When Dan and I went out to take pictures, he brought a long his new Manfrotto tripod. It’s a 190XPROB with the 322R Ball Head. I must admit I’m kinda jealous. He got it for Christmas, and my my it’s a very nice tripod. But it’s not cheap either. It seems that B&H has it for the nice price of $264.90. Seems like a lot of money, but that’s about the going rate. And I guess you have to spend a lot to get a nice tripod. It’s definitely a rock solid one. Put it down, and it doesn’t move. It’s got some nice features too, like an articulated center column that swings out. Good stuff. Now I want one.
If you haven’t had a chance to buy your Canon camera gear with a nice rebate, be sure to check out the ones that expire on Sunday. (The PDF is here, but it’s 9.71 MB, so hopefully you’ve got broadband.) Then go buy some gear! They have a pretty nice selection of lenses available with a rebate, though frankly, the rebates aren’t as good as they have been in the past. Historically, they’ve had rebates where the more gear you buy the more you save, so if you bought two lenses, you’d save a lot more.
But Canon is pretty good about offering rebates on a periodic basis, so if these don’t suit your fancy, feel free to wait a while until the next rebate period. Just don’t buy your gear on Monday after the rebate expires.
So I didn’t post about it a while back because my blog was in transition, but on January 24, nearly a month ago, Canon introduced the world to the new Rebel XSi. Personally, I think it’s a dumb model name, and it’s kinda hard to say. Sounds like “excess eye” to me. In any case, it’s got some pretty cool features. DPReview has a nice copy of the press release, as well as an article detailing What’s Changed since my beloved XTi was introduced in late August 2006.
I must say that it certainly has some nice features to it. But when asked by my friends if I’ll be upgrading, my typical response right now is that I will not. I think my next camera will likely be a full-frame camera such as the 5D but that would cost me an arm and a leg, so that won’t be happening any time soon. I suppose the XSi would make a nice backup body if my XTi died and I needed a replacement ASAP. But in the meantime, I’m very content with the body I have, and I will likely wait a number of years before buying again.
I’d have to agree with B&H that this is indeed the Mother of All Lenses:
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/find/newsLetter/Mother-of-All-L-Lenses.jsp
1200mm is nothing to sneeze at. It weighs in at an astounding 36lbs, 33″ long, 9″ wide at the front element, and a whopping $99,000.
Pretty incredible if you ask me. Can you imagine what it could do with a 2.0x extender? Wow!