Digital Cameras

[Howard 13]

I've got a Kodak DX4900 and paid another £40 for a charging dock. I find this realy handy as when it's not in use you just plonk it onto the charging dock(which is plugged into the mains)and you know the batteries are always fully charged.

 

It saves messing around taking the batteries out to recharge and you don't need a spare set, which I always used to get mixed up.

 

Oh, and the camera itself is pretty good as well.

 

HB.

[jeepster]

i've got a very similar kodak camera with the charging dock and i found it so useless i chucked it and started using regular alkaline AA's which cost me a fortune but the rechargables that came with the camera (ni-cads) get the memory effect and hate being topped up (as opposed to fully recharged) either that or i got a duff set! i found i was getting 5 or 10 shots out of a fully charged set. maybe your camera howard (which is i think a newer one) has ni-mh or li-ion batts which are much better.

alan, your problem with the scanner is most likely due to the 'twain' drivers (the ones which deal with image aquisition, whether it be scans or getting the pics of your camera) you do sometimes get probs trying to run two different aquisition devices, but it can be done with a bit of fiddling!

[Jim Murray]

Thinking of getting one also. Been looking for one with a separate remote control(for when you're fishing alone) but the only one I've seen so far is the Olympus mju400 which comes in over £300 although the res is 4Mpixels.

[Howard 13]

Yeah mine are NiMh's and they've not let me down yet, I must admit I only take the camera out fishing, so I'm never out more than 24hrs.

 

I normally have a mess about with the camera whilst I'm out carping, taking shots of anything for something to do . I find it's messing around with the lens and the LCD that are the things the batteries are not upto.

 

HB.

[kendo]

hi chaps thanks for all the advice,well Ive only gone out and bought one the specs are as follows.

 

1,fujifilm finepix A405

2,2 million effective pixels,4million recorded pixels.

3,3 x optical zoom

4,£99

5,128 meg mem card £37

 

go then tell me ive done wrong.

[lee wood]

Your got one now, but i am sure you are not the only one that looked at this page and wanted advise on them.

 

One thing to be careful with is the lenses on cheapo or cheap unknown brands.

Its best to go with a top brand, Sony, Fuji, Nikon, etc

My dad had been using a fuji for 3 or so years and earlier this year he got one from Aldi's that was double the spec... BIG MISTAKE, he said the picture quality was no where near the quality of the Fuji which was bought in 1998/99.

So he went and got another Fuji!.

Just be careful when buying unknown special offers, it pays to go with the big brands!

 

I have a Sony myself and its 2.1MP it only had a 4mb card with it so we went out and got some HIGH power rechargable batterys and charger and a 64mb Memory Stick.

Superb! is all i can say, the pictures come out excellent and i can get about 70 pictures on the 64mb card at FULL resolution!

 

I wanted some developed last week so i took the stick in, they came out really good apart from a couple (Entirely my fault)!. Infact if you were to put them next to a film photo you wouldnt tell the difference!

[lee wood]

One other thing...

You will want rechargable batteries with a 1800mAh or more power rating. Most normal batts are 1500 or 1600.

[Alan Taylor]

lee wood:

One other thing...

You will want rechargable batteries with a 1800mAh or more power rating. Most normal batts are 1500 or 1600.

Thanks Lee I never knew about the mah thingy but have just checked mine and they are 750 mAh, I will be doing some searching around this week.

 

Well done that man

 

Alan(nl)

[Peter Sharpe]

Buying a cheap digital camera is false economy. The big difference you will find is in the quality of the automatic metering. I too bought one of those Aldi bargains. It is a German make called Traveler and rated at 3.3 mega pixels. In perfect lighting conditions it will take good quality photos, but in anything else the images are full of noise and dropouts. The worse conditions are when you have a moderately dark foreground and a lighter background (as in 75% of fishing photos). The pictures nearly always come out as silhouettes. I tried the manual overides in all positions and it made hardly any difference.

We have a Nikon at work that is only 2.2 megapixels, yet the images are far superior to my camera. It was considered high spec when it was bought about four or five years ago, but has dated faster than a new pc. It just goes to show you though that there is far more to it than the spec on paper.

One of the best bargains I have seen is the Pentax Optio 550. It retails at £499, but can be found for as low as £349. It will take 14 mb TIF images that are so sharp and precise as to be almost startling. You can only get eight of these on a 128mb card, but you have a choice of several other sizes and quality. I have used an image from this camera for a magazine cover, where the quality has to be excellent.

[Newt]

Peter - with the Pentax Optio 550 and assuming you are just shooting every day pics, is is easy to back it off to lower res pictures to save memory space? 100Kb jpg files or something?