Can anyone tell me about these digital cameras and what is a good one and how do they connect or work with the computer? I have a excellent 35 mm Nikon camera but I can't get the pictures developed fast enough and sometimes when I get them back it is a poor developing and have to send them back to get redone. :'( :'(
Then when I run them through the scanner I lose picture quality and it takes a while to scan and save and then download to the computer. ??? ???
Any Suggestions?
Take your time in replying just looking and inquiring now have to wait for the funds to come in for one.
I'd like to know about this too. What I'd like is a really cheep one that takes pictures for the computer. And is really easy to work. Well, even if it aint cheep, at least it needs to be easy. Darn oldest son went and got married and sometimes this computer stuff gets over my head. And he was the one that was good at figguring computer stuff out. Jest can't trust kids these days.
I use a Kodak LS443 digital camera with their easy share software that came with the camera and the XAT image optimizer to get the pics down to the 15k required for this forum.
The camera has 3 pixtel settings, I use the middle setting because it gives a good quality picture for downloading. If I want a high definition pic, I'll go to the highest setting which is a 4 mega pixtel shot. The lowest setting is a waste of time IMO.
Just remember, you get what you pay for. Quality pictures don't come from cheap cameras.
Hi Stumpy
A site I recommend to research different cameras is Digital Photo Review: http://www.dpreview.com/
They have a lot of information, technical specs, and pictures.
A good place to buy is B&H Photo in Neeeew York City. Their site is: http://www.bhphotovideo.com
Nikon has some excellent cameras as do most manufacturers. The Nikon CoolPix is an excellent camera and one to consider. If you don't mind spending more money you can get a Nikon body with interchangeable lenses so you might be able to use your existing lenses. I think one model is the D-100 but I'm not real familiar with their product line. I have 2 Canon SLR-type bodies and a Sony with a 3" CD drive.
The Canon's use flash cards or 3M 1 GB Micro drives. I once had another Sony that used floppy disks. The big advantage of CD's or floppy disks is the storage media is inexpensive and you can take a lot of pictures then pop in another disk and shoot some more. The flash cards are fairly expensive (for big ones) and once they are full you have to down load them to a computer. Since I've been known to take 1000 or more pictures in a day I usually travel with my laptop and 3 micro drives. My Sony CD-1000 will store about 300 high quality images on a disk or as many as 1100 lower quality images. I can put about 300 high quality images from the Canons on a micro drive. If you don't shoot a lot of pictures at one time then the flash cards or other memory cards will work fine. Depending on the size you can store 25-100 pictures unless you get a really big card which can cost $400-$500. The smaller cards are around $50-$100.
Most of the digital cameras will connect to the computer with a cable. The older one's connected through a serial or parallel port and were very slow to transfer images. The new cameras use USB or Firewire interface. There is a new USB-2 (I think they call it) that is very fast. A USB-1 interface is not very fast so I would recommend one of the other two. I currently use Firewire connections and instead of a cable I like to use a card reader. I also have a device that lets you plug the card into a slot on the laptop. You can just pop the memory card or micro drive into the reader and it acts just like another disk drive. In fact I use my micro drives and flash cards to carry data back and forth to work.
Another option to consider is a film/slide scanner. I use a Nikon scanner for my 35 negatives and slides. I might add that since I got my Canon digital bodies I have not shot any film, mainly for the reasons you mentioned. I do however have many hundreds of negatives and slides that I like to play with. The new film scanners can do some amazing things such as color restoration and scratch removal. I've scanned some negatives from 1975 with really faded color and it was amazing how they looked. If you get one, look for a model that will scan at 4000 dpi. This will give you some nice big files to work with. With either digital or scanned film/slide pictures you can edit them and do all kinds of neat things with a photo-editing program, such as color correction, brightness and contrast, sharpening, and a whole bunch of other net things. There are many good photo-editing programs on the market. The best is Adobe Photoshop but it is expensive, about $600 or so. Many cameras or scanners come with Adobe Photoshop Elements. It is about $100 if you purchase it outright and it works very well and has many of the more useful Photoshop features. Since I've can now edit and print my own picture I am finally able to get them to look the way I intended. I know longer have to depend on the automatic settings of a photo-processing machine and it's unskilled operator.
Hope this helps, let me know if you got any specific questions.
Mark
Wallyworld has a kodak on sale from 7 to 10 tomorrow for 99 bucks. You couldnt get me withing 10 miles of there though on the day after turkey.
