Canon S3

[dizneegirls]

Still weighing my options on a new camera. I think I will stick with a digital point and shoot for now instead of slr. I have found a couple others that I think I would like and wanted to ask if any of you have used them. The Nikon coolpix 8700 or the Fuji Finepix S5200?

 

[pxlbarrel]

Still weighing my options on a new camera. I think I will stick with a digital point and shoot for now instead of slr. I have found a couple others that I think I would like and wanted to ask if any of you have used them. The Nikon coolpix 8700 or the Fuji Finepix S5200?

I think you should stick with a digital point and shoot and in the future, should you decide you want to expand your experience in photography, you can go to the dSLR. That's how I did it....I went from a Canon S100 to a G5 to a Rebel. By the time you get to the dSLR you'll know a lot about digital images and how to postprocess.

As you can see, I'm a Canon person (didn't used to be...in film, I used to be a Minolta person). One reason I like to stick with the Canon cameras is that I find their cameras more intuitive than the Nikon cameras. By intuitive, I mean I can take some good photographs right out of the box without having to read a very thick manual.

I've heard good t hings about the S3 and it's a camera I'm about to recommend to my friend too.

 

[psimon]

When I recently purchased my new Canon S3, I also purchased a 2Gb memory card for it. When they arrived, I popped the SD card into the camera and started shooting. All seems to work fine.

After reading the manual, I see there is what is called low level formatting. Is this required to use the card (obviously not!)? How am I getting away without having done it? Would anything change were I to now format the card?

Has anyone that has recently gotten new memory for their S3 and used it without formatting it first?

thoughts appreciated.....

---Paul in Southern NJ

 

[Amy]

I have both a 2G and 1G SD card for my S3 (plus that itty bitty card they give you with the camera), and I didn't format any of them and they're working just fine. I think formatting is optional, and you really only NEED to do it if there's some kind of corruption in the pictures and/or memory card. I'm sure the experts on this board will be able to give you a more technical explanation.

 

[pxlbarrel]

I usually format my card after I've downloaded the photos onto my computer and want to delete all the images. On a rare occasion when there are only a few images on the card, I'll just delete them rather than format.

 

[jann1033]

don't know if i read this here or on a photo site but it said to reformat ( or format the first time) so you clear everything off the card...it is supposed to be able to cut the time between pics cause the card doesn't load it pic one in spot one, it has to search for a spot to put the pic in as you take pics so if something is there is has to search for a spot that is empty...formatting wipes the slate clean so to speak, deleting can leave something there it has to search past...but make sure you don't want to keep any pics on the card cause formatting takes them all away. i format when i put the card in to use it, that way i know i've got everything saved on disk that i want. it takes about a second to format it
the above is for normal formatting not sure what the low level stuff would be and
hope i remember this right but if not sue me for the amount paid and what it's worth =0

 

[psimon]

don't know if i read this here or on a photo site but it said to reformat ( or format the first time) so you clear everything off the card...it is supposed to be able to cut the time between pics cause the card doesn't load it pic one in spot one, it has to search for a spot to put the pic in as you take pics so if something is there is has to search for a spot that is empty...formatting wipes the slate clean so to speak, deleting can leave something there it has to search past...but make sure you don't want to keep any pics on the card cause formatting takes them all away. i format when i put the card in to use it, that way i know i've got everything saved on disk that i want. it takes about a second to format it
the above is for normal formatting not sure what the low level stuff would be and
hope i remember this right but if not sue me for the amount paid and what it's worth =0

Sounds to me like you are essentially defragging the memory card so eacn picture is a contiguous file. Just like on the hard disk, after a while pieces of files get scattered across the memory.

Now it all makes sense! So actually, out of the box, the memory is ok to use, and I suspect if you erase all of the files after you transfer them you get the same result, but formatting the memory ensures that all the pix are contiguous.

An interesting sidebar is that, as you are shooting, if you delete a file for whatever reason, the next pix or two may be split into pieces and they will be slower!

Thanks for the line of logic that spelled it all out!

