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Guide to your Perfect Digital Camera
Alan Dang writes "I've just posted a new digital camera buyer's guide at FiringSquad titled A Tale of Two Cameras. It explains why the digital SLR may not be the best camera for you, and helps you narrow down your holiday digital camera buying to a short list."
...for pointless use of Flash. :-(
Just go to dpreview and get better information without all the annoying page transition "features".
The article asserts "Your eye has a lot of depth of field. Everything you see is sharp and in focus. the laws of physics make it impossible for a camera to do this".
Well, actually most of what one sees is out of focus, since the eyes constantly adjust to favor a specific depth of field at any one time, leaving everything else fuzzy. If you compare this to an autofocussing camera, they are actually quite similar, and well within the "laws of physics". The future's flexible lenses will bring cameras even closer to the model used by the eyes.
Worst flash ever. It's one thing to have useless flash on an artsy site, but to use flash like this on a site/page that should be informative is worse than annoying. I would have read the article if it were plain HTML, but after 15 seconds of the flash navigation, I left and won't be back.
Are you a Candy Addict?
Basically, though, there are two types of camera users: Hobbyists and casual users.
A hobbyist wants a DSLR and is willing to buy accessories and learn to use it. If you're not willing to do these things, you'll be disappointed. I'm one of these guys, and I'd suggest that people find a cheaper hobby. As a side note -- $900 for the dRebel? *After* rebate? Shop around a little, pal...
Casual users are a little more involved, but it comes down to three things that are easy to answer once you get asked the questions:
Megapixels: You almost certainly don't need more than 4.
Zoom: Think carefully here. Most cameras are 3x zoom, but is that enough? Are you planning to take pictures at Disneyland or at, say, your kid's soccer game? At Disney for a posed shot, 3x zoom is enough. Otherwise, a 10x or 12x megazoom with IS might be worth spending money on.
Size: Remember that the best camera is the one you have with you when you need it. What is easiest for you to carry around?
Think that over, then go to www.dpreview.com and look at the test shots for the cameras that meet your specs. I usually end up recommending one of the Canon Sx00 series (S410, S500, etc) for a good balance of size and picture quality. I'd specifically stay away from the Minolta Z line myself (very disappointed with the Z3).
And for the love of God, shop around! Don't buy at Best Buy unless you're ready to pay $100-$200 extra. Go on PriceGrabber.com and consider the retailers with good reviews -- I won't specifically mention those I've bought from in the past, but the retailer reviews are a good guide; don't go with someone poorly reviewed to save $20.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
are in house printers cost effective at all? wallyworld, cvs, and everyone else sells digital prints at under .30$ for a 3x5 print (or is it 4x6?). at anyrate, my take is to let them have the high quality printer/paper/ink etc. and i can just print what i want. i'm hoping also that prices will slightly drop when more and more people switch from film to digital photos.
Single Lens Reflex. In an SLR camera, you are looking through the lens when you put your eye to the viewfinder. In a simpler camera you are not.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
Given the prices of getting real prints made are dropping through the floor, its weird people even bother with photo printers, unless you're shooting pictures you don't want the processor to see.
I have an Alps MD-5000 dye sublimation printer, and at a cost of a buck a print, I can make prints quite a bit better quality than a consumer optical process can do, or those dyesub Kodak kiosks. But for $.24 a print, I can get them printed as true photographs at Wal(greens|mart), and will end up with a quality that is nearly as good for most stuff.
Considering the best ink-jets I've seen aren't even in the ballpark in terms of quality as compared to my Alps or a photo print from a Fuji processor, I find it funny people drop a couple hundred bucks plus ink on a photo printer.
The break-even point is in the thousands of pictures, in terms of cost, and you get grainy, pixelated prints of unknown long-term image stability.
Single lens reflex - the viewfinder looks through the main camera lens, so what you see - focus, zoom, filters, etc - is what you get on film.
One feature the dpreview buying guide doesn't ask you for is the orientation sensor. Not all new cameras have it; I know Canons generally do. The orientation sensor saves you the trouble of rotating from landscape to portrait because EXIF information is written that lets programs like jhead do it automatically. If you take photos in batches, I highly recommend buying a camera with this feature.
