Guide to your Perfect Digital Camera 603
Alan Dang writes "I've just posted a new digital camera buyer's guide at FiringSquad titled A Tale of Two Cameras. It explains why the digital SLR may not be the best camera for you, and helps you narrow down your holiday digital camera buying to a short list."
Yay (Score:5, Informative)
Website (Score:5, Informative)
The eyes' depth of field (Score:4, Informative)
Well, actually most of what one sees is out of focus, since the eyes constantly adjust to favor a specific depth of field at any one time, leaving everything else fuzzy. If you compare this to an autofocussing camera, they are actually quite similar, and well within the "laws of physics". The future's flexible lenses will bring cameras even closer to the model used by the eyes.
Re:Yay (Score:3, Informative)
Anyway, the article itself was quite basic. "A portable digital camera it's what you need, unless you're a serious photographer; then get a SLR". Nice pictures though.
3 words.... (Score:5, Informative)
Decent very basic primer... (Score:5, Informative)
Basically, though, there are two types of camera users: Hobbyists and casual users.
A hobbyist wants a DSLR and is willing to buy accessories and learn to use it. If you're not willing to do these things, you'll be disappointed. I'm one of these guys, and I'd suggest that people find a cheaper hobby. As a side note -- $900 for the dRebel? *After* rebate? Shop around a little, pal...
Casual users are a little more involved, but it comes down to three things that are easy to answer once you get asked the questions:
Megapixels: You almost certainly don't need more than 4.
Zoom: Think carefully here. Most cameras are 3x zoom, but is that enough? Are you planning to take pictures at Disneyland or at, say, your kid's soccer game? At Disney for a posed shot, 3x zoom is enough. Otherwise, a 10x or 12x megazoom with IS might be worth spending money on.
Size: Remember that the best camera is the one you have with you when you need it. What is easiest for you to carry around?
Think that over, then go to www.dpreview.com and look at the test shots for the cameras that meet your specs. I usually end up recommending one of the Canon Sx00 series (S410, S500, etc) for a good balance of size and picture quality. I'd specifically stay away from the Minolta Z line myself (very disappointed with the Z3).
And for the love of God, shop around! Don't buy at Best Buy unless you're ready to pay $100-$200 extra. Go on PriceGrabber.com and consider the retailers with good reviews -- I won't specifically mention those I've bought from in the past, but the retailer reviews are a good guide; don't go with someone poorly reviewed to save $20.
Re:Funny (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Okay, what does SLR stand for? (Score:4, Informative)
Single Lens Reflex. In an SLR camera, you are looking through the lens when you put your eye to the viewfinder. In a simpler camera you are not.
Its funny people even buy printers... (Score:3, Informative)
I have an Alps MD-5000 dye sublimation printer, and at a cost of a buck a print, I can make prints quite a bit better quality than a consumer optical process can do, or those dyesub Kodak kiosks. But for $.24 a print, I can get them printed as true photographs at Wal(greens|mart), and will end up with a quality that is nearly as good for most stuff.
Considering the best ink-jets I've seen aren't even in the ballpark in terms of quality as compared to my Alps or a photo print from a Fuji processor, I find it funny people drop a couple hundred bucks plus ink on a photo printer.
The break-even point is in the thousands of pictures, in terms of cost, and you get grainy, pixelated prints of unknown long-term image stability.
Re:Okay, what does SLR stand for? (Score:3, Informative)
dpreview buying guide (Score:3, Informative)
One feature the dpreview buying guide [dpreview.com] doesn't ask you for is the orientation sensor. Not all new cameras have it; I know Canons generally do. The orientation sensor saves you the trouble of rotating from landscape to portrait because EXIF information is written that lets programs like jhead do it automatically. If you take photos in batches, I highly recommend buying a camera with this feature.
I do agree that dpreview is a great source of information overall, and I didn't have patience to work through much of the annoying flash presentation in this article.
Re:The eyes' depth of field (Score:5, Informative)
SLR's can also have a larger depth of field, it just depends on the aperature setting. And most SLR cameras have a Point and Shoot mode, at least at the hobbiest level.
After seeing these mistakes, I also wondered about the statements that you don't see what you get when use the LCD viewer of an SLR. That doesn't make sense to me at all.
