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digital cameras

C

C Edward Moore

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Location
Burnt Chimney, SW Virginia
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www.burntchimneystudios.com
As those of you who publish pictures of your work on-line know, a digital camera is the easiest way to go when doing that. I have been beating and thumping around about getting a dc for some time. I knew that I wanted good optical zoom and a camera that was around $250-$350. The two which have come to my attention are:
Nikon Coolpix 4800
Olympus Camedia 770UZ
First question: Should a third camera be included?
Second question: Are these good choices?

I would appreciate any and all useful comments that might help me make a good choice. If you are a professional photographer and would prefer to share your thoughts privately, then please send a private post. In addition to the two points mentioned above, "Ease of use for dummies" ranks high on my list of criteria. 😀 😀
 
Ed;
If that Olympus Camedia 77OUZ relates to a 7 megapixel camera then it should be a real beauty.
Mine is an Olympus Camedia 5000 Zoom with 5 mpxl and it has been a wonderfull camera..
Just for posting pictures on forums and emails, the high mpxl is not all that important unless you want to crop out a small portion and enlarge it before saving or posting it. That is where the high mxpls really shine and of course , the higher mpxl ones generally come with lots more bells and whistles. There are a thousand features on mine that only a professional photographer would use . I use a few of those features but mostly I just point at click with it set at the automatic everything default mode and with a little carefull detail to lighting , I am happy with the results..
My first digital camera was only 1.3 mpx and I often got nice comments on how my pictures showed in forums with that basic camera. I used it for about 3 or 4 years and now have the Camedia 5000 for about 2 years.
W.Y.
 
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Bill, my first camera was 1.3mp and I still have it. It takes great photos and was very easy to use and upload onto my harddrive and make prints. I have an HP 950 that has a slot for the film medium.

I also have a Nikon 8700 that is high end and cost $1000. To be honest, when I use it for just taking 'snaps' to send to the family I could just as easily use my old camera......they don't see any difference and the pics are certainly good enough for viewing and printing. If I was doing photos for showing clients and wanted them to be super, I use the 8700.

I think that you could go online and find something in the $150 range that would suit your needs.....if what you are going to do is take snaps of family, flowers, vacation, and babies. If you are taking pictures of your turnings to share with other turners on the web, I also think that you don't need anything more than a cheap 2 or 3 mp. And they used to be very expensive in the $400 & $500 range when they came out.

Since you are away from any major city, try an online search at London Drugs and Future Shop. We also have Ritz camera down here that has great deals.

ruth
 
Both cameras I mentioned are 4 megapixels. I think the "best prices" range from about $290 to $320, and I would need to check that these aren't "gray market" deals.

I don't feel that I need more megapixels, and I think that the 4 mp is a good choice at this time.

Does Olympus or Nikon provide good software or would I need an independent package?
 
keep it simple for posting

for just posting pictures on the web, you don't need anythiing over 1.3 mp ... unless your goiing to submit to magazines or juriered shows, a simple camera that lets you get good depth, zoom, light adjustments, and color correction will do.

i helped a friend choose a d-camera and we selected a nikon coolpic 5mp ... it was so refined and complex, it took several books and a photography degree to take simple pics!!! and all the pictures had to be dramatically resized down to upload to the web ...
 
-E-;
I agree. There sure is a lot of stuff on my 5 mp that I will never use. I got it when I was taking pictures for a several page magazine article I was preparing a couple years ago and they told me the pictures from my 1.3 mp were not acceptable for publication and I needed a minimum of 4 mp.
Other than that I would probably still be using my easy to use 1.3 mp one.
W.Y.
 
Digital pics

Lots of excellent comments! I would like to add that my camera - -a gift - - has a very poor "after the shot" viewing capability. The pic. may be great but it is difficult to see that, and to know whether to shoot another or not.
Just one more distingishing charcteristic. Phil
 
Ed Moore said:
As those of you who publish pictures of your work on-line know, a digital camera is the easiest way to go when doing that. I have been beating and thumping around about getting a dc for some time. I knew that I wanted good optical zoom and a camera that was around $250-$350. The two which have come to my attention are:
Nikon Coolpix 4800
Olympus Camedia 770UZ
First question: Should a third camera be included?
Second question: Are these good choices?

