Cindy -

My advice is to turn the digital zoom off. You will never get a picture with crisp focus with it on. Here is a simple explanation of why not to use digital zoom from:

http://www.dcresource.com/faq/faq.html

"Digital zoom, on the other hand, has no moving parts. Using the "electronic brain" within the camera instead, the camera takes a look at what it's "looking at", and digitally zooms in, usually two or three times closer.

The problem with digital zoom is that you lose quality when you do this -- your images will tend to be more "pixelated" than the same image taken with an optical zoom camera. This is due to the "interpolation" the camera uses, which is a nice way of saying that it makes a guess about how the picture should look while zoomed in. Having optical AND digital zoom on a camera isn't bad, but I'd try to avoid cameras with only digital zoom, myself."

Thanks Greg, I'll forward that page to Jim. I played with it at Christmas and it works pretty good with very small, stationary objects in the macro mode. yes, we can turn the digital zoom off and will in the future.

I haggled with this issue myself. Initially I turned off the digital zoom, more recently I've turned it back on but rarely use it. You are just cropping the picture, which could easily be done while editing, but I lazy and cropping in the camera does have some appeal. My camera shows a little line where the digital zoom starts and the control delays before crossing the line. Pretty smart those Sony engineers.

the original purpose of the digital camera was to photograph jewelry and rocks for the web page and auctions. Of course, we now use it for everything. It's so convenient. Ours is a Canon PowerShot S30

Cecil is pretty close with his cropping comment. A more detailed explanation from the site:

http://www.imaging-resource.com/ARTS/BUY/BUY.HTM

"Don't be fooled by the terms "digital zoom" or "digital telephoto"! A digital zoom is not a true zoom lens, it merely crops into your image, throwing away the information around the edges, and thereby increasing the apparent magnification of the lens. The end result is decreased resolution, soft-looking images, and an anomaly called stair-stepping, or jaggies, which are basically pixels that have been magnified so much, that they appear as stairsteps along the edges of your subject. So be sure that your camera specifications include an "optical" zoom lens, which increases image magnification through the lens itself, not "digital" zoom, which uses the camera's software to make the enlargement."

Greg on another issue, the digital wallet. I've pretty much convinced myself that I can get by with a 64Meg and a 128Meg cards. I have the 64 and the 128 is running around $65. That would give me around 300 pictures, should be enough for a week vacation, after I delete the losers.

I have a 16mg and a 32mg. I'm amazed how much stuff I can fit on them. We took 65 pictures and 2 movies one night on 1600x1200 res. Have to admit, I still haven't figured out all the settings. Was just playing with the digital on/off and macro settings. Some came out clear and others didn't, still a learning process.

Thanks for the links Greg, they should help my curve a bit.

Cecil -

I didn't pick up a digital wallet, either. I probably will when the price comes down on the new model. I took 4 64mb cards (smartmedia) with me for a week. I like the 64mb over the 128mb as they can still hold a good number of pictures while not "putting all your eggs in one basket" if a card gets damaged. These cost $20.00 a piece. With my 2.1 megapixel camera using the highest quality jpg setting I got 319 pictures. If I recall, you have a Sony 3 megapixel. If your are using the highest quality jpg setting I don't think you'll get quite 300 pictures with the memory you have, but it should be close. I assume you are using the highest quality jpg setting. I've never understood why anyone would not.

Cecil -

By the way, by the end of the week I wished I would have had another 64mb card (or better yet a digital wallet). Once you get underwater you will start snapping pictures like crazy. 300 pictures sounds like alot, but it really isn't. Then again, I took about 100 pictures above water as it was my first trip to Bonaire.

Greg, no I'm not using the highest setting. I know, WTF. I'm using the highest setting for picture size but standard setting for resolution. It turns out on my camera the only difference between standard and high resolution is the compression factor when the picture is stored. I've seen comparisions and it's not worth doubling the picture size for something I could not even see blown up. So my pictures are coming out around 800K, hence the 300 pictures with 200Megs.

Ellen had also pointed out the camera seems to work better with the 128 Meg card for some unknown reason. It's faster and more than twice the room, go figure.

The difference will come when you want to print out a picture in a large size: 8 X 10 or larger. I have always used the highest setting. I want to get the most of the cameras capabilities. That's what I paid for. If I didn't, I would have bought something less capable and less expensive.

As for the 128mb cards working faster, I'm not sold on that notion. I read that remark from Ellen, and have never read, heard, or been told that anywhere else. And I tend to research things to death. I still read camera reviews and it's been a over a year since I bought my camera.

Greg, do you have a P1 or P5? The deal about the resolution is only valid on these cameras. I agree about maxing the camera out in general, I just hate doubling the picture size for no discernable improvement. I'll do the experiment tonight and verify what I've read. It's simple enough to do.