I do agree that dpreview is a great source of information overall, and I didn't have patience to work through much of the annoying flash presentation in this article.
Short answer: They don't, technically. Epson just came out with a digital rangefinder with an APS sized sensor (like most DSLR's have).
Long answer: The reason you don't want to use an LCD screen on a DSLR for most things is for creative control. Try manually focusing... with the current displays, this is very difficult because everything looks reasonably sharp unless its VERY out of focus. Another reason is the hardware autofocus modules on DSLR's use the mirror to reflect light into them. Your P&S cameras use an algorithm that calculates focus through the camera's CPU. Dedicated hardware is much faster than that.
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Another really good resource for selecting and learning about digital cameras can be found at imaging-resource.com.
It has quite detailed reviews of pretty much every digital camera out there as well as sample images (there are even pages that allow you to compare images of the same thing taken by different cameras) and discussion forums.
I found it particularly useful when I was picking out my camera.
People will spend $900 to $1500 on a digital SLR, then spend $130 on a "consumer" zoom lens, and find that the images produced are not very good.
There are 2 reasons for this:
The "average" lens is really good at "average" conditions.
Few people realize how much "post-processing" is done "in-camera" with a point & shoot. With a DSLR, most of it is taken care of afterwards in software, Photoshop, Capture1, or some other software. Sure, you can set a DSLR to do sharpening, saturation, contrast, and a few others in-camera... but letting the camera decide defeats part of the purpose of having almost infinite control that a DSLR offers.
There are a lot of things to learn with a DSLR. Consumer-grade lenses are not going to be much help in adverse conditions. Yet, many people bought a DSLR for just that reason. They don't understand that a great lens is 50% of the deal.
Trying to take wedding pictures in a dimly lit church with a $130 zoom lens ins't going to cut it. Wait til the bride finds out that Uncle Ted and his new toy didn't get any "dreamy" shots of the wedding. He got a bunch of dark, gloomy junk! Suddenly, the $3000 she saved on a pro wedding photographer doesn't seem like such a bargain.
Low light means you need better lenses. Fast action indoors (basketball, volleyball, etc) means you need something better than that $130 75-300 f4-5.6. You can do ok, probably better than the average point and shoot, but it takes some skill, and it takes time to learn how to handle the equipment, and most people don't have the patience. They just want a point and shoot that will do it for them. For those willing to learn, it's worth it.
-- No sig for you!
There is actually a model or two that does split the path. Canon makes a "pellicle" model that sends 2/3 of the light to the film, and 1/3 to the viewfinder. The advantages are:
1) You can see the picture the instant it is taken. Viewfinder does not go black.
2) Shutter can fire instantly. With a traditional SLR, you have to wait over 100mS for the mirror to flip up. This might be useful to take a picture of lightning strikes if you wire up an automated light-activated trigger.
But I will admit that I have only seen these in a catalog, and never actually touched one.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
Unless you are a pro (or a VERY serious photo geek) and can afford a pro quality photo printer,do not print digital photos at home.
I'm not sure how true that is anymore. Images from either my Canon Digital Rebel (3072x2048) or Powershot G1 (2048x1536) printed on my pretty low-end Epson C84 look very good. I don't have quite the same kind of gloss you'd get from a professional lab (Actually, they're much like a professional grade "matte finish"), but the image looks excellent. Plus, I get to control the details; I decide how bright the image is, ferinstance, I decide how/where to crop the image if necessary to change aspect ratio for the finished size.
Now, yes, it probably costs me twice as much to run off an 8x10 than it would to have a lab do it. But I get good output [0], I get it my way, and I don't have to leave the house. (And I'm not doing it in bulk, so I'm not worried about the cost difference.)
Just two years ago, I would have agreed with you; nowadays, as I was very surprised to find out, even low-end printers are pretty darned good.
-JDF
[0] Now, my little brother has Epson's high-end photo printer, and it generates output that's better than I've generally seen from labs, beautiful glossy output. It's not cheap, though; $400ish for the printer and six ink cartridges to try to keep up with get expensive after a while. But it's beautiful output.
This is true but depth of field depends also on the focal length and magnification (which is related to the sensor size). The large magnification means that the lens "circle of confusion" should be smaller.
