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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."
I just think it would be helpful when making a "buyer's guide" like this to include some printer recommendations for the layman all the way up to the pro...
Meet today's nominee for the 2004 Worst Application of Flash Award.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
That's all great information...but what about some advice for the budget segment? I want to buy someone a digital camera for Xmas but I don't want to spend more than $200.
To me, this segment is the MOST likely to have a wide range of quality for the price point. Does anyone have advice here as to makes or models in the $200 or less price range? "Don't bother for less than $X" is also valid advice if you can back it up, of course...
Xentax
You shouldn't verb words.
Agreed, pick the best tool for the job. In this case flash isn't it.
People who use flash like this should be shot.
I'm all for using Flash when it makes sense, but I can't even make myself read an article presented in such a way.
Thinkin' Lincoln - a web comic of presidential proportions
This article was focused on a single point pretty much, SLR or non-SLR.
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. It's designed for advanced and more knowledgable photographers.
That being said, I own a Canon A80 which I am quite happy with. Also, a good book on digital photography which I also own is Complete Digital Photography 2nd Ed
# fuser -v
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People without a camera often ask me what camera to get, and they usually don't need to hear any more than: DSLR > $1200 to decide they prefer point and shoot.
People with a camera (point and shoot) often ask me why they can't take good photos in low light or why the camera won't take a picture right when they want it to. Then they understand why DSLR > $1200.
Until they have experience, people seem to believe that there is no difference in quality, just a difference in "bells and whistles," whatever those are, and that inexpensive machines are equivalent to expensive machines, but stripped of useless "bells and whistles."
I got a little way through this piece and came across a gross error which, for me, made the rest of the article of very dubious worth.
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.
The depth of field depends upon the aperture of the iris. A small aperture acts rather like a pinhole camera and hence will give a great depth of field. A large aperture relys upon the lens for focus and hence depends greatly on the focal length of the lens system giving critical focus and a very narrow depth of field.
Cheap "standard" digital cameras will usually have a small lens and small (fixed?) aperture hence a large depth of field. More expensive "standard" digital cameras are more sophisticated and allow the user to change the aperture and have a larger lens, so they can have a narrow depth of field.
Digital SLRs are totally dependant upon the lens system. However, because they have a variable iris within the lens systems they can have either a very wide depth of field (if they're stopped right down) or a very narrow depth of field (iris wide open). Both the end points of these will depend entirely on the characteristics of the lens systems.
How many people would accept an article which said that you shouldn't buy a 35mm SLR because you only get a narrow depth of field?
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
That seems steep. Maybe this article is designed for the semiprofessional photographer who carries more than one camera around? That way the discussion about weight and bulk sounds more relevant. I mean if you're going to spend $1000 on a digital camera you may already be familiar with Digital Hasselblads.
You got that right! 99% CPU usage just to view a freakin' text because the author thought it was cool to do it with flash? What a waste of bandwidth...
There is a lot more to photo quality that the megapixels. You you can't get anywhere near the level of detail and sharpness that a DSLR gets with the tiny lenses and tiny sensors that point-and-shoot cameras have. They're fine for many situations, but to claim that they're almost as good as a DSLR simply because they have a similar number if pixels is absurd.
I'm getting sick of these Slashdot stories that are just ads. This 'Digital Camera Buyer's Guide' is just a pretext to try to sell 'digital camera bundles'.
...Not to mention the $$$ you'll sink into a decent flash! Its funny how many people I see using SLRS strictly in program mode.
http://www.rupertphotography.com/
http://fromthemorning.blogspot.com/
[FromTheMorning]
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?
Space is good! It allows movement.
In graphic design (including web) clear white space is a powerful tool.
In music (the silences are as important as the notes) or in theatre (dramatic pauses) - emptyness is powerful and just as important as words.
Space and silence is good. Don't just fill it up just because it's there.
Fuji S602Z
Fuji S7000
Fuji S5000
Olympus C-750UZ
Kodak 6490
I went for the C-750. The S602 was good, but bulky and, I felt, rather conspicuous for inner-city photography. The S7000 was also good, but was similarly bulky and cost more. The S5000 was also bulky, but cheaper, and with a zoom that matched the C-750, but had rather over-aggressive JPEG compression, forcing one to use RAW mode and post-process more extensively than might otherwise be the case. I'll confess to not examining the 6490 as closely as perhaps I should have, but I gather it is rather more limited in terms of manual controls and also uses a proprietary Li-Ion battery.
The C-750 was the right choice for me, for now. I might well be shopping around for a D- or film SLR in a couple of years, once I've improved my technique with the C-750. But I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
If I had a living room, bedroom or bathroom that measured 19" or less diagonally, you can bet I would fill it up to the walls.
Go to a newsstand and check how many publications use 30% whitespace on their pages. It's just not practical to do that when your purpose is to present informative articles.
Sites that use tons of whitespace think of themselves as museum walls. That's not even appropriate for most photo sites. Think more in terms of a family photo album. You put several photos on one page so people can quickly flip through and find the ones they're interested in.
I recently bought a Canon 20D. Although I am very happy with the purchase, I have to admit that in most situations my old Canon G3 produces photos that look just as good. Granted the 20D's shots will always have twice as many pixel, but 95% of the time they are not needed.