I have an Olympus 2040. Not sure if you are going to experiment with the quality settings or the different cards and their speed.

If testing the quality settings: if you simply look at the pictures on your monitor, you will not see a difference. For that matter, you will likely not be able to tell the difference between a photo from a 1 megapixel and a 4 megapixel camera when viewed on your monitor. It's when you start printing when resolution and compression matter. Particularly in large print sizes. I intend on keeping my photos forever. That's the beauty of digital photography. I can print an image today or 20 years from now, and the source photo will not degrade over that time. Printers are likely to be much better by then With that in mind, I want as much detail in my archived photos as possible (which is why I will probably upgrade to a 4 megapixel camera in the next year or so). If it was reasonable to do, I would use the uncompressed tiff mode on my camera. These images take up about 5mb, though, and take about 30 seconds to write to the memory card. Just too bulky and too slow to use the uncompressed mode to be practical, but you would lose no detail to compression if you did.

If testing the speed of the camera using different sized memory: well, as I said, I have never heard this anywhere but from Ellen. I am skeptical. I have an 8mb card, and when using it the camera works just the same as when using a 64mb card. I also am not sure what exactly Ellen says is supposed to work faster: the actual image capture or the writing of the image to the card. There are ways to speed up the image capture. The more manual settings you choose (aperture, shutter speed, etc.) the faster the image capture will occur, as these things don't have to be decided by the camera. But the difference in my experience is not great. As for speeding up the writing of the image to memory, well 1mb is 1mb and I don't see how writing that to an 8, 32, 64, or 128mb etc, card would make any difference.

Quality, my plan would be to take two pictures of the same subject, one high resolution, one standard. Then blow up some small detail in the two photographs and compare the smallest descernable detail (where does pixelation start).

My spin on TIFF vs. JPG. The CCD chip in the camera captures a picture which is a matrix of pixels, if you run that data through a compression routine (lets say WinZip) and then unzipped the data all of the original data would be in place with no loss of data. Thats what a JPG file is, in other words if you took a picture and saved as a TIFF, and then took the same picture as a JPG with minimal compression, the two resultant pictures would be indentical because all the original data would be there in the JPG. The problem with JPGs is any editing and resaving will lose the original information. What I do is bring the file in as the original JPG, edit and resave as a TIFF. IMHO.

The deal on memory is pretty strange, as far as faster hard to believe and probably not measurable. The more than twice as big, I do plan on measuring but not till April.

Hey Cecil and Greg, I NEVER said that the 128mb memory stick is faster!! Here is the post I think you are referring to. I only commented on the battery.

Cecil -

Check out this link:

http://www.daveread.com/uw-photo/digital/image-compression.html

This guy is pretty sharp. I have learned alot from his site. As you will see, he suggests that you resave the original as a tiff. But he suggests you do this because jpg is "lossy". This is unlike a zip file, which is "lossless". With a zip file what you get back from a zip is exactly what you started with. With a jpg you do NOT get back what you started with. For example, if you were to open a jpg file and save it without making any changes, the file would still degrade because of loss during the uncompressing and recompressing. Done enough times the loss would become noticeable. Read the link, it explains it better than I can.

To all:

If you want to learn about underwater photography, this guys site is pretty good, although under construction. He specifically adresses digital photography as well.

http://www.daveread.com/uw-photo/

Sorry Ellen -

I was going off my memory, which is sometimes dangerous. You said that battery life seemed longer when using a 128mb memory card. Not that the camera was faster. I am still skeptical. I don't see what one would have to do with the other.

Thanks Ellen, teach me to rely on my memory.

Good stuff, Greg, it pretty much agrees with my thoughts. Although there is some loss in the original JPG file, I may have to accept this is order to get a resonable number of pictures.

Cecil -

Here is an example of jpg loss:

http://www.soundray.de/jpgdemo/

I've just moved the digital photo discussion from the WebCams section over to here.

Jake

PS I disagree with the comment that resolution beyond 1MB doesn't matter on a computer. I've spent the last 4 days editing my on-line photo collection of Bonaire (soon to be part of a screen saver available for sale on the BWC site, by the way ), which is a blend of scanned 35mm slides, and digital photos from various cameras, and so far the 35mm slides have the digital photos (even the high resolution ones) beat in terms of crispness and color. It's pretty obvious which pictures are digitally taken and which started as film...

Ok Jake -

The point I was trying to make is on the computer screen, there is not a whole lot of difference between a picture taken with a 1 megapixel camera versus a 4 megapixel camera. But take both of those photos and print them out at 8 X 10 and the difference will be HUGE.

