Mouse Clix
By: Hobie Lunin
Lights, Action, Camera!
OK, but which camera? That is the question I have been hearing
lately. What digital camera should I
buy? Excellent query. It all depends on what you will be doing
with your photos. If you plan to do
with them what you did when you had a film camera, you will be printing them
out on glossy paper and putting them in photo albums and/or sharing them with
your family. If that is the case and
you are only planning to make prints the same size as you got with your film
camera, a low resolution (read less expensive camera) could be your
choice. The same would be true if you
were planning on sending the photos via the e-mail or posting them on the
Internet on your own or a commercial site.
By a commercial site, I mean setting up an album on Yahoo, e.g., and
directing your friends and family to see them there.
In other words, if you are
going to only need lower resolution photos, you do not need to buy the highest
resolution camera. Today, camera
resolution is defined in megapixels and low resolution would mean a camera with
say 1.3 to 2 megapixels. The low end
here is about $100 and the image quality will be poor. You must be ready to spend $250 for a decent
camera in this resolution range.
If you intend to make
enlargements and want high resolution, a camera in the 2.1 to 3.3 megapixels
range will be what you want and the price range will be $350 to $650. A high-end camera is for the professional or
the camera enthusiast. 3.3 megapixels
and up will run $700 to $1200. Most
cameras offer auto focus and some have manual over ride. They mostly will have flash and offer
Compact Flash or Smart media storage (these are removable computer chips that
can hold your photos until you are ready to load them into your computer). Some cameras offer storage directly within
the cameras to a floppy disk or even a CD.
Most have LCD, liquid
crystal displays, on back of the camera allowing you to see what the photo will
look like before you take it. Some have
viewfinders as well, which are helpful if there is bright sun on the LCD making
it difficult to see. Many cameras offer
the opportunity to shoot in color or black and white while others offer sepia
tone and other color preferences. The
number of photos that your media can hold will range with the resolution you
may have set (the greater the resolution, the less number of photos can be
stored in the same storage space).
After taking a shot, you can
see it on the LCD screen in order to decide whether you may want to take
another. You can usually delete a photo
you do not like, to save space on your storage device. Some cameras offer
the opportunity to take short videos as an alternate to a still picture and at
least one camera can take a Polaroid picture at the same time it takes a
digital photo.
For those of you who want
the highest resolution photos, remember that you may have to upgrade your
printer such that it can adequately produce the same high resolution onto the
paper, otherwise the advantages of the higher number of pixels will be
lost. Further, you may want to consider
a dye-sublimation printer, which will give you professional photos but cost
$350 and up. In addition, consider using glossy (also pricey) paper, which can
give you great (sharp and brilliant) prints.
You will also need an image
editor. The best is Adobe PhotoShop
(it’s the one professional use), but if you are going to just be using the
camera for sending photos on the Internet or making snapshot size copies, an
inexpensive editor like PhotoFinish 4 will do a good job for increasing
contrast, cropping and retouching.
Whatever format your camera
uses, e.g., jpg, pict, tiff or bmp, you may want to use your photo editor to
change it to .jpg as it can be seen by most people receiving your photo by
e-mail and it is also easy to upload and use on a web site.
What ever you buy, spend
enough time to read all the literature that came with it. This is not as easy as loading the film in
your average camera and just shooting away.
Menus in the camera will give you a large assortment of choices to make
with your photos and you should have some understanding of whatever it is you
will be creating.
My own preference was to buy
a camera that uses a floppy as a storage device as it is easily popped in and
out and dropped into any computer to see the results and make a quick “proof”
on plain paper. At low resolution, I
can get 20 or 25 photos on one floppy, which can be reused after I have stored
the photos in my hard drive. At the
highest resolution, I can only put one photo on each floppy. This produces a very fine photo when printed
out on a 8 ˝ x 11 inch glossy sheet.
The battery is rechargeable and I can take many photos before I will
need to recharge. Recharging can be
done at any 110-volt outlet and takes an hour for a full charge, but only a few
minutes if just a couple more shots are needed.
For camera reviews, check
out Consumer Reports or the following sites: www.bhphotovideo.com,
www.dpreview.com, electronics.cnet.com, www.pcphotoreview.com,
www.photoalley.com and www.mysimon.com. If you want to save the sales tax
on your purchase, consider purchasing it on the Internet. In that case, you must make your decision on
the camera and know the exact model you want before ordering
Hobie Lunin is a Computer
Instructor and Consultant. He can be
reached at mouseclix2@yahoo.com
Previous articles can be
seen at http://mouseclix.tripod.com