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Which Digital Camera Do You Recommend?
Digital Cameras are becoming the rage these days. It seems that now people are opting for the ease of the CCD and the COMPACTflash card over the trusty 35mm film camera, and why not? Gone are the days of paying to have your film developed at the nearby PhotoHourMart. With a digital camera, a laptop, and a decent printer, you are your own photographer, photolab and even publisher. So what digital camera does the Slashdot Readership recommend? Which one offers the best bang for the buck or has the best features? I'd be interested in hearing your opinions.
Properly exposed good film has a resolution of well over 2000 dots (I think over 3000, even) for 35mm film.
I don't know where you come up with this, but I've never heard of film being measured in "dots". Laser printers are compared in dpi. Scanners in dpi. They are digital devices. Film is not. Film, at least according to Kodak and Fuji, is measured in lines per millimeter. To simply make a blanket statement that 35mm film has x resolution, is not correct. They cannot be compared, as the underlying technology is vastly different.
Different films have vastly different resolving abilities. The best film in the world for resolution is Kodak Technical Pan. At 25 ASA, when developed in Technidol Liquid, it delivers absolutely razor sharp enlargements up to 20x24 from a 35mm negative.
It's resolving power is in excess of 250 lines/mm.
Kodak T-Max 400 can resolve a max of 125 lines/mm at 400 ASA in T-Max RS developer. How do these compare to DPI...I don't know. It's not accurate to compare. With these films, the capability of the film to store detail FAR exceeds the ability of the camera and photographer. Razor sharp focusing is hard to do, even for a professional. Most consumers own really crappy, slow, lenses. This too will have a huge impact on photo quality.
For the average home user, a digicam is a good bet.
I agree saying a $600 SLR will demolish a digi cam. But so will a $100 SLR. It's the lens, more than the film. All a camera is, is a light tight box. Nothing more. Too many people get caught up in buying a super expensive camera. Don't. Buy a cheap ass Nikon FM, and a Nikon 50/1.4. Total price, under $300. Quality, better than any digi cam under $5000.
If you buy a digi cam, you're going to have to spend gobs of money printing out all the pictures. You're going to have to find a storage system. CDr's have a limited life, so do crappy inkjet prints, never mind the horrid quality compared to a photographic paper.
Who wants to scrapbook a bunch of inkjet prints with non-archival and acidic inks? If you're serious about quality, stick with film. If you want something to last, stick with film. If you want to take quick little snapshots of your dog, or your partner for a web page or to spam your friends via email with, get a digi cam.
First and foremost: USB, USB, USB. You will regret
it if you go for a camera that uses a serial link
to connect to your computer. Your only hope then
is usually a CompactFlash card reader that you can
hook up to your PC/laptop.
Speaking of CompactFlash, the camera you're looking at uses it, right? Unless you enjoy proprietary ripoff memory you want to stick to
CF memory. Besides, if you ever feel the urge,
IBM's MicroDrive is CompactFlash..how does a
340 meg hard drive sound in your camera?
Another big issue is Linux compatibility. Your
first stop is to www.gphoto.org to check their
list of supported camera models. Their list is
NOT the definitive list, however! If you can put
up with closed-source software, JCam (www.jcam.com) has a huge list of supported cameras.
And one last note..the Kodak guys have been VERY
nice to me and from the sound of it most other
vendors have been pretty secretive about their
specs/transfer protocols. If you want to support companies that treat you right, keep the linux-friendly-support factor in mind.
What did you eat today? http://www.atetoday.com/
Thos grainy photos are just a bad picture... Either because you underexposed or you used bad film. (Like high-speed Kodak Max. Compare Kodak Max 800 to Fuji's 800, the difference is amazing. And if you really care about grains, use ISO 100 or less film.)
Properly exposed good film has a resolution of well over 2000 dots (I think over 3000, even) for 35mm film.
