The only other NY-area camera retailer worth dealing with (IMHO) is J & R, which many of you might recognize from computer and electronics retailing as well. You can either go directly to the website or use Amazon. Amazon’s sometimes a bit easier because its website is more user-friendly, but the prices and shipping costs are the same.
J & R’s service and staff are excellent in person, and I’ve had good results ordering on-line, too.
Well, I looked at the MIE and one thing that I found was that the 5mp model is about to come out, it will be about an extra $100.00, so now I think that I am going to put off buying as long as possible (with an April 15th deadline), and if the 5mp model is on the shelf, I will buy it!, I am planning on buying from a store (not online), thanks for the tips folks!.
unclviny
Quick update. I’ve had my DSC-F717 for a few days now and it is even better than I imagined. The pictures are amazing! I can get about 51 pictures per 128 meg memory stick at 2560 x 1712 (3:2) with Fine quality in .jpeg format. The really anal part of me wants to take pictures in TIFF, but at that resolution a TIFF image takes over ten megabytes of space. That’s about 10 shots per memory stick and they take a fairly long time to write. I do wish the camera had an option to take mpeg movies at a higher resolution than 320 x 240, 16 fps in anticipation of larger memory sticks(can only fit around six minutes of video at that setting on a 128 stick). I’ve yet to play around with the nightshot/night framing modes, but they look very promising. I really, really like the way the flash works with the laser AF. I do need to get a card reader(so I don’t have to attach the camera to the PC to upload) and some other accessories, notably a case.
All in all, I’m very happy with it so far. The kids are really impressed, as is my wife. My mom is already demanding we send her pictures. 
Enjoy,
Steven
Glad you’re having fun; the Sony 717 is a great camera. Unless you want to make large prints, i wouldn’t worry about shooting in TIFF. As you said, these files have long write-times and take up lots of card space. My Minolta 7Hi has Fine and Extra-Fine JPEG modes, and i nearly always use the extra-fine mode, which gives files of about 3.5 Mb, or about 120-150 on my 512Mb CF card.
Printing 6x4 and even 8x6 inch photos from these JPEG settings should give you perfectly good results. I’d only shoot TIFF if you’re after an artistic picture to blow up really large. Not only do TIFFs take up lots of room on your memory stick, but after a while they also take up lots of room on your computer.
I recieved the Fuji Finepix 3800 from Digital Foto Club yesterday, and I’m very happy with it. The shipping box was a little rougher than say, a package from Amazon, but inside, the camera box was packed nicely, sealed and in very good condition.
I think I’ve learned most of the camera’s features last night- the settings and options are much simpler than I expected. The camera uses an Electronic View Finder in addition to LCD, and true to the reviews I read, it’s a little dark when used in dim lighting. I’m OK with this, and in fact, got some neat shots of the full moon last night. Otherwise, the picture quality is great, and the hardware itself is nicely put together, the 6X optical zoom is awesome, and I’m amazed at the size of the xD card.
The only drawbacks I’ve noted so far are: The supplied xD card is only 16 mb, the camera didn’t come with rechargeable batteries, and the form factor of the camera made it a bit difficult to find a bag that fit it. I was able to purchase solutions to all these problems.
We’re taking my son to Disneyland next week, so we’ll put it to a real test then!
Well, my main concern isn’t what I’m going to do with these pictures. It’s leaving the largest amount of options open to other people who may want to do something with these pictures.
As a way of illustrating what other people may do with my pictures, here’s a story. My mother has recently started tracing our ancestors and she’s done a lot of research on our family going back about twelve generations so far. She’s getting scanned copies of old family photographs or portraits and linking them with the family tree on her PC and publishing it on the net for other geneological researchers to cross index with their own results. The end result is that some other distant relative is also doing geneological research and their information is about another branch of the tree. So they exchange info and both people now have a much fuller picture of their family history and heritage.
I’m trying to leave as accurate, and useful, a history behind as I can, not because I plan to use it, but because I want it to be available(and useful/usable) to my descendants. Some of the only info my mom has on some of our furthest relations was their public records in county courthouses in rural areas. These records, originally intended to stay local, have now been published on the internet. We can find the signatures of our great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfathers on their marriage licenses and the wills they filed which name their children and enumerate their assets. Now the people who made these records certainly never intended them to be scanned into a global computer network(these records being created over a hundred years before the invention of the computer), but nevertheless, the records ARE now online.