Jake -

Here is an example:

From Steve's Digicams site:

Here is a picture taken with a 1.3 megapixel camera (1280 X 960, 343 Kb):

http://www.steves-digicams.com/d460/samples/P7290045.JPG

Here is almost the same picture taken with a 4.1 megapixel camera (2272 X 1704, 2.04 Mb):

http://www.steves-digicams.com/2001_reviews/c4040/samples/P7200064.JPG

Other than the obvious difference in size, the photos are very comparable in quality. This is why if you just want a camera to post photos on a webpage or to email to friends, you do not need to drop a fortune on a 4 megapixel camera.

Greg,

Perhaps if you compare similar digital cameras but if we're going by sheer number of source pixels or cameras with different CCDs (Charge Coupled Devices - the devices which capture the actual image), I must disagree with that comparison.

Below are two pictures (not of same subject, but of a similar color wash and tonal quality, however). Top one was taken with my Sony PC-100 MiniDV Cam in the 1 megapixel still mode. The bottom one was shot with my Nikon N90s onto Kodak EliteChrome 100 and then scanned using the CCD in a Nikon Coolscan LS-2000 scanner at a resolution of approximately 4.5 megapixels. The Sony image was simply shrunk to 1024x768, while the Nikon image was cropped (to get rid of black borders from the scan mostly) and then scaled to 1024x768 as well. Both images were sharpened in Photoshop, but the effect is barely noticable. Both 1024x768 images were also stored as TIFFs (lossless compression).

For the images below, I further scaled those 1024x768 images down to 400x300, sharpened each once, then saved as a JPG with quality level 9 (high).

To follow-up, I would agree that for the average person, getting a 4MPix camera makes no sense if the sole purpose of the camera is to share images via e-mail or the Web (non-professionally only though). That's one reason that many of the digital cam companies are releasing new 2MPix models (Sony just announced several this week - plus these hit a pricing sweet spot. 1MPix cameras tend to be older technology, meaning that their color capture quality will likely be poor in comparison to the new 2MPix cameras coming out.

And, it's still possible to take lousy pictures with any camera, including a 4MPix camera.

However, Linda and I, as Web designers (among many other things we do) have consistently found that we can produce a higher quality small image from a higher resolution (e.g. 4MPix) source than from a lower resolution source image (e.g. 1MPix), because we have more detail to work with and more wiggle room to tweak the image down to size properly.

Jake

Jake -

I think we are comparing apples to oranges. I believe that when comparing a scan of an image from a 35mm camera to even a high resolution digital camera, the scanned image will look better.

The comparison I made was between an Olympus 460 and an Olympus 4040 camera. The first has a 1.3 megapixel ccd. The latter a 4.1 megapixel ccd. The first image was only 343Kb, the second image 2.04 Mb. And the difference to my eyes when viewed on the computer screen is that, other than size, they are of comparable quality. And these cameras are not by my definition similar.

P.S. Nice sunset photo!

And my above links don't seem to work

Jake, you are right of course and I have been saying this for a while. It's typically not as apparent as in your pictures. I have not run into the banding that your seeing in these pictures. You don't just lose resolution when you go digital, you also lose dynamic range. Some of the range can be gotten back by tweeking the digital pictures. I looked for some picture to do a comparision on. What I found was my favorite subject (Lily).

Here's Lily with 35mm, if you ignore the focus (stupid Reefmaster) and look at the color range particularly the browns.



Here's Lily shot tonight with the Sony, raw picture cropped and shrunk.



Here's the same picture tweeked, little more contrast and brightness.



Noticable decrease in the brightness of the browns, some of which was recovered but still not 35mm. What I decided to do is use the digital underwater for reasons I belabored way to much already, and stick to the 35mm SLR out of the water.

I noticed the links didn't work...

Olympus' CCD technology has been decent from the start, but if I compare the color quality and crispness of images from my old Olympus D-600(? - a .75MPix camera) to my Nikon Coolpix 800 (a 1.9MPix camera) the difference is significant once I've brought both images down to the same size (as I did above). Pictures I've seen from the new Olympus E-10, however, are only marginally better in quality to the much older Nikon Coolpix 800 I have, IMHO. So it's possible that there has been some sacrificing of CCD quality in exchange for greater resolution.

In terms of apples and oranges, though, keep in mind that my slide film was scanned via a CCD as well - granted, a high resolution CCD - in order to produce pixels. For ordinary pictures of the family pet, kid, house, etc., being sent via e-mail, there probably is no real practical difference between various digital camera CCD sizes (e.g. 1 vs. 2 vs. 4 MPix). However, when the photography subject becomes one of scrutiny and study (even via e-mail) the requirement for higher resolution and good color quality becomes more significant. And, of course, the quality of the photographer makes a difference too :-)

Anyhow, I think I'm blithering. Time to get some ZZZs!

