Prodigious

I came across this website http://camerasize.com/ which is very handy for getting a feel for camera size (I think http://www.43rumors.com/ referred the link originally).  I’ll show you a couple of examples since I just talked about the G1X.

G1X vs GX1 (my current) – add 100 grams to the weight since the GX1 would need a lens and that is what the 14-42X weighs.

G1X vs EM-5 (next month I switch)

D200 vs EM-5 (put in perspective how big the last one was)

And then just to put it all in perspective, the new Canon 1DX vs the EM-5

It isn’t often that I make a disastrous decisions like this for one of my responsibilities I take very seriously.  I get to help select family and friends with purchasing new electronics, especially cameras.  So my mom has a point and shoot that is probably three or four years old.  And she wanted a significantly better quality camera.  In my opinion, yes the newer point and shoot cameras are an improvement, but not a major improvement.

Of course, I have my personal bias for the mirrorless segment over DSLRs, but that isn’t necessarily true for everyone.  My change in mentality is largely because of my kids (well and because of the subtle shifts in the market).  But most of the m43 have a sensor that is really, really old.   Like comparing the one generation change from the GF3 to the GX1 in DXOMark, the former has a score of 459 and the latter 703.  These two cameras were released a couple months apart.  Now compare that to the D200 -> D300 -> D300s: 583 -> 679 -> 787.  That huge jump from GF3 to GX1 isn’t because the GX1 is a modern miracle, it is because it started really far behind.  Just now the sensors in the m43 cameras are actually getting competitive (which is what I had been waiting for before I sold all my kit to jump in…hurry and get here E-M5).

But I didn’t want to have my mom to spend a grand on the GX1 with the 14-42X.  Getting the 14-42X was a no brainer because of portability.  That and the E-M5 were the only cameras and my mom doesn’t need an advanced body.  But then the Canon G1X looked very promising.  My thought was it was perfect for her.  Anyone that cares about photography, would stay away from the G1X since it has a non-replaceable lens.  Why would you buy that when you could use so many different m43 lenses with either the GX1 or the E-M5 at a small price increase?  But my mom would never swap the lenses of a m43 body so it must be the target audience.  A point and shoot upgrader that wants improved image quality without jumping to a dSLR.

My mom was coming to visit soon so we had her ship here (slightly more complicated than that, but don’t worry it made sense).  I was excited to check out the camera before we sent it to her (it arrived much earlier than expected by about a month).  But opening the box I was shocked at what a brick it was compared to the GX1 with the 14-42X.  Width is about the same, but height is about 20% taller, 40% thicker, and 25% heavier.  Maybe that doesn’t seem like much, but it crosses a threshold.  Especially where the main value of this segment is portability.  I’m real interested in seeing how well they sell because I’m not seeing the market.  Well the market is going to be consumers who don’t know to buy outside the main brands (Nikon and Canon) and both are seriously lacking in this category (although a real Canon mirrorless is rumored to be coming out later this year, so the G1X might just be a short term solution).

But this did make me think, what will be different with the EM-5 than the GX1.  Of the taller, thicker, and heavier, the most offensive to me is the thicker.  And the thickness of the EM-5 is the same as the GX1.  So no worries there.  The taller is also true, but the EM-5 is only taller where the electrical viewfinder is (which is one of my main reasons for switching – unlike the useless optical viewfinder on the G1X).  Other than that, I think it is about the same as the GX1.  Lastly, the weight will also be true which comes with the metal build and the weather sealing.  I’ll be able to tell more when I handle it on how it feels, but I’m thinking this can be a plus.  When you carry around a digital SLR with a neck strap with a long lens (like the 18-200), it dips forward and is really awkward.  So much so that you have to have a hand on the camera all the time.  But with my GX1, I like how I just throw it over my shoulder and it sits nicely against my back.  With the EM-5 I’m thinking the heavier body will make it feel more natural to carry around with a long lens.  Time will tell…

I should point out some positives so this doesn’t appear like a Canon hack job.  The lens is faster at the wide end and has more zoom range than the 14-42X.  I’ll make the logical jump that Canon will probably offer a similar lens on their mirrorless (provided that comes true).  And that would be an even better lens than the 14-42X.  I care a lot more about the f/2.8 at the wide end than I do 4X vs 5X zoom.

