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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.
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."
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!
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.
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
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.
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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