Digital camera are getting cheaper and cheaper everyday, I picked up my HP photoshop 620 "2.1 Megapixels" for only $100 canadian. It only stores 6 pictures at its bext quality, the reason for that is that it only ahs a very small on-board membory of 8megabytes. New camera are comming with upto 128megabytes now a days. but of course you can be cheap and pickup a 5megapixel camera for about $300 that ahs 64Mb of onboard membory them go out and pickup a 256 megabyte flash card for about $120 which is well worth the investment, pretty much all of the digital camera use USB to connect to the computers. you can even get docks for them, you plug the usb cable into the dock, and then all y7ou have to do is set your computer on the dock and it will automaticly downlaod the pictures.
I use a Panasonic DMC-FZ1 camera. It's only 2m pixels but has a 10x optical zoom lens. Makes it much more versatile, and the higher quality lens makes up for the lower resolution to some extent. The lens makes distant shots much more practical as I shoot some surfing and wildlife stuff.
Some things I'd suggest:
1) Dont worry about digital zoom, it's just the same as blowing up a section of the image in photopaint once you have downloaded it to the PC. You will loose image quality. An optical zoom is usefull as it enlages the image before the camera sensor scans it (so you get a full quality image). Most cameras have digital zoom, it's just not very much use : :)
2) Make sure your camera has rechargable batteries, or is able to take some cheap Lithium Ion rechargables that you can put in an external charger. Some of the cheaper camera come with normal alkaline batteries, and they will EAT them.
These days get a camera with at least 2m pixel resolution, more if you want to be able to make large high quality prints. However if you just want to email or post to the web you will probably use it at a lower resolution anyway.
Ian
Walmart has a kodak easyshare 3.2megapixle camera on sale tomorrow from 6am till 11am for $99.74
Ianab's post offers excellant advice
Order on line ...LINK (http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.gsp?product_id=2413374&cat=47601&type=19&dept=3944&path=0%3A3944%3A3946%3A3959%3A47601)
Yes cheaper and cheaper, my olympus 360 was almost 400 dollars but even though it is only 1.3 mega pixels it takes pictures like the big boys. Yes also to rechargable batteries. The part to not over look is your printer. I got an HP photo smart and the print quality is faboulous. And finaly get Xat and irfanview, both free but have such good properties you don't need any other programs.
Thanks for all of the information. I will not go to Wal-mart the day after Thanksgiving or Christmas it is way to dangerous there are a lot of crazy shoppers on these days.
There is a lot of info to comprehend I have an really good printer it is an HP 895 deskjet and if I get a good cd from the developer I can get a really good picture from it. But I have had to take a lot of cd's back to the developer to get them reburned I have one to take back now because they put the pictures on it backwards (from the wrong side of the negative.) :( :'(
I guess there is a lot to research on these cameras. Will keep you all posted on my decision.
Delcy
Stump Jumper,
It's not just pixels it's the glass also, since you use nikon you know about good lenses, i also use nikon and bronica for film but went to digital to use for ebay stuff, my wife bought hers to send pics of my daughter to seattle ( mother in law) fast and easy. As with computers it's better to spend a little extra now than upgrading too soon. My wife has a believe sony dsc-707, long carl zeiss vario sonnar 6x optical zoom 5+ megapixels, too big for me however I wanted something compact to take skiing I have the sony dsc-s85 4.1 mega pixels and carl zeiss vario sonnar 3x optical zoom. Both do and awesome job, optics about equal you do notice the xtra pixels, both use removable memory sticks. good luck, glenn...
Mark
Thanks for that review link. I could have used it last night as I was trying to find out about the camera in Best Buy's ad. My cousin went to Best Buy at 12:30 AM and was SECOND in line. He spent the night and all morning there waiting for friends and family to pick up the stuff that he was holding for them. ;D We did get three digicams though. ;)
I have a Canon Elan 7E SLR, and still plan to use that for higher quality prints as the digital SLR's are still out of my price range.
I wouldn't go less then 3 meg. but at around 4 or so you start to overrun most lower level printers level of quality. I agree that glass is VERY important and wouldn't go less than 3x optical. Digital zoom is mostly just a waste of time and money.
I like the different pixel settings, they can help alot. If you have a good media transfer you can run little or no compression all the time.
One very important thing to remember is if you have an older computer the bigger files can be HARD to work with. If you can burn your own CD's that can be a big plus.
