On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 1:50 PM, John Sessoms <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I hate them. They take crappy snapshots. You can do better with > disposable film cameras. > > The problem is they all offer ONLY live view for composing the picture; > no view finder. So you end up with the camera focused willy-nilly > without regard to the subject, and motion blur out the wazoo from > holding the thing out at arms length; especially indoors. > > I run a mini-lab. It's a digital hybrid with kiosks where the customer > can enter their digital images and get RA4 process color prints. Most of > what I get is crap anyway - it's all young girls taking the same > pictures over and over again. > > Group of girls in nice party dresses all squeezed in cheek to cheek. > Same group of girls at table in some club with umbrella drinks. > Endless succession of various drunken louts they've met at the club. > Rinse & repeat. > > I give them the best prints I can, even though the subject matter > doesn't deserve it, and actual image quality I have to work with is > usually pretty low. Comes from trying to squeeze the maximum number of > images on the memory card instead of just buying another card and > setting the camera to the best quality it can produce. > > Every once in a while I get a heart breaker. > > I had a customer yesterday with 300 some images of a once in a lifetime > cruise of the Greek Isles out of Istanbul, with the Blue Mosque thrown > in for good measure. She took a 8 mega-pixel digital point 'n shoot with > Live View; a package deal including a 512MB SD card at a cost less than > $100. > > More than half the images were motion blurred, back focused or otherwise > impossible to get a good print from because her camera ONLY has live > view for composing images. My partner Judy has such a point and shoot, and I have to agree with much of what you say. Her's is several years old, an Oly with about 4 megapixels (for whatever that's worth). Only a live-view screen, no viewfinder. Many of her photos were out of focus, and I discovered from looking at the manual that there's only one focus-point for the AF: dead centre! And, as you said, holding the thing at arm's length makes it really hard to hold it still. Add to all that the fact that the highest ISO is something like 120 (I think the lowest is about 60, but no manual override) and even in shade on a sunny day lots of shots are blurry. Poor thing (Judy, not the camera) tries her best to hold it still; looking at some shots that were only slightly soft, I've been surprised to see some shutter speeds of as low as 1/10 of a second, shot outdoors. She (on my advice) disables the flash because it makes results worse. My other complaint about that thing is that except in macro, the damned lens is so wide (I guess due to the microchip-sized sensor) that the dof is incredibly wide. ~Everything~ is sharp on most shots (or everything's blurry - you know what I mean). There's absolutely no separation between subjects and background. She so needs a decent body (hopefully she'll have one soon). When she shoots with my camera, even with everything on green, the difference in her photos is incredible. So, yes, I agree with your assessment of cheap digi-p&s cams. They're crap for anyone more than the most casual shooter - and even then not likely good enough. cheers, frank -- "Sharpness is a bourgeois concept." -Henri Cartier-Bresson -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