Re:I have so many questions about digital cameras (Score:3, Informative)
Short answer: They don't, technically. Epson just came out with a digital rangefinder with an APS sized sensor (like most DSLR's have).
Long answer: The reason you don't want to use an LCD screen on a DSLR for most things is for creative control. Try manually focusing... with the current displays, this is very difficult because everything looks reasonably sharp unless its VERY out of focus. Another reason is the hardware autofocus modules on DSLR's use the mirror to reflect light into them. Your P&S cameras use an algorithm that calculates focus through the camera's CPU. Dedicated hardware is much faster than that.
a really good site for digital camera info (Score:4, Informative)
It has quite detailed reviews of pretty much every digital camera out there as well as sample images (there are even pages that allow you to compare images of the same thing taken by different cameras) and discussion forums.
I found it particularly useful when I was picking out my camera.
Few people consider... (Score:4, Informative)
People will spend $900 to $1500 on a digital SLR, then spend $130 on a "consumer" zoom lens, and find that the images produced are not very good.
There are 2 reasons for this:
The "average" lens is really good at "average" conditions.
Few people realize how much "post-processing" is done "in-camera" with a point & shoot. With a DSLR, most of it is taken care of afterwards in software, Photoshop, Capture1, or some other software. Sure, you can set a DSLR to do sharpening, saturation, contrast, and a few others in-camera... but letting the camera decide defeats part of the purpose of having almost infinite control that a DSLR offers.
There are a lot of things to learn with a DSLR. Consumer-grade lenses are not going to be much help in adverse conditions. Yet, many people bought a DSLR for just that reason. They don't understand that a great lens is 50% of the deal.
Trying to take wedding pictures in a dimly lit church with a $130 zoom lens ins't going to cut it. Wait til the bride finds out that Uncle Ted and his new toy didn't get any "dreamy" shots of the wedding. He got a bunch of dark, gloomy junk! Suddenly, the $3000 she saved on a pro wedding photographer doesn't seem like such a bargain.
Low light means you need better lenses. Fast action indoors (basketball, volleyball, etc) means you need something better than that $130 75-300 f4-5.6. You can do ok, probably better than the average point and shoot, but it takes some skill, and it takes time to learn how to handle the equipment, and most people don't have the patience. They just want a point and shoot that will do it for them. For those willing to learn, it's worth it.
Re:Decent very basic primer... (Score:4, Informative)
By this definition a hobbyist also has much deeper pockets! Enthusiasts do pay a premium, but you don't need to go DSLR necessarily.
I chose the Nikon CP 8800 (point-n-shoot) over the D70 or 20D because it's less than $800 (street) and has 10x zoom w/ IS. That is hundreds less than the D70.
Sure, the D70 is, in most technical respects, a better camera, but to take complete advantage of its strengths you need to spend another grip of money on lenses. And then you need to carry the lenses around with you in a big heavy bag, or compromise and mount one lens for a trip.
I know I am not the kind of guy who is interested in changing lenses all the time. I also know that I am not willing to spend a lot on new lenses, even if they are nice. Instead, I got a high-end point-n-shoot type camera, because it is cheaper and very flexible out of the box. I am willing to live with the lesser quality pictures. (though if you check the reviews and sample pics you will see it's still quite nice. good enough for this hobbyist, anyway.)
With the money I saved on the camera I was able to get some high-quality support equipment, too: Bogen-Manfrotto 3021 Pro [adorama.com] tripod with a Kirk BH-3 [kirkphoto.com] ball head/quick release plate.
other good links:
KenRockwell.com [kenrockwell.com] -- lots of good info on Nikon DSLRs and lenses. Be warned though, this guy has a very heavy DSLR bias and thinks you are a chump for getting a "prosumer" camera. If you are a pro, you probably are. If you are a hobbyist, maybe not, depending on your needs and budget. (If you only have about $1000 to spend and you want 10x zoom, you ain't getting a DSLR.)
DPReview.com [dpreview.com] -- Good reviews. Active forums, though they are mostly full of 1) whining and 2) pictures of cats.
