Digital Cameras...help pls!
 

Ok, well wife and I have wanted to get one for awhile now and with us going to the Jags and Saints vs Broncos games I figured sooner better then later. I really don't know much about them at all, or anything about cameras. I will do some online research, but figured I would ask here to see if anyone works with them, or has some insight about them. I want to know anything /everything like;

1. brands to buy / stay away from
2. place to buy them stores/online
3. what specs you have to get/what you dont need

if anyone can tell me anything it would be appreciated, or what you use. I have just gone down to Circuit City and Best Buy and looked at there cameras. Thanks for any help!

W2B... the one site that I always came back to for the best reviews and advice was far and away

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

They had the most comprehesive list of camera info for Digicams out there. I spent 3 months studying and researching for a prosumer level digicam before buying my current camera (Fuji S7000 6.3 mpx 6x Optical)

I would give them a shot before anyone else hands down...

I like this site for looking at the actual pic the cameras take and reader reviews....
http://www.pcphotoreview.com/reviewscrx.aspx

Probably a lot of people with more expertise than me, but I'll give it a stab.

Much of your decision depends on what you want to use your photos for, and how much money you want to spend. What kind of computer you have, and what the OS (operating system) is can also be a factor.

Some of the things to consider:

Megapixels -- This basically indicates how good your photo resolution will be. In other words, the more megapixels, the greater the detail of your photos, and the larger you can blow up the photo before it starts looking grainy and loses detail. If you don't care about blowing photos up much larger than 8x10, 3-4 megapixels would be fine.

Batteries -- Digital cameras eat battery power like crazy. You might want to consider one that allows you to use both a lithium pack type battery as well as rechargeable AA's. If you're on vacation and your battery goes out, you can have a charger with you and use the AA's.

Memory Card -- These are what the pictures are stored on in your camera. They come in Mega-Byte increments. As a rough rule of thumb, figure 1 MB per picture. Thus, a 16 MB card will allow you to take 16 photos. If you don't buy a camera that comes with at least a 64 MB card, go get a larger card. There are different types of cards (media) as well. I have an Olympus (see below) that uses Smart Media cards. The largest card is 128 MB. I bought a second one so I can take up to 256 pictures at one time. There are other cards for different cameras that allow more pictures on them.

Downloading your photos -- Personally, I download from my camera to my home computer. Then back up my photos by burning them to CD. (If you take a lot of pictures, and store them on your computer, you eat up storage space -- which may, or may not, be a consideration depending on the size of your hard drive and how many pictures you take.). My camera comes with a USB connector cable. Provided your computer's motherboard is new enough to support USB 2.0 (1.0 is a lot slower), you can download a lot of photos pretty quickly. There are also cameras using FireWire (don't know much about it), or cameras with docking stations that hook up to your computer. For me, the USB cable works just fine.

Printing photos -- I have literally hundreds of photos, but I have not yet printed out a single one. I just built a new computer and don't have a printer for it yet. So, hopefully, someone can talk about printing photos. I know that some photo developers allow you to go in with a CD with your photos on them and print your own. Haven't tried that yet.

Recovery time -- This is not the correct term for what I'm talking about, but I can't remember what it's called. Basically, it means how quickly you can take photos back to back. If you need to snap off a bunch of quick photos, you need to look into this. If it's just your normal family photo shoot, it probably is not important. There is also wait time for flash to recover.

I own an Olympus C-4000 (4 megapixels) that I bought in April. Got it for about 279 + tax at Costco. Not touting this vendor, this is just a link I found in case you're interested in this camera (DO NOT pay what they say is the MSRP price -- way too high):

http://www.steves-digicams.com/2002_reviews/c4000.html

There's a ton of cameras out there, so look around on the net before you settle on one. I bought the Olympus because the price was good for the camera.

Hope this at least gets you started -- good luck.

Its good to have a Costco in SoCal and LowCal Eh Cyanatix? That's where I picked up my cam too...

Thanks you guys! I have been reading everything I can about it. I think I want 128mbs-256mbs and a 5-6mega pix. just need to find out the other stuff.

i want to use it for family, but also pictures at football games. What dose the 2 zooms mean? says like 10xoptical and 3.5digital. what do you think I would need for a football game? i plan on spending 200-400$

optical zoom is 'REAL' zoom, i.e. a magnifying lens of some sort. digital zoom is blow-up zoom, where quality degradation is an issue. the higher the 'real' zoom the better. fake zoom is just like blowing up a negative or scanned picture, it can't add detail, it just spreads out what's there.

one of the frustrating things with our new camera (a Nikon, but this is true of most cameras that are reasonably priced) is the shutter speed. there's about 3 seconds between pushing the button and taking the picture. any movement of the camera or subject of the picture leads to blurry pictures. and it's hard to take any action shots (football games, etc.) when you've got that 3-second delay. the newer more expensive ones take the picture alot quicker, (like film), but they'll run you about a $1,000, easy. definitely something else to worry about.

memory cards can be pricy, but they're pretty interchangeable, you might be better off getting 2 or 3 64-meg cards, or just one big 512-meg card. we got one big card and have never needed to take it out of the camera. we just burn stuff to disc before getting prints made.

good luck.

thanks football, I will have to look at the shutter speed now. Here is the camera I am looking at *well, one of them*

http://www.infinity-micro.com/prodLG...d=fbc1a84516.1

5-megapixel, 8xzoom, 2"lcd 4xAA, 288/60s movie length, yes sound, SD memory.

Why is it "cheap" at infinity and about 50$-100$ more at other stores? Any of you ever delt with this store?