I’ve messed around with photography for many years, investing in good-quality SLRs. But I’ve given the film cameras away and gone digital, and never looked back.
Man oh man, digital photography, for all its drawbacks – and it has 'em for sure – is the way to go. Anytime I see something that might be worth shooting, it’s point and shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot…
No need to worry about what it’ll cost to get all those snaps developed. Nope, just download all the images, zip through deleting the definite nonkeepers, then go back and ponder over the best of the rest. Editing’s a breeze, too.
As an example, here’s my latest Webshots album. It’s recent photos of my cats, all taken with a digital camera, either my previous 2.1 megapixel Olympus Camedia D-500, or its replacement, an Olympus Camedia D-595 5 megapixel.
All the images in this album were cropped to a greater or lesser degree. “Do not mess with me” in fact is an extreme crop of an otherwise crummy snapshot. In full, the image is cluttered and boring; in the cropped version there’s an air of menace and mystery.
With the new camera, I can crop in tight and still get fabulous detail. An example: a head shot of my horse, taken on the auto setting. So sharp and clear you can see each individual hair.
Now take a look at this tight crop of the same image. The original picture was shot from a few feet away, yet you’d swear the lens was only inches from his eye.
Eddy
Yeah I’ve been waiting to go digital also. I’ve got a good set of Pentax lenses and I’m waiting for the price to come down a bit for a Pentax Digital SLR. (they are about $800 now?)
Anyway, would I just be better off getting a $100 point and shoot camera and forget adding to the expense I’ve already incurred?
(Nice tiger cat by the way).
I’d get a point-and-shoot with at least 3 megapixels. There’s enough good-quality ones out there at a cheap price to make the investment worth it.
Digital is different enough that it pays to get some practice with its quirks. Here are some things I’ve learned:
Get a camera with a traditional viewfinder rather than relying on the preview screen, if you can. I don’t care what camera-makers say about theirs being easy to use even in bright sunlight, you’ll find the viewscreen washes out in bright light. That’s one reason I went with the Camedia D-595 even though it’s a discontinued model and I had to find it (factory reconditioned) on eBay.
Using the viewfinder will also save on battery life. The viewscreeen sucks power madly, although newer cameras are less energy hogs than older ones. My new camera gets by on two AA batteries, while the old one needed four. By all means, get the rechargeables and keep a spare set handy.
Digitals don’t take the picture immediately. This may be the hardest thing to get used to in making the switch from SLR to DSLR. There’s always some delay as the camera sets its parameters after you’ve clicked the button. There’s also some delay after each shot as the picture gets processed to memory. Higher-end cameras may offer faster reaction time, and using the viewscreen does cut down the delay somewhat, but does not eliminate it. I don’t know how many potentially fine pictures I’ve lost because of the delay.
Read the buyer reviews on Amazon, Best Buy, Circuit City, etc., and shop around for deals. If you come across a camera that seems to be what you want but you discover it’s discontinued (as I did) do check out eBay. There’s nothing wrong with getting a factory reconditioned camera (in the original box with booklet and USB cable included) and you can get a good deal. I wound up buying two D-595s on eBay for less than I’d paid a few years ago to buy the 2-pixel D-500. Turned out to be a great idea. Now I keep one by my desk at home and one in my purse, so there’s almost always a camera at hand when I spot a potentially good shot.
The camera will come with a pitifully limited memory stick/chip/disk. It’s well worth investing in a 256K stick/chip/disk so you can take hundreds of pictures, even at high quality, before you run out of room and have to download and wipe the memory device.
You may well already know this, but: for emailing convert your photo files to JPEG, but don’t overwrite the originals. If you decide you want to print a picture, it will come out a lot better printed out from TIFF or bitmap format. Both my camera and photo-editing software allow me to save the images in a variety of formats. I prefer to save the original downloads in their own folder, and the processed images in another.
This is only true for point and shoots. Digital SLRs, even the cheapest ones are very fast, some reasonably-priced ones (I owned a Nikon D70) is as fast as a film SLR, IMHO that is. With a good quality camera you also get the advantage of shooting RAW, and that is a huge difference. I only shoot RAW nowadays.
I’ve owned four digital cameras, from a crummy 1.5 MP Cannon that I got five years ago to the Nikon D70 I have now (there were two other Nikons in between). The D70 is hugely flexible, incredibly fast, easy to use and the batteries last way too long. I bought an extra battery with the camera and have never used it.