One of my mother’s most prized posessions that came out of her research is a picture of my great-great-grandmother taken when she was a young woman at a social gathering. It was put online by the granddaughter of her(my G-G-G-Ma’s) best friend. It wasn’t put online because of my great-great-grandmother, but she is in it. The picture is an ancient black-and-white picture and although it was fairly well-preserved, the quality isn’t very good. There are about twelve people in the picture, and although they are all interesting, the only one we’re really interested in is my great-great-grandmother. Because of the quality of the pictures at the time it is not really possible to excise her from the picture and enlarge it so we can see her on her own.
My goal is to be as forward-thinking as possible. I’d like to save my family records in a format and with a quality which will allow the future great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandson of a family friend excise my friend’s face from the photos, enlarge it and use it to show their children what their ancestor looked like with a fairly high degree of confidence that it is an accurate representation. Who knows, maybe the geneological search software in the future will scan posted family pictures and compare them to see if ancestors are the same person(this would be really handy for families with common names). The higher quality picture/crop, possible because of a higher-quality source file, might help these types of searches link up long-lost relatives.
Obviously(for size and time reasons) I won’t shoot in TIFF for everything, 2560X1712 Fine quality jpegs are pretty high quality and should be enough for day-to-day pictures. Still, last night I was taking some shots of the kids goofing around and one of them happened to knock over a water glass right as I was taking the picture(think she was distracted by the strobe of the flash in red-eye-reduction mode). I got a decent shot of the water splashing out of the glass and over the seat of our dining room chair. This is a small event in the corner of a picture, but my wife and I were both interested in enlarging it and seeing the water as it flowed. The kids were interested too and zooming in on a picture I had taken of one of my daughter’s skinned knees(she fell off her scooter) was tons of fun. They really liked having the picture quality high enough to zoom in to less than a square centimeter of skin and still have a decent quality in the image.
Essentially I believe that even on incidental pictures there is the chance that you might need higher quality so you have maximum flexibility as to how to use the image in the future. Maybe a bit anal, but hey, we’ve got a CD burner and CDs are cheap. I’d rather have too many photos at too high a resolution than not enough photos in a format and with quality settings that makes them unusable to future generations. When you get right down to it, you rarely take pictures for your own sake, you take them for other people; to share experiences you’ve had. I choose to share a very high-quality reproduction of that experience if it is practically possible. We can always scale a TIFF image down to a .jpeg, but the TIFF is still there. I think of them like prints versus negatives. Jpegs would be the prints, TIFFs would be the negatives. It’s very nice to have negatives, it makes your options for reprints/enlargements/etc SOO much better.
oceans_11, Vegas and now Disneyland? Good for you!
Enjoy,
Steven
Manufacturers never give a big enough memory card and rechargable batteries are a must with digi cams. Have fun as that is a real nice camera.
My girlfriend and I just each got a FUJI Finepix 3800. It’s a really nice camera. I am very happy with mine. The menu’s are very simple to learn, and if you learn the meaning of a few of the symbols then you’ll know everything. The shape is unique and ergonomic, which makes it easy and “fun” to use. The only drawbacks are what people have already said. A bigger memory card is needed, I just bought a 64mb from eBay for $35. This holds plenty of pictures for my purposes. The viewfinder can be hard to see in dark situations. The biggest annoyance is the inability to focus manually, because when its dark the autofocus has a hard time focusing. As with any camera, it’s a good idea to get rechargeable batteries. Instead of buying the ones from Fuji’s catalog, I just got 4 NiMH AA’s and a charger for a lot less money.
Someone mentioned the need to buy a card reader for the xD card; I don’t know why you would want to when all you have to do it hook up the camera to a USB cable. Can someone explain this?
To save your batteries! It’s very convenient to pop the memory card out and plug it into the card reader to get your files to your computer. Then you don’t need to leave your camera turned on while you wait for the files to transfer. In my experience, transfer is a bit faster, too, since my Mac just looks at the card as a simple removable drive; it sees the camera as a removable drive too, but it takes a bit longer for the computer to recognize it.