Affordable digital cameras - reviews of six under-$550 cameras - Hardware Review - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, May, 2000 by Eileen Bien Calabro

By contrast, you can buy Canon's Elph2 APS film camera for $269 and a 40-exposure roll of Kodak Advantix 200-speed film for $8. One-hour developing at any shopping-mall chain will cost you about 55 cents for every 4 by 6-inch print. The camera is your only initial cost, and the total cost of each print is about 75 cents.

While digital photography is certainly faster, more Web-friendly, and more convenient than traditional photography, printing digital images won't start saving you any cash until you've printed 498 standard-size photos.

RELATED ARTICLE: SEEING IS BELIEVING

All the digital cameras we tested took decent Web-bound, low-resolution images, but how did they perform at higher resolutions? All the outdoor images turned out similarly. The bright, even outdoor light made it easier for the cameras' CCDs to create sharper, truer-to-life images. But indoors, where light was uneven and artificial, we saw striking differences in image quality. The samples below were taken using each camera's standard autofocus, highest resolution, and lowest compression modes, Though each camera had its strengths, the best mix of color, color saturation, and focus came from the Olympus D-460 Zoom.

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