Goleta DeskTop Publishing User Group
Meeting Information

November 7 -- Selecting a Digital Camera

There are strategies you can use to help choose a digital camera that suits your needs. Reviews are helpful, but you have to realise the reviewer may have different interests or needs than you. This can range from intended use of the camera to just how it feels in your hands -- if your hands are much different in size or flexibility than the reviewer's those controls that the reviewer praised or panned because of their perfect or awkward locations may suit you much differently.

We'll be talking about various features and their consequences, as well as how to make the most out of time spent at the store playing with the likely candidates.

Here's a short summary of things that will help you find a camera that you will enjoy for some time:

Assessment of Needs
Physical size and shape of the camera: Larger and heavier cameras tend to take better pictures because they are easier to hold steady, tend to have better optics, and more features. However, they tend to be left home because they are large and heavy (a camera in the drawer isn't very useful). They also tend to cause people to duck and run if you point one in their direction. These cameras can be wonderful for landscapes, architechtural studies, and wildlife, but are not well-suited for parties, family gatherings, or other places where you to be inconspicuous, or at least be considered innocuous.

What size print do you want? This pretty much tells you the minimum number of pixels you need. A 2Mpixel camera will do a 5" x 7" print pretty well, a 4Mpixel camera can do a 7" x 10" print. If you need to crop the picture you're going to either get a smaller print or a fuzzier one.

How responsive does the camera need to be? If you are doing landscapes the fact that it takes some time for the camera to turn on, focus, set the exposure, and take the picture is not of much significance. But if you want to take pictures of people these delays can be maddening. Children, of course, are much worse -- there's no such thing as "Hold still" for a young child!

What range of focal lengths do you need? Do you do a lot of landscapes? If so, you're probably more interested in wide angle than long telephoto. If you like to do wildlife telephoto is more useful. Unfortunately camera manufacturers tend to tout the overall zoom range (like 3:1 or 5:1) instead of detailing what the widest angle and longest telephoto. It is easy to get this (and other) information from online review sites like www.dpreview.com or www.steves-digicams.com.

Selecting Likely Candidates Before Going to the Stores
After deciding what features you need you should look at the reviews as well as forums to get an idea of how various cameras stack up against your list. Be aware that reviewers have their biases and forums tend to collect like-minded people, so just because a forum is cheerleading for a particular camera doesn't mean that it is a particularly good choice for you. It may not even be a particularly good camera!

Use the reviews and forums to winnow out all the cameras obviously unsuitable for you, but don't use them to select between cameras that are likely candidates because you will use the time in the store to find which of these cameras meet your needs.

Making the Most of Shopping at the Store
Now that you have selected some candidates you need to do a little more groundwork. First, note what kind of storage medium each uses. The popular ones are CompactFlash, Memory Stick, and SmartMedia. If you already own a digital camera you probably already have one of these mediums. If some of your candidate cameras use something else start calling your friends to borrow the proper medium -- often cameras come with a memory card that has very little capacity and the owner tosses it in a drawer after replacing it with something larger. You can probably borrow that low-capacity card.

Go back to the review sites and read carefully how the controls work so when you get to the store you know how to operate the camera and can test it for the kind of pictures you want to take.

Take the memory cards with you to the store and ask permission to use them in the cameras as you take a few pictures -- most camera stores are quite happy to let you do so. Take test shots that exercise the functions you believe are most important to the kinds of pictures you want to take. Also take some test shots that will reveal any significant problems, like poor focus, poor color, significant chromatic aberration, or barrel or pincushion distortion.

Making the Final Decision
After you review the photos you've taken and your impressions of how the cameras felt in your hands you may well wind up with a difficult choice between two (or more) cameras. If you really find it hard to decide, toss a coin. If you find yourself thinking "well, how about two out of three" you now know which one you really wanted!

The final step is purchasing the camera. Remember that store you went to with the friendly clerk who let you play with all the toys? You do want them to still be there when you want to buy something else, don't you? Help insure that by buying the camera from them.

Please send email to gdtpug@troutcom.com with suggestions for topics you are interested in seeing covered. Or even better, volunteer to give a presentation!

The Goleta DeskTop Publishing Users Group is a SIG (Special Interest Group) of the Santa Barbara PC Users Group. We are not platform specific: some members have PCs, some have Macs, some have both. Linux and other systems are sprinkled in as well for good measure. We focus on the issues of publishing in all forms, be it on paper, web, CD-ROM, or some other medium.