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Oh boy! (Digital Camera thread)

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Perhaps a wild goose chase - though I was blown away when I simply opened a catalog today from the local Officeworks(!) store which had a SLR based (if not semi) Digital camera which could offer 10 mega pixel resolution with a 20x Optical Zoom for a little bit over $500! What I didn't understand with it was this face detection business. Personally I'm not in the business of taking people photos - though the impression I got was this camera was meant to do exactly that! But what puzzles me is the 20 power Optical Zoom! :-o Unless you're down at the Cricket or something I don't see why you'd need 20 power. Personally I thought it would come in extremely handy in taking bird photos from a distance and the 10 mega pixels would make them look good!

Personally I don't feel I'm done with the Camera I have - even though it's 4 years old and offers half that optical zoom with a bit over half the mega pixel range, it makes me freak when I see a camera with twice the mega pixels and optical zoom around the price I brought my camera some 4 years ago! :-o At the moment there's a few other things on the agenda (e.g. GPS Reciever!)
 
That sounds like one of the new Panasonic digital cameras. I spoke with a Panasonic rep at a local store and he showed me a camera with those same features. I wouldn't really call it a DSLR though because the one I saw had a fixed-mount lens which could not be changed. It did seem to be a really nice camera though.
 
BuggZ wrote:

That sounds like one of the new Panasonic digital cameras. I spoke with a Panasonic rep at a local store and he showed me a camera with those same features. I wouldn't really call it a DSLR though because the one I saw had a fixed-mount lens which could not be changed. It did seem to be a really nice camera though.

Unfortunately I cannot recall for certain what brand of camera I saw - I thought it might have been an Olympus though it could have been a Panasonic! ;-) The one I saw wasn't a true SLR either - I generally call it a Semi-SLR mainly because of that fixed lens, though has some of the features which resemble a SLR! :-D I'm not here to start a debate about what it's supposed to be though! :-D

I guess the only crunch with having a 20x Optical Zoom would mean it would have essential to have a tripod on it. My camera only has a 10x Optical Zoom and at times needs a tripod to take sharp photos at full Zoom.
 
I agree that the zoom is very overrated. But what is worse are the horribly noisy sensors you get when you have so many pixels. I doubt that most people need more than maybe 5 MP
 
pontus wrote:

I agree that the zoom is very overrated. But what is worse are the horribly noisy sensors you get when you have so many pixels. I doubt that most people need more than maybe 5 MP

Yeah I'm not sure about the need to have a photo which is 10 mega pixels in detail - because I take mostly photos of plants and animals (mostly birds) the camera I have does the job nearly everytime. I only time I feel it fails me is when background light is a problem - a problem most if not all digital cameras have! I was having so much trouble taking a photo of a Black Raven with a White sky as the background! :-( And it wasn't until I changed the angle (with something just behind it) that I got a clear shot of the bird! I took some photos of some Welcome Swallows (very small bird with long wings and fly around like you wouldn't believe), I got some photos of one pirched on a branch - having taken a photo of it with my 10x optical zoom and 4 mega pixel camera, it would be interesting to see what a 10 mega pixel camera with 20x Optical Zoom would do to it! :-o
 
Further to my discussions on Digital Camera I found this website:

http://www.cnet.com.au/

Which review cameras outlining their key features and issues with them.

The Camera I thought I saw the other day with a 10 mega pixel capacity with 20x Optical Zoom appears to be an Olympus SP-565 Ultra Zoom and when they review it the problem they had with it was "Distortion and fringing clearly apparent" - not fully sure what that means thought it sounds like a flaw with the lens, which if that were the case, seems to be a bit of a dodgy camera.

The type of cameras which fit into what I'm looking at and to which what I have are regarded as Prosumer cameras.

Here's an example of a list of them. I see they have a forum as well. Just looking at their website makes choosing the right camera quite tricky - and I guess that's why they have a forum to deal with queries of that nature. When I got my first digital camera which is a Fuji Film Finepix S5500 I simply had my eyes set on that camera - to me it seems like I was lucky to get a good camera, sure I occassionally have problems with photos based on light, though I've taken some nice photos on it. Guess it all really depends on what kind of photographer you are, since I'm only really an amateur, some (if not all) professional photographers would laugh at my camera!
 
pontus wrote:

This site means serious business

http://dpreview.com/

Mostly bigger cameras though

Looks like an excellent website! :-D It's even got my Digital Camera on it! (see Fujifilm Finepix S5100). According to them my camera was a vast improvement on the S5000 - scrapping the Super CCD in preference to CCD. Just comparing the cameras between both of the websites shows consistancy between the flaws in certain cameras!

 
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