My husband was channeling Santa Claus last night. He wished to discuss my Christmas present. The generous and discerning fellow intends to give me a digital camera! I am blown away. How cool is that? But he wants to know if the one he picked out is a good one for me. Does anybody know anything about digital cameras? What should I be looking for?
I am an artist, familiar with using an SLR Nikon, and currently working on an Interface Design degree, so while I am not a professional photographer, I am interested in more than just sending snaps to Grandma.
The Fuji S602 here is what he is thinking about, basically recommended by a student of his who has one. I don’t speak Digital Camera at all, so any help is much appreciated.
A piece of advice I found useful when buying my first digital camera was this: make sure it’s very compact. The point of a digital camera is to be handy and available. If you want the highest possible photo quality, use a film camera. A digital camera should be easy to carry. That way you’ll have it and you’ll use it.
A corollary of this is that a belt-mounted case is about the most valuable accessory.
If you want a prosumer-level digital camera, the Canon EOS 300D got some very good reviews… a 6 mp SLR for around $900.
If that’s a little steep, you can get a good Sony 5 mp camera… less dynamic, but a lot smaller and simpler, for around $450. And I’ve used Sony digicams for years, and I’ll vouch for 'em. I think they’re great. Sony or Canon, that’s what I’d go with for a digital camera.
That is a nice camera!! I have a Fuji 2800 2 megapixel camera and it works great. The 602 has some nice features, I especially like the one where it takes 3 pictures at different exposure levels. Our camera’s meters get fooled easily with a bright background and the subject can be dark and ruin the picture. Yep it’s kind of big but that hasn’t a big issue with me. You will need some beefy memory cards and some rechargeable batteries and I think you would be set.
The Fuji seems like a decent camera, with the best feature being the 6x optical zoom. However the 3.1 megapixel sensor is a bit low resolution for cameras in that price range (although they interpolate to 6 megapixels). I’d consider a 4 or 5 megapixel camera. Spend some time reading the reviews, and maybe wander down to your local Best Buy and play with the cameras to see how they feel in your hands, and how intuitive the menu system is. (I rejected several cameras because their menu structures were either ridiculously complicated or non-intuitive.)
Wouldn’t a Nikon 5700 or a Minolta A1 be in the same price range? They’d be 5 megapixel units with a similar zoom range, and both are generally well received.
A photographer friend just referred me to the dpreview.com site as well! I’m in the market for a compact digital camera, preferably around 3.2 megapixels, with good optical zoom for taking close-ups of comic books and action figures.
She has directed me to the Canon A70, which she says is perfect for what I’ll need. I’m not a serious photographer, I just want a cool small camera for everyday use, and also for taking pictures of stuff to sell on eBay. Any other advice?
I’ve got to recommend the Nikon D100. It’s a little pricier than the models above, but it’s just such an unbelievable camera that you owe it to yourself to go check one out at your local camera store. It handles beautifully, 6.1 MP, and the controls are right in between those of an F100 and an N80 (F80 outside the States), so if you’re used to Nikon SLRs you’ll be right at home with it. Plus, you can continue to use all your Nikon glass…
You can email me and I can send you some samples, if you like:
When you hear “Digital Zoom”, recognize that it means “Cropping”. To oversimplify, it doesn’t count. To not oversimplify, what it accomplishes is not wasting memory space on the outer regions you would have eventually cropped anyway, but the only thing that accomplishes what you think of as “zooming” is what digicams call “optical zoom”.
And,
Get yourself one of those little $20 readers that connects to your computer and reads your Compact Flash or SmartMedia or Memory Stick as if it were a floppy disk. Don’t even bother plugging the camera into the computer directly. Seems like half the problems people discuss re digicams are actually software problems trying to get the camera and PC to work together, and it’s all unnecessary!
Not all digital cameras use Li-Ion rechargeable batteries. Many of them use AA batteries; in this case they usually include a set of Ni-MH rechargeable AA batteries and a charger.
Li-Ion batteries are lightweight and tend to last longer than AA. But Li-Ion batteries are propriatory, so spare batteries are expensive. AA is more versatile; you can use rechargeable Ni-Mh for daily use and carry non-rechargeable batteries as spares, for example.
By the way someone mentioned the Nikon D100. If you’re going to consider this, the Fuji S2 should also be considered. The review articles on DPReview should tell you all about the similarities and differences.
I’ve got an S602. It’s a very full featured camera and takes nice pictures. It’s not exactly portable, but I disagree with the poster above who said that’s the most important aspect. For me, I want the biggest freakin’ optical zoom I can get! I tend to take pictures of animals (like at the zoo) and scenery from a distance and I want to be able to see it.
The only downside that I’ve found with the S602 is the battery life and usage. It continues to suck batteries even when the camera is off. Leave the batteries in for a few days without using the camera and they’re dead. Also, the camera has no battery meter like my Sony does - you don’t know how much juice is left in the batteries until they’re almost dead (when the camera displays an icon for low battery level). The plus is the camera uses standard size AA batteries so if you’re rechargeables run out in the field you can pick up some standard AAs to get you through the day.
I believe Fuji has released a new model that is slightly slimmed back on features but includes some accessories that I had to buy separately for the S602 (like the expansion lens tube to allow for filters and telephoto converters). All in all it’s a nice camera and I’m not unhappy that I bought it.
