Digital Cameras - Product Review
Digital cameras are a popular item, and are of particular interest to:
- Web publishers,
- newspapers and magazines,
- businesses with catalogues,
- graphic designers,
- automobile and real estate business
-- wherever a large number of photos need to be taken, and rendered quickly into electronic format. - Go to Camera Listings -
NEW: CanadaRAM now has SmartMedia and Compact Flash memory cards. Click here to check prices..
NEW: Quill Services now has Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH) AA batteries and chargers available: Batteries $ 7.00 each, Charger $ 39.99 + taxes and shipping.
NEW: Jan 28, '99: Epson has released the PhotoPC 750Z which addresses almost all of the reservations that we had about the PhotoPC 700 (lack of optical zoom, stingy memory configuration, extra cost Mac cable). One last barrier to overcome, price: at $ 1,275, it's high, but still competitive with the Kodak, Olympus and Sony top-end models.
Considerations:
- Resolution: Cameras that shoot at 640 x 480 resolution are not suitable for print work, and have image-quality limitations even for web output. The preferred resolution is 1024 x 768 and higher. If your work is going to be used in colour print publications, especially at large size, then go for the highest possible resolution.
- Price: Our target price for this survey is CAN $600 to $1,300 (US $350 - $850) - the current state of the art means that you have to sacrifice too much quality if you try to go under CAN $600. Pricing is actual (street) price for these cameras available through Quill Services.
- Value for money: Keep in mind before spending your money on a digital that a $ 150 auto-focus snapshot camera will still give you better picture quality than any of these digital cameras, plus you can buy and develop more than 50 rolls of film for the difference in price. The drawback is that after developing, you will have to get this film scanned in order to use it electronically. The traditional time delay for developing and the cost of scanning attracts people to digital cameras, which give virtually instant results.
- Focus: Watch out for fixed-focus cameras - "focus free" is not the same as auto-focus. With a fixed focus lens, you will never get the sharpness and control over depth of field that you are going to want. Auto-focus mechanisms are pretty good, and cover most bases for you. The best choice is an auto-focus that can be switched to manual focus when you want to do close-ups, shoot through a window or achieve special effects. In this chart, fixed focus cameras have been penalized.
- Zoom: Another great lie is "Digital Zoom". All digital zoom means is that the camera will cut off the outside of the picture and just give you the middle pixels inflated to larger size - you DO NOT get any extra pixels of resolution, and the resulting picture will be fuzzier than it has to be. You could do as well in your photo editing software. Much more useful is an optical zoom lens, which allows you to magnify the image so that your desired shot takes advantage of all the pixels in the camera's sensor. Ignore digital zoom - optical zoom is all that counts.
- Focus vs. zoom vs. price: Here is where we have the tradeoff - there are no inexpensive cameras in this survey that offer optical zoom and auto or auto+manual focus. How do you choose if you don't have $ 1,299 to spend?
- If you will be doing a lot of close up work, abandon the zoom and choose an auto or auto+manual focus model.
- If you know that all of your photos will be outdoor, longer-range shots, then choose a model with optical zoom, because fixed-focus cameras work acceptably well for distances beyond 30 feet or so, and the zoom will be more useful to you.
- Storage: As you shoot photos, they have to be stored in the camera. The type of storage the camera uses affects the cost and the speed at which you can take sequential shots.
- Compact Flash memory cards - available from 4 to 32 Mb.
- SmartMedia memory cards - currently limited to 8 Mb; there are 16 Mb cards for the newest cameras just being released, but these cards are incompatible with cameras built for 2 - 8 Mb SmartMedia cards.
- Floppy disk - slower to store than memory cards, but super-convenient to use. Floppies are cheap, and you can pop the floppy directly into your computer and open the JPEG file. No cables or software needed, and you don't have to wait around while your camera is tethered to your computer downloading data. With a pocket full of floppies and a spare battery or two, you can shoot all day. Currently, only Sony uses floppies.
- PCMCIA (PC Card) memory and miniature hard disks - expensive, generally found only on professional cameras which need to store ultra-high resolution files.
- Uploading: once you've made your shots, the data has to be transferred to your computer. This is usually done via serial cable (unplug your modem and plug in the cable to the camera) and with proprietary software that comes with the camera. If you have a lot of shooting and uploading to do, you might invest in a memory card reader for your computer ($ 150 and up depending on model).
Cameras can take from 5 to 20 minutes to upload the photos. This is the not-so-fun part of digital photography. Sony's floppy solution is one convenient way out. Olympus offers an optional floppy-reader for their SmartMedia cards - this is Windows-compatible only at the moment.
- Mac users beware: Software compatibility is not all it could be. Poor marks go to the following models:
- Agfa, for software that behaves badly, and refuses to work at all on a PowerMac 4400;
- Kodak for making the Macintosh cable an optional extra (and Epson on the PhotoPC 700);
- Kodak, who bundles a great Windows-only suite of software with the DC260 and DC220 but doesn't offer either a serial connection or ANY application software for the Macintosh - owners of Macintosh models other than iMacs have to buy an external SCSI Compact Flash card reader AND Adobe Photoshop to make this camera work (over $ 1000 investment);
- Hewlett-Packard, who don't even make Macintosh connection available.
iMacs and the new Power Macintosh G3's don't have a serial port or a floppy drive - iMac and "blue & white" G3 owners have to invest extra in a USB-to-serial conversion device (get a guarantee of compatibility with your camera first) or wait until the first crop of USB-equipped cameras comes along (Kodak has iMac USB software in beta testing).
- Batteries: Cameras eat batteries for breakfast. Plan on buying rechargeables, and plug the camera into the AC Adapter whenever you are uploading files to your computer (many manufacturers charge extra for either the AC adaptor, battery charger, or both). Turn off the camera's LCD viewing screen whenever you can.
The models with a regular optical viewfinder can extend battery life because you can shoot longer-range shots with the viewfinder and leave the LCD screen turned off (but like snapshot cameras, the parallax problem makes it difficult to frame close ups through the viewfinder. Here, an LCD panel is a distinct advantage because it will show you exactly what you're going to get in the frame).
Price alert: Some cameras don't come with rechargeable batteries, and some make you pay extra for the AC adapter. Among battery choices, Nickel Cadmium (NiCad) batteries are average, Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH) batteries are better, Rechargeable Lithium batteries are best.