Then you have medium/large format, where you have film that measures on the order of 4x5 inches at a resolution of over 2000 dpi. (I don't recall the specs, but 2000 is being VERY conservative)
For the average home user, a digicam is a good bet. But for a serious (or semi-serious) photographer, a $600 SLR (Like my old Pentax PZ-70, nowadays I could get an even better camera for less) will obliterate a $600 digicam. (Like the Olympus C-2020. It's sweet as far as digicams go, and my mom is giving my dad one for his birthday, but our old Pentax blows it away if you want to do anything more than a basic picture.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I think it's going to be a little more fine grained than that - sort of like how noone now records their home movies onto film - the magnetic storage methods are cheaper and simpler... However, there is always a class of people (i.e. professionals) who will always need _real_ film.
I think the same will happen with digital cameras. The old fashioned point and shoot cameras will simply all but disappear, and we'll be left with a choice of digital cameras or high end SLR cameras that professionals (or hobbyists) use. I think there will also be an option to have your digital COMPACTflash card processed at the chemists into glossies.
OK, back on topic... I think there's something still to be said for the Sony Mavica. While floppy's don't hold all that many high quality pictures, there's something to be said if you're on holiday and you fill up your disk - you can just buy a new pack of ten floppys!
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
The one I use is the Jenoptic JD11 (aka Praktica D500).
Pros:
Cons:
For the price it is a superb camera, although it can't compete with models costing more than twice it's price. It's a case of knowing what it can do, and staying within it's limitations, then you get good results.
Samples: www.custodian.com/album
Manufacturer's page: www.jenoptik-camera. com/english/products/jd11/main.html
--
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
Differences? Well, notice how the pro's image has colors that are incredibly washed out. Notice how the pro's image has no depth of field.
The short depth of field is a "feature, not a bug," so to speak. It draws attention to the foreground subject by flattening the background. People pay lots of money to get this affect - he was probably using a 300mm-400mm f/2.8 lens, cost: ~$3000. The color washout can be fixed in 5 seconds in Photoshop, BTW.
The digital's shot is good, but it actually proves one of the flaws of digital cameras: they can't handle the light range the way a 35mm can. See the underexposure in McNabb's face and under his armpits on your shot? There is no shadow detail there. The highlights are also missing a little detail. Compare with the other shot, where you can see his open mouth, eyes, nose (these elements really make the shot). Digitals are not as versatile as plain old film in this regard. In turn film is not nearly as versatile as your eyes.
He didn't spend $10,000 for nothing, BTW. Your $900 digital would have a helluva time focusing on air airborne, running quarterback (It wouldn't be able to, until after the shot was already missed). His expensive SLR has a predictive autofocus computer which can determine the direction the subject is moving and compensate accordingly - severl times a second. By the time your digital got a shot off, he could tear through half a roll of film.
I'm not knocking your shot or the camera in any way. For low-res stuff, low-action shots like pretty much everything you find on the web, digitals are a godsend. Just keep in mind that they have a long way to go before they can hold a candle to even a mid-range SLR. People are not spending thousands of dollars in vain. For someone whose livelihood depends on consistently producing great shots, you want the best equipment available. That's why the pro went with the SLR and you with the digital.
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Anyone have experience with the DC215?
Also, GPhoto should be pointed out... this is one sweet looking app. Great effort by those guys!
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After doing a fair amount of research (reading every review I could find on certain models of cameras) and changing my mind several times about which one would best suit my needs, I've decided on a Sony CyberShot DSC-D770. I selected this camera because the 35mm I use most often is an SLR, and after much deliberation I decided to stick with the SLR style. The Sony's resolution (1.5 megapixel) is a bit on the low side by today's standards, but that's the only real shortcoming of this camera. Still, I think 1344x1024 output will be sufficient for my purposes. What I particularly liked about this camera is the wealth of manual controls, especially the zoom and focusing rings.
Other cameras (less than $1000 street price) worth considering:
- SLR: Olympus C-2500L and Canon PowerShot Pro 70. Although the Sony was my favorite of the SLRs, for someone else's needs one of these might be a better bet.
- Versatility: Hands down, one of the Nikon Coolpix cameras. There's a wealth of lens attachments and other accessories available for these things. And while not the most compact, they're certainly less bulky than an SLR. And the new 990 is a 3.3 megapixel powerhouse.
- Bang for the buck: Casio QV-3000EX. For a little more than $900 you can get one of these 3.3 megapixel beasts in combination with IBM's 340MB MicroDrive. Unfortunately there's no external flash attachment, and the lens is not threaded to accept attachments, but someone will find a way around this limitation.