---Paul in Southern NJ

 

[psimon]

I'm sure I must have missed it. I connect up tha camera and it downloads just fine. My problem is that the pix are going to the My Pictures directory on C. I would like to save my pictures to a directory called Canon on my H drive and see each of the date subdirectories under that.

Where do I change the default directory path for saving files?

Thanks...

---Paul in Southern NJ

 

[Groucho]

Fragmentation shouldn't be too much of an issue - someone here (darn, I can't remember) who was apparently in the know says that when the memory cards are formatted, the layout is randomly changes, so that the memory cells are used more evenly than just having the beginning ones used over and over. It makes sense, I suppose, but it would also mean that fragmentation isn't going to be a problem. It really shouldn't be much of a problem anyway - hard drive fragmentation can lead to real-world speed changes because there are mechanical moving parts (mainly, the head) that have more work to do when the drive is fragmented. With a memory card, there's no moving parts and any fragmentation will not be nearly as noticable. (Of course, I have some opinions about the marketing of hard drive defragmenters, too, but that's a whole different topic! Don't get me started. )

As for the formatting - 2gb and smaller memory cards use the standard (and extremely old) "FAT" file system. They're generally all preformatted before you get them, and when you put them in your camera, the camera created the folders that it needs to store photos in. One of the problems with the FAT system is that it's limited to two gigs. Larger (over 2gb) memory cards are formatted with FAT32, which can support much larger drives, but not all cameras know how to read FAT32, that's why some can't use memory cards larger than 2gb.

(To more experienced users: yes, I'm pretending that partitioning doesn't exist for the sake of simplification.)

A low-level format is one that theoretically should wipe all the data on the card. This would be useful if you were selling the card or returning it for service, or any case where you wanted to make sure that the next person couldn't peek at what's left over from before you did a normal, quick format.

 

[Jeanne B]

I came across this link on steves-digicams a few minutes ago. I know there are a lot of S3 owners on here (including myself) and I thought this book might interest someone. You can get it in both a book and CD version. I've never heard of them but they have quite a few books, not just for the S3. I was hoping they would have one for my Pentax K100 dSLR but no such luck.

http://www.shortcourses.com/bookstore/canon/book_canons3is.htm

 

[Amy]

Thanks for the link! Has anybody ordered a book from them before? Is it worth it?

 

[amid chaos]

Fantastic books! I refer to my 20D book often. well worth the money.

 

[Jeanne B]

I did a quick search on the dpreview forums and they seem to be pretty well recommended.

 

[er3465]

I just got my S3 yesterday, and I am in love. I have just been playing around with it but this is my favorite picture so far.

Its my parrot and I love the detail of his feathers.

 

[grover]

great photo!
what setting did you use?

 

[er3465]

what setting did you use?

It was just the auto with the flash.

 

[shellyfive]

hi guys, been reading thru all the pics threads-----was trying to decide to get the s3 or not-------where did you get them at/ what was the cost????
thanks!

 

[Jeanne B]

hi guys, been reading thru all the pics threads-----was trying to decide to get the s3 or not-------where did you get them at/ what was the cost????
thanks!

You can buy it from Amazon for $355, that's the cheapest I'm seeing it right now. It's a great camera by the way, I have it and if you've never had a camera with much zoom you'll love this one.

One nice thing about Amazon is that if the price drops within 30 days after you buy it they'll refund you the difference (you have to add it back to your shopping cart though and watch for the price drop, it's not an automatic refund). I've taken advantage of this a couple of times since learning about their price guarantee.

 

[Mom2Ashli]

I missed out on the Dell deal for $319.00 but I did find the Canon S3-IS at Sam's Club for $339.88 and thought I would pass it along.

Now I need to check with Santa to see if I can purchase it.

http://www.samsclub.com/shopping/navigate.do?dest=5&item=345623

 

[Dan Murphy]

Also check J&R, about $5 more, including shipping, but no tax.

http://www.jr.com/JRProductPage.process?Product_Code=CAN+S3IS&JRSource=zdnet.datafeed.CAN+S3IS

And if through Ebates, another 3% rebate.

http://www.ebates.com/stores/J_and_R_Music_and_Computer_World.htm