I would appreciate any and all useful comments that might help me make a good choice. If you are a professional photographer and would prefer to share your thoughts privately, then please send a private post. In addition to the two points mentioned above, "Ease of use for dummies" ranks high on my list of criteria. 😀 😀
Click to expand...
Ed,
Here are two good places to check out camera reviews. http://www.steves-digicams.com/ and http://www.megapixel.net/ . You will see they have a scroll down list in the reviews that lets you jump from page to page. I usually go right to their conclusions. Then go back if I want more detail. I’ve had my eye on the Olympus also. It all depends on what you are going to do with the camera. Most of the digital cameras out there are pretty good. Some are just better than others for certain uses. I currently have a Fuji 3800. It is a 3-megapixal camera with 6x optical zoom. When I bought it I was leaving for a road trip from Ohio to California. I wanted more than the typical 3x optical zoom for outdoor shots. In normal lighting it’s a great camera. I would however like to find a camera that does a little better in lowlight conditions. What I’m trying to say is buying a camera is like buying a lathe, There are always trade offs, Size, weight, power, and ergonomics to name a few for the lathe. For the Camera price, picture quality, optical zoom, type of memory card, battery life and ergonomics are some considerations. I suggest, even if you are going to buy the camera online, find a local store where you can pick up the camera and see if it feels comfortable to you. Do you like the controls? Is it easy to focus? And so forth. You get the idea
If you want to clean up and organize photos on your computer I suggest Adobe Photoshop Elements. It has most of the features of Adobe Photoshop, the program most of the Pros use, at less than $100. Make sure you get version 3 it’s the latest some places still have version 2. Jasc Paint Shop Pro at just over $100 is also a popular photo manipulation program. What operating system do you have on your computer? Windows XP seems to be more user friendly for loading pictures than windows 98 was.
Good luck! No matter which camera you pick. It will be up to the task of taking pictures for the forums. Since I got my Digital camera my two 35 mm cameras have been gathering dust. The only thing I use the 35mm for now is to take slides of my daughters artwork for her portfolio. BTW I am by no means an expert or professional photographer.
 
Some additional DC information

Howdy Ed,

You've received some excellent guidance from the thread. I'd like to add a couple of comments that may help you make your choice. I purchased an Olympus Camedia C-5050 5 MegaPixel camera a couple of years ago. All of my image postings have been captured using the Olympus on a tripod with the turned object in a light tent. At the time that I made the purchase the most important factor for me was the optical system. Olympus has had a long-standing reputation for making cameras with excellent optics. The same is true for Nikon. All of the wonderful digital technology is ultimately going to be limited by the ability of the optical system to bring a high quality image to the camera's photo-sensor. I also felt pretty strongly that it is always possible to crop and compress a 5 MegaPixel image down to fit a web page or forum image size (i.e., 80kBytes for the AAW galleries). I was a bit concerned that sooner or later I would have a genuine need to produce a very high resolution image and wouldn't have the camera needed to do it.

Like most other tools, you'll probably find that the quality of the images you create with a digital camera is proportional to the amount of time that you spend learning how to set it up and use it.

On the image editing side of the equation, I have been a user of Corel PhotoPaint for more than 10 years. Many of the software packages noted elsewhere in this thread have surpassed it in the ease-of-use arena, but it has served me well over the years. The functions that I use most often include cropping, automatic color balancing and resampling. Microsoft's Photo Editor tool which is included with WindowsXP is capable of doing these operations as well.

FYI: I had an occassion last week to survey a tree that our city had taken down and offered to our woodturning group. Unfortunately, I didn't have my Olympus with me. Instead, I used my trusty cell phone with its on-board camera. The images were horrible, but after processing them through PhotoPaint they had enough detail and color to be somewhat useful!

Best Regards,
-Allen
 
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I chipped the $300 to pick up a nice Fuji with lots of bells and whistles a couple of years ago. 6 months later, we picked up a computer with a camera package that included a much lower range Fuji. To tell the truth, we use that one alot more.

