Re: question about low-end digital camera
- From: "harrogate2" <harrogate2@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 01 Aug 2005 17:35:58 GMT
"chancellor of the duchy of besses o' th' barn and prestwich tesco"
<this_address_is_for_spam@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1h0m4jn.ulk19r1gz1137N%this_address_is_for_spam@xxxxxxxxxxxx
> harrogate2 <harrogate2@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> []
> > Always look for a camera with a viewfinder as
> > many (most?) LCDs are impossible to see in sunlight. A good
compromise
> > seems to be 1.8" - bigger than that means either a bigger body or
some
> > other compromise (like loss of viewfinder) and smaller means
difficult
> > to read.
>
> Meant to add- I agree with you about having a viewfinder. With my
> camcorder, I found I hardly used the LCD monitor as it was difficult
to
> view in daylight, and not always practical. If the specification is
> "optical viewfinder" is that the kind you're talking about?
>
Correct.
Also another point that I missed - ignore any reference to digital
zoom. You are only interested in optical zoom which is done
mechanically in the lens. Digital zoom enlarges a portion of the whole
picture but uses the same number of pixels in terms of area, i.e. a 2x
zoom (that is half height and half width) will use one quarter of the
original number of pixels to produce the same sized final picture, so
the resolution goes down in proportion.
If you intend to only ever print from the full sized original, then a
3Mp will produce perfectly acceptable prints up to about A4. If you
are ever likely to want to crop the picture then more pixels is a good
idea, and 5Mp is about right. Go above 5Mp and you don't improve the
subjective quality very much at all, but what you will get is digital
noise - the same thing as that shimmering graininess that you often
see on a TV picture in a saturated red or blue.
Finally, if you can check the format in which the camera stores the
picture after it has been taken. All take them in jpeg, but some take
them in TIFF or RAW. Jpeg is a lossy compression system that saves on
file size at the expense of reproduced quality, especially if you have
to enlarge in any way; TIFF is a nearly loss-less storage format but
unfortunately produces large file sizes; RAW is the digital equivalent
of a film negative, except that the picture is actually a positive and
will always need some doctoring, usually sharpening and contrast
adjustment. However RAW - which incidently is at present* almost
unique in format for each manufacturer - can and does produce the best
end results. (" Adobe are trying to get manufacturers to adopt a
common RAW format that they have developed called (I think) DCF.) The
camera will come supplied with the software to read their own RAW
format, and your picture editing software will thereafter permit you
to save it in a more common format such as TIFF or JPG after editing.
Some packages - Photoshop CS2 and PaintShopPro (V8 or V9) can directly
decode the RAW formats of some of the bigger name manufacturers such
as Canon, Nikon, and Olympus. For comparison my Olympus C5050 5Mp in
best quality mode takes about 1.5Mb for a JPG image, 5Mb for a RAW,
and around 9Mb for a TIFF, so unless you have a 512Mb or 1Gb memory
card you will quickly run out of storage space in TIF mode. Also bear
in mind that the bigger the file the longer it takes to store -
typically around a second per Mb.
--
Woody
harrogate2 at ntlworld dot com
.
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