Anyways, maybe I’m overly excited about the E-M5…  Maybe I was a bit too harsh on the Canon (it is already on its way back to Adorama, took less than 48 hours and definitely don’t regret sending it back)…  Anyways, please pass along your thoughts.

I thought I would give a quick update.  I’m still adjusting to the camera a little and I didn’t account for losing as much control as I did in transition.  But luckily Olympus announced a better camera (for what I want) in the Olympus E-M5.  So I’m using this body for a couple months and then I’m going to sell it when the other one starts shipping.

My main reasons for switching are the following:

Builtin Electronic Viewfinder (GX1 only has an external one for $250)

620k pixel OLED (GX1 has a 420k pixel LCD)

Better controls for AF especially

In Body Image Stabilization (I’m slightly on the fence on this, but it will be handy for lenses that don’t have IS)

Better external flash

Tiltable LCD (GX1 is static)

The only downsides are a little more expensive (but not really when you take into account the viewfinder which I wanted) and a little taller (again viewfinder).

Below is a shot from the GX1 using the 45mm f/1.8.  This is at f/1.8 using the lowest quality jpeg in camera with no post processing.  Pretty sharp, especially wide open.

It is official, I’ve made the move to micro four thirds.  There are some things I already miss from using a high end body to my new camera.  But I think it will all work out well in the end.  I actually haven’t used my new camera too much yet, but am looking forward to it.  Hopefully I will have some pictures to share in a little bit.

So now I own the Panasonic GX1 with the 14-42X and I also grabbed the Olympus 45mm f/1.8.  I’m sure I’ll be adding to that kit soon.  In the meantime here is a great article from Thom Hogan that sums up my sentiment on some of the issues with the camera companies…

Shops starting to open in the Old City of Jerusalem.

Inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Merchant getting ready to start his day in the Old City.  Very small shops, but people work (and likely live above) their shops even though there is not a lot of room and lots of similar small shops around.

View of the stain glass inside the room of the Last Supper.  Obviously a Muslim mural (the Arabic).

Plane taking off in New York on the way home.

Quick update on the website.  I don’t know when, but news agreggators (RSS/Atom Feeds) started enforcing well formed XML and apparently mine wasn’t.  I fixed that and added a new gallery way to view my front page.  I also added links for the two different feeds since it wasn’t very obvious before.  Anyways, a much needed update for the front page…

These were my travel companions when we went to DC to see Josh get married.  What follows are some of my leftover shots from that trip.

Lincoln Memorial.  Tons of people coming and going.  I needed a neutral density filter and a long exposure, but even still many people were just sitting on the steps.  But it would have looked a lot better.

Tomb of the unknown soldier.

Lincoln himself.

The Washington DC temple is more impressive than what these pictures show.  Here you can see the limited dynamic range of the S90.  But still a great travel companion.

This is shooting pretty much straight up.  I was more impressed with the size of the temple than I thought I would be.

One thing about eBay is that you can’t pick who wins your auction.  One of mine had someone with a rating of 1 win an item.  So that means he has only bought one item on eBay.  I was slightly concerned, but it all worked out in the end.  There were two issues though: he took three days to pay (in eBay time, that is an eternity) and he was asking follow up questions about the item after he won which he should have asked before.  Anyway, he left positive feedback and I did the same, but I thought I would help him figure out the eBay “culture” for future bidding.  What followed was this email exchange:

Me:

According to your ranking, you are relatively new to eBay. I just want to help you out with future purchases.