Butterfly Photo [butterflyphoto.com] -- Good prices and a real manufacturer's warranty. Be warned, they WILL call to upsell you accessories before they finalize your web order, but if you don't want any they do ship the camera: it's not a NYC bait & switch.
Re:Why DSLR might not be right for you (Score:3, Informative)
1) You can see the picture the instant it is taken. Viewfinder does not go black.
2) Shutter can fire instantly. With a traditional SLR, you have to wait over 100mS for the mirror to flip up. This might be useful to take a picture of lightning strikes if you wire up an automated light-activated trigger.
But I will admit that I have only seen these in a catalog, and never actually touched one.
Re:Funny (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not sure how true that is anymore. Images from either my Canon Digital Rebel (3072x2048) or Powershot G1 (2048x1536) printed on my pretty low-end Epson C84 look very good. I don't have quite the same kind of gloss you'd get from a professional lab (Actually, they're much like a professional grade "matte finish"), but the image looks excellent. Plus, I get to control the details; I decide how bright the image is, ferinstance, I decide how/where to crop the image if necessary to change aspect ratio for the finished size.
Now, yes, it probably costs me twice as much to run off an 8x10 than it would to have a lab do it. But I get good output [0], I get it my way, and I don't have to leave the house. (And I'm not doing it in bulk, so I'm not worried about the cost difference.)
Just two years ago, I would have agreed with you; nowadays, as I was very surprised to find out, even low-end printers are pretty darned good.
-JDF
[0] Now, my little brother has Epson's high-end photo printer, and it generates output that's better than I've generally seen from labs, beautiful glossy output. It's not cheap, though; $400ish for the printer and six ink cartridges to try to keep up with get expensive after a while. But it's beautiful output.
Re:DSLR == Narrow depth of field???!!! (Score:3, Informative)
This is true but depth of field depends also on the focal length and magnification (which is related to the sensor size). The large magnification means that the lens "circle of confusion" should be smaller.
Try any "depth of field calculator", e.g. here [dofmaster.com] and you will see that on Canon A75 at 16.2 mm telephoto (which has the same filed of view as 105mm 35mm lens) the total depth of field for an object 3m apart at f/5.6 is 2.15m
In contrast for Canon 1Ds with 105mm lens and f/5.6 depth of field is only 0.27m
Of course on 1Ds you can stop the lens to f/22 and and have the same photo with large depth of field (and because of the small noice of the sensor, you can increase the ISO speed without much degradation of the quality and have reasonable shutter speed). With DSLR you have a choice of large and shallow depth of field. With most point-and-shots you have only large.
Re:DSLR == Narrow depth of field???!!! (Score:3, Informative)
No it's not.
DOF is not only dependent of the aperture, but also on actual focal length and how large your circle of confusion is.
While the smaller circle of confusion on compact digcams reduce the net DOF, the biggest difference is due to the very short focal lenghts these cameras use.
Since your typical digicam has a very small sensor compared to a DSLR it will use a short focal length to get a normal viewing angle. The increase in DOF due to this short focal length often makes it impossible to properly blur the background.
Of cource on DSLRs you can get optics with numerical aperture of f1.4 or even less. Good luck in finding a digicam with such a large aperture.
Re:Article not useful (Score:1, Informative)
Exactly. The article goes on to explain what depth of feild and exposure time is. If you don't know, you shouldn't be getting a digital SLR. Buy a fully manual film SLR for about $100 first to see if the SLR world is right for you.
nope, you be wrong (Score:2, Informative)
For reference, cheap digital P&S cameras typically have zoom lenses with focal lengths ranging from 3-50 mm, depending on the sensor size and zoom range. Minimum aperture numbers are usually between 2.0 and 5.6, with maximum aperture numbers rarely being larger than 8.0. Since they have such great depth of field at an aperture number of 8, they don't even bother putting on controls for smaller aperture sizes.
Re:Article not useful (Score:5, Informative)
A large part of the rest of the article deals with all those manual settings an SLR offers you and how bad that is when you just want to take a couple of quick snap-shots. Again, this is nonsense, because in reality a good SLR will give you the possibility of setting everything according to your preferences, but doesn't force you to do that. They have autofocus and auto-exposure just like cheaper models, and usually they choose these parameters more cleverly as well. As a bonus, they don't only allow you to take a quick snap-shot as any other camera, but a good one will take a dozen uncompressed, high-quality pictures in a matter of one or two seconds. You can choose the one you like best and discard the others. Now that gives you a good snapshot.
