Re: I'm looking for a prosumer "sports" camera

In message <p9-dnc30ftRnzazVRVnyjwA@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, bugbear
<bugbear@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes

Anyone else think that 6-8 megapixels is "enough" (*) ?

Depends what you want to do with the images.

I earn a living taking pictures. I'll qualify that -- I survey
equipment installations and write reports for the customer who have lost
track of what they installed in a particular site five or ten years ago.
Sometimes I need to get into very badly-placed cabinets to read serial
numbers and other important little labels on the backs of equipment. I
can't shut the equipment down or otherwise interfere with it as it's
running 24/7. So what do I do?

I get out my Canon A640 camera with its 10Mp sensor, fold out the LCD
screen, poke the camera into the back of the cabinet at arms's length
and point it at the labels I need to get the information from. I take a
few pictures at highest resolution with/without the builtin flash and a
bright LED lamp I carry in my toolkit. After that I use the digital
"zoom" feature in review mode to rummage around in the 10Mp image to get
the serial numbers I need to complete my report. If they didn't come out
clearly enough I try again. I'm tempted to get a cheap 12Mp P&S camera
as it might do a better job than my A640 for this task.

Many of this newsgroup's posters believe that digital photography
hardware requirements should be driven by the need for absolute picture
quality and the physical prints produced from such images. Noise in a
small sensor camera is not important for the majority of people, just
the "pixel-peepers". As for printing images, I think the last time I
printed a picture I took onto paper it was to test an A3 colour laser
printer I was installing at a customer site about a year ago. The rest
of the time I look at pictures on a 22" CRT monitor which gives me an
effective image size of 16"x12" landscape.

6-8Mp is enough resolution for "art" photographers who can (and do)
spend thousands on 35mm-style SLRs and lenses (large-format digital
camera backs are another matter, of course), who will never need to zoom
or crop their pictures to fix badly-framed images. For the rest of us
the more pixels the better because Grandma doesn't use a camera very
often and her eyes aren't as good as they used to be.
--
To reply, my gmail address is nojay1 Robert Sneddon
.

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