- Portability: Take your pick of Canon's PowerShot A5, A50, S10, or S20 (increasing in capability from sub-megapixel to 3.3 megapixel). These little jewels are about the size of Canon's Elph APS film cameras, which is hard to beat for a go-anywhere camera.
There are plenty of other cameras out there, but these were the most appealing to me (at one time I was torn between the Nikon Coolpix 990, the Casio QV-3000EX and the Sony DSC-D770). There are a number of Web site with loads of reviews out there; some of them are the Imaging Resource, the Digital Photography Review, and Steve's Digicams. Happy searching!Regards,
Jeremy
(And if anyone's interested in how that Sony works out, I'll be receiving the camera this week. I'll be happy to share my own impressions of it once I've had a chance to play with it.)
The FD91 was top of the range at the time it was released, and only intended for moderately serious use with a price tag to match. It has an excellent 14x optical zoom (no nasty expanding pixel tricks) and takes photos at either 640x480 or 1024x768 res with two different JPEG compression settings. There's also an uncompressed BMP mode that I've never used. At the tight end of the zoom you can get a whole lot of detail on a fairly distant object, so it's good for taking candid shots that people aren't aware of. This is helped by the camera's "steady shot" feature, that I rarely if ever turn off.
Purists will also be pleased to note that all its features are manually overridable, so you can focus manually if you like. Exposure is automatic, but you can do shutter or iris priority, and expose to the entire scene or turn on the spot meter for high contrast situations. There are several white balance modes as well.
On top of this, it will also do audio/visual MPEG recordings at 320x200 for 15 sec, or 160x100 for a minute. Probably more useful is the "audio annotation" feature where you take an ordinary still with several seconds worth of audio attached as a separate MPEG file. The audio can be a bit artifacty, and it's a "convenience" feature: you'd never mistake it for a serious audio recorder.
All in all the camera is easy to praise. It's easy to use and produces very nice results in most environments. My only gripes about the camera would be that the widest zoom angle is a bit narrow, and I'd like better low-light performance. Not that its low light performance is bad, but I know that CCDs can be really impressive in low light when they want to be, and getting a flash photo to work well can be a bit of a challenge.
I'd love to post a "photo gallery" link for you all, but my poor old 'net link would not stand the Slashdotting.
Disclosure: I used to be a Sony employee, and I got mine on the cheap as an ex-demo unit. Sony retrenched me, so it's not like I feel I have to say nice things about them, though.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
I've been interested in one of these, and a friend of mine has one.
One thing that I wanted to try was to use superformat to create floppies that use extra tracks and extra sectors per track--virtually all drives will support this, and DOS is happy with it. Unfortunately, the camera flatly refuses to use any of the specially-formatted disks. (I suspect it would take some firmware hacking to get it to work.)
So much for getting a little extra storage.
Not to troll or cause flamage, but it really doesn't help the /. reader trying to buy a digital camera; it's interesting, yes, insightful, yes, but also not very useful when one wants to find out about:
Stuff like that.
For example, I've heard from a store that Kodak cameras aren't very well supported from Kodak; a multitiude of Slashdot readers exclaim the praises of their cameras, however.
Then there's Epson's PhotoPC650, and excellent looking camera. HP isn't a great camera, despite their good printers and scanners. Does Epson stack up? Casio's QV2000+ seems a great idea, packing an IBM microDrive.
At least, it seems those are more what the questions was asking for; referrals, recommendations, etc.
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
WIthout knowing details on what specific features are needed, here's a brief review on two I've owned, the Olympus D-340 and the Kodak DC280.
Olympus
------
+ great case with integrated sliding lense cover
+ ability to store uncompressed tiffs
+ great color, especially in dark situations
+ adjustable ISO setting
+ excellent battery life
+ very sharp preview screen
- way too hard to use, interface sucks
- pictures didn't look as good as the kodak when printed
- serial only
- screen sticks out so it's impossible not to smudge with your cheek
Kodak
----
+ higher resolution
+ 20 MB memory
+ USB
+ good quality printed pictures
+ easy to use interface
- crappy lens cover that falls off all the time
- somewhat slower on taking pictures, has to be held still
- poor battery life, only about 15 minutes of constant use
- crappy preview screen, can't tell how good the picture is
Overall it's a tough call. I think the really really bad battery life of the kodak combined with the useless LCD screen really ruin it. You're probably better of spending a bit more and getting a camera that has the best of both
I was just looking at digital camera choices yesterday and came across
this handy 'tell us what is important and we'll help you choose a camera guide' at activebuyersguide.com.