In summary, the more you pay for a camera, the more options and possibilities you will get. Surprise surprise, who would have thought that. Depth of field and ease of use are non-isues, the article gets this very wrong. But yes, if you couldn't care less what depth of field or aperture even is, you might never want to set these manually and thus not want to pay for such advanced optiones.
Re:Funny (Score:3, Informative)
If your CDR backups are failing within a couple of years, you are either using POS cheap media and/or not storing them correctly. Please be aware that there are only something like 12 companies in the world that manufacture CDR discs, and everything else is a rebrand of those. (i.e. There is no such thing as a Memorex or Sony CDR factory. These companies rebrand from multiple other companies, some with quality and some with POS media. (Sony doesn't make its own burners either. It rebrands from Lite-on. I'm not sure who makes the Memorex burners, though I can guarantee you they are rebranded OEM's.) Memorex is a particularly bad offender though because you can often find media from different factories on the same Memorex branded spindle, even though it all looks the same to the naked eye.) The correct course of action, of course, is to invest in some genuine Taiyo Yuden media (and watch out, because there are plenty of fakes,) and then burn multiple copies of your data and then store them in a dark, cool area with low humidity and constant environmental conditions. This WILL last for a long time. I have T-Y dating back to 1996 and it's still perfect.
Re:Article not useful (Score:3, Informative)
I've designed a remote capture tool for HDR imaging [uh.edu] while others have made replacements/supplements for Canon's own remote capture tool (Cam4You [jpegclub.org]) that support features like time-lapse photography and turning your digicam into a webcam.
Now if I wanted to upgrade my camera, I'm not sure I could get used to one that I couldn't control through my computer.
Why Digital SLR's Still Rule. (Score:4, Informative)
I have been doing photography since I was 12 years old. By "photography" I mean that I actually go take pictures, develop film and do my own prints. Recently it has been hard to do so due to do so because I haven't seen one bedroom apartments with dark rooms. Therefore, I decided to get a digital SLR instead. After months of investigation, I decided to go with Nikon D70.
Digital SLRs are not created equal. If you are into new things, take a look at cameras with 4:3 ration (Olympus E1 and Evolot). They have an ability to dust off the sensor before taking every shot, thus pics stay dust free. If you want to get a pro-sumer DSLR, take a look at Nikon D70 and Canon (although I recommend Nikon better due to its low noise). Why spend all $$$ on these cameras if you can find a point-and-shoot for cheaper? Here are my pointers:
Lenses.You are not creaing pictures with a camera. You create pictures with a lens. If you can exchange lenses, you give yourself more flexibility. This is a must if you want to take pictures of animals, close up shots, wide-angle shots, etc.
Color. Digital SLRs tend to have larger sensors with larger photosites. When you take pictures, you work with light and it is essential that you get enough light in order to process it correctly. Larger photosites do a better job, hence they have less noise. If you take a look at pictures produced by standard digital SLRS (based on 35mm cameras) vs. pictrures made by Olympus cameras that implement 4:3 technology (the latter have smaller sensors) you will see the difference.
No LCD monitor. Despite whatever you may think, this is a plus. First of all, your camera does not suck batteries for what you can actually see through a lens, secondly, your view is unaltered. You see colors and objects as they appear.
Depth of field. This one gets me everytime somebody says that DSLRs lack depth of field. In fact, if you have more than two brain cells, you will be able to vary the depth of field by adjusting your shutter speed and aperture. Most of cameras come with a "depth of field preview" button that will let you judge the picture that is going to be recorded.
There are several things that you must remember about digital SLRs (and digital cameras in general):
Run away from any person who tries to sell you a more expensive camera by saying "Well, it has more megapixels." Megapixel is a number that is related to the area of the sensor in terms of the number of pixels. Thus, a small linear enlargement (like adding a few megapixels to the horizontal side of the sensor) will affect the number. If a sales person tells you that a 6MP camera will give you much larger prints than a 5MP camera at the same sharpness, slap them in the face: the difference in size will be rather small. In order to increase the size of the print by 2, you'll have to increase the megapixel count by 4 in order to maintain the same image quality.
