral more-pricey Canon dig­i­tal SLRs, to simul­ta­ne­ously apply long expo­sure noise pro­cess­ing to one pic­ture while cap­tur­ing another
  • The addi­tion of a 3.5% spot meter­ing mode
  • A more-precise 4-increment bat­tery charge indicator
  • No more new fold­ers cre­ated every 100 pho­tos; in the 30D, a folder can hold 9999 pho­tos (this one is a 50/50 like/dislike to me)
  • Dur­ing play­back, the image+shooting data screen will dis­play either an RGB or Bright­ness his­togram, file size and will option­ally dis­play AF markings
  • The Jump fea­ture dur­ing image play­back can now leap back and forth 10 pic­tures at a time, 100 pic­tures at a time or by the date shot

So yah, “nothin’ seri­ous.” It looks like it’ll be ship­ping mid-March (US) with an MSRP of $1399. $1399? That was how much I got my 20D for back in Decem­ber through Costco.com. Oh well, you can’t beat a rebate of $300 for it. Any­ways, I might have to take Costco up on their 100% return/warranty pol­icy later this year. Good times.