Try any "depth of field calculator", e.g. here and you will see that on Canon A75 at 16.2 mm telephoto (which has the same filed of view as 105mm 35mm lens) the total depth of field for an object 3m apart at f/5.6 is 2.15m
In contrast for Canon 1Ds with 105mm lens and f/5.6 depth of field is only 0.27m
Of course on 1Ds you can stop the lens to f/22 and and have the same photo with large depth of field (and because of the small noice of the sensor, you can increase the ISO speed without much degradation of the quality and have reasonable shutter speed). With DSLR you have a choice of large and shallow depth of field. With most point-and-shots you have only large.
Save the bandwidth. Don't use sigs!
One of the reasons extolled at length for choosing one type against abother is that a DSLR has a narrow depth of field and a "standard" digital camera has a greater depth. As anyone who knows about photography would know this is total tosh.
No it's not.
DOF is not only dependent of the aperture, but also on actual focal length and how large your circle of confusion is.
While the smaller circle of confusion on compact digcams reduce the net DOF, the biggest difference is due to the very short focal lenghts these cameras use.
Since your typical digicam has a very small sensor compared to a DSLR it will use a short focal length to get a normal viewing angle. The increase in DOF due to this short focal length often makes it impossible to properly blur the background.
Of cource on DSLRs you can get optics with numerical aperture of f1.4 or even less. Good luck in finding a digicam with such a large aperture.
The way I see it is - if you're looking to get a digital camera and you don't even know what SLR is, don't get one.
Exactly. The article goes on to explain what depth of feild and exposure time is. If you don't know, you shouldn't be getting a digital SLR. Buy a fully manual film SLR for about $100 first to see if the SLR world is right for you.
For reference, cheap digital P&S cameras typically have zoom lenses with focal lengths ranging from 3-50 mm, depending on the sensor size and zoom range. Minimum aperture numbers are usually between 2.0 and 5.6, with maximum aperture numbers rarely being larger than 8.0. Since they have such great depth of field at an aperture number of 8, they don't even bother putting on controls for smaller aperture sizes.
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Find out more about the impending downfall o
A large part of the rest of the article deals with all those manual settings an SLR offers you and how bad that is when you just want to take a couple of quick snap-shots. Again, this is nonsense, because in reality a good SLR will give you the possibility of setting everything according to your preferences, but doesn't force you to do that. They have autofocus and auto-exposure just like cheaper models, and usually they choose these parameters more cleverly as well. As a bonus, they don't only allow you to take a quick snap-shot as any other camera, but a good one will take a dozen uncompressed, high-quality pictures in a matter of one or two seconds. You can choose the one you like best and discard the others. Now that gives you a good snapshot.
In summary, the more you pay for a camera, the more options and possibilities you will get. Surprise surprise, who would have thought that. Depth of field and ease of use are non-isues, the article gets this very wrong. But yes, if you couldn't care less what depth of field or aperture even is, you might never want to set these manually and thus not want to pay for such advanced optiones.
but what do i know, i'm just a model.
If your CDR backups are failing within a couple of years, you are either using POS cheap media and/or not storing them correctly. Please be aware that there are only something like 12 companies in the world that manufacture CDR discs, and everything else is a rebrand of those. (i.e. There is no such thing as a Memorex or Sony CDR factory. These companies rebrand from multiple other companies, some with quality and some with POS media. (Sony doesn't make its own burners either. It rebrands from Lite-on. I'm not sure who makes the Memorex burners, though I can guarantee you they are rebranded OEM's.) Memorex is a particularly bad offender though because you can often find media from different factories on the same Memorex branded spindle, even though it all looks the same to the naked eye.) The correct course of action, of course, is to invest in some genuine Taiyo Yuden media (and watch out, because there are plenty of fakes,) and then burn multiple copies of your data and then store them in a dark, cool area with low humidity and constant environmental conditions. This WILL last for a long time. I have T-Y dating back to 1996 and it's still perfect.
I'm also a fan of Canon's cameras (I own an A75). They rate highly for the nerd factor if only because Canon provides to interested developers a really slick and very thorough SDK. (In the U.S. this SDK is easy to obtain, but in other countries the rules differ.) The SDK is available for Macs and PCs and lets you control just about every feature through the USB port that you can access by pushing the buttons on the back of the camera (zoom, focus, aperture, shutter speed, image quality, white balance, etc, etc).