One other thing I would change about the S602 is the movie mode. It’s very cool that you can take small movie clips with the camera, but it stores the clips in AVI format and the files are very large, eating up the memory card. I wish it would use one of the MPG formats for a smaller clip sizes.
I Second that; least useful of all is a medium-sized camera with average features - too big to put in your pocket and too poor on features to make it worth carrying about.
I’ve just bought the Sony UX-30 which, although it is only 2MPixel, is lovely and compact (and 2MPixel shots are actually quite good) - there’s no zoom (I use leg zooming).
If you’ve been using an SLR though, I’d go for something with a lot more pixels.
DPReview is a fantastic site, spend some time there and look at all the sample pics from each of the reviewed cameras and think of them in terms of taking pics of your artwork. If you were using a SLR Nikon then you’re probably used to a very high picture quality. You’ll probably need a “pro-sumer” class digital to capture the same quality images. I don’t know of any small/light digital cameras which can compete with an SLR in terms of picture quality.
I have, and highly recommend, the Sony DSC-F717. It is a very fine 5-megapixel camera. The thing which makes it stand out is the high-quality optical lens. It has a Carl Zeiss 5X lens which produces very high quality images. I second the idea that “digital zoom” isn’t all that useful because all it does is crop the image and interpolate to make it fill the full dimensions. A camera with a good optical lens and good optical zoom will typically take better pictures than one with a lower quality lens and more digital zoom. Sony has continued to improve this model and have stuck with the extremely fine Carl Zeiss lens with their new model the DSC-F828 which is on my drool list at eight megapixels and a 7X optical zoom along with a new CCD design using four color filters instead of three(which is supposed to give better color variety). The Sony also has what they call “Hologram AF” which is an autofocus method where they send out a pattern of laser light and when it bounces back to the camera from objects in different distances from the lens it can adjust the zoom really tightly based on this precise measurement from camera to subject.
The Fuji you linked to is a fine camera. It has a good lens with a nice zoom(6x optical). It received high marks in the 3.1 megapixel prosumer reviews at DPReview as well. It received especially high marks in the digital video category and is top-of-class for taking videos with a digital camera. It was not considered a 6-Megapixel camera by DPReview because it interpolates the 3.1 MPs into 6MPs because of the design of the CCD(they have an explanation of this at the DPReview site for the camera, linked to by Finagle). As a general rule of thumb I’d consider it a 3.1 MP camera for best results.
We may be able to help more if we had some more ideas about what you need to do with the camera. Some scanned shots of your artwork perhaps? Do you work with 3D media where something like Hologram AF would be useful? Most of the flashes on these cameras are only good for short-range(~15 feet). Do you need to take flash shots of things further away? The more info we have the more useful we can be.
I love my Nikon Coolpix 4300. It does everything I want it to do and was very affordable. A few things I like about it, and I would look for in other cameras are:
Because of its shape I can hold and control it in one hand. That bulge on the front is a great grip and I can do everything with my thumb. Simple, but it makes handling easier.
I like the SanDisk CompactFlash memory better than Sony Memory Sticks- very fast and affordable.
The rechargeable battery is the same shape as a CR5 (and vice-versa). This means that if the juice runs out of the Li-ion, I can pop a Duracell or Energizer CR5 in it and am good to go for another 250 shots. Plus they sell CR5s all over the place now (at least here in Europe).
I love the mini-movie function. I think one with sound would be worth an extra $50 now, but oh well, the vid-clips are still cool.
I like the software- it does everything I need and more. Simple, easy to understand, etc.
the 3x optical zoom is good, the clarity of resolution with the lens is better. At 10 feet with normal (medium) quality and a 5x7 picture size you can zoom in on someones face and see what is stuck in their teeth. No kidding! 4.3 megapixels are cool like that.
Follow other people’s advice, but keep in mind this: A digital camera is best at recording your life. Use it as a digital diary. Thus, make sure you get one that is easy to use and works when you want it to. The fancy pictures can be saved for the geeks and pros, you probably just want to take a bunch of pictures to email and or save on a CD for future late nights with a bottle of wine where the image quality is less important than the shot of uncle bernie playing with your kids…Keep it handy and snap away- it’s cool not to be constrained by film! Take 100 pictures a day if you want- that’s what it is there for.
Many thanks for the input, folks. The dpreview site is a gold mine of info.
Some of your recommendations are a bit out of my price range, but it helps to know what I’m comparing with.
Tomcat, I got to play with that very camera last night. My teacher had one and let me try it out. Very nice.
Another friend has recommended the Olympus C750, because it has a 10X optical zoom. I’m thinking seriously about that. At this point, the best advice seems to be “go to a store and play around with a few so you get a feel for what you like.” I’m putting that on my list of things to do this weekend.
I second the Canon EOS 300D if you’ve got the cash. Or the Nikon D100 or Canon D10.
I used a higher-end Sony (dsc-s85 5mp) for quite a while, and mostly loved it except for the curse of focus that afflicts all non-SLR digicams: the autofocus is so slow as to be almost useless (an entire second or worse after pressing the shutter before the picture is taken! Arg!), and manual focus is fairly unusable. As far as I know (and DPReview bears me out in thier tests), all non-SLR digis have this problem.
I finally bought the 300D, and it’s so fast it’s just lovely: clickity clickity click! SLR digis soooo rock.