Give the gift of digital camera for Christmas
Nov 25 '01 (Updated Nov 27 '01)
The Bottom Line Digital cameras are fun, and now they have great picture quality. They aren't cheap, but compared to high end film photography equipment and processing, they are in the ballpark.
Digital cameras are HOT. Everybody is either buying one or wants one. But no one seems to know much about them. Read this review to learn more about digital cameras.
Picture quality
Once again this weekend, I heard someone say that even a cheap film camera will make a better quality photo than an expensive digital camera. This is not true . It is true that a 35mm SLR camera with a good lens and color slide film will still take far better pictures than a more expensive digital camera. But how many people use color slide film and 35mm SLRs??? Not that many.
Disposable cameras are really popular. Those things take HORRIBLE photos, but the people who use them don't seem to notice or care. If you are unaware how bad the photos from a disposable camera are, then you are lucky in the sense that you can buy an inexpensive 1.3 megapixel camera and be happy with the quality of photos.
The real answer is that high end consumer digital cameras, like the Nikon 880, Sony S75, S85, Canon G2, to name some good models, will take better pictures than you will get with a point and shoot film camera with color print film developed at Walgreens.
How many pixels do you need?
Cameras seem to be sold by pixels. The more pixels the better, but if all you can afford is 2.2 megapixels, then you can still blow these up to 8 x 10 and they look pretty darn good. In fact, as you increase pixels beyond 2.2 MP, the picture quality is often limited by the quality of the lens. Put a mediocre lens in front of a even 10 megapixels, and all the extra pixels will just be capturing blur.
There are more reasons to buy more pixels besides just the pixels. The camera manufacturer put their best lens and best high-end software features only on their top of the line cameras. Most cameras of 2.2 megapixels and less don't give you any manual control over the camera. The camera selects ISO, shutter speed, and aperture and not only don't you have any control over it, the camera doesn't even tell you what it has chosen. Photographers who know what they are doing find this very annoying. "Photographers" who don't know what they are doing maybe don't care, although they should.
Zoom Lens
Consumers seem to love a big zoom. They love them too much. Do you know that zoom lenses, in general, underperform non-zoom lenses (called prime lenses by photographers). The more zoom, the more complicated the lens, so you get blurrier pictures with chromatic aberration. Zoom lenses tend to be not as fast as prime lenses (a fast lense lets in more light, allowing pictures to be taken with faster shutter speeds), and they exhibit barrel or pincushion distortion at wide angle or telephoto zooms.
Nevertheless, the zoom is very convenient. Non zoom lenses on cheap cameras tend to be stuck at the 35mm equivalent 38mm focal length, meaning that they are permanently wide angle. Photographs of people come out looking bad at wide angle. Use the wide angle only for landscape shots, zoom in to take pictures of people.
So the conclusion here is that you want a zoom lens to take pictures of people, but you don't necessarily need the biggest zoom out there, because with all things being equal, the more zoom the more quality problems the lens will have (unless it's a really expensive zoom lens).
Buy extra memory
Cameras use Smart Media, Compact Flash (the best in my opinion), and Memory Sticks (only Sony's use this proprietary format). They never come with enough memory. They will come with 8 MB or 16 MB. This is a joke. When you buy your camera, make sure you buy a 64 MB memory card to go with it. Or 128 MB if you plan on taking lots of photos. a 64 MB memory card can hold about 50 3.3MP photos at high resolution.
The FUN factor
Digital cameras are FUN. More fun than film. Seeing your photos right away are fun. My dad always says that "patience is a virtue", but I hate to wait for film. And with film, I never use up the whole roll and then I have to wait weeks before I take pictures again so I can get the roll developed. I hate that, don't you? With a digital camera you can take as many or as few pictures whenever you want to, and see the results right away.
Printing your photos
You don't NEED to print your photos, but if you want to, I highly recommend internet services such as www.dotphoto.com. For only $3 you can get an 8 x 10 of your favorite photo. (Plus $2 for shipping and handling per order). This is a pretty good price, well worth the money. It's a lot easier than getting a blowup of a negative. Can anybody even figure out which negative belongs to which print? I can't. And if you work with slide film, theoretically color slides make the best prints, but they are EXPENSIVE. A lot more than $3 each.
You don't need to buy an inkjet printer, and in fact I don't really recommend them because the technology isn't perfected yet, the printouts fade in a relatively short amount of time, and the ink is so expensive that it doesn't cost any more to use one of the internet services.
Conclusion
I skipped some detail that you may have found in other articles about digital cameras, but I told you what you need to know that a lot of people aren't telling you. To find out about specific cameras, besides epinions of course, check out sites like www.dpreview.com.
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Epinions.com ID:
Parrothead2000
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Reviews written: 52
Trusted by: 6 members
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