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. :-(

Re:Yay

[Walrus99]

...for pointless use of Flash

I agree, what ever happened to good old HTML? And why so much border? You have a whole browser, fill it up, I had to put my glasses on to read the text and all I wanted to know was where to get a good digital camera for around $150.

Another case of designing for the PHB. What looks good on the latest PC on a high speed connection at work, might not even show up in the browser of the average user. And did you even check to see if it runs on Macs or Linux???

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.

Website

[1000101]

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

Gah

[American AC in Paris]

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

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.

Karma-whoring Article Text:

[loteck]

Aw, damnit.

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: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.