There are two different types of censors. CMOS and CCD. CMOS sensors are smaller than CCD. It appears (from my tests) that cameras with CCDs produce less noise; however, CMOS will soon improve. CCD technology is rather old. You can learn more about it by googling :)
Flash-sync speeds are really important for fill-in flashes. Typically, you want somethin above 1/250 in a pro-sumer camera. If you have no idea what a fill-in technique is, you'll learn it once you start taking pics during nice sunny weather.
Dust on sensors is pain in the rear. I have a lense that I use primary with my D70; thus, I haven't experienced it yet. You can clean it off yourself or take it to a shop. If you are concerned, take a look at Olympus cameras. E1 and Evolt use ultra-sound to take dust off the sensor before taking a shot.
Night photography sucks.... Yes. You heard me right. With a film camera, this is a pretty easy due to the lack of noise and purple frinding. With digital SLRs it requires more training, but can be done. I do not like high
ahmen, brothah (Score:3, Informative)
I got a Nikon D70 earlier this year. It's proven to be one of the best purchases I've ever made. One of the strongest examples of how it's improved my photography is shooting at night with slow shutter speeds.
With my film cameras, I was never willing to invest the time and wasted film to experiment with tricky lighting and night shots. I always wanted to be sure I got the moment, so I'd always use a flash.
With the D70, I could see immediately how my shots were turning out and adjust settings to dial in exactly what I wanted. It was a real breakthrough moment in photography for me.
Depth of Field, Quality etc. (Score:4, Informative)
The reason you can't reduce depth of field with most non-SLR cameras is that they have cheaply designed lenses that won't open up to large apertures. It would actually be both technically easy and (compared to SLRs) cheap to provide fast lenses which offered low depth of field creative options on non-SLR digital cameras, but the market doesn't seem to want them. Indeed, the 35mm SLR market was already moving to zoom lenses incapable of large apertures (and with commensurately poor low light performance) before digital cameras became competitive.
Two features of digital SLRs are simply legacy.
1) Interchangeable lenses. There remains a significant demand for cameras that can use the lenses originally developed for 35mm photography. There's no reason why cheaper lenses can be developed for smaller format digital cameras. Sony has started offering this option with its DSC-V and DSC-W cameras. You get Carl Zeiss lenses for far less than comparable 35mm lenses, but the camera CCDs so far cannot compete with the larger CCDs in the Canon and Nikon SLRs.
2) No digital preview. This seems to me a horrible and unnecessary flaw in digital SLRs. With a good non-SLR camera I can preview motion blur in my photographs and manually adjust exposure settings for time exposures while seeing the results in real time.
At the moment, we seem to be able to produce nicer CCDs at slightly larger sizes. Thus you can get better pictures from a 6.3MP Digital Rebel than from an 8MP Sony DSC-V3. By the same token if Hasselblad were to produce an even larger format digitial camera it would quite possibly be better still (and cost $100,000). In the end, I suspect the market will create smaller format digital cameras that offer all the benefits anyone much cares about at prices substantially lower than the Digital Rebel et al.
Two missing points... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why Digital SLR's Still Rule. (Score:3, Informative)
I won't argue that all Canons are better then all Nikons have less noise. But I can say that the current crop of Canon DSLR's (1Ds MarkII, 1D Mark II, 20D, DRebel) have noticibly less noise then their Nikon competition (1DX, 2DH, D100, D70) at the same relative pricepoint/feature set.
Of course Nikon's have generally better AF and exposure, so there's plenty of reasons to buy a Nikon.
On a side note, it'll be interesting to see how well the Nikon 2DX performs with it's CMOS sensor (a first for Nikon). Canon doesn't currently sell a DSLR with such high MP in such a small sensor. The 1DsII is full frame @ 16.6MP and the 1DII is 1.3x crop @ 8.2MP, so the 2DX has much higher photosensor density then either of those.
