Madinat al-Muslimeen Islamic Message Board
| Anyone buy a digital camera lately? |
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| jannah |
| 03/21/01 at 13:12:18 |
| [slm] I'm thinking of buying a digital camera asap. Any recommendations/disclaimers?? Anyone have the elph or the latest mavica? they are pretty pricey but i've been saving since i was in high school to get one :) i'm thinking maybe the FD90 Mavica... |
| Smile.... |
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| SuperHiMY |
| 03/21/01 at 14:08:58 |
AsalamAlay.com I recommend the J@MCAM 2.0 or 3.0. This is a consumer camera that quietly has got 35% of the consumer market for digital cameras in the past year and a half. It's less than 100 bucks. I was looking for a digicam that'd save me $$$$ from buying film, developing, and then my TIME in scanning in those pictures for use on the web. Some things one needs to know: A Resolution of 640 by 480 is Good enuff to print an excellent quality picture on a regular colour ink jet picture. Except for UP CLOSE, like less than TWO FEET the lower resolutions of 320 by 240 are USELESS. These lower resolution pictures just suck. I haven't used 320x240 resolution in months. Many digital cameras are high in price because they say they have a higher resolution than the 640 by 480, they say 1 megapixel or 2 Megapixels and now I've also seen 4 Megapixels too. ...but for all the extra pixels, it doesn't make ANY difference to the naked eye, either in printouts on an ink jet, or on Webpages. Save your money. Scanning in pictures for use on a webpage: Any resolution ABOVE 72 dots per inch, or dpi can not make ANY difference as computer monitors can't Display any resolution Above 72 dpi. Scanning in or downloading pictures from a digicam at higher DPIs say 100 or 300, doesn't make any difference, all it does is increase the filesize. This MAY be useful, once you get the hang of JPEG compression tricks, with smartsizing etc. But that's meant for another msg thread. So all those 1 Meg and 2 Megapixel digicams are geared to Profession Photographers and not normal people. But wait, what did KB GEAR, makers of J@mcam do? They partnered with Adobe, came up with a NEW FREE software driver, that makes pictures taken at 640x480 turn out as if they were taken at ONE MEGAPIXEL. It's all math algorythms, and after I started to use the new drivers, I couldn't tell the difference between a 1 meg picture and my j@mcam pics. The j@mcam 3.0 has the standard memory card so one 64 mb memory card can have hundreds of pictures taken and stored. The 3.0 has a flash, the 2.0 doesn't I have the 2.0. Think of it like using 100-200 film, ideal for daytime and bright rooms. The 3.0 is a better day AND night camera, like using 800 speed film. The 3.0 fixed all the shortcomings and added all the features that the manufacturer received the year before. It's got a timer, fast download from the camera into the computer via USB so it's like downloading on a T1 line, I clocked it at circa 1.55 MBits on my computer. almost a picture a second from the camera to the computer. I'd recommend it cuz of the price. at a hundred bucks US, it's just the right price to experiment and play around with until you decided to 'upgrade' to one of those multi-hundred dollar digicams. at that point, you'll know exactly which features you'd need and actually use after not having those extras with jamcam 3.0. http://www.gojamcam.com http://www.zdnet.com/products/stories/reviews/0,4161,2665576,00.html http://www.pc-kids.net/JamCam.htm P.S. ..................Say Cheeeeeese! |
| Re: Anyone buy a digital camera lately? |
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| bhaloo |
| 03/21/01 at 14:35:48 |
| slm While I agree with Super Himy on the part about it doesn't make much of a difference on the display (as he mentioned the display is 72 dpi) I totally disagree on the print outs. I am a computer programmer for a major bubble jet printer company and when I print images there are a lot of things that effect the printout. I printout compressed TIFF images that are 20 to 30 megs in size on a single sheet of paper. Today's printers are 1440 or 1200 dpi MINIMUM and many use 2880. You need to use really expensive paper to get best results. Mediocore 50 cents a sheet paper is ok for most stuff, but get the $1.50 paper and about a dollar's worth of ink per page and with a $200 or less printer you can have images that look better then something out of a magazine, I guarantee it. Anyways, digital cameras are way too expensive in my opinion. 3 mega pixel and 4 mega pixel cameras are like $800+. The 1 mega pixel ones and less are now much cheaper. What I would recommend you go with is a digital video camera, namely JVC's or SONY's PC5. They both can capture video at over 500 lines of resolution (about the same as DVD) and they can capture still images with 640x480 resolution. Both JVC and SONY's digital cameras are TINY. We are talking 4" x 3" x 2". They fit in your pocket. I can get into tons more specs about these and advantages and disadvantages, but I don't want to bore anyone yet, just let me know if your interested and then I'll go crazy with this information and post up a lot on this. Gladiator told me Circuit City opened up out there (hahahaha, it opened up here about 15 years ago), you should go there and visit and check out the equipment. BUT don't buy anything from them, they are soooo expensive even though they have this price matching policy. Play with all the toys there and find out what you like. Then when you are ready to buy, here's what you do. Go to mysimon.com and type in the product you want. It will go search all these stores across the internet and come back with the lowest price for you. Buy it from there. CNET.com is incredible also, and they have awesome reviews by consumers of different devices that tell you what they hated or liked about the product. Apparently for cameras, the best prices are some stores in NYC, I think on 47th or 49th street, I forgot where. I bought the Sony PC5 camera from there through mailorder. |
| Re: Anyone buy a digital camera lately? |
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| Moe |
