Accessories and Summary
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Accessories and Summary |
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Questionable Features
Over the past couple of years there's been a lot of competition between digital camera makers, and since many digital camera features are hidden and often hard to explain there's been a rush to increase the easily understood megapixel count. (By the way, it's spelled "megapixels," not "mega pixels," just as metric distance is spelled "kilometers," rather than "kilo meters.") Having more megapixels is supposed to be better than having less megapixels, and within reason that's true. But some manufacturers have been packing in more and more pixels without increasing the size of the sensor array. The result is pixels packed so close together that even fairly low ISOs produce far too much noise.
If you never expect to make prints larger than 8 x 10 inches, a camera with 4 or more megapixels will do just fine. That's only true, of course, if you frame your shots in the full sensor. If you do a lot of cropping you'll need more megapixels. 6 megapixels will make a fine 11 x 14 print, again assuming you frame your shots the way you want the final print to appear.
The bottom line is that if you need more megapixels, start looking at professional or near-professional DSLRs. Most of those have larger sensor arrays and can handle more pixels without producing unacceptable noise.
Unimportant
Features
Some digital cameras come with a “movie” feature that’ll let
you shoot a few seconds of low quality sequential frames. If you want
movies, buy a movie camera.
Some digital cameras let you connect the camera to a
television set so that you can show the pictures on the TV screen. A TV screen is far too coarse and badly color-corrected to
give you a decent picture.
Accessories
You need a good camera case for your camera and you can get
one at any good photo supply house. If you're using NiMH batteries you also need a good charger. You can buy one at Radio Shack, but I’d suggest
you go to http://www.thomas-distributing.com
and check out Maha Powerex chargers and batteries. They seem to be the best on the
market. Thomas distributing also carries external power packs for professional
cameras. Thomas Distributing carries some little plastic
four-battery carriers, but the best ones I’ve found are cloth ones you can get
at http://www.greenbatteries.com.
These little packs also have room for a flash memory card or two.
In the end, the amount of stuff I have to carry around with
a digital camera is a lot less than I had to carry around with a film camera.
Outside of the fact that I don’t have to carry film, I’m not sure why. It’s
just the way the world works.
Which
Digital Camera Should I Buy?
The situation
changes so fast that I can't keep this lecture up to date
with the current choices. Best thing is to go to
http://www.dpreview.com
where there are very thorough reviews of most digital cameras.
http://www.imaging-resource.com also has
good camera reviews and excellent reviews of photo printers,
scanners, and software.
If you’re a professional or a serious amateur and know about cameras, or if you just want a camera to take pictures of the kids, you can buy your camera from the web or from Best Buy or Office Depot. On the other hand there are some reasons you might want to buy your camera from a camera shop. It’ll cost a little more, but a good camera shop has people who know more about cameras than how to fill out a sales slip. That expertise sometimes can come in handy.
Printers and Scanners
There’s not much to say about printers and scanners. Epson,
Hewlett Packard, and Canon make good photo printers. In my
opinion, shared by many others, Epson makes the best photo printers and scanners.
In 2000 they came out with the Epson Stylus Photo 870, which, for the time
being, blew away the competition. The printer represented a huge
jump in resolution and color handling, and Epson’s been staying out in front
ever since, though HP and Canon are beginning to make a serious effort to catch
up. Imaging resource (http://www.imaging-resource.com)
has the rundown on almost all current printers and scanners.
Image
Manipulation Software
Just about everybody is making image manipulation software
these days but there are only three software packages that can do almost everything
you might want to do with photographs on your computer, though others are trying
hard to catch up.
Top of the line is Adobe Photoshop CS4, which goes for around $600.
Adobe Lightroom is a product designed specifically for photographers. It has the best photo cataloging features I've seen in any product, and contains a majority of the photographic post-processing tools found in Photoshop. Lightroom sells for around $250.
Adobe recently came out with Photoshop Elements 8, which has almost everything from Photoshop an amateur photographer might want to use and goes for less than $100 if you look around.
I can’t demonstrate these packages in this paper, so I’ll
leave it to you to learn how to use your photo manipulation software. The
learning curve is fairly steep at first but it’s well worth the effort. There
are dozens of third-party books out on Photoshop and Photoshop Elements.
Is All the
Hassle Worth It?
To me, photography is the finest of all the visual fine arts. Why I feel that way is another lecture, probably longer than this one. But even if you don’t agree with that, photography is fun. Digital photography is even more fun than film photography because you don’t have to mix the chemicals, set up the darkroom, wash all the prints, dump all the chemicals, and clean up the trays and tanks and surfaces. So, get a digital camera and join in the fun.
