Digital Cameras

[Tim Regan]

Hi All,

> --- In HPFGU-OTChatter Cindy wrote:
> > I want to get my husband a digital camera for his birthday.  
> > He is a photographer by nature, so I can't get him anything 
> > that doesn't take good pictures.
> > 
> > Any recommendations?  

If he's a photographer then he'll want to tinker with the pictures 
afterwards (e.g. crop, tint, overlay etc) and so the higher the 
megapixel value the better, because you can crop pictures, blow them 
back up to a larger size, and still retain print quality.

I bought a Nikon Coolpix and I really like it apart from two major 
problems - the time between turning it on and being able to take a 
picture, and the time between pressing the button and the picture 
being taken. If your husband is just interested in arty shots this 
isn't a problem. For any candid shots, especially of kids doing the 
kind of crazy things kids do, my camera takes too long. Illyana 
recommended the Canon for this reason, and I've heard other people 
comment on its great speed. I just bought mum a Minolta Dimage XT 
for her 70th birthday. It's really slinky and has a neat feature 
where the lens zooms within the camera so it retains its sleek form-
factor. It should be fast and has high quality optics too.

Make sure that the optics are good (i.e. buy one from a company who 
make decent SLRs, telescopes, etc) and ignore the zoom rating other 
than the optical component. Non-optical zooming gives awful results.

Another thing to factor in is the software (that could be next 
year's present). If he's a computer geek too, he'll want decent 
photo manipulation software. The camera will come with some, and 
there are reasonably priced ones on the market (e.g. Microsoft's 
Picture It Pro). But the real pinnacle of these is Adobe's 
PhotoShop. It isn't cheap ($649) but is a truly amazing application. 
When you see professional graphical designers at work with PhotoShop 
it is really astonishing the results they can achieve in next to no 
time. But since it's such a powerful tool, it is quite hard to learn 
some of the complex bits. I've just swapped to Macromedia's 
Fireworks, which does much (though not all) that Photoshop can, is 
cheaper ($249), and has more sophisticated options for outputting 
the vector elements of the graphic to Flash. That may or may not 
mean anything to you. Photoshop and Fireworks are much much cheaper 
if you or your husband are students.

You mention that he's a `photographer by nature'. If getting 
something compact isn't important, you could look at high end 
digital SLRs. That way, if you shop carefully and spend a small 
fortune, he'll be able to use all his existing lens on the new 
digital camera.

All digital cameras come with paltry memory cards (e.g. 16M). Get a 
bigger one (128M or 256M) when you buy the camera. You can get huge 
ones (1Gig) but I have a feeling that they take more battery power, 
though I may be wrong there. One of the huge advantages of digital 
cameras is that it's cheap to take hundreds of pictures on a trip 
and just save the few good ones. Without the larger storage card 
you've lost that advantage.

This next suggestion probably won't help, and goes against much of 
my own beliefs on present giving, but you may just want to give him 
the money. Spending weeks browsing the internet, talking to 
shopkeepers, and buying magazines before buying a gadget is the kind 
of thing us men enjoy. So he may actually prefer to be involved in 
that process, rather than getting the camera as a done deal.

Cheers,

Dumbledad