Focus in on the costs and quality of digital cameras
I've spent a couple of months working with two megapixel digital cameras and am impressed. But I have reservations. That is not a ringing endorsement. I own a dozen cameras, including studio view cameras and an aerial camera. To me, a digital camera's biggest fault is the delay while it stores images between shots. That's now a thing of the past. The fast memory in the two megapixel cameras
Ive spent a couple of months working with two megapixel digital cameras and That is not a ringing endorsement. I own a dozen cameras, including studio view cameras Sometimes I must use a high-end 35-mm camera for good images and dont mind The fast battery consumption surprises most users when they buy a digital camera. But Dont expect to get more than about 40 digital images using flash out of a single Aside from their usefulness for low-end prints, digital cameras are tops when you need I tested both cameras in publishing a dozen personal, business and local government Web In shooting for the Internet, always keep resolution low. It will look OK on computer But if you occasionally crop and enlarge images or want better resolution for printing, Users who work at high resolution should load up on storage. The same camera that I tried the oddly shaped D-600L from Olympus America Inc., which was surprisingly The panoramic mode wasnt appropriate for most Web pages, but it worked fine and Both cameras weighed about the same, were equally easy to use and produced images of The Olympus shape, similar to that of 35-mm professional cameras, was dictated by Olympus latest D-620L model can shoot up to 3.3 images per second even at the John McCormick, a free-lance writer and computer consultant, has been working with
am impressed. But I have reservations.
and an aerial camera. To me, a digital cameras biggest fault is the delay while it
stores images between shots. Thats now a thing of the past. The fast memory in the
two megapixel cameras let me shoot as rapidly as with a motor-wind single-lens reflex
camera.
waiting an hour to a week for the prints. Other times a Polaroid is preferable to get
instant prints. A low-end or midrange digital camera can make instant prints, too.
Megapixel camera imagesholding 1 million pixels or moreare as good as Polaroid
prints. If you take a lot of pictures, rechargeable batteries will cut the cost
considerably below that of Polaroid shots, even counting the far higher cost of the
digital camera.
you can store and erase as many images as you want on the same removable media, and the
cost of standard batteries is comparable to what you would spend on film and slide
developing.
set of alkaline batteries.
to transmit an image, insert it in a document or post it on a Web page.
pages, and I never needed the highest resolution. A megapixel camera is overkill for most
Web tasks.
monitors and will make pages load faster from the Internet.
pay extra for a midrange camera even if you work at the lowest resolution most of the
time. Lenses and other features will be better.
stores 40 or 50 640- by 480-pixel, low-resolution images in the standard version will
store only two to four megapixel images.
comfortable considering its large size, and the PhotoPC 700 from Epson America Inc. The
PhotoPC 700 had a 2-inch color LCD panel for previewing images, built-in 2X digital zoom
and an optional panoramic format.
would be perfect for group shots. The PhotoPC also had an unusual power-on method:
rotating the large lens cover.
similar quality at a maximum 1,280- by 960-pixel resolution with 16-million-color depth
and similar storage times. The Epson cost about $600 and the Olympus double that.
its extended lens barrel for motorized 3X optical zoomthe equivalent of a 36-
to-110-mm zoom on a 35-mm camera. The Epson had digital zoom.
maximum 1,280-by-1,024 resolution. Yes, you can get equally good images and auto-focus,
auto-exposure and auto-flash features from a $200 35-mm film camera, but for direct PC or
Macintosh image transfers, you cannot beat a digital camera. And whenever you preview a
bad picture, just retake it.
computers since the early 1960s. E-mail him at powerusr@penn.com.