Go digital! Now we can all be mediocre photographers.
Eddy and Mighty_Girl
Thank you both for the detailed answers. Mighty_Girl - you seem to give the “edge” to the Digital SLR if for no other reason than its lack of delay. I might as well ask you and Eddy (as I’ve already done) - is it worth the added expense for the digital SLR? Eddy - you don’t have to tell me about batteries. Ever since I was a kid I have despised batteries - they are expensive and wear out MUCH too quickly. Even for the Pentax I currently own (the PZ1), I do NOT rely on those tiny, expensive NiCad or lithium batteries or whatever it is they are called. Since it is a six volt battery, I use a lantern battery which I clip to my belt. (Lasts much longer and is much cheaper).
I would say it was more than worth it. I had an expensive point and shoot before I got an SLR, they are nothing alike (this is going by my experiences with Nikon).
Nikon’s D70 is much faster (instant fire-up), can take several shots at a very fast rate, the batteries last a long time, shoots RAW, can go up to ISO 1600, and of course you have the flexibility of using the right lens for the job. I had the disadvantage of having to buy all the lenses. The camera was cheaper than the lenses (which is normal for film cameras too). If you are a ‘serious amateur’, or a ‘professional amateur’ then DSLR is definitively the way to go.
By the way, you don’t have to buy batteries constantly, they are rechargeable (most digital cameras have rechargeable batteries). Mine take about an hour to charge completely and I have taken hundreds of pictures without running out of juice.
Whoa! Mighty_Girl, that Nikon looks like a helluva camera, all right, but it’s way beyond what I want to pay for a point-and-shoot, which is all I use a camera for these days. I paid under $200 total for the two Olympus D-595s on eBay. Other than the delay issue they more than meet my needs.
Heck, they’ve got shooting modes I’ve never bothered to try out, including a panorama feature that allows you to stitch together three shots horizontally. And the clarity of the images just blows me away – I mean, look at that extreme closeup of Ben’s eye!
One thing on the inexpensive digitals I forgot to mention: the built-in zoom is likely to produce poorer-quality images. I rarely use it, unless I absolutely must. Seems to me I’m more likely to get better quality final images by cropping than zooming. Of course, that’s just my experience with the two lower-end Olympus models I’ve owned – dunno if it’s different with other brands, or higher-end cameras.
I saved up for a digital SLR (I’ve got the Canon EOS 350D) because I felt the combination of speed, quality and control was what I wanted. I’ve never regretted my decision. About the only thing you can’t do with an SLR is video, but that hasn’t been a problem. I’m constantly blown away by the quality of pictures I can take, and the way my little 350D handles low-light situations. I can crank up the ISO all the way to 1600, and still get much better quality pictures than point-and-shoots at ISO 400. You have much more control over depth of field and exposure, and the camera feels every bit as responsive as my film SLRs.
Btw, you can get the Pentax *ist DL for $456 from Beach Camera, along with an 18-55mm lens. The DL is one generation behind the latest Pentax DSLR, the DL2, but it’s still something to be considered, perhaps.
Eddy, Mighty_Girl and Dervorin
Thanks for your answers. I guess I’ll get the Pentax DSLR one of these days. I suppose I might get it cheaper if I could buy it without the included lens. I have a great 20mm Pentax wide angle lens.
However, one disadvantage of the DSLR (that I heard) is that wide angle lenses “lose” their wide fields by a factor of 1.5. That is to say, my scenery crunching 20mm lens becomes a moderate 30mm wide angle on a DSLR. Is this correct?
I used to take sports photos with my first digital camera, an Olympus C-700. The delay was irritating. If I wanted a shot of a pitcher releasing the ball, I had to click the button at the start of his windup and hope that he was in the pose I wanted when the camera decided to get around to taking the shot. When shooting tennis, if I wanted a shot of Player A, I clicked the button when I heard Player B hit the ball, and had to hope that Player A didn’t move out of the spot I was shooting.
That’s correct, unfortunately. But it also means your 200mm telephoto becomes a 300mm.
Some manufacturers (e.g. Nikon) are coming out with digital-specific lenses. These only work on DSLRs because they don’t illuminate the full 35mm frame, but they are smaller and more affordable than a film camera lens of the same focal length.
As for shutter lag, my Nikon D70 is much faster than any point-and-shoot digital camera I’ve owned or tried. It’s not quite as fast as my Nikon FM2 (film camera with purely mechanical shutter), but it doesn’t bother me.