P.S. Mark, have you ever heard of making the first shot count ??? ;D
I don't keep up on what the latest and greatest is in digital cameras but I can give a review on my now antique Olympus C-2020 I bought about 4 years ago. Guess it would be a mid to high-end consumer camera for the time. 2.1 MP and the price was somewhere north of $600. Great pictures for the web and has produced a lot of high quality 8X10's if you do the cropping in the camera. If I don't I get "grain" or whatever you call it in the digital world. Take about 500 pic's a month with it and it has never let me down.
Now for the best part. The camera was about 2 years old and out of warranty. All of a sudden I couldn't download pictures to the PC. Called Oly tech support for help expecting to pay a bill for service. The tech guy spent two hours with me on the phone to troubleshoot it and found out I had screwed up the driver on my PC. Didn't cost me a penny. When this old dog dies the first thing I am going to look at is another Oly but will also give the other brands a chance.
When I bought my camera I thought about getting a new printer. The only one on the market at the time in a reasonable price range that would supposedly produce archival prints was the Epson. Bunch more of them now but there is a high paper and ink cost with all of them. Decided to try out ALL of the online processors and they all offered free trial prints. Finally settled on Ofoto. Beam the pic's off and they show up in the mailbox about 3 days later. High quality and reasonable cost.
Since I am windy tonight thought I would also add IrfaView is the best thing since sliced bread for looking at your pic's on the harddrive.
Tried the XAT image optimizer for reducing pixel count but never could get the hang of it. Looked like I was looking at my pictures through the bottom of a milk glass.
If you like to print you might consider a continuous ink system. I use one with my Epson printer. It uses 6 4oz ink bottles that are plumbed to the print head with small tubing. Costs about $40 for the six bottles of ink and you can print hundreds of pictures before you have to add more ink. I don't think anything of printing 8x10's because the cost is so low. With this Epson printer you can print 13x19's that are absolutly beautiful. I perfer to use the Epson Heavy Duty Matte paper but have used canvas, glossy, and a bunch of different specialty papaers. Before I got this system I printed very few pictures because the cartridges where so darned expensive.
Well I bit the bullet today and stopped by walmart on my way to a saw job, it was about 730 am. I walked right in picked up the on sale kodak camera and was out of the store in less than 15 min.
the camera was the one on sale for $99.74, but I didnt get off that easy, WM also had the 128 mb memory chip on sale for 23 bucks, and I had to buy some rechargeable batteries, but not bad in all.
I took some pics of my new saw shed, If I can figure it all out tonite I wll try to post them.
Sure is a thick instruction book for such a small camera! ;D
If I cant figure it out I may have to actually read it. :o
Furby - I used to be real thrifty when I was using film cause I could easily outshoot my budget, but with the digital cameras it so much fun taking picture and not having to worry about the cost.
Kevin
You should do OK with that camera, nothing flash but good enough to be a real camera. Extra memory and rechargable batteries you will not regret. Welcome to the digital world. 8)
Ian
Went to Wallmart yesterday to get that $99 camera the 4 that they had in stock were gone so I got the Concord 4060 4pix. It comes with a 57 page manual. The kids are coming over for dinner tonight so I'll have my son-inlaw get it puter ready & show me how to use it, ezer then reading that book 3 times.
Posting pics for 1st time
Buck Pole 2003
(https://forestryforum.com/images/04_01_03/mouse%20retouched.jpg)
can anybody tell me what I'm doing wrong with posting pics, need to make them sharper.
QuoteIf you like to print you might consider a continuous ink system. I use one with my Epson printer. It uses 6 4oz ink bottles that are plumbed to the print head with small tubing. Costs about $40 for the six bottles of ink and you can print hundreds of pictures before you have to add more ink. I don't think anything of printing 8x10's because the cost is so low. With this Epson printer you can print 13x19's that are absolutly beautiful. I perfer to use the Epson Heavy Duty Matte paper but have used canvas, glossy, and a bunch of different specialty papaers. Before I got this system I printed very few pictures because the cartridges where so darned expensive.
Do you know if this system is only used on the Epson printers.
I don't print that many photo's because of the ink cost.
After all these posts I'm on digital camera over load ???
Gonna take awhile to make sense out of all of it. Guess I'll chew on it for awhile. . . go look at camera's . . . come back and chew some more. . . go look some more, til it all starts making sense.
Lots of good info. just hard to digest all at once. ;D
Glad someone brought it up.
Gus
Hi Bill B
I got mine from Media Street. They have them for Epson and Canon printers. Here is a link: http://www.mediastreet.com/index.html
Thanks Mark