Digital Cameras

[Taceas]

Rich, you take some great shots. What kind of camera(s) do you have?

Do you recommend any under $500? =P

I'm looking to get a new digicam at the end of this year and am looking for advice on what to get.

Basically looking for ease of use, great close-up shots, clarity, etc.

Right now I have an old Olympus Camedia D-340R 1.3 megapixel, yeah I know, old fashioned. It still does ok, but it doesn't really have the depth I'm looking for when I see a great picture. I want to feel like I'm right there staring that snake head on, not like I'm looking at a picture of a snake.

So since I already have the crappy Olympus software, I was thinking on the new Olympus C-740 or C-570. They both have decent customer reviews on Amazon.com.

Anyone have any ideas or suggestions? Anyone know of a place where I can compare digital cameras?

Thanks

 

[Rich Z]

Well, I am using a Fuji Finepix S1 Pro digitial camera body along with my suite of Nikon lenses. I had a Mavica FD91 for a while that did an OK job, but obviously the Fuji/Nikon mix blows it away.

The lens I use most often is the Nikkor 105 Micro lens. Excellent piece of glass!

Sorry, but I have never really evaluated anything else out there to be able to give you a rundown on what is available. But when you check into one for yourself, the magic words to ask about are "depth of field".

Later.....

 

[pewter]

I´m not Rich but maybe I can help a bit.
I have a fuji 602. That is in my opinion the cheapest good camera!
We here in europe have to pay 500$ instead of 1000.
I made something like 20000 pic´s with that kamera.
I just used two other digi cams in my live so I can´t say if that is the best camera you can get for your money but i can say that I´m still happy with it.
Especially macro shot´s work good when you use full zoom and a flash.
Normal pic´s are also really good to make. Just when it´s dark - it´s realy early dark with that fuji ;-) - you get fast problems with the auto focus.
The main problem I have with the camera is making pic´s from adult´s that I like ... maybe it´s my personal problem.
The handling of the fuji 602 is also very good. With micro drive and a fresh good pack of 4 aa nimh cells I made 400 pic´s with flash!
That´s a realy good battery managment!
Another good point is the color management is quite good.
A lot of digicam´s (my old olympus) have something like a red problem. If you look around you see a very much pic´s that are too red!!!
Sometimes normal corns look even more red than a blood red.
The 602 does not have that problem too much.

So my choice would be still the fuji 602 ....
I have some example pic´s:

Snake gallery´s
here
here

Normal pic´s:
pic´s pic´s pic´s

and here some sport action pic´s from rc-boats. really hard to make good pic´s because these boats a quite fast!!!
also the sun-light conditions are not easy to handle...
pic´s pic´s pic´s

All pic´s are are the original pic´s just cut down from 2mb to ~ 50-100kb !!!

Rich´s pic´s are mostly 200 to 300kb, that´s a big differnce but anyway his pic´s would look better at the same size - but he knows exactly how to make pic´s and his camera is from a totally different class ;-)

and here a few links to good pages:

http://www.dpreview.com/

http://www.dcresource.com/

http://www.imaging-resource.com/

http://www.steves-digicams.com/

 

[13mur 6]

$500 dollars can pretty much get you any consumer digital camera out there. The most notorious digital camera is Cannon's G5, since it's pretty much a professional digital camera sold for under $1000.

I'm biased toward Cannon's for their versatility and image quality (not too good with those crazy macros though). The A70 is an exception as it takes some awesome macro pics. Cannon has a non-existant customer support, so if you need that, look elsewhere (but I don't think any camera company has good customer support).

For macro performace look into Pentax or Minolta. These two companies make very good lenses, and it's all they do. They're camera's are typefied by superb image quality and lense to CCD matching, so you get very little chromatic abberation and very close to true colors.

Sony is also a good camera, but not too many people seem to like them for some reason (I guess they're also slow in start-up and lense extend/retract). They use Carl Zeiss lenses, and a good set of these will give you some gobsmacking results.

If you're like me, you're going to be paranoid as heck running around with a digital cam and you're going to want something that can take a bump or two (dropping a camera from 3ft can pretty much destroy the LCD and lenses). Pentax makes WR (water resistant) versions of some of their cammeras, but as a "side effect" of the WR, they're beefier and better built. A new compact model is due out late October or November (I forget), model number is 33WR.


Go to http://www.steves-digicams.com/ and check out their sample photos. http://www.dpreview.com/ is a much more technical site with more indepth testing of the camera's capabilities.

-Lemur 6