You can get a very functional digital camera these days for under $200. Short of planning on using it for more serious photo work, the inexpensive ones work very well for web pics and general camera work. The features you lose are high optical zoom (which is kinda useless past about 3-4x cause the shaking of your hand makes the pictures blur), a really nice display (which actually isn't that needed either since you can zoom the display to find out if the picture is focused and you'll know what pic quality your getting after using the camera for a few weeks anyway), and lots of manual adjustements such as flash time, color saturation, etc (which you won't use unless you are a serious photographer, especially with Photoshop available for touchup afterwords).

Finally, by my experience, anything over 2meg isn't needed for web pics and anything over 3 is pretty much indistinguishable from optical photography for your average Joe. Use that extra money for a tripod and some good lighting for your photo box.

Just an opinion,
Dietrich

P.S.(consumer reports does frequent digital camera reviews. Just drop by the local library)
 
So far no one has mentioned having a sync-cord socket or hot shoe. All the pocket digitals have built-in flash, but if you ever want to use accessory flash units or studio strobes, you need some way to trigger them. In my view, a hot shoe or sync-cord socket is just as important as mp.

My gallery photos were taken using stobes sync'd to an old Olympus C700 digital. I prefer strobes to floods for ease of set-up, less heat, better color balance, better depth-of-field, etc.

BH
 
For my camera work, I prefer something with an easy to use manual focus system.

As far as megapixels, sure more is better. But it doesn't become real important until you have to use your digital pics for show and magazine submissions.
Lately, several shows have allowed digital submission and they required 1920x1920 (I believe) photos. Not an issue with most cameras, but the higher end cameras are going to have better quality lenses.
 
dkulze said:
I chipped the $300 to pick up a nice Fuji with lots of bells and whistles a couple of years ago. 6 months later, we picked up a computer with a camera package that included a much lower range Fuji. To tell the truth, we use that one alot more.

You can get a very functional digital camera these days for under $200. Short of planning on using it for more serious photo work, the inexpensive ones work very well for web pics and general camera work. The features you lose are high optical zoom (which is kinda useless past about 3-4x cause the shaking of your hand makes the pictures blur), a really nice display (which actually isn't that needed either since you can zoom the display to find out if the picture is focused and you'll know what pic quality your getting after using the camera for a few weeks anyway), and lots of manual adjustements such as flash time, color saturation, etc (which you won't use unless you are a serious photographer, especially with Photoshop available for touchup afterwords).

Finally, by my experience, anything over 2meg isn't needed for web pics and anything over 3 is pretty much indistinguishable from optical photography for your average Joe. Use that extra money for a tripod and some good lighting for your photo box.

Just an opinion,
Dietrich

P.S.(consumer reports does frequent digital camera reviews. Just drop by the local library)
Click to expand...
I think that 5 or 6 x zoom is still very doable for hand held shots. Some of the better cameras have stabilization built in for longer shots. You would not need the zoom for shots of turnings unless they are mounted on someone's roof though.
 
Choose a Camera Like you would choose a Lathe

Ed,

Sounds like your potential choices would be good ones for me, but that is the key. You're getting a lot of good advice from everyone, but it's a very personal decision. I'll try to add my $.02 without simply duplicating what they've already said.

I've been happy with my 1.3 MP Kodak DC215 for about 6 or 7 years now... bought it when the price came down to about $235 plus the cost of a 64MB memory card. That, of course, is a fraction of the capability you can get today for the same money. Probably the most important factor in being satisfied this long with the choice was forecasting fairly accurately what I intended to do with it. I wanted simply to take lots of snapshots for up to 5x7 prints. I've pushed it satisfactorily to 8x10 equivalents and it's still going strong except the cheesy battery carrier is being held in by a rubber band since the plastic latch broke and the cheap plastic lense cover needs an auxilliary thumb applied to stay in place.

I have been casually shopping for my next digital because prices are now within my reach for a significant upgrade, and I want additional capabilities (more zoom, more creative control, bigger cropped enlargements, etc.)

Here's my bottom line:

First, I would not buy a 1.3 MP DC today, unless I simply could not afford more including the memory for adequate storage without having to download and delete. There is so much more available for very little more money.

Second, when I drag out my credit card I will again try to forecast as accurately as possible what my next 5 years needs (wants) will be. Being pleased or displeased only has meaning relative to expectations.

Finally, I will do what I have heard so many say about choosing a lathe (which I recently did) an buy the best I can afford.