I auctioned ten or so items on eBay. Every single one was paid for within hours or at least half a day of the auction ending with the exception of yourself. Not a big deal to me, but mostly everyone pays that quick.

Also after the auction ended, you asked a couple of questions that should have been asked prior to the auction closing. If any of those questions had changed your mind, you should never had bid in the first place and someone who did want the item would have won. But if I had to deal with finding a new buyer or relisting, it is very annoying.

I am going to leave you a positive review, but I wanted to pass this along as advice (pay quick and ask all questions before winning). I apologize in advance if this comes across poorly to you. I’m only trying to help you be a better eBayer Best of luck on future auctions.

His Response (edited, he really wrote the profanities):

What a smart a@@ response. I dont really care about any of that. If you want people to pay within the day then I suggest you make note of that in your auction. Otherwise don’t b%%%% when someone makes payment after a couple days, because there is nothing wrong with that.

The lens is alright but im an a@@hole so f— you.

My Response:

I apologize for passing along unwanted advice. I didn’t think of you as you indicated, nor did I mind you taking a couple days as I originally indicated. I’m sorry you took this as an offense. I didn’t intend it as such.

His Response

Hey man, I was mostly just kidding around. I was only a little bit offended by the message and I definitely exaggerated for the hell of it. The lens is great.

If you want the two second recap, I made about $3,000 gross.  My estimate to final price for everything was shockingly off by only $5 (I was of course high and low on some, but in the end the total price was very close).  eBay didn’t estimate nearly as well for me, but more on that later.  One thing I didn’t realize was eBay fees have gone up significantly.  eBay fees were roughly 8% and then PayPal takes 3% (my eBay fees turned out to be 10% because of second chance offers, original listing fees, etc.).  If I were to do it again, I would figure out the ball park price by watching a couple auctions close.  Then try to sell high or at that price through craigslist.  If you don’t find a buyer at a good price, then go to eBay.  Like my expensive lens sold for ~$1350, but after fees and such it was more like $1200.  So going to craiglist, I could have listed for $1400 and taken a lower offer for more money than what I got on eBay.  But sometimes you see irrational prices on eBay.  I didn’t really see that much this time around though.  But I’ll review that later.

But the high level summary, everything probably cost me around $6,000 when I bought it new.  Everything sold for barely over $3,000.  eBay took a little more than $300 of that.  PayPal took a little less than $100.  So I was left with $2600.  Crazy when you think in the end you lose $400 for the privilege of the eBay market.  I’m not sure it justifies the cost like I was mentioning above.  I don’t know why you would think normal depreciation is, but the 40-50% seems about right to me.  More details on an item by item break down below.

Before I get into the numbers game though, this next chart is meant to highlight how cool Google Docs are.  It is pretty handy making these plots and charting the data.  I don’t see why people need excel at home.  But the data behind the chart is percent of final price over time for the auction.  You can see all of them had a good uptick on the last day by about 25%.  As most people already know, the action all takes place in the last two days.  But it is interesting how some get bid up high early and just stay there for a while.  And I’ll be honest, I was a bit worried about my 70-200 sitting at $280 with two days to go.  But in the end, system worked out as expected.

Watchers is a good indicator of interest and how affordable your price appears to be.  Toward the end it was interesting to see people dropping off since it was too high in their opinion.  I was watching fairly closely the last day and people started slowly falling off during the day.  But for most every item, there were the hard core eBayers that waited for the last minute to bid up items.  That happened for mostly every item.  So even when you are losing watchers, some of your watchers are still interested more than likely.

So for the first eight or nine days (I always do a ten day auction), the watchers was most significant to me.  Then the last day, I think the views is the most important.  The purple line (total) shows the total per day while the others show the overall total for each auction over time (so day five is the total views over five days for each item, but for total is the number of views on that day).  First day is significant, then it goes into a lull just to spike the last two days.  I don’t think it matters which day it ends, the pattern would be the same.  But the final spike would probably be even higher on a weekend.

