Wallace Koopmans Artlog

Lets be honest the only appealing thing about this camera is the fact that it has a 26mm lens which sets it apart from almost all the other point and shoot cameras in the world (including ones in the landfill).

One of the side effects of Canon’s attempt to produce this wideangle wonder was that the corners of the image are so soft that you could stuff a pillow with them.

But is it bad enough to make it good?  Not really, 26mm doesnt provide a distinct advantage over the more available 28mm camera’s that I’ve seen and the results are questionable but not bad enough to make it obvious that you ment to do it.  The flash doesn’t cover the frame very well and without it it heavily under exposes in darker situations.  The focus is fixed as is the aperture at f6.  The viewfinder is nice and big though I will give it that.

What I’ve rambled on about this camera before previously Canon BF-10

I didn’t christen it the ewwwww that came courtesy of Duncan Turner.  The primary and interesting feature of the 24EW, and what helps gives it its name is the 24mm at the wide end of the lens.  The EW [pronounced /u/w/]  actually stands for Extra Wide but that’s hard to miss on the front anyway. Very few other fixed lens film cameras have anything this wide.  Released in 2003 it is also one of the last film cameras that Pentax produced as they were already well on the transition to digital.  As with cake you can’t have it and eat it too and the inedible part here is the distortion that you get from the lens at 24mm, fortunately much of the distortion near the edges is masked by the vignetting (that would be sarcasm)

  This camera has some great additional features the best of them being exposure compensation in half stops from -3 to +3 EV  also it can close focus to 30cm.

While it doesn’t actual replace the need for a wide angle lens, stitching images together can help in a pinch.  I wanted to get a reference image of this old bulldozer but I was too close with the lens that I had (that’s a whole other story as to why I only had a 28mm prime lens with me).  My solution was to meter the scene for all aspects and then shoot a series of images in manual mode.  It’s necessary to control the exposure to ensure a good match, if you let the camera control the exposure then as you frame each image it will want to make changes to the shutter speed and aperture.  So once I have all my images back home I use a piece of software that is actually free, not spam spam spam and pay us a fee, Microsoft’s Image Composite Editor.  It does such a good job I would hate to be a commercial company trying to make a similar product.

And after the magic I have an image that would have required a much wider lens to create.

As far as I’m aware there were very few wide angle capable point and shoot cameras ever made.  Ricoh made several including the R1s that I own, but most point and shoots started around 35mm at the wide end.  And then there is the Pentax Espio 24Ew.  The EW stands for ‘extra wide’, it’s lens goes from 24mm to 105mm.  This camera was released in 2003 right in the middle of the digital camera explosion.  I have to admit I only paid about 1% of it’s original cost making the film inside it more expensive than it is.  When you first start this camera up the lens is at a position somewhere greater than it’s widest so in order to get it where I want it I have to hit the zoom out button.  The lens does some amazing contortions to fit within the cameras 1 1/2 inch depth which then expands to a ridiculous 4 1/2 inches at 105mm.  So how was it?  It does an admiral job,  There is definitely softness at the edges at 24mm, which is really the only focal length of this camera I’m interested in and also vignetting depending on the aperture which it selects and you have no way of knowing what it is.  These limitations aside and considering the difficulty and finding anything this wide in a film point and shoot it does a pretty good job.