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Hardware

Digital Camera

Well, I’m finally thinking about getting a digital camera. Not quite sure if I want one, but seriously thinking about it. Could be a fun toy. Saw this one. I’m wondering if anyone has it, and what they think of it? Good/Bad? Better recommendation?

Might be fun to have. I’m going to think about it a bit. Not something I plan on doing right away.

Needs:
Decent Quality
Decent battery life
Zoom
Removable Memory (most likely SD) so I can upgrade, and carry an extra card
Cross Platform (Mac/PC support)
USB
Reasonable priced (I’m not a professional, nor will I use it daily. It’s mainly a toy to me).

4 replies on “Digital Camera”

On the whole, the Canon’s are a pretty hard game to beat when it comes to digital cameras. They’ve been doing professional lenses and optics for many many years, and similarly with their involvement in digital imaging in various areas. Both myself and many others I know have various models from the PowerShot range and I know of no complaints πŸ™‚

You’ll probably notice a fairly significant difference between any digital camera that takes regular AA’s and those that use purpose specific rechargables…. whatever you do, don’t use cheap no-name batteries as you’ll drain them in a number of shots (I made this mistake when I borrowed a friends a few years back!). Grab some 2200mAh or thereabouts rechargables and you should get more snaps out of a set of batteries.

I’m currently using a PowerShot G3 which I get the joy of getting several hundred photos out of one charge; the downside of this is that if I get stuck without my charger somewhere I’m going to be in trouble, I can’t just buy a readily available battery and be up and shooting again. The AA’s give you the convenience of being able to buy batteries just about anywhere which can be great if you run low. As a tradeoff, you might only get 40-80 photos out of a set of batteries (it’ll vary a lot depending on things like whether the LCD is on, if you’re using the flash, etc).

Glancing at the spec sheets, it looks like there’s a NiMH pack available to go with the A310 anyway, in which case you can experience the benefit of a longer-life battery with the backup of knowing you can grab some AA’s if your battery runs out on you.

Picture quality has been excellent – I’ve gotten several large blowups from the photos and they’re indistinguishable from regular film prints. I tend to stick with a larger memory card (CF in my case) and shoot at best quality/resolution; disk space is cheap, and if I ever need a blowup then I don’t have to worry about pixelation or JPEG artefacts! It’s also great being able to crop a photo down before getting prints (or even just for storing)…

The software for downloading photos is feature packed, although not to my asthetic tastes πŸ˜‰ Most of the modern cameras support WIA which means you can access the images without having to use the camera software if you like.

If the quality of the pictures isn’t the most important factor you can buy almost any camera.

what I consideed when I bought camera to my girlfriend (her criteria wasn’t the best possible picture quality either)

– Size, is it easy to carry or do you have to think twice when going out.

So she jsut wanted to be able to take it with her to town and take photos of our son etc.

then my additional criterias:

– uses normal AA sized batteries (accus) I had already a camera that uses those so reloading them isn’t a problem. Maybe lithium ion accu is good enough and seems to be the trend anyway, they are expensive to replace thou.

– how fast the camera is? So how long does it take to “boot” and how long does it take to take a photo (some cameras are slower than others. The complain I get from my mother who has a Sony is that she is always late when taking a picture because it’s not instant and the camera takes a long time to boot.)

– Optical zoom, it should be at least 3x to be usefull, bigger zoom adds to the size usually.

– uses memory I can use elsewhere (mmc cards)

– price

So I bought an Casio qv-r40, it has really fast boot and picture take time. It was quite cheap and it was conveniently small. Uses MMC memorycards.

picture quality isn’t the best possible, but the newer 5Mpix model is better in that regard afaik.

My other camera has more bellss and whistles so when I do seriuos photography I use that and it’s manual controls.

But as others have mentioned you can’t really go wrong with a Canon, downside with a Canon is that you usually pay a little extra compared to other brands.

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