Digital cameras

Home Office Computing, Jan, 1998 by Steve Morgenstern

Whether it's on the Web, in your brochures and other mailings, or in a multimedia presentation, the easiest way to incorporate photographic images is with a digital camera.

One key advantage a digital camera has over a traditional 35mm camera is speed: A digital image can be printed out, sent via e-mail, or posted on a Web site minutes after you have taken it. Affordability is another benefit: You might need dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of pictures to create a catalog or a pictorial database. In this scenario, traditional film and development costs start looking pretty awful compared with the low per-image cost for digital photographs. Plus, if desktop publishing and presentations play a vital role in your small business, you can't beat the convenience of dropping a digital image into a computer-based document.

In this roundup we put nine digital cameras to the test and came up with good investments, overall favorites, as well as noteworthy special-purpose cameras.

Testing Inside the Digital Darkroom

For this review, we decided to get some input from professional photographer Michael Darter, whose work includes advertising campaigns, editorial photographs, and covers for this magazine.

Darter has always done his photographic shoots with conventional 35mm cameras and had never fiddled with digital cameras at all until we hauled nine models of all shapes and sizes to his New York City studio.

By the end of a long day's comparative shoot, he wasn't quite ready to trade in his Nikons, but he was suitably impressed.

"I like being able to see what I've shot right away," Darter explains. "That way I know whether I have the shot I need, instead of waiting nervously for slides or prints to come back from the lab."

Start With the End Use

The overriding question in choosing a digital camera is, "What are you going to use it for?"

For many users, photographic quality is less important than such portability factors as size and weight. For example, the smallest camera in our roundup is the Panasonic CoolShot, which, frankly, did not take the best pictures, but it's the only model that will fit comfortably in your shirt pocket.

If you're trying to replace conventional photographs in preparing promotional materials, though, only the best is going to be good enough. As long as you keep reproduction size within reason, you can substitute a high-resolution image from one of our top-rated digital cameras for a film-based picture and no one will be the wiser.

Check All the Angles

Resolution. Resolution was the make-or-break feature in our tests. With an Epson Stylus 800 (1,440 by 720dpi) color ink-jet printer, we printed out a set of images taken by the cameras and laid them out on a conference room table to make our comparisons. If the color accuracy or contrast of an image is off, you can alter it using image-editing software to produce acceptable results. But if the details aren't contained in the original image file, no amount of tweaking is going to make them magically appear.

Storage. Shooting at high resolution has its price when it comes to storing those big images. That's why all of the cameras we tested have more than one image-quality setting. When only the best will do, choose the highest setting; when you need lots of shots, throttle down to a lower-quality mode.

Another option, of course, is more storage. Six of the models we tested employ some form of interchangeable memory card, which works like a solid-state disk drive -- it stores information like a disk but doesn't have any moving parts.

Power. Some digital cameras use rechargeable batteries, which is an economical solution but dangerous if you run out of power on the road and have forgotten to keep a spare set charged.

An alternative is powering the camera off AA cells, which are easy to find but pricey in quantity -- and you will run through them pretty quickly.

Optical viewfinder and LCD. All but one of our test cameras comes with an LCD panel for framing images while you're shooting and for reviewing pictures stored in the camera. The ability to immediately see a picture you've shot is a key digital camera benefit -- you know right away whether you've got the shot you need. Equally important, given the cameras' limited storage capacities, an LCD panel lets you throw out the shots you don't need to make room for more images.

Some of the LCD panels are superior to others in several ways: overall size, brightness, and smoothness of the display when moving the camera. "I like framing shots on the LCD," Darter says. "But when the display stutters as you pan across the scene, it makes it very hard to frame a shot accurately."

Flash. A flash does more than light up a dark scene. It also helps improve color reproduction if the lights in a room are a little off (fluorescent fixtures, for example, tend to turn folks' faces a lovely shade of bluegreen in photographs). The lack of a flash is a substantial black mark in a camera's overall rating. "It would be almost foolish to buy a camera without a flash," says Darter. "Without it, you can only shoot outside. Even outside, in the middle of the day, a flash can fill in the shadows so [your subjects] don't have deep eye sockets or any shadowing in the face."