On Tue, December 9, 2008 19:21, Elson T. Elizaga wrote: > To paraphrase a line, I just want to make pictures. Why is that difficult? Autofocus modes -- the FM[-2] didn't have autofocus, so the entire sections of the manual that explain autofocus modes weren't necessary. Talk to sports shooters about whether they could do their job competitively without modern AF. Also the AF fine-tune options. Auto-exposure modes -- Lots of stuff in the manual about how to control these. The FM[-2] didn't have auto-exposure, didn't have multiple metering modes even for manual exposure. Also didn't have TTL flash exposure. (The FE did; I never used one, don't know what the manual or user interface were like.) Also, all the film choices have been rolled into the camera, so we have color balance, sharpening modes, vividness, and also B&W and sepia stuff, all sorts of complications that didn't exist because they existed separately. I never touch them, shoot RAW, don't worry about it. There's a lot of stuff for in-camera post-processing, starting with Active D-lighting. I ignore all that (shooting raw), but I can see reasons for wanting quick results at low per-shot effort that would result in using those things. Those are all doing things that weren't previously done in the camera. And so forth. The N90 manual was an intermediate size, and it had the AF and auto-exposure stuff in it but not the film/sensor stuff. The manual is bigger because the newer camera does more. -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
