The ME Super was my New York street camera during the years 1980-1987, when I lived in what was then a pretty dangerous New York City. Not caring to lose my Leica M3 to a chain snatcher, I acquired an inexpensive ME Super and a couple of lenses \u00e2\u20ac\u201c a very compact 20mm ultra-wide, a 28mm wide and that miniscule 40mm \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcPancake\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 standard. A sweet outfit, with the added benefit of exposure automation.<\/p>\n
The 6×7 represented my first foray into landscape photography and while it went off like Dirty Harry\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Magnum<\/a> when you pressed the button, there was no arguing with the quality of the negatives that resulted.<\/p>\n The other day I was thinking about changes in camera design which made things so much easier for today\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s picture taker. Small 35mm cameras, greatly improved film emulsions, ever better lenses and that sort of thing. But clearly digital imaging was the watershed that made everything much faster yet, to my mind, vibration reduction has saved more snaps from the reject bin than any feature since automatic exposure and focus. If your goal in life is big prints, then the old saw that the slowest shutter speed should be no slower than the reciprocal of the focal length for hand held pictures is simply wrong. You think you can get shake free pictures with your standard lens at 1\/50th second good enough for an 18\u00e2\u20ac\u009d x 24\u00e2\u20ac\u009d print? I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think so.<\/p>\n I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know who came up with the idea of vibration compensating mechanisms and circuitry in still cameras \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the Steadicam for film makers, after all, has been around for some 25 years, famously used by Stanley Kubrick in \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcThe Shining\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 in 1980 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c but I was very conscious of its availability in some Canon lenses when I sprung for the EOS 5D<\/a>. Most importantly, the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcstandard\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 lens I chose \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the 24-105mm \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcL\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c has this feature and it adds wonderfully to definition. Canon says it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s good for three shutter speeds slower than normal, meaning that the modest f\/4 maximum aperture of the lens is not as limiting as you might think.<\/p>\n Similarly, my Panasonic LX-1<\/a> comes with Panasonic\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s version of vibration reduction in a very compact package and Nikon has offered the feature on some of its more exotic lenses for a while. However, with both Nikon and Canon, the execution is not well thought out when it comes to their interchangeable lens cameras. The problem is that the vibration reduction circuitry is part of the lens, not the camera, meaning only certain lenses have it.<\/p>\n It took a smart designer at Pentax to finally get this right. His answer? Simple. Build the circuitry into the body, not the lens, which they have just done with the newly announced K100D.<\/p>\n In this way, any lens, however adapted to the camera\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s body, benefits from this wonderful feature, and you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to double up on lens bulk as no lens contains any related mechanisms or circuitry. Now is that clever or what?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How vibration reduction should be done I have made no secret of my admiration for the camera designers at Pentax, having owned a Pentax ME Super and a Pentax 6×7 over the years. The ME Super was my New York street camera during the years 1980-1987, when I lived in what was then a pretty … Continue reading Pentax does it right<\/span> 
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