Taken from the old site a post that I have often referred to and am sure many found useful , hope you dont mind Sticks ,

Right - sorry for the delay and also apologies in advance if I'm about to tell you something you already know!

 
It's worth explaining what a 'bridge' camera is for starters.  This is a camera which has styling like an SLR but has an integral zoom lens, usually with quite a big range.  There are some coming out now which are totally automatic with little or no manual over-ride.  If you want to photograph bike racing avoid these.  You will need something that has the ability to control the shutter speed and also has autofocus tracking.  As with any product there are pros and cons.
 
The advantages of a bridge camera are:
 
* Usually more compact than an SLR
* Integral zoom lens with a very wide range, often from very wide angle to extreme telephoto
* Cheaper than a digital SLR outfit
 
The disadvantages (compared to an SLR) are:
* Inferior picture quality
* Slower operation
* More difficult to focus manually
 
I'll explain in more detail.  The image sensor in a bridge camera is tiny compared to an SLR, so if you had an SLR & a bridge camera both with 10 megapixel resolution the pixels on the bridge camera will be much smaller.  This makes them less effective at doing their job, which is to capture light.  In use this means that a bridge camera will be less effective in capturing shadow detail and will be more prone to burning out highlights.  A small pixel is also a noisy pixel, so bridge cameras will be more likely to suffer from image noise (coloured blotching & speckling in the picture).  In a nutshell, bridge cameras will give perfectly acceptable image quality in optimal conditions but if it gets very bright & contrasty or dull, the SLR wins every time.  When looking through an SLR viewfinder you're seeing a true image via a mirror/prism arrangement, which makes focussing manually (and you will need to at some point) fairly easy compared to a bridge camera which uses a miniature LCD screen.  The wide range lenses bridge cameras have are more prone to distortion than shorter range zooms but this won't be especially obvious unless you shoot subjects with lots of parallel or vertical lines.  They're also more prone to chromatic aberration or 'purple fringing' which can occur around the edges of high contrast areas in the shot.
 
An SLR, even a modest one, will usually out perform any bridge camera in terms of picture quality and response speed.  Bike racing is a difficult subject to photograph and you don't need to be making life any harder for yourself than you need to!
 
Pixels - don't worry about how many a camera has.  Anything you get now will have more than enough for most needs.  Some of the 12x8" shots I'm showing in the RRS.com exhibition at St Ninian's were taken on a 6 megapixel Nikon D70.
 
As a Nikon user it grieves me to suggest this but if you look on flea bay for a Canon EOS 400D with 18-55mm lens (for every day stuff) and a Canon 75-300mm USM lens (for racing) you may well get them within your budget and it will be a good starting point.  The USM bit is important - it indicates that the lens has a fast focussing motor which you'll need for racing.  Nikon's version is called AF-s and Sigma is HSM.  (Canon lenses will only fit Canon cameras & Nikon lenses will only fit Nikon cameras.  Sigma is an independant brand, so if you got one of their lenses you'd have to make sure it's the right fitting.)

I use a Nikon SLR but find it heavy to carry around especially with a long lens on have been looking at Olimpus 4/3 as they are mutch lighter and smaller.
It looks as though the EM 5 is out of production and the replacement will be out this spring just hope that it's not to expensive.

The thing about 4/3 is that the sensor is smaller than other digital SLR cameras, so the pixels will be smaller possibly causing some of the issues mentioned in the first post.  You may also find that the lenses with the fast focus motors may be expensive.  I've been away from the market in general for a bit now though (used to be involved in it until about 4 years ago) and there will have been advances in controlling image noise.

However, with 4/3 because the image sensor is half the size of a full frame camera, a 200mm lens will act like a 400mm so carrying the gear around will be less of an issue.

All that said, there's a reason why most motorsport photographers use Nikon or Canon and that's because they have the tools for the job.  I've never met a working 'tog who wanted to lug half a hundredweight of gear around but the reason they do is because the smaller, lighter stuff just doesn't get it done.

All true Olimpus have in camera focus so do not rely on lenses with motors.
Had a look at the Olympus OM EM1 looks a good camera to me but a little expensive.
I only seem to use my SLR for bike racing and want something lighter I will have a look at the new OM 5 or whatever thay call it and decided then.
Haven't got any fast lenses so that's not a problem but focus speed is as is good image quality.

With Olympus they have two ranges of lenses.  The ones that will successfully autofocus on a bike at racing speed are equipped with what they call 'Supersonic Wave Drive'.  I would presume the lenses without may be a bit hit & miss so you may have to focus manually with them.

What equipment do you have at the moment?

(12-12-2014, 01:51 PM)sticky Wrote: With Olympus they have two ranges of lenses.  The ones that will successfully autofocus on a bike at racing speed are equipped with what they call 'Supersonic Wave Drive'.  I would presume the lenses without may be a bit hit & miss so you may have to focus manually with them.

What equipment do you have at the moment?

Should have said Macro 4/3 sorry for confusion

This Camera as in this link
Dont know if there system will focus as fast as Nikon but if its a lot lighter the maybe it would get used a lot more for stuff that doesn't move as fast as bikes.
I sometimes pre focus on a spot and use the motor drive to take pics so focus speed will not be a problem then

Well I can see that being a corker for the Old Tarts with that 45mm lens with "depth and blur " it says
loads of happy Togs


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A question for you techno guys , just looking at memory cards , and many years ago when I got my point and squert pocket job , they came in class 1to 10 of different storage capacity, but notice now that you get class 10 with now a mb/s ranging from 20 up to 125 , so my question is what mb/s do you need ? Remembering that the 125 is £75 , how much ????

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Get more than one of the lower mb rather than one top number so that if you loose your card at the end of the week all is not lost

Now I think the mb/s is to do with the speed it is capable of updown loading the picture to the card,  and the Gb is the storage capacity , that as I understand it tends to range from 1Gig to I am not sure?  Often as high as 64Gig 
But I get what you mean about having more smaller ones  compared to one large one , as if you have a load of smaller ones you could use one for each day,  making editing easier I would have thought,  
Will be interesting to see the answers from the,  tech guys that we have on here 

If at first you don't succeed,  don't be frightened to ask,  life is too short to make all the mistakes yourself. 


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Hi

I agree with the idea of more cards of smaller storage capacity in case of loss. I currently use 8Gb & 4Gb cards and carry a bunch in my kit(Canon, sorry).
As for the Mb/s, you are correct, in that is the transfer rate between camera and card that the card can handle. So think about if you are using burst mode, especially high speed burst, then you may see the camera buffer filling up if the card is only a slow transfer rate. I use 60Mb/s cards, as I generally do not use the 8 frames a second burst mode, only 3, which means I'm looking at a total of around 60Mb per second transfer rate(3 x 21Mb per RAW file) needed, so that's what I get.
Hope this makes sense,

Regards Chris