Monday, October 11, 2004
Cameras
I have been using a higher end consumer camera (Kodak DX7630) for the last few months, and I feel that the results are somewhat mixed. I have gotten a lot of very good images, but it seems to be somewhat of a shooting match to get them in marginal lighting situations.
I have been using the camera in 5.4 megapixels per image mode, even though it goes up to 6.1 megapixel per image. I suppose part of the reasoning for this it that I want to take as many pictures as I can on my storage card with suitable resolution, and I think that maybe 6.1 megapixels is perhaps overkill for a consumer camera (but I wanted that option anyway ;^{) ). Another concern is that the camera only supports JPEG (.jpg) images. There is not an option for "native" or "raw" format pictures, i.e. the compression is always lossy. I wish that I could save in .tiff or other non-lossy format, even if it took additional memory. Memory is cheap and getting cheaper all the time.
One other complaint- and this may be fairly generic to most digital cameras. It appears that only a small variation in background lighting causes a very large difference in the aperture/exposure setting. My 20 year old Canon AE-1 seems to do a much better (more consistent) job under low light conditions. Is this a common problem with modern digital cameras? I have also heard similar complaints about some of the Sony cameras.
I have been using the camera in 5.4 megapixels per image mode, even though it goes up to 6.1 megapixel per image. I suppose part of the reasoning for this it that I want to take as many pictures as I can on my storage card with suitable resolution, and I think that maybe 6.1 megapixels is perhaps overkill for a consumer camera (but I wanted that option anyway ;^{) ). Another concern is that the camera only supports JPEG (.jpg) images. There is not an option for "native" or "raw" format pictures, i.e. the compression is always lossy. I wish that I could save in .tiff or other non-lossy format, even if it took additional memory. Memory is cheap and getting cheaper all the time.
One other complaint- and this may be fairly generic to most digital cameras. It appears that only a small variation in background lighting causes a very large difference in the aperture/exposure setting. My 20 year old Canon AE-1 seems to do a much better (more consistent) job under low light conditions. Is this a common problem with modern digital cameras? I have also heard similar complaints about some of the Sony cameras.
