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

Gah

[American AC in Paris]

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

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.

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.