:)
I've designed a remote capture tool for HDR imaging while others have made replacements/supplements for Canon's own remote capture tool (Cam4You) that support features like time-lapse photography and turning your digicam into a webcam.
Now if I wanted to upgrade my camera, I'm not sure I could get used to one that I couldn't control through my computer.
I have been doing photography since I was 12 years old. By "photography" I mean that I actually go take pictures, develop film and do my own prints. Recently it has been hard to do so due to do so because I haven't seen one bedroom apartments with dark rooms. Therefore, I decided to get a digital SLR instead. After months of investigation, I decided to go with Nikon D70.
Digital SLRs are not created equal. If you are into new things, take a look at cameras with 4:3 ration (Olympus E1 and Evolot). They have an ability to dust off the sensor before taking every shot, thus pics stay dust free. If you want to get a pro-sumer DSLR, take a look at Nikon D70 and Canon (although I recommend Nikon better due to its low noise). Why spend all $$$ on these cameras if you can find a point-and-shoot for cheaper? Here are my pointers:
Lenses.You are not creaing pictures with a camera. You create pictures with a lens. If you can exchange lenses, you give yourself more flexibility. This is a must if you want to take pictures of animals, close up shots, wide-angle shots, etc.
Color. Digital SLRs tend to have larger sensors with larger photosites. When you take pictures, you work with light and it is essential that you get enough light in order to process it correctly. Larger photosites do a better job, hence they have less noise. If you take a look at pictures produced by standard digital SLRS (based on 35mm cameras) vs. pictrures made by Olympus cameras that implement 4:3 technology (the latter have smaller sensors) you will see the difference.
No LCD monitor. Despite whatever you may think, this is a plus. First of all, your camera does not suck batteries for what you can actually see through a lens, secondly, your view is unaltered. You see colors and objects as they appear.
Depth of field. This one gets me everytime somebody says that DSLRs lack depth of field. In fact, if you have more than two brain cells, you will be able to vary the depth of field by adjusting your shutter speed and aperture. Most of cameras come with a "depth of field preview" button that will let you judge the picture that is going to be recorded.
There are several things that you must remember about digital SLRs (and digital cameras in general):
Run away from any person who tries to sell you a more expensive camera by saying "Well, it has more megapixels." Megapixel is a number that is related to the area of the sensor in terms of the number of pixels. Thus, a small linear enlargement (like adding a few megapixels to the horizontal side of the sensor) will affect the number. If a sales person tells you that a 6MP camera will give you much larger prints than a 5MP camera at the same sharpness, slap them in the face: the difference in size will be rather small. In order to increase the size of the print by 2, you'll have to increase the megapixel count by 4 in order to maintain the same image quality.
There are two different types of censors. CMOS and CCD. CMOS sensors are smaller than CCD. It appears (from my tests) that cameras with CCDs produce less noise; however, CMOS will soon improve. CCD technology is rather old. You can learn more about it by googling :)
Flash-sync speeds are really important for fill-in flashes. Typically, you want somethin above 1/250 in a pro-sumer camera. If you have no idea what a fill-in technique is, you'll learn it once you start taking pics during nice sunny weather.
Dust on sensors is pain in the rear. I have a lense that I use primary with my D70; thus, I haven't experienced it yet. You can clean it off yourself or take it to a shop. If you are concerned, take a look at Olympus cameras. E1 and Evolt use ultra-sound to take dust off the sensor before taking a shot.
Night photography sucks.... Yes. You heard me right. With a film camera, this is a pretty easy due to the lack of noise and purple frinding. With digital SLRs it requires more training, but can be done. I do not like high
I got a Nikon D70 earlier this year. It's proven to be one of the best purchases I've ever made. One of the strongest examples of how it's improved my photography is shooting at night with slow shutter speeds.
With my film cameras, I was never willing to invest the time and wasted film to experiment with tricky lighting and night shots. I always wanted to be sure I got the moment, so I'd always use a flash.
With the D70, I could see immediately how my shots were turning out and adjust settings to dial in exactly what I wanted. It was a real breakthrough moment in photography for me.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
The article's discussion of current benefits and limitations of digital SLRs vs. non-SLRs is accurate in the situation it depicts but hopelessly inaccurate in explaining the reasons.