Jake

Blithering or not, this has been a good discussion. Time for my nap, too.

Is everyone awake yet? It seemed like we went off a tangent about number of megapixels, vs. photo quality. IMHO you do need at least 3 megapixels for the quality I want and require, anything less and you can fall into the snapshot mentallity. My friend has a 1.3 MP camera that he always shoots at 640x480, drives me crazy. He going to take a good picture one day and not have enough pixels. He claims that he only using the pictures for the web and e-mail, very shortsighted.

Anyway with respect to my camera (all of the Sonys), heres a comparision of the above Lily picture. These pictures are cropped and blown-up 300%. The first is the standard resolution.



Here's the high resolution shot.



The first file was 791K the second 1290K. I can not see a difference, the little white hairs on the top of her nose look the same to me.

It’s hard to compare the two because they are not identical photos (the cat moved her head). The bottom one does a look a little smoother, but it’s is difficult to tell. I am assuming these are taken at the same resolution, the difference is in the compression (“quality setting” on the camera) of the file. From the links above, there is no doubt that there is loss in jpg files due to compression, and the more compression the more that is lost. Why short change yourself? If you are taking photos that really matter to you, I would think you would want the most “accurate” image possible. Memory cards are pretty cheap in the grand scheme of things. This has always been my thinking. I've always used the highest resolution and quality settings, and always will. But hey, if everyone liked chocolate they wouldn't make vanilla.

Here is a link to new technology for digital photo (and video, I suspect) that will make a difference. It seems the 'next revolution' may already be here.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1842000/1842673.stm

Glen, X3 chip will probably revolutionize digital photography. There has been an amazing amount of buzz on the digital sites about this chip. There are already a couple of high-end prosumer cameras coming out with this chip, it will be a little while before it trickles down to us mear mortals.

Greg, today I went on to the dpreview site and looked at the reviews on the Sony DSC-P5 and looked at what was said about the standard vs. fine resolution. Not much is the short answer, the two pictures comparing the two looked identical to me, but then I am biased.

Cecil -

I think you said you have Photoshop. If so, save a file as a jpg. When you do, it will give you a dialog box with a slider for jpg quality (numbered 1 on the low end to 12 on the high end). Move this slider back and forth and watch what happens to your image. There is a very noticeable difference as you move from 12 to even halfway at 6. This can be noticed without zooming in on the picture. I do not know what the difference is in the settings on your camera. Maybe, in Photoshop terms, it's from 12 to 10. Or, even 12 to 8. But regardless, there is more loss of data when using the lower quality settings. I would think this would matter to you. After all, just like your friend you mentioned before, what happens when you get that once in a lifetime photo? Wouldn't you want it to be as accurate as possible? You have been critical of digital vs film. I would think you would want to get as close to film as your camera would allow. And the difference in file size seems like such a petty matter to me considering the price of a memory card.

The X3 chip seems to be the way of the future. Check out the sample images taken with a protoype of the new sensor:

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0202/02021103foveonx3preview.asp

INCREDIBLE!

This does look impressive. Probably one of those advances where a small company inovates a new technology and then all others do at least similar and down comes the price as the quality goes up further. Certainly everyone can do CMOS. I may have to give up on film yet!!! :–) Now, about printer resolution. And the cost of projecting digital images--that is (was?) one area where slides have a cost advantage. Technology marches on.

Greg, I've never doubted the loss of information from saving as a jpg. Just in the short term, until I can afford more memory, the switch stays in standard. I have sworn to resave as tiff's, so I only take that one compression hit, all subsequent edits will be to the tiff.

I've been playing quite a bit with photo shop, tough program but very powerfull. I managed to destroy a couple of pictures already, so I'm using the program to my potential. I played with that slide bar and it's interesting the effects it has on the pictures. Sometimes you can't tell the difference, other times it kills the picture. I use it quite a bit to get pictures below Jake's 50k limit. High detail pictures are a pain to get that small (Jake, you listening 75k would be great, if possible). I've always had a phobia about tiny pictures.

frames for digital pics...MCS industries makes a "format frame" - black plastic box that the glass pops in over the pic - the box holds the glass by spring tension...anyway in sizes up to 16X20, the 11X14 which i am using is about $6 each...try pfile.com...i guess with 5 Megapixels one can get the 16X20 size...

i just ordered a dozen (kmart was sold out)...don't know what one looks like matted down to 8X10 - that's next...

too much fun...

Thanks for the pointer on the frames. I've been searching on-line on and off for a couple weeks trying to find glass only frames which they have as well as the ones you mentioned. I saw the ones you mentioned on line but I couldn't tell if it is possible to slide in a mat as well as a pic. Have you used these frames before? They describe it as "front loading" so I was unsure what they meant by that.