Also I was surprised how flat the price per day increase was.  I think we saw before the big initial spike.  Then everything was very flat at about $100.  Until the depressing day of Sunday followed by two back to back $1000 days.  This was of course mostly just my lens.

Removing the 70-200, a similar flat trend was still there with only the last day showing a spike.  I imagine this is more typical.

Here is my final post on how eBay’s estimate fared.  I’ll provide more details and thoughts on the why below.

The 70-200 price I was a bit curious about.  There is a version II that replaces this one so I wondered if eBay was distinguishing between the two.  Apparently not since mine also came with two expensive filters and ended up well below the target.  I owned this lens for three or four years.  Bought it for $1700 (not counting $100+ worth of filters) I believe and sold it for $1350.

My Nikon D200 was a little disappointing since I did include a good number of extras like an extra battery.  But this is a six year old camera body.  Bodies depreciate like crazy.  This I bought new for ~$1700 and it sold for under $500.  An ideal cycle for a body is to sell right before a new one comes out so you get top dollar for it.  A friend of mine used a Canon 7D for eighteen months and sold it only losing ~$150 (there is no 7D replacement yet or on the near horizon like end of this year).

The Tokina 12-24 was a big surprise.  This one has a newer version and I had no extras other than the filter.  How and why it went above eBays target was a bit surprising.  Maybe the non-name brand lens market is a little less informed to know the difference   I bought this for $500 and it sold for a little over $300 after three or four years.

The SB600 is no longer made by Nikon and there is a significant market for it.  It sold over my initial purchase price (I paid $180 and it sold for $250.  There were some extras with it, but it still would have sold for more just with the flash alone.  Also as an fyi, you are not allowed to ship batteries.  I had to switch to a new buyer when I couldn’t ship them and the previous high bidder wanted a ridiculous amount to compensate for not getting the rechargeable batteries.

The S90 took a hit from the target, but I imagine that was because the S100 was announced.  I wasn’t really surprised by this.   I had it for a year and bought it for $320 and sold for $160.  Pretty significant hit.  I was willing to do it because I wanted higher resolution video and a faster lens on the telephoto end.  I now have the LX5 I paid $360 for (or an increase of $200) which is worth it.  I hurried a bit in buying mostly because our little boy is turning two soon.  So recording the memories and in high definition was worth it to me.  I know not everyone would see it the same, but that was my perspective especially since I need a filler camera until I find a mirrorless body I want.

Vixia HF100 is three years old.  We paid $600 I think and sold it for $200.  I know little about this market (which I think is dying much like point and shoots).

The tripod eBay didn’t really have an estimate for since the legs and head are different combinations and I doubt you can find a comparable.  But I bought them for $230 and they sold for $123.  The craziest thing is the buyer paid for two day shipping which cost $80.

The 18-70 is maybe the craziest.  I owned that lens for eight years if not longer.  Ever since my lovely D70.  It came as part of the kit and so I don’t really know the price.  I think it was valued at $300 at the time.  It sold for almost $150. But I made a lot more than eBay thought I would and there wasn’t much in addition to the lens.

The two backpacks were pretty disappointing.  I thought people winning one of the above items would try to score a backpack cheap since the shipping was free for any additional items.  I charged a flat fee of $20 per item for shipping (which was pretty accurate in the end).  So I think for cheap stuff it prevents it from getting bid up much since that is the overall cost (even though I don’t get the money, you have to think relative to Free Super Saver Shipping and other promotions companies have).  But the Micro cost $60 and it sold for $20 and the Computrekker cost $200 (at least it does now, but I thought I paid less than that) and it sold for $50.  I owned the Computrekker for six or seven years and the Micro for two or three years.

In case I didn’t make this obvious, I haven’t given up on photography (just Nikon ).   I’m going to buy a new camera and probably two at that (although only one at first).  But here is where my head is (by the way, if you read my earlier posts you can see my mindset has changed along the way.  Read it as my inner turmoil as I decide to leave Nikon and join the mirrorless crowd and figuring out the best fit).

