My two cents on digital cameras

[Marseeya]

I just bought a Fujifilm S5100. Is anyone else familiar with this model? I'd love some feedback here because I'm totally lost trying to understand all the features on this thing. The manual is not much help.

I did buy a great book I want to recommend on here. It's called How to Do Everything with Digital Photography by Dave Huss.

It's really overwhelming for a novice like me, but he talks a lot about how to use the different features on your camera. It is a terrific book and it's not the author's fault I'm confused

 

[PrincessTeddyBear]

2) KEEP THE FILES! Lots of people ask where they can print thier digital pics while on vacation, then delete the files to free up space on thier memory cards. This is a HUGE mistake; the digital files on those memory cards are your negatives. If you delete them, you have thrown the negatives away and made it nearly impossible to share your pics by email, blow them up, or reprint them later when the first set of prints fades or turns yellow.

One thing I do is bring my notebook computer and download them to not only the computer but burn them to a CD-ROM as well. I know a lot of people don't bring/have notebook computers but for those that do and have burnable CD-ROM drives it works. If I print them from a store without putting them onto my computer, than I'll spend a little extra and get the CD burned from them so I have a backup.

 

[SlightlyGoofy]

I am the brand new owner of a Kodak Easy Share camera and I love it so far. Has 16 b of internal memory and have been playing with that. I took about 2 dozen pictures and a couple of minutes of video last night and stil had some memory left. Have bought rechargeable batteries (4) with a cord to do reg charges as well as car ones. Next is to buy the memory card. You say to guy several smaller ones but I am wondering if buying one large one that would stay in the camera might not be a good thing as well since it would not be as easily lost. They are so darned small. How do you all keep track of yours btw?

You cannot accidentally erase the pictures on my camera, has a couple of prompts before doing the deed. I am shopping tomorrow. Any tips? How much should a card cost?

Thank you for any help, Slightly Goofy

 

[Pedler]

But it might not be how you think. Before you go out and get a digitial camera think about what you use now in film cameras. Its easy to get lost in all of the specs and buy something that may be too complex or big for what you want to use.

For some people all they may want to hassle with is a quick point an shoot with almost no buttons and want something to put in thier shirt pocket to take with them. Then one of the small ones like the digital elph series by Canon makes sense.

I know some people that went out and bought the best camera on specs and then almost never use it.

On the other hand if you are a closet Ansel Adams then shop the specs and the the biggest optical zoom you can. Or do what we are going to most likely do... have a small one for every day use (Our old digital Elph S100) and also get one with all the bells and whistles and a big honkin 10X zoom!

 

[Pedler]

We have been digital for over 3 years now and the biggest thing I have seen with people transitioning from film to digital is the slow realization that it costs nothing to take extra pictures. Zip, zero, nada!

You know how with traditional film you would try to take the one perfect shot of a scene, maybe shoot an extra one or two if it was important but that was it. You wouldn't take 10-20 pictures. That would be wastefull by the time you took into account the film and processing fees. Then when you got the pictures back you may have gotten one good shot.

Well with digital don't hold back. In particular with kids... especially little kids... If you camera supports shooting continuous pictures then use it. If it doesn't then just keep on clicking. Then aftwards delete the pictures from the camera you don't want. Or if you have enough memory keep them and delete them later.

Once I adopted that attitude I found it much easier to get pictures of the kids smilling or doing whatever. I just held down the button and took multiple shots. That way I did get both of them smiling or in the case of thier hockey team the whole group with thier eyes open. If you take enough pictures one of them is bound to be good.

Yes.. your purist photographer friends will call this cheating, wastefull etc. The same way they talk about croping as opposed to composing the picture in the camera. Hey, it works and its just bytes were wasting.

Just my 0.02.

 

[Pedler]

speaking of archiving I can not stress enough the need to burn all pictures off to CD or DVD. Even once you get them downloaded to your computer and get them printed you should still periodically back them up to CD or DVD. These are the equivilent of negatives in film. And you know the old computer saying... its not a matter of if your hard drive is going to fail... its when.

 

[WillCAD]

I am the brand new owner of a Kodak Easy Share camera and I love it so far. Has 16 b of internal memory and have been playing with that. I took about 2 dozen pictures and a couple of minutes of video last night and stil had some memory left. Have bought rechargeable batteries (4) with a cord to do reg charges as well as car ones. Next is to buy the memory card. You say to guy several smaller ones but I am wondering if buying one large one that would stay in the camera might not be a good thing as well since it would not be as easily lost. They are so darned small. How do you all keep track of yours btw?