Bulls**t: Canon 300D and TONS of depth of field... (Score:2, Informative)
Pointless use of Flash, yes - but also inaccurate. I have a Canon 300D digital SLR - I love it. Depth of field depends entirely on lens aperture, or the f-stop setting - not on SLR vs. regular digital. An SLR does allow but not require way more control and fine-tuning of depth of field. If you set it at automatic, you have a very heavy, bulky snapshot camera with an expected wide depth of field. But if you want a particular result and are willing to invest in the knowledge of the tool, the SLR camera, this thing can get shots I couldn't touch with any regular SLR. Add a 100-300 zoom lens and I got portraits over the Thanksgiving weekend that had the older ladies in the family slipping me $20 to delete their picture... Sound like this guy had a bad experience with the tool and failed to care enough to learn to use it properly or just set it to auto and forget it.
And for me it was
control of exposure and focus and depth of field
image quality
interchangeable lenses!!!
attachment for a real flash unit
That sold me on it.
Not a very good article at all.
Whitespace (Score:3, Informative)
Well, yeah actually--to a point. In my house I tend to put the furniture and stuff "right up to the walls". There is "empty space" but it is towards the centre of the room, in the middle of my stuff.
Space is good! It allows movement.
I see no point in allowing so much movement arount the outside of the room (or a page) when all the useful stuff is crammed in the middle.
Space is only good when appropriately used. If the article was a 20' by 20' living room the furniture would be bunched up in the middle of the room--you could not sit on the chesterfield because the console TV and bookshelf would be shoved right up against the front of it. But hey, there would be six feet of empty space from any given wall so I guess you could sit on the floor.
Overall, the article is hardly worth being posted on Slashdot--editors must've had a brain fart. I'd think the authors would try to present themselves as experts in photography (and as such would know something about presentation). There is nothing there that justifies the use of flash. It is locked to one resolution so on anything 1024 or higher it looks ridiculous. It is not printer friendly. The navigation(paging) controls are INVISIBLE until you hunt down their location with the a mouseover. The content is fairly light, and couldn've been presented in a single HTML file. Basically, wasteful use of bandwidth.
If you are annoyed by flash or want a low-bandwidth summary, here it goes:
* 2 main choices: "regular" or SLR
* SLR has large sensor, "regular" is 1/9th the size
* SLR==expensive, "regular"==cheap
* SLR==hard to use but flexible (depth of field, exposure settings, etc) so good for "artsy" work (portraits, closeups, etc). Lots of accessories.
* "normal"==easy to use but less ability to play with settings--set up to work for general purpose use (snapshots, scenery, etc) but not really well suited to specialty phototgraphy
* SLRs have no LCD viewfinder screen (the ones that have an LCD screen only use it after the pic is taken). "Normal" cameras can use the LCD as a viewfinder.
* conclusion: save your money and don't buy an SLR unless you are a professional or enthusiast. Take a "normal" camera along if you want to take pics quickly and easily.
There. No waiting for flash to load, no paging through tiny screens, etc.
Re:DSLR == Narrow depth of field???!!! (Score:3, Informative)
Cheap digital cameras frequently have remarkably bright lenses -- f/2.8 is very common. The depth of field is quite large because the magnification of the image on the sensor is very low, because the sensor is so small. Even in macro mode, the magnification is less than on a 35 mm SLR (much less a medium or large format camera), because the sensor is small.
Obviously, saying that you only get a narrow depth of field with a 35 mm SLR is nonsense. If you use a wide angle lens (with less magnification), or you stop way down (making the aperture tiny, or a large F number), you can get a very deep field of sharp focus. The problem is that a telephoto lens stopped down that much won't gather much light, so you need a very long exposure. A compact camera at the equivalent of 105 mm (but actually 20 mm) at f/2.8 would require f/16 to get the same depth of field, or 5 stops (32x) slower.
What's really happening here is that the compact camera has the pixels much closer together than the 35 mm SLR. This makes the pixels much smaller and somewhat less sensitive to light, so you do need a bit more exposure. Of course, tiny pixels do mean more noise and possible diffraction problems, so it isn't free.
Re:Yay (Score:2, Informative)
A Tale of Two Cameras
The guide to your perfect digital camera
It was the best of times, it was the worse of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness...
