More experience wiht the P300
Anyone who read this thread back in May will probably be surprised to learn that after getting rid of my P300 after a few days experience with it, I went out and bought another one... After my initial disappointment I decided that there was not anything out there at the same price that would do all the things I wanted, so when I saw it for £215 in Dixons at Heathrow, I bought it for the second time. In the same shop the Canon S95 was still well over £300.
I made a slightly more sturdy adaptor, but still zero cost (pictures attached), from a cup that I found to have the right diameter for the (new style) 20-60 swarovski zoom that I use on the old-style AT80HD.
I have to say I am still not in love with the camera, but I growing to like it. It does a job for me. The camera now that seems to fit my spec the closest is the recently announced Canon S100, but I would find it hard to justify the cost of that, which at launch seems likely to be double the Nikon here in the UK.
The main issue, as discussed before, is image quality. One of the criticisms of the Fuji F30/F31 (my old camera) when it came out was the “over processed” look of the pictures. But the P300 is *so* much worse when you look at the pictures at full res. It looks like heat-haze on every pixel. Since there is no raw mode, this effect is impossible to remove other than by down-sizing images. I can certainly do this, but then I have reduced my camera to one with a quarter of the pixels and I lose any advantage that I might have accrued of being able to crop more aggressively for those birds that are just too far away.
Using 20x on the scope’s zoom I have vignetting from 4.3mm up to about 12mm (full zoom is just under 18mm). Using the camera at full zoom gives noticeably poorer image quality. However I also get more vignetting as I zoom the scope meaning I have to zoom in further with the camera. This is a consequence of my home-made adaptor that places the camera at a fixed distance from the eyepiece. When the camera is hand-held I can reduce vignetting to zero in the mid-zoom range of the camera by moving it physically away from the eyepiece.
I will follow up this post with a few pics.
Cheers, Ian