You cannot accidentally erase the pictures on my camera, has a couple of prompts before doing the deed. I am shopping tomorrow. Any tips? How much should a card cost?

Thank you for any help, Slightly Goofy

I keep track of my memory cards by keeping the spare in a wallet made specially to carry and protect memory cards (mine also has space for a spare set of batteries).

Memory cards will vary in cost according to A) the size of the card, and B) the type of card (there are about a dozen different formats). Compact Flash cards are the cheapest, XD cards are the most expensive.

 

[Pedler]

One last thought on digital cameras.

Think long term when printing. Most of the home printing options, i.e. inkjet, are not archival. That means there is a good chance those pictures will not age all that well to show the grand kids 30 years from now. (Or for you older folk show the great grandkids. ).

Yes, those of you with dye sub printers can stop reading now but for the rest of you I would encourage using one of the many digital photo printing services available. On line you can use places like www.ofoto.com or use walmart.com to upload pictures and get 4x6 prints for ust 26 cents each. Walmart as 5x7 prints for 79 cents. (Note: see post on multiple shots and think about how much you will save making your own 5x7 prints of junior with Pooh. Just take about 20-30 shots to get that perfect one...)

Seriously I would hate to seen anyone jump into digitial and then find out 10 years down the road that they don't have quality long lasting prints (despite what the manufacturer say!) and they don't have the files to print more. (See post on burning to CD.)

 

[markºoº]

I prefer to have one large memory card so I never need to worry about taking it in and out. No worry about bending pins or misplacing it.

My Canon G2 4MP has a 1GB card and can store over 400 pixs at the highest resolution.

When buying a memory card, pay attention to not only the size but also the speed as not all cards are the same speed. Speed plays a factor in how fast the camera can write a file to the card and how fast the card can transfer data to a computer. A point and shoot digicam can't process pixs faster than even a slow card. However, downloading pics to a computer will be slower with a slow card.

 

[NewEnglandDisney]

1) Don't buy ONE big memory card. Buy several smaller memory cards. This way, if something happens to one of your memory cards (loss, damage, accidental formatting, etc), you will only lose some of your pics, not all of them.

Great thread, and great advice (all of it)!

I'd make a small change to #1 though - I agree not to buy one big memory card if you are only buying one, but with prices going down as low as they are now, I'd say buy several big memory cards.

With deals online (for instance, a couple of months ago I got a couple of 512MB compact flash cards from Dell for like $45 each. When you think about how much rolls of film cost, buying a couple of them that will last over and over becomes a bargain.

It also frees you from even thinking about storage. I usually bring 3-4 512 MB cards so I never have to worry about space. I can take thousands of pictures if I want - and so it encourages experimentation. I find that even when I have "just enough" I'm always concerned about space and don't let myself think as freely.

In fact, I don't even delete my "mistakes" in the field. For one, you never know when something bad might turn out good, and two if you aren't deleting anything you will have a harder time accidentally deleting anything.

A big concern of many is what to do with the pics after. I don't know about you guys, but printing them out like regular photos seems odd when we can do so much about it. Then I found My Publisher. I swear, I'm not affiliated with them, but I absoultely love 'em. Every WDW trip I get a new book printed up, and when you consider how much you pay to go to WDW it's a bargain to have a hardcover (or softcover, they are cheaper) bound "real" book of photos of your vacation. I make a new voulme each time. Some pics I blow up full page, some I stack.

Photo albums are great, but having it in a book just feels so cool.

N.E.D.

 

[Pedler]

Then I found My Publisher. I swear, I'm not affiliated with them, but I absoultely love 'em. Every WDW trip I get a new book printed up, and when you consider how much you pay to go to WDW it's a bargain to have a hardcover (or softcover, they are cheaper) bound "real" book of photos of your vacation. I make a new voulme each time. Some pics I blow up full page, some I stack.

Photo albums are great, but having it in a book just feels so cool.

N.E.D.

The mypublisher site looks great! Where has that been all this time.

 

[PKK/MJK]

Could someone explain about the zoom. Optical zoom? Digital zoom? I'm really confused. What does that mean? I LOVE the zoom on my regular (film) camera but my digital doesn't zoom anywhere near as large. when I do use the digital camera zoom, the pix seem blurry. HELP!

