Digital cameras - again

I know some of you are photographers, and I take on board what has been said here before about staying with the trad camera makers for quality, but we did sorta decide that Sony had some cred - did we??

Now that I have an up to date PC, and I'm thinking about digi cams, I can't think of any reason not to buy a £420 Mavica. what do you guys think? Are they reliable - mini cd burners and all that stuff?

The spec is up there with £400 other makes: 5Mpixies, big posh lense, more knobs than you can shake a stick at etc BUT you burn 156M data onto 50pence mini CD-R or CD-RW disks. No poxy memory cards. Sounds like a no-brainer to me, so whats the down side?

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/prod...m9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=47351&_LOC=UK

 

if you're looking for a 5 mega pixel camera, personally i would go for a canon powershot a95 (i have the baby brother a60) for £230 (roughly)

buy: http://www.pixmania.co.uk/uk/uk/54654/art/canon/powershot_a95.html?srcid=3
review: http://www.dpreview.com/news/0408/04081905canon_a95.asp

nothing wrong with memory cards. with my 256mb compact flash card, i get over 400 photos @ 1024x768 resolution and "superfine" setting with my 2 mega pixels. which i guess would be 160 at the same setting on the a95 with 5 mega pixels.

 

There is a lot more to the quality of a digital camera than the number of pixels. In fact sometimes higher pixel count can actualy have a negative affect on the picture quality. Another very important factor, (but unfortunately one that is almost impossible to find out), is the size of the individual pixel sensors on the CCD. Small give better resolution but digital noise becomes significant. Larger pixels are much lower noise but lower resolution of course, (unless of course you increase the total number of pixels to compensate). For this reason a full sized SLR Digital Camera with 11m pixels and a large CCD isn't as big a resolution increase over a 5m pixels on a typical compact digital cameras size CCD as the number of pixels alone would lead you to believe. What the SLR can do however is use all of it's resolving power because it has a much lower digital noise level in the picture.

At least this is what I can tell from this website:

http://www.normankoren.com/Tutorials/MTF7.html#Pixel_size

For more info see here:

http://www.normankoren.com/Tutorials/MTF7.html


GTM

 

I have been recomended by Isaac (off these forums) and other people that canon is probably the best make you can get, so learlier this year i got an EOS 300d possible not what your looking for but the camera is superb.

But a closer camera to your price range is the A95 or the PowerShot G6 all you need then somthing like a 512mb CF card that you can pick up now for like £80.

 

My brother is a professional photographer, and as far as he is concerned, its the quality of the lens which is the most important factor. A five megapixal camera with a crap lens will be outperformed by a two megapixel with a quality lens. I have two 3.2 camera's, one a nikon and one a sharp. The nikon blows the sharp away. I also have a 2.0 nikon which again beats the sharp. The only reason for buying the sharp was for mpeg4 video.

Rod

 

as road rat says it does make a lot of differance the glass, and for that reason go with nikon or canon.