Digital cameras

I'm going to post a version of this on my blog but it might help some people here at some future time.

I don't think I'm too immodest if I say I'm not a bad photographer :oops: I've won a few competitions and I've had my photo's used commercially and by some not-for-profits. And I take between 3000 and 4000 images a year mostly in the mountains. I have a bunch of cameras, point and shoots and digital SLR's pretty much all Canon. My day-to-day camera has been a Canon A95 point and shoot.

On a recent trip to Morocco I took some images at night and for various reasons it highlighed some dirt had possibly got into my A95. I'm not surprised, I take no care whatsoever with the camera and deliberately so as that's why I use a P&S. But, P&S digital cameras are disposable possibly and commodity items for certain. I have one absolute requirement for a new camera, that it must use AA batteries so I can buy them anywhere in world on trips. So, I picked the Canon A1000 which still has an optical viewfinder and takes AA batteries. By a series of technical details it's clearly a better specified camera than the A95.

The reality is different. The A1000 is a piece of junk. Without getting too jargoned there's a range of problems which stop it producing good images, the result is no depth of field and the images are soft. Part of the problem is it increases F-stop before shutter speed which stops it getting sharp images and the "auto white balance" doesn't work properly which is a particular issue in snow. The white balance is an import of a classic DSLR problem which you avoid there by shooting RAW and balancing later, you can't do that with a JPEG though.

In that situation you've got several options. First, you can blame user error but I'm reasonable with a camera and pretty good with technology so I can eliminate that. Second, it's a bad unit, i.e. the range is fine but this actual model is defective. This is where I realised something I should have done before.

If you go to flickr you can look at photo's grouped by camera type and look at groups of images tagged by camera type. So now I can see that no one gets good results with this camera, I'm sure some of the users are perfectly happy but it's perfectly clear (or not actually) these shots are soft and unfocussed as well.

What I can also see is that results from a lot of other big selling, well reviewed, digital cameras are also junk so I'm no closer to getting a new camera as I can't find a good one.

So, my advice is if you're going to buy a new camera, look at the Flickr sets rather than the reviews, it doesn't matter what some reviewer says and it does matter what other people are getting from the camera without being experts in any way.

Oh dear, treble :( for wrecking your camera, believing the mfrs hype, and buying a turkey.

You can buy another A95, this supplier will ship internationally..

http://www.bmsoftware.co.uk/hardware/cameras/canonpowershota95silver5mp.htm

I had been using the previous version of the Cannon A1000 until recently. After a couple of years of abuse, skiing, kayaking, and anything else I was doing, unprotected bouncing around in my pocket, it finally gave out. I bought it as a cheap camera for casual use, that wouldn't cause tears if it got damaged. I was very happy with it and it performed well within it's intended purpose, a point and shoot camera. As a point and shoot camera, the exposure bias is toward shutter speed over depth of field (F-stop before shutter speed) because that's what the average point and shoot user most needs. That is, the camera is designed to prevent camera shake, as this is the most common problem for casual users. I just replaced it with another Cannon compact, the SX110. Lack of a real view finder is the only drawback with the new one.


Trencher

I use a fairly cheap 2 year old Kodak V5 dual lens and it takes as good a picture as anything any of my friends uses that they paid up to 4 times as much for.

I use an Casio Exilim Pro EX-P700 I bought a couple of years ago ....i get excellent results but would have liked something a mite more pocketable but cant find a camera with a viewfinder ....why have they stopped making them!!

I have Samsung S800, Sh*t really, but then again I'm more into video :lol:

daved wrote:I use an Casio Exilim Pro EX-P700 I bought a couple of years ago ....i get excellent results but would have liked something a mite more pocketable but cant find a camera with a viewfinder ....why have they stopped making them!!

yes, this annoys me a lot as well, optical viewfinders are better in high light.

What's really happening is related to DSLR's, they're so cheap now that they've killed part of the market for compacts more orientated at enthusiast users. You just have to browse through flickr and see how desperately poor the performance of a lot of camera's is.

There's some digital rangefinder type cameras out there but they hit a price that's not unreasonable as such but is probably at a level where I want to have in my pocket on the hill. And then a lot of them don't take AA's. It actually looks like there isn't a camera suitable for me with both AA batteries and an optical viewfinder with the right quality. The Panasonic Lumix range look great but no optical viewfinders.

The Casio Exilim Pro EX-P700 is good example, it takes about 10 seconds looking at flickr to see good results.

well I thought I would follow the herd..and sign up to flikr to share my pics...seems easy

here's the first few

http://www.flickr.com/photos/n3dsd/