What Should You Know About Digital Cameras: Don't Fall Into The Mega-Pixel Trap!Apr 18 '01 (Updated Apr 24 '01) Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line Save your $$ and get a camera at the end of its retail life.
While the options seem endless, there are a few factors to consider when shopping for a digital camera. I hope that you find some of my opinion helpful in this pursuit. One thing is for sure, I will never go back to traditional photography. What Will It Be Used For? Printing If you plan on printing images by either printer or professional photo finishing, and up to 5" X 7" in size, then I've had excellent results using a 1 mega-pixel camera. It's when you start climbing the ladder that you may run into images looking grainy or pixilated. I have found that a 1.5 to 2 mega-pixel camera is suffice for images up to 8"x 10". Should you desire anything higher than this, you must consider if it is worth the extra costs involved. I have printed 11x14 images at an online service using a 1.5 mp image with satisfactory results. The cost of printing images is about 50 cents for a 3x5, $1 for 5x7, and $2 for an 8x10. These of course are rough estimates. Let's not forget the shipping charges. This is by far more expensive than your traditional photo finishing. For me, this method of printing has proven to be much less expensive than my traditional camera for several reasons. 1. The best part about digital image taking is the immediate result shown on the "on screen display". This affords me the opportunity to delete the image, or take another while the 1-year-old subject is sitting still. 2. Out of about 100 shots (normally $23 for film and processing), I have maybe 10 printed. The other 90 are archived on CD-R(W). In the days gone by, these 90 images were stored in plastic containers bigger than my body, and placed in the attic. I am more apt to sit here on my rear and view these images as a slideshow on my monitor. 3. These images can be easily duplicated without further degradation by simply copying them to a disk. Scanning photos only degrades the original, making for a poor source to work with. Internet Use If your main intent is using the images on your web site, or e-mail photos of little Johnny to your Mother-In-Law in Albuquerque, then a camera capable of 640 x 480 pixels is suffice. This would also be a consideration on online auction sites such as eBay. How Many Pixels? I've read many articles and reviews where it's been written that you should purchase as many pixels as you can afford. I think this is not only silly, but can be overkill when considering the purpose of the camera. Believe me when I tell you, technology will change in the coming months, year, whatever, and you and your camera will be left in the obsolete bin soon enough. Bigger Is Not Always Better With many pixels comes many MB of storage, and these storage cards are not cheap. Let's take one example of digital images. On my camera, a Sony DSC-D770, an uncompressed image will consume about 4.5 MB. So you'll fit about 14 images on a 64 MB card which runs about $70-$100 depending on the brand. If you were to utilize this as you would a normal 35 mm camera and shoot 3 rolls of 36 exposures (not unusual for me), you would need almost eight 64 MB cards. That's crazy right? Naturally you would use compression, usually JPEG. This expensive 1.5 - 2-mega-pixel camera you bought is now producing JPEG files with a compression of about 11 times. The original 4 MB image is squished to 350 KB. Wow you say! Now I can fit 180+ images on the same card! Not so fast bucko! With this savings in space comes loss of quality. Pixels tend to get melded together in the process, leaving you with a less than perfect image. So your mega pixel camera is now producing images with the same quality as a camera with a lower pixel rating, with little or no compression. Something else I noticed. Some camera manufacturers use different compression ratios when compressing files. One company's "middle" compression may be another's "High" quality. Keep In Mind · Digital cameras just love batteries. Consider purchasing rechargeable batteries, preferably of the NiMH variety. Avoid NiCad like the plague! They are not very efficient at maintaining a consistent charge. NiMH batteries more or less, mimic alkaline batteries in their behavior. They cost more than NiCad, but you'll save $$ and tons of aggravation in the long run. · Consider where you'll be storing all of these photos. I know of a few people who store all of their memories on their hard drive. Should it fail, gone are these images. If you have a CD writer, this isn't a problem, considering the low cost of media. You can choose to store these online at one of the many sites, but be forewarned, there is no guarantee these will not be lost when a site goes belly up or decides to charge for their service. PhotoPoint has recently went to a pay service only, and the millions of images on their site will be forever gone if their rightful owners don't remove them or purchase them from PhotoPoint on a CD. This was a raw deal indeed. If you're reading this and aren't aware of their new policy, I suggest you visit them soon! If you have a dial-up connection, you can just forget about uploading those uncompressed 4 MB photos I spoke about earlier. How Do They Get Here From There? Beware of cameras that use a parallel interface to transfer images from your camera. They are quirky at best and notoriously slow. Parallel ports were designed for one thing, printers, not Zip Drives, card readers or anything else they're used for. Stick with a USB or Fire Wire connection. The Mavica line of Sony cameras use a 3 ½ " floppy drive to store images. Handy but clumsy. You can convert to a Memory Stick adapter, but speed and expense becomes an issue. Serial port connections are fine, but I've had numerous problems in the past. I have opted for a Universal Media Reader from Lexar for about $50 with shipping. Through the use of a PC Adapter card, I can read CompactFlash and Memory Stick formats. A SmartMedia slot is also available on the unit. And since my camera will read any of these formats, I can purchase the least expensive media. Some Useless Information Festering Inside My Head An audio track on an old-fashioned LP was made up of one continuous wave, which replicated the original artists session. The needle rode this wave and was reproduced by your audio system. Today's audio CD's are not on the same playing field. Each track is actually broken into millions of pits that are picked up by a laser and converted to analog. It may sound better than those old scratchy records, but it's not as original as the LP or cassette tape. Like it or not! So, what does this have to do with digital cameras? Digital photography is similar to the above in that the image is made up of hundreds of thousands to millions of pixels. Again, it is not like an image taken with a traditional camera, but made up of millions of pieces to make one. Does this really matter? It does if you're a traditionalist like myself! ;) Some Of My Favorite Digital Photo Stops The ins and outs of digital imaging http://www.shortcourses.com/ Compare images taken with cameras in a side-by-side comparison http://www.imaging-resource.com/ Camera info, reviews. http://www.steves-digicams.com/ Overall I never intended this opinion to be your sole basis for a camera purchase. This is my experience with digital cameras and some things I've learned along the way, in hopes that you don't fall into the same "Mega-Mega Pixel" frenzy. What I have done in my last two camera purchases was to catch both at the tail end of their retail life. This has saved me no less than $1600 in the process. I can live without having the latest and greatest. Research each camera of interest on the web for information. You'd be surprised at the amount of info that can be obtained using an engine such as Google. You'll find good and bad about each and can weigh this into your final decision.  |
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