Digital Cameras

The Digital Camera Marketplace

Stop Press
Here is the answer. Meade Sports Optics Captureview binoculars with built in digital camera 140UKP http://www.telescopehouse.co.uk
I am sure it is not very good at either function but it will save having the weight of two units. Perhaps it will soon have a mobile phone too.

I have been using an Agfa CL18 S Digital Camera. It has flash, self-timer, 2MB of memory, and a picture quality of 640x480 resolution (about 300K pixels).

It has an optical viewfinder, and small control panel with buttons for the options.

Cost £80 - it probably would be cheaper on the Internet.

 
What I would really like for a little more money
I like a simple camera. I like the fact that I can slip it in my shirt pocket. But having used it for a week or two I would like these things in my next camera:

• Quicker switch-on time - it currently takes about two seconds before it is ready to go
• Not to switch off - although this saves the battery, it always seems to time out just as I want to take the next picture
• Faster processing of the image - it takes about three seconds to process the picture before you can take the next one; some cameras allow you to take five pictures one after another, or automatically one per second.
• Flash Card for storing images, with spare cards which would make it more flexible, and be easier to transfer to the computer.

Blinded by Choice
There are a vast range of Digital Cameras on the market from about £50 to £1000. What sort shall you buy?

The low end ones like the Agfa above, are the equivalent of the point-and-click APS or 35mm film cameras. The low-end digitals are as good as these film cameras.

Just off the bottom cost range, you get some additional functionality such as a zoom lens, closeup mode, etc, but not so much as to confuse you. If you are used to a SLR with umpteen lenses, filters, and so on, I doubt you would be happy with the modern-day equivalent of a Box Brownie. Some digitals have the same camera body as the equivilent film camera and you can use all the same special lenses and filters.

You can use your digital camera as a webcam in video mode for storing a sequence on your computer, or for video conferencing. You can view your pictures on a TV.

Optical or LCD viewfinder
My digital has an optical viewfinder. Some have a small LCD screen so you can do a quick check on the picture quality and delete the disastrous ones immediately. The most frustrating part was having to use the screen to line up the shots as it didn't have a regular viewfinder. Optical zoom is rated as a very good idea, but digital zoom just mucks up the image and is a waste of time.

Picture Quality
Unless you spend in the region of 500 pounds on a 'megapixel' camera then you won't get the same clarity as you'd expect from a 35mm film camera - but you do get the 'take the pic now and put it on the website before teatime' facility - which you don't get with film.

Once you start using a digital camera, you'll probably use it a lot more than you thought you would. And when you print your pictures you'll start lusting after better quality. But the problem with digital prints is not not resolution but the the printing technology. My 1200 dpi laser printer isn't nearly good enough, even for small images.

 
With an ink-jet colour printer, like the HP Deskjet 845c which I have, it is better, but you will really need photo quality paper at a pound (UK) per sheet, printed shiny face down. Note that you should buy the paper recommended for your printer, otherwise you may find it comes out all blotchy.

Resolution
The higher the resolution of the camera the better the picture quality - but the bigger the filesize of the image. So storage (camera memory) costs more - or alternatively you can take fewer pics before dumping them to your PC.

You need high resolution if you want to print anything larger than 6"x4". 1.3MPixels is said to be good. I only wanted images for the website so 640x480 (300K pixels) is as much as you need. The camera compresses this to .jpg format as it stores it in the memory.

Sending pictures by Email it behoves you to make the picture file size as small as possible. Reducing the size to say 300 wide, saving as .jpg format, and compression level say 30%. 20K file size would be reasonable and will look very good as an Email attachment.

Memory
My camera takes 32 pictures at low resolution, and 16 at high resolution before the memory is full. High resolution is good if you want enlarge only part of your image. When the memory is full you have to connect up to your PC and download the pictures before you can take any more. Not so good for going on holiday.

Some digitals have a removable (flash) memory card; you can have more than one card for taking a larger number of pictures. Then instead of using the software supplied with the camera, you buy a card reader to plug into your USB socket. It's much simpler than using their interface. The reader appears as an additional drive letter on your computer and you can treat it in the same way as a floppy drive.

