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

Funny

[StevenHenderson]

It's funny how an entire feature can be so insightful about digital cameras, and totally leave out suggestions about photo printers. Quality in prints now is limited to printer quality, not image resolution, if I am not mistaken.

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...

Re:Funny

[DocStoner]

You've brought up a good point. People (amatuers) ask me all the time about what printer to buy because they want to print their digital photos.

They always give me a dumbfounded look when I tell them not to print any photos on any of the entry level photo printers, instead have them printed at a reputable photo lab. "Isn't that expensive?" they ask. Nope, not when compared to the total cost of the paper, the ink cartridges you used and the quality of the prints.

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.

Gah

[American AC in Paris]

Meet today's nominee for the 2004 Worst Application of Flash Award.

Argh!

[Xentax]

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

Article not useful

[ktulu1115]

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

Re:Article not useful

[temojen]

So far, it looks like they're saying that dSLRs always have shallow depth of field, which is less than helpful.

Iff you know how to use it, any Digital or Film SLR should have whatever depth of field you need, and should be really fast to dial in the right setting. On my Canon AE-1 Program (a 1980 film SLR) it takes me seconds to dial the shutter speed to one that will force the aperature to what I want. Shooting portraits, I use a fast shutter to force a shallow depth of field; shooting landscapes, I use a slow shutter to force a wide depth of field.

For better results, sometimes I use the simplified zone system with the built-in lightmeter.

My Minolta DiMAGE 7 (a digital cam midway between a compact and a dSLR) only has wide depth of field. This can be handy for some shots, but I find it annoying for others. Also the shutter and aperature are awkward to adjust manually, which makes the simplified zone system difficult to use. I greatly prefer the clarity (and NO LAG!) of my SLR viewfinder to the LCD and evf of my digital camera.

DSLR == Narrow depth of field???!!!

[MROD]

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?

Re:Yay

[jc42]

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

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:

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.

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, ...". Um, no; it's the lense, primarily the iris opening (f-stop) that gives the depth of field. The camera itself doesn't have a depth of field. With an SLR, this isn't trivial. One of the important features of such cameras is interchangable lenses. This article is comparing SLRs with "Standard" cameras, so it's important to distinguish camera properties from lens properties.

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.

Re:Yay

[adamjaskie]

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.