Ars Technica:
This remarkable $599 camera lets you watch while completely unobserved from distances so great that people can’t even see you, much less know that you’re watching them.
Check out the video. The camera has insane amounts of really good zoom.
To say nothing of the surveillance possibilities.
As a photographer I wouldn’t know what to do with that kind of focal length.
OTOH, I enjoy photographing people in the street. To capture the rhythm, energy, and dynamics you have to be close. 35mm focal length (FF equiv) is ideal.
I personally found it pretty amazing but damn the amount of flack the ars author got for trying to talk about photography. Seriously, I think the worst kind of nerds are photography nerds, so focused on numbers, specs, strawman arguments, and wildly inappropriate comparisons (who the fuck compares a consumer grade point-and-shoot with professional grade astrophotography equipment?) that it’s just pointless to even try to say anything on the topic.
“This remarkable $599 camera lets you watch while completely unobserved from distances so great that people can’t even see you, much less know that you’re watching them”
Creepy quote.
Oh this, so very much this. It’s reached the point of pure farce now with a lot of photography nerds seemingly forgetting that the purpose of having a camera is to take pictures not compare stats. So long at the tech is good enough to get a decent picture then it all comes down to convenience. For me I’ll sacrifice some of that to get shots in low light or for outright quality on pictures I know are going to get blown up to a metre plus prints.
I have a Canon SX60 with a 65x optical zoom + 4x digital and it’s a lot of fun to use. Great for bird watching.
I know telescopes have motor mounts to account for the earth’s rotation, but I’d never personally observed it before until using this camera. I was trying to photograph the recent Jupiter/Venus conjunction and at 200x I hardly had any time to get the picture before the planets moved out of the frame.