Getting the Most out of Wink - Part I

Recently, I was looking for a zoom lens was for a Canon EOS 20D. Of course, given where I work, I turned to Wink. I found just the lens I was looking for, and now I’m awaiting its arrival from Amazon. In the process I used several Wink tools and thought it might be helpful to summarize how some of those tools worked. So this post is titled “Getting the Most out of Wink - Part I”.

Before describing my experience I’ll say: the objective of Wink is to find answers. I wasn’t looking for the 10 Web pages that had the word “Canon lens” the most times. I was trying to find out about the best zoom lens for me. I soon realized that what I needed was to read some information about the lenses so I could make a choice. The best information would come from those sites that others had thought to mark as favorites.

1. Basic search. I began by using the basic search functionality. After entering the query “Canon lens” in the search box, Wink returned several links to camera lens reviews for Canon digital cameras, including Canon itself, photo.net, the digital picture, Bob Atkins, and a site called the Luminous Landscape, among others. Wink showed me that most of these had been tagged a few times.

2. Exploring the results. The links were useful - most led to the actual lens reviews, not the home pages or marketing pages. And the sites were informative. Not really knowing much about EOS lenses, I had some learning to do. And each of these explained the key features, reported on detailed tests, and helped identify the criteria for making a choice.

I learned that the “L” series are the higher quality, expensive, white lenses. I learned that “IS” means image stabilization, and by looking at comparisons I was convinced that IS made a big difference. I also learned that size and weight are a real factor. I was leaning towards high quality over price … within reason (some of these lenses cost more than cars). I’ve always thought that for zoom lenses you want to try to get a low f-stop throughout the zoom range. That was more important in the days of film, because you had one speed of film in the camera, and you had to get as much light onto the film as possible. But with a digital camera you have whatever speed you need: 100, 400, 800 for a given shot. Also, to get a good bokeh (the out-of-focus background in a zoomed shot that makes your subject stand out) you want to stop down the shot to narrow your depth of field. And with good image stabilization you can shoot 2 -3 stops down from where you otherwise would have to shoot, because you can hand-hold the resulting longer exposure.

To accomplish this you need a lens that lets in enough light, and that ends up being long and heavy. (and expensive.) On one site, I found the statement “Remember, you always get a better shot with a lens you have with you than one left behind”. Another writer said that he found the large Canon lenses attracted so much attention in some countries that he had trouble getting candid shots. And then I discovered “DO” lenses - that’s “diffractive optics”. These lenses are fairly new (Canon only makes 2). They use diffractive lenses ( think those plastic magnifiers your grandparents use for reading) and are therefore much shorter. It’s amazing to me that they can use the physics to actually create a clear image of the quality acceptable for a high end Canon lens. I found several detailed reviews of the Canon EF 70 - 300mm f4.5-5.6 DO IS USM .

3. Research background information. I conducted additional searches at Wink in the process. I searched for diffractive optics, image stabilization and chromatic abberation. In some cases there were several very relevant results in “Wink Results”. In others I turned to “Web Results” which come from Google, which highlighted how the Wink - Google combination works. I also learned that DO lenses actually have negative chromatic abberation - that is they naturally correct for it.

In terms of the drive mechanism I learned that the best were ultrasonic ring-type USM drive. This results in fast, quiet focusing and zooming and lower battery consumption. It also means full-time manual override. This is important because to lock you lens for carrying or putting away, you need to put it in its shortest position. You don’t want to wait to zoom out every time you take a shot, or turn the camera back on every time you want to put it away. With manual override you just turn the ring yourself and put it away. You may also choose to manually zoom while shooting.

There were some weaknesses reported with the DO lens - mostly with direct sunlight reaching the lens when doing backlit shots at high zoom levels. That’s a problem with most lenses, but in the case of the DO it is particularly exaggerated because of the refractions off the diffractive optics. Given all the benefits, I decided that was a compromise I could live with. I think I’d decided which lens was right for me. I was going to try the 70 - 300 mm DO lens with image stabilization.

4. Tagging. At each step along the way I tagged the pages I was on. There were two ways to do this. The first was to click on the yellow star to the left of any result. A pop up opens and gives me a chance to add a few words I think were relevant. It was pre-populated with the query term, and I sometimes added additional words. When I hit “return” the star lit up and the number above it incremented by one. The second way I tagged was by getting the “Wink Tag” bookmarklet from the Wink home page (also available in the Wink Tools box on most pages). I dragged this to my bookmarks toolbar on Firefox. Then when I was on a page reading a review, if I decided I wanted to remember the page, I could add it to my favorites by clicking on the “Wink Tag” bookmarklet. This opened a small window, similar to the one I described above, into which I could enter a few tags.

I tagged pages for two reasons. First I found that several times I wanted to go back to the site. My research continued over a couple of days (and I found it useful to go back in writing this as well). Second, I felt like I was leaving bread crumbs behind me that anyone searching for lenses in the future could follow. In fact if you do some of these searches, you can see that some of these pages were tagged by me.

5. Collections. This is a feature that is fairly new, and not well documented yet. Because I’d done all this resarch on Canon lenses, I decided to make a collection of all the links I’d found, and called it EOS Lenses. Now someone who really got interested in researching lenses for an EOS camera could find everything I’d found in one easy place.

The 70-200/2L IS looked awesome but was out of my price range and didn’t have the longest zoom range. The 70-300/4-5.6 IS looked great, but is quite large and didn’t have the true ring-type USM drive.

I decided to go for the 70 - 300/4.5-5.6 DO IS lens. Believe it or not, there was an ad for EOS lenses at Amazon right there beside my final search result. I clicked on it and went to Amazon, who sells the good Canon lenses through a partnership with Adorama (who also had an ad on that page, by the way.) I ordered the lens and am now waiting for it to arrive. (I put the Amazon links in below in case you’re now interested in one of these lenses.) If you want to know how the DO lens performs, leave me a comment and I’ll let you know!

Cheers,
Michael

Tags: Wink, search, socialsearch, wink.com, camera, lenses

26 January 2006 | observations | Comments