I was hoping someone could help me out with selecting a good digital camera?
Now, i’m not a pro or anything, but i am looking for a pretty good amature-pro ish one, because i intend to use it a lot, for personal and business etc,
Ideally, i want one with a high colour range, a digi cam i got atm from like 6years back which came with my old family pc i think is 1.3 or somin… and i hated how the green carpet we used to have came out grey…
Other things i’d like to be able to do is to generally have manual control over every little thing. Be able to do nice close ups, say insects etc… and pref be able to zoom out pretty far (i know this should be more based on the lense though.)
I dont need to take 1000 pictures a second, or take pictures of moving objects really, so it’s only going to be rather steady /still scenes…
I know your all going to ask what my price range is so, in GBP inc VAT, 400-600ish, bites tounge and this is including the camera, lense (basic atlest) and memory card, (battery would help too but that should come with the camera lol) I could go to about 1k… but IMO i think thats going over board, Of course, if the camera’s worth it… then i’ll save up for it… i’d rather save up and buy a £600 or what ever camera that last me for 20 years lol than to spend less, have a not so usful camera to ‘get me through’ and spend overall even more by upgrading afterwards and having worser pictures in the first place. I have a couple of months till i go out and buy a camera, somthing like 2-3 months, maybe even more so i’ve got some time to save up =P
www.imaging-resource.com
That site has reviews (detailed reviews) of almost every consumer digital camera out there as well as sample photos taken with each to compare.
Uhhhh… GBP = Great British Pounds… from where did you get euros?
Also, if you look in the newspaper there will be an exchange rate (not that it makes much difference because a $20 toaster would cost £20 here- almost double the price)
@lukus: As far as I’m concerned, the next camera I get will be a sony- the image quality is , IMHO, superior for the price. Only downside is the lousy memory stick [pro] media… :<
I have one of these (Sony DSC-F828) at work. It can use both MemoryStick Pro and Compact Flash (or CF microdrive).
Not that I mind MemoryStick Pro, though. That way I can swap media between this camera and my personal ‘point and shoot’ (Sony DSC-P73) which only takes MemoryStick/MemoryStick Pro.
If you want to be able to see what image you will get before it turns out, look for an SLR camera. You can get digital ones in the price range you are looking at.
Be sure to get one that supports a rechargable Lithium battery though because they suck power quite badly. My brother recently bought a digital camera and his AA batteries lasted just a couple of hours but his litium one lasted about two days.
I think the best type of media support is the SD card. My brother had a camera with XD memory and had trouble with it.
General advice:
-Don’t touch Kodak, They sadly missed the spot and produce low quality lens for numeric. So photo look too grainy for the price, trust me you can get better for less. At least all the “CX” serie.
-You numeric camera must support physical zoom, Numrical zoom is like zooming a photo in windows, you start to see pixel in no time.
-I advise SD card support.
-no more than 3mp, more is useless and pricy imo.
-Get a camera that support sound with video recording, it’s way better to get sound. Make sure your camera get a TV output also.(very handy)
That really only applies if you are using the viewfinder as opposed to the LCD. If you are using the LCD you are seeing the view as seen by the imaging CCDs.
I’ve been looking at the nikon d70s is that a good camera? Is there any better ones than that? I saw the d50 but i’m told it’s more automatic and pre-set options so it’s not so good.
im looking at the imaging resource site now though, ty.
The d70s looks pretty good. It’s a 6.1MPixel SLR. Definitely get the rechargeable EN-EL3a Lithium-ion battery with charger if it doesn’t come as standard.
Here is a pretty good comparison of the d70s and d50:
I might go for the d50 more since I think it’s cheaper and has better autofocus than the d70s. Also it uses sd cards instead of compactflash like the d70s.
I don’t know if that’s better as there are advantages and disadvantages to both. CF is bigger, but faster, cheaper and has bigger storage options. SD is more compact and I think has a write-protect switch, which is useful because I’ve seen flash cards wiped on being inserted into a flash drive. I don’t think CF has that. Although CF is technically faster, it uses asynchronous transfer so in the real world, SD doesn’t appear to be much slower using synchronous transfer.
The d70s has more control features like you say and has a faster maximum shutter speed but the d50 looks better to me personally.
That site above places the d50 at the top of all the cameras they reviewed:
I think that some of the more automatic features on the d50 probably just make it easier to take better pictures instead of taking away your control. One of the features is a more advanced auto-focus:
the D50 has improved auto focus especially in the area of motion tracking, it has a new auto AF mode (which automatically switches between single and continuous AF depending on the subject), it has a lower resolution metering sensor but that sensor is a newer generation than the one used in the D70 (and D70s) - spot metering circle is also larger, the maximum shutter speed is 1/4000 sec, continuous shooting is 2.5 fps, it has a better viewfinder eyecup, the LCD monitor has increased to 2.0" in size, the D50 takes SD cards (not CF), it’s slightly smaller and lighter than the D70 and several features have been removed or simplified to make the camera easier to use.
The only key difference between the D50 and D70 from an image pipeline point of view is that the image processing algorithm has now been tweaked to improve rendition of highlight detail (to clip less and have a softer roll-off to the highlight). It’s also worth noting that the D50’s default color space mode is IIIa which is still sRGB but is described as being optimized for nature and landscape photographs
As the site says though, you have to decide for yourself what kind of features you want.
I went to imaging resource this morning, saw the sigma SD10 and been looking for information on it all day ^^.
I think i might go for the D50, even if the D70 is better it’ll be money wasted on features i probabily wouldn’t use /need, at lest to thier full extent and by those comparisons, i might aswell go for the D50.
I’ll just be spending the next couple of days deciding to go with the D50 or the Sigma one, sigma is a sexy 10mp ^^ and the images seem rather more impressive ^^ so that might me my baby in a couple of months.
lol) I could go to about 1k… but IMO i think thats going over board, Of course, if the camera’s worth it… then i’ll save up for it… i’d rather save up and buy a £600 or what ever camera that last me for 20 years lol than to spend less, have a not so usful camera to ‘get me through’ and spend overall even more by upgrading afterwards and having worser pictures in the first place. I have a couple of months till i go out and buy a camera, somthing like 2-3 months, maybe even more so i’ve got some time to save up =P