Enjoy! You're gonna love it!

Rick
 
Thank you

I would like to thank each of you who contributed here. Your answers were excellent and meaty. I was familiar with Steve's Digicam, but found Megapixel.net to be very useful. Another site that I stumbled on was http://www.dcresource.com . I like the fact that he gives his personal opinion at the end of a review. One can factor in, or out, his personal likes and dislikes.

In addition to the two cameras that I listed in the original post, I have added the Canon Powershot S1 IS because it has image stabilizing. It is also a zoom camera and is 3.2 mp.

Steve's observations make sense to me. Today's standard is tomorrow's low-end. Submission of electronic photos with a show application is something to keep in mind. They will not want low-end photography because they will probably project the picture for all the jurors to see. So maybe the 4 and 5 mp cameras are about right.

Thank you all! 🙂
 
Try this link for more infor about digital cameras ... it is my #1 source ... http://www.dpreview.com

After much research and study, I opted for the Kodak 4 MP with 10x optical zoom ... cost with dock about 425 ( a year or so ago). Now they have 5 MP available.

What I really liked, besides the awesome optical zoom, was that I could use it as a simple point and shoot ot I could get somewhat ambitious ... but the instruction manual did NOT require a degree in Photo Engineering ... something I don't like even though I attended Brooks Institute of Photography back when I was a young pup ...

So far I have found no real flaws. I know I could spend several $100's more and get something on par with a professional film camera, but all i really want to do is photograph my own stuff and take pictures when I am at the AAW Symposium or visiting friends and relatives.

Gotta be realistic and know your own limitations.
 
dcams

And now a word or more from a professional photographer(recently retired to turn more wood!). Criteria for the interested user:
1. 3~5 MP is more than enough resolution
2. Manual overrides for focus, exposure, color balance(white balance),are desirable to defray immediate
obsolescence
3. Zoom ratio of 3x or thereabouts- close focus ability more important than longer zooms
4. Learn how to use it- read the manual and carry it with you!
5. Go to the local camera store and try several out before you buy-maybe this should have been number 1 or 2 ?
 
rayebersole

I have a question on cameras can I get to the same end spot with and good old Nikon 35mm maybe by asking for a CD with my prints?

The new guy on the block.
 
Boy a lot of good answers. I would suggets checking to see if it will focus close enough for what you want to shoot. The only advantage of more megapixels is being able to crop the image more without loosing quality. This can also be an advantage if your camera won't focus close enough.
A tripod is a must. I personally prefer manual exposure and manual focus for art work but then that's the way I grew up so I think that way. I do think manual focus is a must. Auto focus rarely focuses at the right point. With a good program like Photoshop elements you can salvage an exposure problem but you can't change poor focus.
I love Photoshop elements. It has a lot of power for the money. I use Photoshop 7 at work and Elements has 90 percent of all the things I use for a whole lot less money.
I can't answer many questions on digital cameras and computers becasue I'm a complet klutz in that department. I do spend almost all day every day shooting art work so If you have any questions on lighting and exposure problems I will be glad to try and answer those.
 
Hi Ed:
I have read through this thread and unless I've missed it, there is no mention of controlling the depth-of-field (front to back focus). I feel that this is an important feature that should not be overlooked, especially in close-up work. Recall fundamental optics which says that the depth-of-field increases as the aperature's diameter decreases, e.g. larger f/ numbers. If you want both the "front" and "back" edges of your piece to be in sharp focus you will need to be able to pre-set the aperature to the highest f/ number that the camera is capable of and than let the camera adjust the shutter speed according to the lighting. You will also want to be able to manually set the focus. Therefore, I would suggest that in your list of criteria that you look for a camera that allows you to choose the aperature and also lets you manually focus. I have seen more pictures of turnings not looking their best due to poor focus and lack of depth-of-field than for lack of pixels.

Our best to the better half, Peter Toch
 
I agree 140% or more. Auto focus rarely picks the best spot to focus on to get the maximum depth of field and program mode will seldom pick the right f stop for the depth of field needed. I firmly believe in manual for serious shooting of artwork. I'm picky however and I've seen some really nice shots done with an amatuer point and shoot camera in full auto. Sometimes things just work for you.
 
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