It lets you set your priorities/preferences etc. and asks you a series of 'tie-breaker' questions, then spits out several recommendations with full stats.
I found it a helpful starting place.
-- Balf
Try scanning some 35mm prints sometime. You run out of resolution at about 300 dpi
Part of that is that the paper you are scanning does not hold as much information as the film does - here's an interesting comparison page that shows film scans ranging from 2400dpi to 6000dpi (drum scans). They also comapre the same images from digital cameras, 35mm, and 4x5 (large format) cameras.
I think even counting for the enlarged size of the photo, film still has a lot more resolution than you think!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I bought the Nikon Coolpix 950 several months ago and I love it! I used to use a couple of SLR 35mm Camera's but now I don't think I will EVER give up my digital. If you've ever used an all manual SLR 35mm camera, the Nikon Coolpix 950 gives you the ability to adjust everything on it, from manual focus, shutter speed, aperture, style of autofocus, flash types, and the list is practically endless. Some of my favorite features are the "Best Shot Selection" where it takes 10 pictures of the same thing then chooses which one is of higher quality. It uses the compact flash cards and there are tons of adapters, serial, usb, laptop. You can also buy seperate lenses for Telephoto, Wideangle, and Fisheye. Has support for external flashes also. If you're willing to shell out some heavy money on a high quality camera...this is it!
End Of Line
The Sony Cybershot cameras are unquestionably the best I've ever encountered. The DSC-F505 CEE has a 2.1Mpixel CCD (1600x1200), a superb lens, great optical zoom, and good upload capabilities. It's pricey, but worth every penny. Some information is here.
I recently picked up the Kodak DC280. It lists for $699, but I got it from Buy.com for $499. It has Compact Flash, Serial and USB. If you install the USB patches for the 2.2.14 kernel, it works with Linux. gPhoto supports it really well, and you can take the compact flash card, put it in a pcmcia adapter and pop it into your notebook to get the pictures that way. The resolution is something like 1700x1100 and the pictures look great.
The Kodak DC290 is one of the better digital cameras I've seen. Great picture quality, decent zoom, great controls. And the scripting language (Digita) really tops it off. With that you can load apps on your camera to help you take pictures. Like things to assist with panoramic shots, or exposure settings. I've had mine for a few weeks now, and I've taken plenty of pictures. Combined with Paint Shop Pro to clean up pictures that were too dark (because of distance), the pictures are better than anything I've taken with a film camera. And the USB cable makes it pretty quick to get the pictures onto the computer.
I ended up buying mine at Accompany (now MobShop). They regularly have them for $680 to $650. And I happened on a NYTimes promo code for them, and got 20% off that. So it ended up being slightly more than $500. For a $900 camera, that's not too bad.
If you'd like to see some pictures from my camera, check out the Photos section of my web site. It's still under construction, but the pictures taken of the Explorer, as well as the pictures from the wedding and the pictures of Akamai's servers, are all from my DC290. The only ones that I cleaned up in PSP were the wedding pictures (since they were in a dark room).
-Todd
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"The details of my life are quite inconsequential..."
Think of this:
Most people who are on Slashdot are computer people (i.e., their profession involves computers in one way or the other).
Most computer professionals are equiped with a laptop by their employer.
CompactFlash can be put in an adapter that fits in a standard PCMCIA slot.
Most computer professionals take their laptop on vacation with them.
If you have your laptop and the PCMCIA adapter (which comes with the Kodak camera) there's no need to puchase more digital film when you run out. Simply hook it up to your laptop and save the pictures you want on your hard drive.
If your laptop is short on space, it's relatively easy to backup large applications that you WON'T need on vacation to your Linux server at home before you head out, and restore them when you get back.
Well, there are still reasons for traditional cameras.