The reason you can't reduce depth of field with most non-SLR cameras is that they have cheaply designed lenses that won't open up to large apertures. It would actually be both technically easy and (compared to SLRs) cheap to provide fast lenses which offered low depth of field creative options on non-SLR digital cameras, but the market doesn't seem to want them. Indeed, the 35mm SLR market was already moving to zoom lenses incapable of large apertures (and with commensurately poor low light performance) before digital cameras became competitive.
Two features of digital SLRs are simply legacy.
1) Interchangeable lenses. There remains a significant demand for cameras that can use the lenses originally developed for 35mm photography. There's no reason why cheaper lenses can be developed for smaller format digital cameras. Sony has started offering this option with its DSC-V and DSC-W cameras. You get Carl Zeiss lenses for far less than comparable 35mm lenses, but the camera CCDs so far cannot compete with the larger CCDs in the Canon and Nikon SLRs.
2) No digital preview. This seems to me a horrible and unnecessary flaw in digital SLRs. With a good non-SLR camera I can preview motion blur in my photographs and manually adjust exposure settings for time exposures while seeing the results in real time.
At the moment, we seem to be able to produce nicer CCDs at slightly larger sizes. Thus you can get better pictures from a 6.3MP Digital Rebel than from an 8MP Sony DSC-V3. By the same token if Hasselblad were to produce an even larger format digitial camera it would quite possibly be better still (and cost $100,000). In the end, I suspect the market will create smaller format digital cameras that offer all the benefits anyone much cares about at prices substantially lower than the Digital Rebel et al.
Image noise, and speed of operation. Compare a consumer type camera at ISO 400 with a DSLR at 1600. The DSLR will almost always give a cleaner image with less noise. Why is that? As the author shows, the consumer cameras have much smaller imaging chips. It doesn't take too much to figure out that cramming 8 million pixels onto the smaller chip will give much smaller pixel wells than 6 million onto the larger. A smaller pixel well doesn't capture as much light as a larger one. When you up the ISO equivalancy for a faster shutter speed, or working in low light conditions, you're amplifying the signal more. More amplification, more noise. Which looks very much like film grain. I've looked at D70 and 20D images at high ISO settings against almost all of the 8MP all in ones and it's not even close. The DSLRs win hands down. Also DSLRs focus and make their calculations MUCH more quickly than the small cameras. It all depends on what your own individual preferences are. Buy a compact if size and convenience are the most important factors, or if it's the almighty buck that's the biggie. But if image quality and speed are more important, than pony up to the big leagues. tbuck
Pointless use of Flash, yes - but also inaccurate. I have a Canon 300D digital SLR - I love it. Depth of field depends entirely on lens aperture, or the f-stop setting - not on SLR vs. regular digital. An SLR does allow but not require way more control and fine-tuning of depth of field. If you set it at automatic, you have a very heavy, bulky snapshot camera with an expected wide depth of field. But if you want a particular result and are willing to invest in the knowledge of the tool, the SLR camera, this thing can get shots I couldn't touch with any regular SLR. Add a 100-300 zoom lens and I got portraits over the Thanksgiving weekend that had the older ladies in the family slipping me $20 to delete their picture... Sound like this guy had a bad experience with the tool and failed to care enough to learn to use it properly or just set it to auto and forget it.
And for me it was
control of exposure and focus and depth of field
image quality
interchangeable lenses!!!
attachment for a real flash unit
That sold me on it.
Not a very good article at all.
So, can I assume that if you have a living room, or a bedroom, or a bathroom, that you'd just fill it full of stuff, right up to the walls?
Well, yeah actually--to a point. In my house I tend to put the furniture and stuff "right up to the walls". There is "empty space" but it is towards the centre of the room, in the middle of my stuff.
Space is good! It allows movement.
I see no point in allowing so much movement arount the outside of the room (or a page) when all the useful stuff is crammed in the middle.
Space is only good when appropriately used. If the article was a 20' by 20' living room the furniture would be bunched up in the middle of the room--you could not sit on the chesterfield because the console TV and bookshelf would be shoved right up against the front of it. But hey, there would be six feet of empty space from any given wall so I guess you could sit on the floor.
