Digital Cameras

ArtLady

SGF, Supreme Grumble Framer
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Oct 13, 1999
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Lawrenceville, Georgia
Help, we need a good digital camera to allow us to provide images to inquiries over the internet. Any recommendation or personal experiences with digital cameras would be appreciated.
 
I recommend a mid priced model by Kodak. These seem to give the best images for the price and the software is relatively easy to use. Digital cameras are not the answer to everything. They are expensive, eat batteries and are very time consuming. I sell digital cameras but I have stopped using them. Film works better for me. Film is cheap, quick and it's easy to keep the images. I found with digital I would delete images rather than fill many discs with the large files. Now I wish I still had some of those images. Scanning from a print is the fast, cheap way to get images on the net.
Scarfinger
 
My experience is with the Sony cameras that use a floppy disk for storage. This seems to be a very logical way to store the images. Floppies are cheap and each disk holds 40 images. If you are at a party, you can take pictures and then give everyone a copy on a floppy disk, even before leaving the party. No need to download or upload.
 
I use a video camera and a snappy to convert it to the screen. My Sharp Viewcam takes an excellant picture and I can store oodles on a cassette.
 
I have been doing some research. Based on comments from the web the Nikon Coolpix 950 is the critics and consumer choice for digital cameras. Aparently while it may not have as many pixels as other models the contrast and color are outstanding. There is also a new printer called a Hewlett Packard photosmart P1000 that will allow the sandisk to be inserted int he side and print directly from the disk. I could get set up for about $1150 net of sales tax. I have a scanner and have been using regularly but I has drawbacks. It is slow and the scans are not very good quality. Almost everything on my website was a scan from a photo. Used a panoramic disposable camera to do the wide plaza photo shot of the storefront. We have a 35mm camera to do some of the shots but the results have been unpredictable. Anyone out there with any experience on the products mentioned above?
 
Making a good photograph is just like picture framing. Good results only come from a person that has learned and practised the craft. For some reason people still think if you buy a "good camera" all you have to do is point and click. Not so! 35mm, digital, scanner or whatever doesn't matter if you are not starting with a good image. A good image is based on the original design concept plus the ablility to handle the technical difficulties of photography. A good photograph can readily be shot with a 100 dollar camera by a skilled person. before you spend thousands on equipment and still don't get the pictures that you need, I suggest you hire for a few hundred dollars a skilled person to get the images that are so important to the promotion of your business. Perhaps you have a photographer customer that supports your business buying custom framing that you could support in return.
Scarfinger
 
A little more on digital cameras. A 35mm color negative when digitized to give full photographic quality is many megabytes. It may be able to be compressed so that one image can fit on a floppy disc. For example a Kodak picture CD of 650 meg will hold about 100 pictures. A good quality megapixel digital camera produces an image file of about 1 megabyte so 1 will fit on a floppy. This is a good but not high quality image. The idea above of 40 images on a floppy disc means very low quality images. These images may be ok for thumbnails on the internet but that's about it. If you think this level of photo quality is fine for all your pictures you will be sorry one day. Then there is the matter of storing these images - it's more expensive than film. I had a customer buy a digital camera from our store. He came back a few days later indicating he was going on a long trip - what did he need to take with him? I suggested he would need 3500 dollars worth of memory cards or to travel with a laptop with Zip discs. He took his 35mm camera. If you think a scanner is slow wait until you start downloading these picture files from the digital camera. But then again you could buy a new computer with USB or Firewire. If you have a good Photograph your scanner ($150) should give you fast quality results. And if you use film you will maintain a library of full quality images. Some of the world's main news agencies now realize that since going digital their photographers have been deleting images because of storage demands and their archives are sadly lacking of the pictures that are so valuable in later years. I have gone back to film and am back to the good results that I used to have.
Scarfinger
 
Over the past few days I have been producing a brocure with the Olympus C-900 (I think it is the D-400 over that side of the world), this camera has been extremly easy to use and I have actually acheived a good result with my photo's.
 
I thought you all might like to know our conclusions regarding the digital cameras. One day I was in Office Max (still undecided) and I found a Visioneer One Touch Scanner. When I saw the image quality I purchased it on the spot and went back to my 35MM camera. Now I buy rolls of twelve pictures; And if I am in a hurry go to a one hour developer. The scanner with its copying function, OCR Reader, Faxing, Emailing buttons/internal function is wonderful. My next acquisition is an HP1000 Ink Jet Printer. Beware, the new scanner caused printer problems when installed with a pass through to my NEC860 Superscript Printer through the parallel port. We have resolved that problem by installing and USB Port/Card and getting the scanner off the parallel port. Installing the USB is easier with Windows 98, so this weekend we are installing Windows 98.

After considering the resources that would be taxed on my computer and the image quality for the money ($950 for a Cool Pix Nikon)we felt that the 35mm was great for now. It seems every camera we considered was lacking in some area ie Contrast, color intensity etc.
 
The other thing to consider is a film scanner like the Nikon Coolscan 3 or Polaroid Sprintscan series. On the low end an Olympus ES-10 might be a good choice. I know several pros that use Walmart to get their negatives developed in less then an hour and scan and transmit their images to their destination within minutes
 
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