My biggest complaint is that I seldom used my dSLR because it was too big and heavy.  A lot of that has to do with having two kids and not wanting to carry them along with ten pounds of equipment.  I’ve gone on some trips with friends for a weekend and used my dSLR, but those trips are getting more and more rare (again kids).  And then when we are with the kids, I pretty much use the S90 for most of the shots since I can have it ready so much faster.  Like my Hawaii shots, 95% of them were shot with the S90 and I was pleased with the results.  It wouldn’t have been quite as relaxing taking my dSLR everywhere.  Your needs are perhaps different than mine so I respect that other people see it differently.  But for me, I think a permanent move to the m4/3 system is on the way.  My only beef at the moment is Panasonic’s are too basic and the Olympus is using a two year old sensor.  I’ve waited two years for the Nikon D400 (which still hasn’t come), so waiting another year or so for a refresh of the Olympus PEN E-P3 or Panasonic going back to the roots of the GF1 isn’t that big of a deal to me (in the mean time, my wife still has her D90 with the 18-200 which is sufficient to fill the gap should an exciting trip arise).

But in case you didn’t notice, I’m selling my S90 and our video camera.  My two biggest issues is the S90 only shoots SD and is so slow on the tele end, it is like a prime indoors.  The video camera is good quality, but I ended up using the S90 since it was much easier dealing with that compression instead of AVCHD.  And the S90 can take pictures and was more portable.

Below are the cameras I was/am considering and my take on each.  Please feel free to add your thoughts.

Olympus XZ1 ($460) – excellent lens, but it isn’t very thin compared to the S90 and the video is shot at 720 MJPEG (worse than AVCHD).  The video pretty much kills it for me.

Panasonic LX5 ($350) – great lens, wider angle than the Olympus, only 720p, but at least it is AVC.  Second most portable after the S90.  I’m strongly considering this partially because of price, but also features are pretty solid.  The sensor is 1/1.7″ CCD which I want to compare to the next two.

Canon S100 ($430) – this was just announced, but should be available soon.  1080p video, by far the thinnest (27mm vs 38mm for the LX5, 42mm for the XZ1, 57mm for the X10).  CMOS sensor (slightly smaller than 1/1.7″ but still should be better because of CMOS).  Biggest gripe is the same with the S90 that at the tele end it is an f/5.9.

Fuji X10 ($700 potentially) – largest sensor compared to above and it is CMOS.  Should be best quality, although I will definitely check dpreview and see if it is a meaningful difference.  Great lens, 1080p.  Downsides are cost, weight and size.  It is more than 2X as thick as the S100.

Olympus PEN E-P3 – Comparing this to the Fuji X10 is really interesting.  With teh 17mm lens it is (34mm (body) + 22mm (lens) vs 57mm for the X10).  Crazy right?  The X10 is thicker than the m4/3.  But this with the 45mm f/1.8 prime and I would be set.  It would weight 25% more.  This thinking had me start doing some image quality analysis.  Even with the much larger CMOS sensor, the image quality wasn’t any better than the S95.  What a disappointment.  That sensor is pretty behind the times.  I thought the camera was given a silver by dpreview because of bias toward Nikon/Canon until I compared the images myself.  The big issue I have with investing in the PEN already and then waiting for the next body is that they mostly all come in kits instead of body only.  And I really don’t care to sell a lens I didn’t want to buy in the first place.  And waiting gives me a little more time to see what the market does.

But comparing all the above, the image quality of the PEN kills me along with the lack of portability.  The X10 would need killer image quality to justify the bulk.  The S100 is too slow at the wide end.  And the LX5 seems to be the right balance of quality/features/price.  This is my current thinking which could be different in an hour.  I’ve attached my table below with the feature set as I view it.  I’m not purchasing anything until all my eBay stuff is shipped and received.  So please pass along your two cents in the meantime.