Typically a flash card holds 16mb which takes about 12 pics. There is a 64 mb one that takes 45 pics and a 160mb one. There is an IBM microdrive at 1GB which will take about 800 pics.

Some digitals use floppy disks as the recording medium. You can record about 5 pictures per floppy at the best definition on a 1.3 megapixel device.

Software
The Agfa camera came with two CDs full of software. The useful bit is a program called Picture House which displays thumbnails of the pictures from your camera and you can save them to disk in an appropriate format as you wish. They also provide Coral Print which is enormous. They insist you load it, but I shall probably not use it as I always use Paint Shop Pro to massage my images.

They also provide a driver program, and you have load a second driver from your Windows CD - lets hope you still have that!

Once loaded, the software seems very easy to use. On this camera the power comes from the USB while it is connected. As soon as you have displayed the pictures and saved them to disk, you can disconnect the camera and delete the images in the camera.

Massaging your Image
You obviously cannot just grab the image from the camera and publish it. There are things to do. I use Paint Shop Pro but there are several other graphics packages. The procedure is directly equivilent to massaging images from a scanner. On both the scanner and the camera you control the size of the image produced by specifying the resolution. But it is much quicker to read from a camera.

• save the image to disk, and keep the original in case of mistakes
• crop the picture
• Resample, typically 300 wide
• Brighten
• Sharpen once or twice
• Save As .jpg with say, 30% compression and 300 resolution
• Check it in the browser and
• Check the file size is acceptable, 20K max, less if possible.

Battery Life
Some people have commented that digitals eat batteries as if there is no tomorrow. If you have an LCD monitor you certainly use a lot of batteries. If you have it switched on for 20-30 minutes, that is it; two more AA batteries thrown away. My camera switches itself off if not used for one minute, which sounds like a good idea but is in fact a pain as it is always off at the instant you need it.

Rechargeable batteries are definitely the way to go. You should check that your digital allows rechargables. There are different sorts of rechargables. The best and more expensive can be up to 1600 mAh. It seems at some of them should be completely discharged before they are recharged - users of video cameras have always worried about this. Some also have to be used and charged a few times before they work properly.

The trick here is to buy more expensive rechargeables and keep them longer. The ones I have been using have been Ni-Cd which are in the cheaper range, like 1 UKP each. But when recharged they only deliver 1.2 volts and have a limited life like 800 mAh.

What I now have are Ni-MH (Nickel-Metal Hydride) which are 4 UKP each but recharge in five hours and deliver 1.5 volts with a life of 1300 mAh. For more money I can have 2000 mAh life. These sometimes have to be specially ordered since the smaller shops are unwilling to stock expensive things which only the readers of this message will ask for.

Some more expensive cameras have special battery packs which last, they say, for 500 pictures which is a much better bet. There could be a weight penalty here - not so easy just to slip the camera in your pocket.

Will I use it?
Probably not on this website too much, but certainly on the family pages, and on my Goring website. I have to get used to the small delay on all digitals when you press the button - you have to hold the camera still until you hear the beep. The camera then flashes at you for a couple of seconds while it saves the image in its memory before you can take the next one. I shall certainly carry my new toy around the village. Watch this space!

You can have a choice
Take several pictures and choose the one you like.

• One digital user lives out in the country, so a trip to town isn't something she takes more often than necessary. Once she was looking for a special tiny corner sink for a new bathroom. She took digi pics of all the ones she found, uploaded to the laptop right there in the store, and emailed them to partner at his office to see which one he liked best.
• Did the same with a party tent they needed in a hurry.
• Right now they are having a 5 acre pond built, and partner loves to see the progress each day. She goes down to the site, takes a bunch of pics, comes back to the house and send off a batch of quickie web pages for him to see from the office.
• The project of the moment is finding homes for a litter of kitties. In a matter of minutes she can take pictures and get a URL to prospective takers.