There has never been a better time to buy a digital camera. The technology has matured and there is no longer any debate that digital photography is not simply and alternative to film, but its replacement. Digital cameras offer more value today than they ever have, and you can buy a camera today without having to worry about it being obsolete. Unfortunately, like the famous opening line from Dicken's classic novel, it's also a difficult time to find the right digital camera. Never have there been so wide a range of options andn so wide a range of quality. Fortunately, with Pfucata as your personal guide, you'll easily be able to find your perfect digital camera and it begins with by realizing there are two different types of cameras.
The Mental Image
We take our cameras to events and vacations, hoping to capture memories that will help us share and re-stimulate the emotions of the day. When we take a picture, we all have a vision of what we hope to share with others through the final photo. Knowing what you mental image looks like will help you decide whether the right camera for you is a standard digital camera or a digital SLR. Only the right camera will take pictures that tell your story.
A common mistake is to focus only on megapixels (MP) when shopping for a digital camera. This would be identical to buying a diamond ring by counting the number of stones in the piece and ignoring the carat size, clarity, and color of the gems.
Imagine that a 4MP digital SLR and a 4MP standard digital camera were both rings fitted with 4 diamonds. The "SLR" ring, however has stones that are 9 times as large and several grades better in clarity and color.
Digital cameras have an imaging sensor that actually captures the image. A typical digital SLR uses a large imaging sensor 9 times as big as the sensor in a standard digital camera. The larger sensor provides better image quality, which allows a 6 megapixel digital SLR to provide better ovaerall image quality than an 8 megapixel standard digital camera.
Although digital SLRs have a rear LCD screen
More importantly, differences in sensor size has consequences on depth of field, the way objects appear in or out of focus. This part is a bit technical, but this is what will determine which camera will tell your stories best.
Your eye has a lot of depth of field. Everything you see is sharp and in focus. The laws of physics make it impossible for a camera to do this.
A digital SLR has a shallow depth of field, which means it can be more difficult to get everything in focus. This is sometimes good and sometimes bad. Don't worry, this will make sense on next page...
Shallow Depth of Field
With a shallow depth of field, only a small part of the scene is in focus. In the photo of the red poppy on the left, notice how the details in the background are out-of-focus. Shallow depth of field is an effective way for drawing attention toward the main subject and removing the distrations from the background. When Hollywood filmmakers change the focus from the foreground to the background, they are taking advantage of a shallow depth of field to tell their story.
In the photo of the rose on the right, the photographer focused on the rain drops are the edge of the rose petal. Here, you can already see that the lower most petail is going out of focus while the background is so blurry, that it just looks like green velvet.
Extended Depth of Field
In this picture, the photogra
Re:Article not useful (Score:4, Informative)
slow to start up and there's a lot of delay between pressing the shutter release and actually taking a picture. You can mitigate this by half-pressing the shutter release to pre-focus/meter, but that's a problem with a moving subject (like a toddler!).
Try setting the camera to "action" mode, so it continuously re-focuses while the shutter release is half-pressed.
Second issue: on camera flash is evil. Only a few compact cameras give you a hotshoe. DSLR's will give way better flash results with their bounce flash/diffuser capability. Almost every flash picture I have yields terrible red-eye. Photoshop Album can generally fix this, but not all the time. Even without red eye, you generally get a sterile, harshly lit result.
As a former pro photographer, (newspaper, studio, wedding), I appreciate the advantages of an SLR, and how a pro or avid hobbyist benefit from these more costly, larger and more complex pieces of equipment. But a pro or avid hobbyist does not need to read this type of article. As for myself, I've grown too lazy and cheap to drag $2,000 and 8 lbs of camera gear around with me and go through the ritual of setting-up flash brackets and bounce cards anymore. If I need that stuff, I still have the gadget bag with over $5K of Canon gear. Instead, I use a Panasonic Lumix [panasonic.com], which is still at the upper-end of size and weight for most consumers.
On the other hand, when the typical consumer asks "what's the best camera" what they really want to know, when questioned, is what's going to give them good snapshots of the kids and easily print quality 4x6 and maybe the occasional 8x10. For them, something with a good zoom range, relatively quick focus and release time, decent low-light capability, built-in flash that sits-up high enought to avoid red-eye in most cases, and at least 3 megapixels, coupled with a pl