All digital cameras are a tradeoff, until you get to pro models, which run
several thousand dollars.
The key points of a digital camera are, in no particular order:
1) Size and portability
2) Ruggedness
3) Image Quality (How many Megapixel)
4) Optics Quality (Good lens, usable zoom)
5) Media and Capacity
6) Ease of Picture transfer.
7) Battery Life.
Nobody that I know of makes a small indestructable 6 Megapixel camera with
a 6x quality optical zoom that has incredible battery life and can store
thousands of pictures and transfer on the fly.
So you have to look at those seven and pick what's most important to you,
keeping in mind what you intend to use the camera for.
For me, Size, ruggedness and Image quality were paramount. I also wanted a
way to upgrade the memory to allow ALOT of picture storage.
As for media, you have, essentially, CompactFlash, SmartMedia and
MemoryStick. (I'm ignoring anomalies like the Mavica floppy based system). I
found MemoryStick to be rather expensive in the bang-per-buck area. I ended
up Choosing a Compact Flash based camera, which came with an 8meg card.
I knew I wanted something small enough to drop in my jeans pocket, and
rugged enough to not get killed there. I also knew I wanted something 2
megapixel or over.
I ended up choosing the Canon Digital Elph Powershot S100.
http://www.powershot.com/powershot2/s100/index.html
Its very small, smaller than a deck of cards, but has a 2.1Megapixel image
size. It has a stainless steel case, making it very durable. It also plugs
right into the USB port on my computer, which pops up the camera software
automatically when it detects the camera.
I bought the kit, including battery, charger, 8meg Compact Flash and USB
Cable for $369 last fall.
In December I bought (From the mighty Ebay), a 128meg CF card for $200.
What did I trade off? Well, for starters, the battery life is poor if you
enable the LCD and flash. Luckily the battery does charge in under 45
minutes. But it's a proprietary battery, and they're $50 a pop, so it's a
bit pricey to stock up on batteries.
The Optics are great quality. But unfortunately, making a camera this small
rather prevents a long optical zoom. The camera comes with a 2x optical zoom
that doesnt do anything more than reframe the image. It also has a digital
zoom which emulates a zoom, allowing 2x 4x or 8x, but every time you go up a
digital zoom step, you cut your resolution in half, so I dont use it.
8Meg of storage is pitifully small. at 1600x1200 it's 11 pictures. You can
also set the camera to 640x480 (more than adequate for web shots) and get,
if I recall, 44 pictures. Luckily, that's something I could fix, and $200
later I had a 128meg CF card. It's rather astounding. 211 1600x1200
pictures, or 771 640x480s. Yes, seven hundred and seventy-one. Or any
combination of the two.
Unfortunately, I have no MG pictures to share that were taken with this
camera. But I do have pictures of my rotten kids, which I did take with the
Powershot. http://cthompson.com/kids/
Note that the pictures of my 73 B and my house were NOT taken with this
camera. The pictures of my kids are not raw out of the camera. They were all
taken from 1600x1200 jpg's and cropped down, scaled down to about 45% of
original size, and had two filters applied. First, I find that the skin
tones tend toward the blue, so I used a color balance filter to kick up the
reds a bit to give a better skin tone. Second I ran through a standard
"Sharpen" filter. I used a unix image editor known as The Gimp, though
Photoshop or any Windows or Mac editor should have the same filters. If you
want to see a raw pic, click the link at the bottom of the page of the
pictures of my daughter, but be aware, it's 479k, and is exactly how a
1600x1200 (normal mode, not fine mode) comes off the camera.
-C
On Wed, 21 Feb 2001, Ajhsys@aol.com wrote:
> Some listers have posted questions abouut digital cameras in the past. I
> just got back from the Photo Marketing Association trade show and they always
> have a digital camera shoot-out to see what the attendees think is the best
> camera. They shoot a picture of the same subject in the same conditions and
> post them all, by price category and without identification. People at the
> show vote on which is best in each price category.
________________________________________________________________________
| Chris Thompson ct@cthompson.com |
| 1973 MGB http://cthompson.com/mg/ |
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