Overall, the article is hardly worth being posted on Slashdot--editors must've had a brain fart. I'd think the authors would try to present themselves as experts in photography (and as such would know something about presentation). There is nothing there that justifies the use of flash. It is locked to one resolution so on anything 1024 or higher it looks ridiculous. It is not printer friendly. The navigation(paging) controls are INVISIBLE until you hunt down their location with the a mouseover. The content is fairly light, and couldn've been presented in a single HTML file. Basically, wasteful use of bandwidth.
If you are annoyed by flash or want a low-bandwidth summary, here it goes:
* 2 main choices: "regular" or SLR
* SLR has large sensor, "regular" is 1/9th the size
* SLR==expensive, "regular"==cheap
* SLR==hard to use but flexible (depth of field, exposure settings, etc) so good for "artsy" work (portraits, closeups, etc). Lots of accessories.
* "normal"==easy to use but less ability to play with settings--set up to work for general purpose use (snapshots, scenery, etc) but not really well suited to specialty phototgraphy
* SLRs have no LCD viewfinder screen (the ones that have an LCD screen only use it after the pic is taken). "Normal" cameras can use the LCD as a viewfinder.
* conclusion: save your money and don't buy an SLR unless you are a professional or enthusiast. Take a "normal" camera along if you want to take pics quickly and easily.
There. No waiting for flash to load, no paging through tiny screens, etc.
The depth of field depends upon the F stop (absolute aperture divided by focal length) and the magnification of the image on the sensor/film, to be more precise. The aperture (F-stop) is also a measure of how bright the lens is -- a factor of 2 larger F-stop (F/4 vs. F/2) means 1/4 as much as light.
Cheap digital cameras frequently have remarkably bright lenses -- f/2.8 is very common. The depth of field is quite large because the magnification of the image on the sensor is very low, because the sensor is so small. Even in macro mode, the magnification is less than on a 35 mm SLR (much less a medium or large format camera), because the sensor is small.
Obviously, saying that you only get a narrow depth of field with a 35 mm SLR is nonsense. If you use a wide angle lens (with less magnification), or you stop way down (making the aperture tiny, or a large F number), you can get a very deep field of sharp focus. The problem is that a telephoto lens stopped down that much won't gather much light, so you need a very long exposure. A compact camera at the equivalent of 105 mm (but actually 20 mm) at f/2.8 would require f/16 to get the same depth of field, or 5 stops (32x) slower.
What's really happening here is that the compact camera has the pixels much closer together than the 35 mm SLR. This makes the pixels much smaller and somewhat less sensitive to light, so you do need a bit more exposure. Of course, tiny pixels do mean more noise and possible diffraction problems, so it isn't free.
slow to start up and there's a lot of delay between pressing the shutter release and actually taking a picture. You can mitigate this by half-pressing the shutter release to pre-focus/meter, but that's a problem with a moving subject (like a toddler!).
Try setting the camera to "action" mode, so it continuously re-focuses while the shutter release is half-pressed.
Second issue: on camera flash is evil. Only a few compact cameras give you a hotshoe. DSLR's will give way better flash results with their bounce flash/diffuser capability. Almost every flash picture I have yields terrible red-eye. Photoshop Album can generally fix this, but not all the time. Even without red eye, you generally get a sterile, harshly lit result.
As a former pro photographer, (newspaper, studio, wedding), I appreciate the advantages of an SLR, and how a pro or avid hobbyist benefit from these more costly, larger and more complex pieces of equipment. But a pro or avid hobbyist does not need to read this type of article. As for myself, I've grown too lazy and cheap to drag $2,000 and 8 lbs of camera gear around with me and go through the ritual of setting-up flash brackets and bounce cards anymore. If I need that stuff, I still have the gadget bag with over $5K of Canon gear. Instead, I use a Panasonic Lumix, which is still at the upper-end of size and weight for most consumers.
On the other hand, when the typical consumer asks "what's the best camera" what they really want to know, when questioned, is what's going to give them good snapshots of the kids and easily print quality 4x6 and maybe the occasional 8x10. For them, something with a good zoom range, relatively quick focus and release time, decent low-light capability, built-in flash that sits-up high enought to avoid red-eye in most cases, and at least 3 megapixels, coupled with a pl
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