Re: Choosing a digital camara
- To: Multiple recipients of list <i*@rt66.com>
- Subject: Re: Choosing a digital camara
- From: z*@isomedia.com
- Date: Fri, 7 Mar 1997 00:18:23 -0700 (MST)
From: Scott Aitken <zebra@chcs.com>
>ELaborde@aol.com wrote:
>>
>> Hi everybody!
>>
>> Before the blooming season I would like to buy a digital camara to take
>> thousands of pictures of my irises without going broke. Since I know some of
>> you have already done it, I would like to ask you your advise/opinions/feed
>> back on whatever camara you have or on what to look for and what to avoid.
>> From what I have seen in a couple of stores, the selection is not that great.
>> I would like to spend less than $1000, preferable closer to $500 than to 1k.
I would raise two concerns: storage and image quality.
Storage: If you plan to take a lot of digital pictures, where are you going
to store the images? A 640 x 480 pixel image saved as a medium quality JPEG
file takes up about 95k. A couple hundred pictures would obviously take up
a lot of space. A thousand pics would really take up a lot of room.
Quality: The image sharpness is expressed in pixels. Most of the digital
cameras sold for under $1,000 come in 493x373, 640x480, or 756x504 pixels
as a maximum (many come with 1 or 2 lower res settings as well). I think
that all are great for taking pics to display on your computer, the web, or
your TV. These media all display at fairly low resolutions, however. Most
computer monitors display at 72 dpi (dots per inch). Most current laser
printers print at 600 dpi. The master color plates for the AIS Bulletin are
printed at 1270 dpi (and take up about 24 megs of space!). Therefore none
of these cameras produce sharp enough images for high quality printing. Try
this experiment: Go to the AIS web page and you will see an image of BEFORE
THE STORM (this is roughly half the size of a 640x480 image). Looks great
right? Now print the page, or save the image to your hard drive, and import
it to another program to print later. Now you can see whether the print
quality is adequate for your needs before you dash out and buy a digital
camara.
I personally feel that these digital cameras are fine for web page photos,
but would not consider using one to archive important Iris photos. They
don't come remotely close to the quality of regular prints or slides.
Scott Aitken
<zebra@chcs.com>
AIS web page: http://www.isomedia.com/homes/AIS
