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."

Comments

Yay

[Anonymous Coward]

...for pointless use of Flash. :-(

Website

[1000101]

Just go to dpreview and get better information without all the annoying page transition "features".

The eyes' depth of field

[erlkonig]

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.

Re:The eyes' depth of field

[jd142]

Brilliant. Because I was thinking the same thing. ;) The eye's depth of field is normally pretty small, at least for near object. A quick experiment will show you that for close object, the depth of field is about 3 inches.

SLR's can also have a larger depth of field, it just depends on the aperature setting. And most SLR cameras have a Point and Shoot mode, at least at the hobbiest level.

After seeing these mistakes, I also wondered about the statements that you don't see what you get when use the LCD viewer of an SLR. That doesn't make sense to me at all.

3 words....

[filenabber]

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.

Decent very basic primer...

[Skyshadow]

Okay, this was a fairly decent very basic primer about selecting a digital camera, and better than listening to a blueshirt at Best Buy...

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.

Re:Article not useful

[n3k5]

This article was focused on a single point pretty much, SLR or non-SLR.

That by itself isn't so bad, a lot of people like to learn wether choosing an expensive SLR would pay off for them. However, half of the article is about how a bigger sensor gives you a shallower depth of field and how bad that can be in many situations. And this is patent nonsense. An SLR gives you the possibility to make the depth of field shallow, but the much larger size of the sensor makes it possible to catch more light, thus you can tighten the aperture and get a really large depth of field as well.

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.