Another Optura 60 question

[Marco Leavitt]

Okay, I've decided I could probably live with the shutter and aperture priority modes, but I do have one more concern. Can anybody tell me whether or not they feel this camera applies gain with these modes? I know you can't set the gain with these cameras. I just wondered if the camera ever applies it without telling you.

[Jason J. Gullickson]

I ran across this on Ron Dexter's site:

As the light level decreases, the camera compensates by opening the iris completely wide, and it warns you to switch the ND filter switched OFF and last the gain is automatically increased. At lower levels you DO NOT see any indication of gain increase in the viewfinder. You have to go to manual exposure mode to see if the camera has increased the gain. For the best image quality try to keep the gain at no more than -3 db. (-6db, -9db to -18db are increased gain to be avoided.) Gain increase increases noise and loss of color saturation.

From his description I can only guess that he's talking about the original Optura, but it might be worth checking if the 60 provides any sort of indication like this. I'll be checking mine when I get home.

Here's a link to the complete article:
http://www.rondexter.com/library/canon_optura.htm

[Marco Leavitt]

Thanks. I'd appreciate it.

[Jason J. Gullickson]

I played with my 60 for about 30 minutes over lunch and I could find no such indication as to when it starts to turn on the gain.

I did find out that the "exposure" range varies, sometimes it stops at zero, other times you can go + or - on either size of zero...time to hit the manual up again...