I know it’s just a point-and-shoot, but I just picked up a Canon PowerShot A520, for a very good price, and I’m quite pleased. Feature for feature, it matches a $600 camera (S40) from three years ago, and it only cost me $225.
The delay is a bit annoying, but I think I can turn certain features off and just make it work. I never bothered to explore, but I suppose I could.
My last point and shoot did record RAW images, or large TIFF files, but the delay between one picture and the next was so big (several seconds) that it only took me one month of use to decide for an SLR. The lag is a little bit less annoying if you are shooting stationary objects, but if you want to shoot action (such as a free range baby :D)) then it is just impossible to deal with.
With a film SLR you can shoot as many pictures as the film allows one after the other, digital SLRs buffer the file and after some time you have to give the camera a rest to record the files. The more expensive the SLR the more pictures you can shoot in a row. According to this review (http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canoneos350d/page21.asp) the Cannon EOS 350D and the Nikon D70 both shoot about 12-14 pictures before they need to rest.
Unfortunately, this is correct (but it’s worse with Olympus DSLRs, which have a “crop factor” of 2x, vs 1.5x for Nikon and Pentax, and 1.6x for the newer Canon DSLRs). So your scenery cruncher is just going to be a very moderate wide-angle 30mm - but on the plus side, a 300mm telephoto suddenly becomes equivalent to a 450mm supertele, without any loss in aperture. Since I’m interested in birds, this is actually a good thing for me, but I can see where it would be a pain when doing landscapes. Panoramic stitching, anyone?
It’s also true that many recent point-and-shoots are pretty responsive compared to models that are only a year old - the Canon PowerShot A620, for example, has a shutter lag of about 0.1s - certainly instant enough for most photography that doesn’t involve fast movement.
That number does depend very much on the type of memory card you are using, as well as the image format you choose. I can get only 5 RAW images before my EOS 350D needs to flush the buffer (each RAW image is about 8MB) but I’ve shot 50 small JPEG frames (about 1.5MB each) without any problem - the camera was able to write to the card just as fast as the pictures were coming in. I’m sure I could have gone on for as long as I wanted, happily machine-gunning my subject at 3 frames per second, but I decided 50 was more than enough.
I used to say that I would give up my 43-year-old Pentax H-3 when they pried it from my cold, dead fingers.
However.
Someone where I work was selling his Canon EOS 20D and let me try it out for a day. I didn’t buy it, but I liked it a lot more than I thought I would. I’m going to keep an eye on the digital camera market for a bit and probably get a nice SLR when the next generation comes out.
I just picked up the Samsung Slim Style 6 MegaPixel. It’s a little smaller than a stadnard PDA and takes great photos.
Also you may want to pick up a copy of this book (it was written by my sister-in-law) It’ll teach you all the lovely fun wonderful things you can do to your digi-pics once you download them from the camera
The newer cameras have much smaller shutter lag (that delay between pushing the button and taking the picture) due to better electronics. It’s still not quite as good as a dSLR, but they are vastly improved from last year’s models. For example, the Canons with the DIGIC-II chips are quite good.
I really like an optical viewfinder as well. I hike/backpack/ski and the LCDs really eat up batteries. While NiMH AAs are great, smaller cameras usually have Li-Ion batteries that work pretty darn well.
It’s pretty much impossible to get a camera with less than 3 MP these days. Keep in mind, more MP doesn’t make better images, it just makes bigger images. What makes better images is optics and image algorithms.
I put in a very strong recommendation for Digital SLR. I’ve done everything else, and I aint ever going back.
And as a testament to the quality of the current crop, let me say this. Halloween of last year, we were out on the back deck, carving pumpkins. The door bell rang, friends showed up, we trick or treated with the kid, came home when the rain started.
The next morning when I let the dog out to pee, there was my camera, sitting in the rain, looking like a very expensive lump. (This was a Canon EOS 20D, love of my life #3).
My heart sank, and the self loathing took over. I brought it in, toweled it off, took off the lense and flash, and dropped in front of a fan, so that I could perhaps delay the discovery of my stupidity when I took it in for repair.
12 hours later, I put it together and turned it on, knowing that I was really just looking for final confirmation on what a huge festering dumbfuck I was. However, everything worked fine, and has continued to do so to this day.
Thank you Canon, for anticipating my idiocy, and guarding me against it, even when you didn’t have to.
