Mulligroup Email Newsletter - Change Your Camera

Effective Pixels, Digital Zoom, Optical Zoom, CF, SD, MMC; buying a digital camera can be a pretty confusing affair. If you’re thinking of buying a digital camera, lets take a look, item by item, at what you’ll need to know to make sure you get the camera that’s most appropriate for you.

The first thing you need to decide is what kind of a photographer you are. Are you a point and shoot first, ask questions later type? Do you think an f-stop is a type of musical notation? If so, you’re in luck. You won’t be spending a lot of money. Almost all consumer cameras have excellent auto features, and even the lowest megapixel cameras are capable of making excellent prints up to at least 8×10. The main thing to look for in this category is Optical Zoom. Zoom lets you visually pull your subject closer or push it farther away without changing your position. A lot of cameras will boast a high Digital zoom, even though they have a relatively small Optical Zoom. What’s the difference? An Optical Zoom is accomplished by moving the optics inside the lens to magnify or shrink the size of the image hitting the camera’s image sensor. This lets you use all of the pixels the camera has available to it. A Digital Zoom, on the other hand, simply takes a section in the middle of the camera’s sensor and enlarges it, throwing away the pixels around the outside of the image, resulting in a lower quality image. This is something you could do yourself in the computer by simply cropping out the outer portions of the image and scaling up the cropped version until it has the same number of pixels as the original file had, just without all the focus and sharpness. Moral here; Optical Zoom good, Digital Zoom bad.

Many people obsess over the Megapixel rating of the cameras they look at. In the consumer category, most people are keeping their photographs on their computers and e-mailing them to friends and family. Anything over 1 Megapixel is just fine for the internet (the average camera phone is just one third of a Megapixel). The most demanding use these images will ever get is a 4×6 or maybe a 5×7 from a home inkjet printer, or from the digital lab down the street. 3 Megapixels will get you a great 5×7. Since you’d be hard pressed to find a camera under 4 Megapixels these days, unless you have specific plans to make large prints, you don’t really need to worry about the camera’s resolution. It’ll be enough. You can spend your time more effectively researching how the camera handles and what sort of auto features it has. Another feature to investigate is what type of battery the camera uses. Some cameras use common ‘AA’ size batteries. If this is the case, make sure you buy rechargeable batteries. Not only will you save money, but in devices that suck back electricity like there’s no tomorrow (I’m lookin’ at you, Mr. Digital Camera with Giant LCD Screen), a set of Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH) rechargeable batteries will actually last you longer in use before needing recharging than a set of regular alkaline batteries will.

If you prefer to have a little more control over the photographic process, get ready to hand over some bigger dough. The next step up from the consumer point and shoot is a category sometimes referred to as ‘Prosumer’. These cameras are meant for advanced amateurs and enthusiasts.

Basically, photographers who don’t get paid. They usually look a lot like the SLR (Single Lens Reflex) cameras used by professional photographers, but without the interchangeable lenses. Again, in this category, one of the most important features is Optical Zoom, and some of these zooms are doozies! It’s not uncommon these days for a camera to have 7, 10, even 15x zoom lenses! At that range, you have the option of photographing the entire room at the widest zoom setting, or just the person standing in the middle of the room at the mid zoom setting, or just the doorknob on the other side of the room at the longest zoom setting.

The next step up is the Professional category of Digital SLR cameras with interchangeable lenses, although some of the cheapest of these are just starting to reach into the Prosumer category. Optical Zoom doesn’t apply to these cameras, since the lenses are purchased separately. You buy the length of lens that you need and clip it onto the front of the camera. Some of the features you’ll want to look into in this category are frame rate and buffer. Frame rate is how many frames per second the camera can take, and the buffer determines how many frames the camera can shoot in rapid sequence before it has to pause to write the images onto the storage medium. Megapixel ratings are also important with these cameras, as the images are often used for larger print sizes. Don’t be fooled by a high Megapixel count though. Just because a camera has a lot of pixels, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will make sharper images. A lot of the sharpness relates to the camera’s sensor, the lens used and how the image is processed inside the camera. There’s also the fact that a big jump in Megapixel rating doesn’t translate into a bit jump in the size of print that could be produced. Let’s take a look at 2 of Canon’s cameras for a comparison: the 8.2 Megapixel EOS 30D and the 16.6 Megapixel EOS-1Ds Mark II. The 30D gives an image that is 3504 pixels on the long side by 2336 pixels on the short side for a total of 8,185,344 pixels (8.2 million), while the Mark II gives you 4992 by 3328, for 16,613,376 (16.6 million). This means that at a standard magazine resolution of 300dpi, the 30D can give you a photo that measures 11.7×7.8 inches, so you’d expect the Mark II, with double the resolution to give you an image that’s at least 22 inches by 14 (doubling the 30D’s print size), but if you do the math, you only get a print that’s 16.6×11 inches. Just 5 extra inches of width for double the resolution and about $6000 more.

Your best bet when looking for a camera is to go to the store and look at them, and hold them. You can also do some online research before you head out. Check out sites like www.dpreview.com for a very thorough list of the cameras that are available, in addition to some very in-depth reviews and sample images for most of the cameras available. www.robgalbraith.com is a good site for general digital photography insight, and don’t forget to visit www.luminous-landscape.com for great articles and reviews on everything digital photography and printing related.

RELATED WEBSITE LINKS
www.dpreview.com
www.robgalbraith.com
www.luminous-landscape.com

ABOUT THE GUEST
For the past decade Greg has been working with digital images. Through his years of experience he has developed a distinct style of retouching people. His ability to seamlessly composite images from a variety of frames to create the ‘perfect shot’, has made him a sought after retoucher by commercial, advertising and fashion photographers. Some of his clients include Flare, Chatelaine, Clin d’Oeil. Greg has maintained long lasting working relationships with many established fashion photographers and up and coming make-up artists and stylists. His photographic and digital talents have combined in CD covers and Dance Posters, where he has done the photography, retouching and layout, taking the project from start to final press.