| 03/21/01 at 15:38:03 |
| [slm] hey super himy i live near toronto where can i pick that camera you are talking about up from? i dont think futureshop has it. moe |
| Re: Anyone buy a digital camera lately? |
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| jannah |
| 03/21/01 at 15:39:48 |
| arshad how much did you get it for about? are we talking a grand !! and tell me more about the digital photo capability on it.. where does it store the stuff and how can you upload it? my primary use of it would be to take pictures so that's why i wasn't really looking at the digital camcorders |
| Re: Anyone buy a digital camera lately? |
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| bhaloo |
| 03/21/01 at 18:18:49 |
| slm Ok, the SONY PC5, it was $1074. It was $500 more at Circuity City and Good Guys at the time. This one by JVC isn't bad for the money, its $450 shipped to your door from New Jersey (I checked prices at CNET.com) http://www.jvc.com/subprod.jsp?modelId=MODL006275 Its a little bigger then the SONY one, its dimensions are 3" x 3" by 6" and weights 1.3 pounds. It has an RS232 cable (serial cable) that you can connect to your mouse port on your PC and like all digital cameras it comes with a fire wire connector. Also like the majority of Digitial video cameras it has 640 x 480 picture resolution for snap shot pictures. I'm not sure where it saves those images. On my SONY it saves it to the memory stick or tape (my choice). The memory stick I can just use in another sony computer or I can download it to my computer using the serial cable. I haven't tried downloading it via the firewire connector, but I did that for video and it was nice, and best part is that i don't lose any video or audio quality because its all digital. There are 2 different formats for digital video cameras. Some use those mini DV tapes, which is what you should be using as they offer the highest resolution. Others use the Digital 8 tapes have lower resolution but they are backwards compatible with the older 8mm camcorders (if you had one). The other drawback is that systems using the Digital 8 tapes are much bigger then the mini DV systems. The SONY camera I have can film in complete darkness. Also all these cameras have SVHS and RCA output jacks for connecting to your TV. However, one thing missing in many of these cameras is the ability to record from analog connections (they only have output). Fortunately the SONY one has analog inputs, but if one doesn't have an older camcorder or tapes of something there really is no point or need for this feature. I've probably missed a lot of things, but check out an electronic store and play with the "toys" there. :) |
| Re: Anyone buy a digital camera lately? |
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| Al-Basha |
| 03/21/01 at 18:54:12 |
| [slm] man digital cams are so expensive and so confusing, i wanted to get one for Eid but i went to Best Buys and got dizzy hehe. check out http://www.dpreview.com This is a good site, with reviews of all these different digi cams. I was gonna get the Sony with the awesome Carl Zeiss lens. Go for the one with the Carl Zeiss lens :) |
| Re: Anyone buy a digital camera lately? |
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| bhaloo |
| 03/21/01 at 19:18:05 |
| slm I could be wrong but I thought all SONYs have the Carl Weiss Lens? ??? Mine does. |
| Re: Anyone buy a digital camera lately? |
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| Al-Basha |
| 03/22/01 at 00:58:29 |
| [slm] No not all the sony dcams have the awesome CZ lens. The CZ lens is a specialty item in the higher end models. I am personally waiting till they come down in price, Sony's stuff is very expensive, and I don't want to get one of those crummy $100 ones because you can't take any decent pictures with those. |
| Re: Anyone buy a digital camera lately? |
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| BroHanif |
| 04/14/01 at 18:16:07 |
| If you go for a make, go for Sony. A couple of guys at work have em and the quality and the sharpness of the image is absolute top. I was there when he was taking the photos, it was about the size of the palm of his hand, amazing...!!!. Belive me its better to save a bit of money and go for a decent one rather than some unknown brand. |
| Re: Anyone buy a digital camera lately? |
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| meraj |
| 04/15/01 at 00:13:52 |
| slm, yeah sony's have the neatest features and overall best design, but the only thing in my opinion that sony has struk out on a few times is storage... the mavicas have floppy storage, which is obviosly gonna limit the number of and quality of the pictures you store on it... the others have sony's proprietary memory stick format which is [u]ok[/u], but the largest capacity they have is 64 megabytes and its more expensive than other types of memory... and it can only be used with sony devices... there is a newer mavica out that stores pictures on a proprietary cd-r.. the camera actually records the pictures/movie clips on a small 156mb cd-r, but thats not all that good cause once you save it, its saved for good.. and the cd-rs are only available form sony... but other than that, sony's cameras still have the same quality and value like all other sony products... hope that helps :) |
| Re: Anyone buy a digital camera lately? |
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| jannah |
| 04/15/01 at 00:49:41 |
| wlm, thanx for all ur advice!! inshallah i'd like to get the sony fd90 but i'm just waiting for them to come back down in price again.. can you believe that 2 weeks ago to now it's gone up about $50 bucks sheesh! |
| Re: Anyone buy a digital camera lately? |
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| eleanor |
| 04/15/01 at 12:47:47 |
| boggle boggle boggle I'd like a digital camera too. Or more specifically my husband would like a digital camera, but I haven't let him buy one yet. All this info. is amazing. What's the cheapest Sony camera for a very very very beginner type person? Or do Fisher Price make "My first Digital Camera". That's the one for me. wasalaam eleanor |
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