My Dad’s 70th is coming up shortly and myself and my brother are buying him a digital camera to replace his current one that isn’t up to scratch for what he needs. He has chosen the one he wants but as it is his 70th we want to surprise him and get him something better.
I have tried researching different camera technologies but it is a bit of a minefield so I was hoping snap-happy dopers could point me in the right direction.
The camera he has picked out is a Fuji Finepix F300EXR. He likes to use the camera at the football (soccer) and finds at present that his old point and click isn’t up to the job for several reasons, which are:
[ul]
[li]Optical zoom too short[/li][li]Long delay between ‘click’ and ‘capture’[/li][li]Glare on the digital screen makes it hard to see what is being captured[/li][li]Long delay between shots taken[/li][li]Motion blur during fast action[/li][/ul]
My questions are as follows:
[ol]
[li]Is there anything to be aware of when comparing optical zooms other than the magnitude?[/li][li]Higher is better for ISO ratings I understand but what are M and S mode? (see specifications in link up the page) Are they true ISO ratings or at the upper end is it somehow being emulated?[/li][li]What determines the delay between ‘click’ and ‘capture’? Is this something that is usually listed in the specification?[/li][li]Is there any other factor I should be aware of when looking for a camera suited to taking sports pictures?[/li][/ol]
From my research it looks as though an SLR camera would be more suited to the job, something like the Fuji Finepix HS10 looks good to me. At the risk of venturing into IMHO what do people think of this camera, is it a decent step up from the one my Dad chose?
Guidance here would be greatly appreciated, I want to make sure we get him a camera that will keep him snapping away happily for a long time to come!
Aperture. (f/2.0 is faster than f/8.0 – see explanation). Basically, the faster (or wider) the f-stop, the less ambient light the camera needs to make a proper exposure. The faster your lens, the more flexibility you’ll have with your shutter speed and ISO setting. The shutter will affect the blurriness of objects in motion (i.e., sports players) and the ISO will affect noise (little unwanted colored specks in your picture).
The F300EXR’s lens will be at f/5.3 at full telephoto, which is average. For comparison, a high-end SLR telephoto lens might be f/2.8, which needs just approximately a quarter of the light that the F300EXR needs. It’ll also cost several thousand dollars all by itself, so that’s probably not useful to you.
The aperture speed is important in sports photography because you cannot rely on flash or image stabilization to help your capture – the flash won’t work that far away and the image stabilization only helps with your hands, not the players on the field.
1b. Also, the “15x” number isn’t as useful as the focal range (24-360mm for the F300EXR and 24 - 720mm for the HS10). The 15x tells you that there’s a fifteen-fold difference between the minimum focal range and the max, but you can’t compare that with other cameras without knowing the focal range. In this case, the HS10 can zoom out as far as the F300EXR, but can zoom in and see twice as far.
High ISO ratings on compact digitals is mostly just a gimmick. The noise introduced will usually make the resulting pictures near useless.
M and S modes might stand for image size (medium, small), but I can’t say for sure.
The camera body and your memory card speed. SLRs tend to be much better at this, not because of any inherent physical limitation in compacts, but because SLRs cater to a more professional market. High-end compacts may share this trait, but it’s hard to say without reading individual reviews.
It’s hard and expensive to take good sports photos, especially in low-light conditions. You basically want a camera that has a low shutter delay, fast burst rate, a good, big sensor size (NOT just megapixel count – sensor size directly affects how much noise you get in the final photo, which directly affects your highest realistically-usable ISO, which ultimately means you’ll need less ambient light if you have a good sensor)… and then you want to couple that with a good telephoto lens, which can run anywhere between several hundred to several thousand dollars.
For the glare issue, you could try a screen shade like this one or an anti-glare screen protector. Or, if available, use the camera’s viewfinder instead of its main screen.
If your budget doesn’t allow something that extravagant, my guess is that either camera you pointed to would be fine under adequate lighting, but this is the kind of thing that’s hard to say without having the camera on hand. For what it’s worth, you can read reviews of both cameras:
ETA: You’ll probably get more detailed and professional responses at dedicated photography sites like dcresource.com, dpreview.com, or steves-digicams.com. Many of them have forums.
This is called the “cycle time” or “shutter lag” and it has to do with a number of factors. Mostly it’s caused by the “autofocus” and “autoexposure” settings on most cameras. These settings take a handful of exposures, analyze them, and then interpolate to automatically figure out what the ideal focal length and exposure times should be. Some nice DSLRs can do this really quickly with some clever advanced circuit designs.
There is no standard statistic, as far as I know, for the shutter lag times. You really have to just measure it experimentally, and it depends on the conditions. At night, finding the appropriate exposure can take much longer than in a well-lit picture. But there are lots of people who collate their results for this sort of thing at places like this: http://www.cameras.co.uk/html/shutter-lag-comparisons.cfm
The F300 will do better in low light, which can be a huge deal if you are taking pictures indoors or outside at night under sports lights. It will require your dad to use a few manual settings, but it will be worth it.
The HS10 has more zoom, but you will sacrifice some image quality because no lens of that size is going to be all that sharp. The full zoom is going to be hard to use except in good light since even with image stabilization it’s hard to hand hold a 720mm lens.
The 30X isn’t all the information, it just tells you the ratio of the wide angle to the telephoto end of the lens. The actual focal lengths give you more info. In this case both cameras start at 24mm so they have equal wide angle ends, which is good. It’s hard to beat that in an ultrazoom.
The HS10 is much larger, and will require a bag to carry around. The F300 is small enough to slip in a jacket pocket.
Answers to your questions:
The actual focal range is important, but in this case they both start at the same 24mm wide angle. Quality of the lens is important, and the aperture range is critical for low light performance.
Higher is better, but only if they perform. Lots of cameras have ISO settings of 3200 but most take absolutely awful shots at those settings. The F300 is one of the few that can actually take good shots at high ISO. The HS10 is adequate, but not great. To get higher ISO values on the HS10 you have to decrease the size of the images. It’s a gimmick to my mind, and the high ISO settings in this camera are pretty useless.
Actually, card speed has almost nothing to do with shutter lag since images are buffered on the camera. The delay is because your camera is trying to focus and make adjustments to all the settings. While some compacts are better than others, all will struggle in low light, at full zooms, and with moving subjects. The best solution with a compact (besides buying a DSLR) are to pre-focus by pushing the shutter release button halfway to lock focus before you take the shot. High-end compacts really aren’t much better than middle tier ones IMO.
Burst mode is very important as mentioned. Will he be taking video? The HS10 has nice video features on paper, but reviews are underwhelmed with the quality.
IMO, the Panasonic FZ-40 is the best of the lot in the super zoom category. There’s a race right now to have the most zoom possible in a camera, and image quality is going to hell. Modest zoom (in the 18-24x range) will give you the best results.
You could also consider the EVIL (Electronic Viewfinder, Interchangeable Lenses) class of cameras like the Panasonic GF2, Sony NEX-3/5 or the Samsung NX100 with a nice big zoom. It will set you back considerably more money, but buying new lenses will give you built in birthday presents for years to come.
You’re absolutely right about that. I confused it with shot-to-shot delays in burst shooting, while the camera is trying to write to the card from the buffer. My bad, sorry.
I had a Fuji point and shoot, and if it’s like the rest of their line, be aware that Fuji cameras like XD cards, rather than SD. I scratched the hell out of 2 SD cards (with resulting data loss) in 2 different cameras before realizing that the brand simply didn’t play nice with the cards.
