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.

Comments

Decent 'help-you-choose' guide

[Balfazar]

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

Kodak DC290

[signe]

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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Deja Vu

[tedtimmons]

It's been said for the last 3 years that digital cameras are replacing "film" cameras. I don't think that's happening.

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!

Re:Deja Vu

[ctj2]

I am a ProAm photographer and lust after a good digital camera. The problem is one of what makes a digital camera "good"?

The criteria that are commonly used seem to be:

• Number of pictures that fit on the media
• The size of the captured images.
• The ease of transfering images from camera to computer.
• The quality of the captured Image.
• The size of the captured Image.
• Quality of the camera.
• Quality of the Lens
• Ease of control of the camera.

I have one lens for my 35mm that I payed almost 1K for. If you look at lenses for 35mm cameras you'll find the prices range from a few hundred dollars to many thousands of dollars. It is hard to look at a camera that costs less than $300.00 and even consider the lens to be reasonable.

Each person judges their needs and makes a decision based on those needs. My brother wanted "webshots." For him a Sony which compresses everything like mad and has 640x480 sizing is just fine. For me it doesn't come close.

My friend wanted a digital and used 3 before he picked his favorite. He choose the Nikon CoolPix 950. (The current Nikon is 990). For him quality was the name of the game. The size had to be 1280x1024 or larger. The compression had to allow for NO compression. I.e A raw TIFF file. And the "Hi Quality" setting is only 4:1 compression JPEG. Very usable.

The other day I took some pictures of a personal event. I ended up with about 16 pictures, all of them head shots. After the film was developped and I had scanned them for the web it turned out that we wanted some close ups of an earing. With just the original scan I was able to do a close up of the earing without upscaling or generating any data that was not already there. And my film scanner isn't the best there is. It only does 30bits of 2000+ by 3000+ pixels.

So to determine what the "best" digital camera is requires a good understanding of what the user wants to do and how they plan to use their images. If you want to be able to just move floppy disks with "Webshots" from your camera to your computer for uploading, pick a Sony digital camera. If you want higher resolution, you need something like the CoolPix 950 from Nikon. Or if you want the real thing you can pick up a Kodak DCS660 for only $20,000.00. That actually does 2k by 3K with 36 bits.

Pick what works for you, just take the list there at the top and rank those things that are important for you. "Webshots" or "Artprint" it makes a difference as to what camera features you need.

Chris