General Questions is for questions with factual answers. IMHO is for opinions and polls. I’ll move this to IMHO for you.
Off to IMHO.
DrMatrix - General Questions Moderator
Just a nitpick/clarification - the capcity (mAh) rating for a battery describes how much current it can deliver. The amount of energy stored in the battery should be measured in Wh (watt hours), which is the mAh rating multiplied by voltage. The 1200mAh Sony battery is 7.2V so it delivers 8.64 Wh. Ni-MH batteries are 1.2V each, so four 1600mah batteries only deliver 7.68 Wh.
Of course AA Ni-Mh batteries are still cheaper for the same capacity.
The main reason I like Li-Ion rechargeables is that it makes recharging much easier. On my Canon I just plug the camera to the AC adapter and the battery gets charged. Much easier than opening the battery compartment, taking out four batteries, putting them into the charger and plugging it into the wall. And some cameras lose all the settings (including the clock!) if you leave the battery out all night.
Oops, I just noticed SONY also makes a 3.6V 1200mAh battery. Those, of course, have far less capacity than four 1600mAh AA’s.
I’m also a proponent of digital. A couple of weeks ago, a good friend of mine and I did an experiment. We traveled about town with his digital camera (1.5 megapixel) my digital camera (4 megapixel) and a nice 35mm (not point and shoot – SLR? is that the correct term?).
Anyway, we took the same picture with the three different cameras (and I used two different settings on mine) then had them developed at the same place.
Without fail, the 35mm were indeed “crisper”. In a side-by-side comparison, it was easy to tell which was which in a blind test.
HOWEVER, when only looking at one print, it was difficult to tell. The quality was not THAT significantly different, to my eye.
And incidentally, the best news for digital recently, in my opinion, is that Wal-Mart (and other developers as well) can develop straight from disk or CD. It’s a Fuji Frontier printing process that more or less fools the one-hour developing machine into thinking it has a negative. (That’s ultra-simplistic, I know, but it’s the wayI like to think of it.) They come out as quickly as one-hour prints, and if your camera has good enough resolution, there is no way to tell it was originally taken with a digital. (There are no dots, in other words.)
I’ve been very impressed with the process and it has re-invigorated my picture taking. And FWIW, the COST is great, too – instead of those do-it-yourself machines that are just high-quality inkjets and still charge four or five dollars a sheet, these prints at MY Wal-Mart are 30 cents for a 4x6 and 1.25 for a 5x7. 8x10s are available as well but I don’t know the cost.
There’s my two cents!
I bought an Olympis camera and will be looking into scanners soon.
Thanks.