First, they're cheaper, and less fragile. Do you want to bring your $600 toy into the pit at an Atari Teenage Riot show, or would you rather carry a disposable camera?
Second, if your ultimate goal is to have prints to keep around, it's cheaper to develop a roll of film than the print out a digital image on a photo printer (with photo paper and ink). Plus, while it takes about the same amount of time, sometimes it's more convenient to just drop off the film, get lunch, and come back 23 minutes later than to spend that 23 minutes over your computer.
Third, there's quality. I'm not going to go into the old argument of the theoretical quality of analog vs. digital (records vs. CDs, for example), because they're mostly biased BS. But anyone can look at a picture taken with a consumer digital camera and a picture taken with an equivalent-priced analog camera and see the difference. And when you factor in interpolated digital zoom vs. optical zoom (since most digital cameras only do a small amount of optical zoom, whereas for the same price you could buy a good traditional camera and any zoom lens you want), it's even more dramatic.
I'm not saying that digital cameras don't have their place. But for the time being, traditional cameras have their place, too.
no
Couple that with the fact that floppies are *almost* free, and you've got an open and affordable format to make sure every computer can view the image. In recent years, the ability to read the jpg format has been increased since almost every computer has at least a web browser.
With every camera manufacturer offering their own proprietary storage media, remember that your images, like undeveloped film, are just bits untill a computer can read them.
___
Digitals are great for snapshots, web-related stuff, and the like, but most individuals that have a serious interest in photography will own a digital, plus one or more "film" cameras.
It seems that the digital camera is an add-on- you don't replace a good camera with a digital, you simply use both.
It's amazing how good the quality of old-fashioned film cameras is. The level of control over your subject through aperture, focus, lenses, exposure time, film usage, and more hasn't been duplicated in the digital world. The quality of 35mm has not been matched in the digital space yet, not to mention medium format!
This cammera is the C|Net editor's choice and for a good reason. It also has a 99% approval rating on their site. Anybody wanting some great resources for picking a digital camera should go here: http://cnet.com/shopping/0-1427343-7-1436443.html? tag=st.cn.1.sptlt.1427343-7-1436443.
Thanks to them, I got the Olympus D-360L for about $250 and I am incredibly happy with the purchase. It has everything I want and although I have not tested it their site says it has full Linux support. I strongly recomend this.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Then...
I bought a Casio QV-3000EX Plus about 4 weeks ago and have taken something like 400 pictures with it, most of them in the camera's undocumented and unsupported TIFF format -- each pic is 6MB, compared to up to 1.5MB for the JPEGs it takes at 7:1 compression (ew!). Okay, so you only get 56 shots before the microdrive is full and it takes 20 seconds to process each shot (1-2 seconds for the JPEGs, if that long)... and most graphics programs won't read these TIFFs (IrFanView does; ImageMagick does; I imagine GIMP will too; PhotoShop does NOT), but they look awesome when printed on photo paper with a 6-color printer (Epson Stylus Photo 750, in my case). Certain things, like tiny tree branches, show the printer's deficiency in the 720dpi direction (the long edge of the paper). Mind you, of those 400 pics I've taken, pixelation is visible in less than a dozen of them -- but that's the printer and not the camera. 2048x1536 is more than enough to print an 8.5"x11" photo without artifacts if only the printer were capable. Gimme a 2400x2400 dpi printer and I promise you won't be able to distinguish between this camera's photos and a real 35mm in any of the usual photo situations. (With an f-stop limited to F8, 'usual' is defined as a broad but comparatively small set of situations.)
Also, the camera can store 236 JPEGs at full resolution on the microdrive. It's just a fairly lousy compression ratio so if you print them larger than 4"x6", JPEG artifacts quickly show themselves. 7:1 is as good as it gets with this camera if you use JPEG.
And speaking of unsupported/undocumented features, it's possible to get shutter speeds up to 60 seconds (the documentation says the limit is two seconds); however, I've found that any exposure over 1.3 seconds tends to show a lot of CCD noise. That includes shots of the night sky... this camera captures starlight (and airplane lights) with exposure times less than 1 second.
The only limitation that's repeatedly been bothersome is the f-stop range. It's F2-F8, which is way too small; should be F2-F12, at least, F22, preferably.
My two on-topic cents...