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MooseAndSquirrel
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MooseAndSquirrel
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PostWed Apr 09, 2003 6:28 pm 
I have an Olympus D-460Z Zoom digital camera. Got it as a gift 2-3 years ago. 1.3 MP- ok for 3x5 pics but pretty limited now. Fellow digital owners- I've noticed too many times in images taken by it that the highlights are very frequently washed out. I've read somewhere that digital camera's light capturing device (the actual word escapes me!!) have problems capturing bright areas well in a scene- compared with film cameras. I guess they have a narrower exposure latitude too. Is this true, and if so just for the lower tier of digital cameras? I can't imagine Prosumer/Pro Digital ones being inferior to film cameras in this regard by this stage. Also, one other beef I have about my Olympus and that I've heard at least for some other digital brands is the very frustratingly long lag time between exposures! Thanks for any input! M&S

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Synchro
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PostWed Apr 09, 2003 9:36 pm 
the lag time you are talking about has been fixed in many camera now adays. though it is not totally gone in your better cameras with more cache in them it is handled nicely. the old adage of "you get what you pay for" definitely applies to today's digital camera. as for the highlight thing, CCDs have come a LONG way in the past few years too. many prosumer cameras can rival 35mm cameras now. a lot depends on how the printing is done if you are comparing printers. I have been shooting for years, part of that professionally. I have a BFA in photography and for the most part only shoot digital for most things. I have an Olympus E-10 and use it all over the place and love it. for most of my work the quality is great. This year I hope to trade up to a Canon D60 or a 1Ds. After I saw what the digitals can do and the quality they can now put out i was amazed. the higher convienience of a digital outweighed the lower quality in some cases (I was used to shooting 2 1/4 cameras which still blows away digital, much less results from my 4x5 camera). Don't get sucked into features with cameras if you every decide to get a new camera. the current trend in the market is to treat digital cameras like the way the printer market has gone. cram as much crap features into one camera and hope that a buch on middle america is wowed enough to buy it. how often will you use the movie feature? how often will you print directly from the camera? just rememebr that 99% of the time you will need the basic features of a camera. shutter, f-stop, light meter, focus, battery life, cache size (how many pictures ytou can take back to back, the lag time as you called it), number of MegaPixels. that is it. anything other feature is a nicety. then decide how big and how heavy you are willing to go and begin narrowing down your choices. if you are going to take it backpacking you have vastly different needs than a camera you might carry on vacation. so you might have to sacrifice soemthing or pay more for the quality. it depends. I personally am not willing to take a $2000 or $8000 camera backpacking. a $600 perhaps. I still would like the Pentax s430 as my backpacking camera. with batteries it'll weigh 1/2 pound. I just don't have the cash and am saving up. heck the photo printer itself is a HUGE scam. for $.29 each or less you can get a 4x6 digital print done these days. how many $.29 prints does it take to equal the cost of a photoprinter, the paper and the ink. get your stuff processed by some place that has a Fuji Frontier machine and you will be golden and amazed at the quality.

It could be that your life is meant only to serve as a warning to others.
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El Puma
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PostThu Apr 10, 2003 6:49 am 
On the printing front - even Costco at 0.14$PP for 4x6's does an outstanding job for its purpose. Plus there are a number of eMail-Printers available - you e-send your pix there and for about 0.30$ they snail-send you the prints... I went digital and traded most of my SLR stuff toward a Nikon 5000 that I am very happy with. Has all the features I use (and more that I don't clown.gif) and is relatively compact for a 5MB unit. Could not bring myself to part with my 1970's Minolta SRT101 though. I like the fully manual setup - and I'm planning to teach my kids photography with it. IMHO you have to learn that way to get the basics down before moving on to fancier stuff. On the digital front, the main difference I noticed in two 11x16's I compared side-by-side with analog is the sharpness of the high-contrast edges. They are "parallel" pics of Mt.Stuart outlined against a sunrise sky taken from the Cathedral Rock vicinity. In the 35mm print from the Minolta, the skyline ridges have a soft, almost wraparound feel to them whereas in the digital, one pixel is dark, the next pixel is sky - there is no visible transition "grey-zone" (definitely two-dimensional in that area of the picture). Anyone else ever noted something similar?

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#19
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PostThu Apr 10, 2003 8:33 am 
Great thread with lots of good info. I have always enjoyed taking pitchures, but never put much effort into increasing quality. Just tried to record the trip, mostly using a K1000, then switching to video, then disposables and now a 3.2 meg point and shoot digital. The last couple posts by synchro and El Puma have me confused. One of the reasons I went digital was so I WOULD NOT end up with a bunch small prints. Do most digital users still get small prints made?

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El Puma
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PostThu Apr 10, 2003 10:02 am 
I do get some prints done to mail to friends/parents/relatives sans technology. However, the digital advantage is to take 25 pix of the same subject, can the ugly ones, keep only one or two, and only print what you want (after modifying, if you want). I still like prints to show around; always dragging out the laptop with Powerpoint gets too tedious when sitting around the kitchen table in the evening. Another BIG advantage of digital is the storage: I have an external LaCie 120GB HD (mostly for DV); it's great to have all the thumbnails available instead of boxes of negatives and slides, or worse, walls lined with albums (albi?)... One more thing to consider when going digital and thinking MP's: If you ever have the chance of projecting your stuff via PowerPoint, you'll want 5MP! But it does look really cool.

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