 

[WillCAD]

Could someone explain about the zoom. Optical zoom? Digital zoom? I'm really confused. What does that mean? I LOVE the zoom on my regular (film) camera but my digital doesn't zoom anywhere near as large. when I do use the digital camera zoom, the pix seem blurry. HELP!

The term optical zoom refers to how much the camera will zoom using the lens (i.e. moving the pieces of glass in the lens closer or farther apart like binoculars to make the image bigger).

Digital zoom is a misnomer; a digital zoom does not really zoom the picture at all, it mearly blows up the image electronically, interpolating the pixels to fill in the information needed to make a small piece of the image fill the whole image area.

Optical zoom is much preferable to digital zoom, because an optical zoom actually puts more information in the image, while a digital zoom only blows up a part of the image and invents information to fill in the blanks. Computer programs like Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro can blow up a portion of an image far better than most digital cameras, so it's better to take your pic with as much optical zoom as you havem then blow it up further in the computer instead of using the digital zoom.

Optical zooms of 3x to 6x are very common in mid-price digital cameras, and 10-12x is getting more common. However, even with optical zoom there is sometimes a side effect, called barrel distortion. Barrel distortion means that if a lens is designed to go from way wide angle to way zoom, the pics you get at the wide angle will have a slight fish-eye effect to them. It's mostly noticable if you are taking a shot of something with lots of straight lines, like a building, or bookcases or flagpoles, and more pronounced at the outter edges of the image. Straight lines at the edges of a wide-angle pic will appear to curve in toward the center in a camera that produces barrel distortion. The effect can be neutralized by zooming up slightly on the subject.

 

[goofy4tink]

I'm still trying to get somewhat competent with my Koday EasyShare that I got for Christmas. I got my memory card. Did I format it? Nope, didn't know about that until I had used up the internal memory first..about 18 shots. Then the camera tells me that the card must be formatted. Okay. So, I figure out how to do that. But, if/when I get more memory cards, which seems to be a good idea based on what you guys have said here, does each memory card need to be formatted before its' first use, like the one I already have?
So, my best thing is to get all the shots I like onto a cd so as to not lose it? And then have a double made, just to be sure. Good, got it.

Now, off to play with other stuff. God, I hope I don't break the darn thing...I am so NOT technologically literate!!

 

[Ariel Wanna-be]

I have a Kodak EasyShare 7440, and while outside pics come out great, the ones that I take inside are incredibly dark and grainy.

Is there some sort of setting that I should fiddle with?

Or is there an external flash that I should have?

When I try to brighten them on my PC, they lose quality.

Thanks!

 

[okjay88]

I had a fairly large Memory Card which I was usin on a recent trip in Maui. All of a sudden, while snapping away, the camera flashed an error message and then shut down. No the card in unreadable. I only lost about 20 pics, but they were from the top of a volcano (pretty cool shots). I'm still trying to recover them (no luck yet), but it may bea good idea to not keep too many pics stored on one large card w/o any backup.

 

[Minnie824]

I have a questions????

I currently have a Sony Cybershot 4.0 mp camera. I love it, except for one thing...the flash. Before Disney, I want to buy a new camera that doesnt take so long for the flash to get re-ready between shots. Is there such a thing? Taking pictures of my kids, its impossible to get good shots of them sitting still while waiting a minute for the flash to get ready again.

 

[bcvprincesses]

This is a great thread. We just bought a Canon 20D and I have no idea how to use everything on the camera. Is there a good book that will teach me all about ISO and everything else you need to know to use the camera in manual mode? My dh knows all about it but I still don't get it. I guess I am really slow. We are planning on using it at my dd's next gymnastics meet where there is no flash allowed. I would love to learn in the next few weeks and take some really great pictures.

 

[oogieboogie]

Check out this site: http://www.megapixel.net/html/articles.php

Look and read the camera basics portion. It explains a lot of things in plain English.

 

[cocowum]

I have a few questions?? Does it matter what brand (i.e. generic) replacement battery I buy ? as long as it is the KLIC-5001 battery. Is one brand better than another? And what about the 1800mah Kodak Klic 5001 Battery is that better? I see all different brands over on ebay or should I just buy them at bestbuy? any thoughts would be appreciated. TIA

BTW- great thread