The one place where the 20D and other DSLRs excel is that their much larger sensor allow for very low noise, even at very high ISO settings. But again, 95% of the time you are never going to notice the difference, and programs like Neat Image and Grain Surgery do an amazing job in situations where there noise is noticable.
Another problem with DSLRs is that good lenses are very very expensive. Even in DSLR bundles, the lens that comes with the camera is not likely to be as versatile as the built-in lens of a good 'pro-sumer' camera like the G3. Granted, DSLR lenses are probably much higher quality than the built-ins, but again, it's quality that you don't notice most of the time. So you will end up spending extra money for a wide-angle and a zoom lens, and these things are not cheap.
I guess the moral to the story is, that unless you really know what you are doing, and know you want to explore that 5% of photography where the DSLR excels, you are better off with a good pro-sumer model.
The point of a digital SLR is superior image quality and immediate response. There are two DSLR attributes that result in better image quality: sensor size and lens quality.
CCD (or CMOS) sensors in current DSLR's are at least three times larger than the largest sensor currently found in most point and shoots. The bottom line on a larger sensor is that, for the same number of pixels, you get much better sensitivity to light. This translates into lower noise. The practical application of this is that you can set a DSLR's light sensitivity to something like ISO 400 and have less noise in your image than if you set a Point and Shoot's sensitivity to ISO 100. A larger sensor set to the same sensitivity will give you fewer artifacts than a smaller sensor.
The second attribute, lens quality, isn't as absolute. But in general, a manufacturer's [D]SLR lens has excellent optical properties. They are not as compromised by form-factor or packaging considerations. Many point and shoot cameras have optics that exhibit exposure falloff in the corners or suffer from various optical and/or chromatic problems such as flare and color fringing. This is not true of all point and shoot cameras, digital or otherwise, but you can't use price as a determining factor. The $250 point and shoot I currently own has a much better lens than the $500 point and shoot I purchased originally.
This link: http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/2dig.htm/ gives a much better summary of the two different types of camera than I can give. But, IMHO, if you're going to spend $800-1000 on a digital camera, you're far better off getting a DSLR than a point and shoot.
Two parameters on digital cameras that are never mentioned:
burst - the time from when you press the button to when the picture is actually taken, and
speed - the time it takes to store the picture to the memory device
I have not used many digital cameras, but the (low budget) ones I have used are terrible at both of these. I never seem to capture the fleeting smile of my kids because of the 250-500 ms burst delay and I have to wait 2 seconds or so (longer when the batteries are low) for the picture to save before I can try again.
I'd rather use my 35mm SLR, but I love the instant-review and capacity of a digital.
Can someone explain this to me? The point of an SLR camera is that when you look through the viewfinder you see what the lens sees. But with a digital camera you have a screen on the back which shows the view through the lens anyway. So what is the point of all that extra complicated, expensive, heavy mechanism to give you something you already have?
Maybe it wasn't pointless. For example, you generally can't use copy-and-paste to copy part of the text to another window. This is done for a couple of reasons. The obvious one is copyright protection, since it makes exact copying difficult. But a more important use is to interfere with criticism, which often requires copying significant chunks of text to explain what's being criticised.
For example, consider the following paragraph (which I've laboriously retyped:
I'd originally intended to comment on this, and the comment could well go here. This paragraph is rather discrediting to any reader who knows any physics at all. Your eye and your camera are subject to exactly the same laws of physics, and photons don't change their behavior for either one. Fact is, your eye doesn't have an infinite depth of field; it just has a very fast "autofocus". And it's difficult for most humans to look at something without automatically focusing on the subject of interest. The only real difference with a camera is that the picture preserves the focus from when the picture was taken, so you can look at the out-of-focus portions easily. It takes training (that most people don't have) to do the same with your eyes.
Anyway, I'd consider this paragraph a "howler" that instantly discredits the rest of the text. I'd suggest that it be rewritten in some way that's not blatantly incorrect (to someone with a bit of knowledge of optics).
It even gets worse in the next paragraph, which starts "A digital SLR has a shallow depth of field,
OK, so this was aimed at the PHB, not anyone with even a minimum of knowledge of optics. So I'm pissed for having my time wasted like this by an abstract that promises more than it delivers. I suppose I should have known the second I saw the white space and the flash, and hit the Back button. I'll go away now.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Would you rather have lines of text that go all the way across your 1600x1200 monitor? I make my web site scale up to a point, but when you start getting past a certian width of text, it becomes hard to read. That is why I limit the width of text to 30em. That ends up with about 12-14 words per line, which is much more comfortable to read than 50 or 60 words per line that you would see if I let it "take advantage" of your 1600x1200 display.
There is nothing wrong with using print design on a web page. You do not have to design for a fixed-size box to use print design on the web. You can quite easily make that "fixed size box" be a "fixed proportion box" and scale up or down to whatever size the user is displaying it at. The key is to make it so it is still comfortable to read at high or low resolutions, or anything in between.
I would not shove my site into a fixed-sized box in the middle of your screen, I would make it take up whatever amount of space it needs to have a comfortable 12-14 words per line, in a font that is a reasonable size for you to read, without looking huge.
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