Digital Cameras: Hard To Keep Up With
Rapid Innovation Makes It Difficult To Decide On A Purchase: Here's Help
Just when you think you have digital cameras all figured out, look out, because something will come out of nowhere and bite you in the butt.
It's getting harder and harder to make a purchase decision for digital cameras because of all the rapid innovation. It's not just that the camera you buy tomorrow might be better than the one you buy today -- the camera you could buy tomorrow could make obsolete the camera you buy today. It's driving me nuts!
I'm in the market for a new digital camera. I thought I had it narrowed down to a choice between ?
- A Nikon 990 -- probably the best of the digital cameras that have less than 3 megapixels of storage and cost less than $1,000
- And the Fuji FinePix S-1 Pro -- which is about three times the price but makes absolutely gorgeous pictures and uses Nikon 35mm lenses.
Basically, it's a choice between good enough and the best -- or between "priced-right" and the most expensive (Setting aside the professional-caliber digital cameras that go for more than $20,000. I haven't totally lost my mind -- yet.).
So all I have to do is plunk down a chunk of cash and cart away a camera, right?
Cheaper? Better? Both? Which?
In the last month,
- Olympus has announced plans to sell a single-lens reflex (SLR) camera with 4 megapixels of storage capacity and a glass zoom lens with 4-to-1 magnifying power.
- Pentax is about to show a 6-megapixel SLR with a "CCD"-type image sensor the same size as a 35 mm film frame.
- Kodak has announced a CCD chip with a whopping 16 megapixels of storage, which will probably be mondo expensive.
- And a company you've probably never heard of, Foveon, announced its own 16-megapixel chip (of the CMOS variety -- more on that later) that it says can be put in cameras and compares in price to Kodak disposable cameras.
Yikes! That means cameras with more than four times the resolution of a 3-megapixel camera, available at a fraction of the cost!
What's a buyer to do? What am I going to do?!
First, take a deep breath (whooooooo, pheeeeew); let's look at all the changes; and maybe then we'll all have a better idea on how to proceed towards a digital camera purchase.
For The Layperson
Just so we're all operating on the same page, let's define some terms.
Megapixel is one million "pixels," the individual photosensitive picture elements (that's where the word pixel comes from) that make image devices work. Think of them as the cells in a bug's eye. The resolution of an image sensor is determined by multiplying the number of pixels in a horizontal row, by the number of pixels in a vertical column -- and more is obviously much better.
CCD stands for charge-coupled device -- one type of image sensor in digital cameras -- and CMOS stands for complementary metal oxide semiconductor, another, less expensive image sensor for digital cameras.
Finally, single-lens reflex camera means a camera where you look through the lens to focus and compose an image, as opposed to looking through a rangefinder next to the lens.
A Closer Look
The Olympus E-10 is designed from the ground up to be a digital camera. When it's released in late October, it will offer the best resolution in its price class. (Setting aside Fuji's contention that it can get 6-megapixel-quality resolution out of a 3-megapixel CCD by "interpolating" the extra data -- basically running the raw bits through a computer program to produce larger images.)
Olympus makes great lenses, and this is also the first camera in its class to offer a 4-to-1 zoom lens, meaning that the camera will zoom in even tighter than a typical 3-to-1 zoom lens.
But it has one really funky feature. Even though the lens supports manual focus, as well as auto focus, your fingers aren't actually moving the lens when you twist the focus ring. The focus ring activates a servo motor which does the actual focus -- sort of a fly-by-wire arrangement.
I used to be a professional photographer, and feel is a big part of focusing a camera. I'll reserve judgment on this feature until I can get my hands on the camera.
Keep Your Old Lenses
Philips, the European electronics conglomerate, is producing a 6-megapixel CCD that's exactly the same size as a 35 mm film frame. It'll show up first in a Pentax camera but will be available to other manufacturers.
A 35 mm-sized imager is great because the good old 35 mm lenses will now be a perfect fit for digital photography.
In the past, the CCDs weren't big enough to cover an entire 35 mm frame, so images were cropped and it was hard to find a wide-angle lens.
But there's something strange in the preliminary data from Pentax. The lenses listed for use with the new camera are for an even larger film format! Once again, the CCD won't capture the full image produced by the lens. What's up with that?
Big Chips, Cheap Chips
Kodak's new 16-megapixel CCD is even larger than a 35 mm frame. It's just a hair wider, but because it's square, it's a whole lot taller. In theory, you could use this imager with 35 mm lenses and lose only some of the pixels at the top and bottom of the CCD. Or you could use it with lenses for larger-format cameras. But once again, the CCD, being smaller than the image produced by the lens, would produce a "cropped" picture.
Don't hold your breath waiting for this top-of-the-line chip in a consumer camera. This in intended for professional, large-format cameras, like the Hasselblad 555 ELD and Mamiya RZ, and costs more than I'd want to pay for digital camera, computer, software and printer combined.
So why even mention the Kodak? Because Foveon is releasing a 16-megapixel imager produced with CMOS technology. The important distinction here is that CMOS chips are much, much easier and cheaper to produce than CCDs. Until recently, CCDs produced higher-quality images, but the image-quality gap is narrowing.
Foveon says that cameras produced using its chip could rival Kodak disposable cameras in price. And they could be right.
Foveon's CMOS imager electronically acts as a shutter to regulate light exposure to the sensor. The chip replaces the mechanical shutter found in most cameras and operates from a slow exposure of 2 seconds to one eight-thousandth of a second.
In other words, a manufacturer using Foveon's chip no longer needs to manufacture a shutter mechanism. That's a big savings in cost.
Foveon's chip is slightly shorter than a 35 mm frame and, because it is square, it's considerably narrower in width. But it should be a decent match with 35 mm lenses, cropping the image just slightly from top and bottom and lopping off a a considerable amount from the sides of the rectangular 35 mm format.
The Answer Isn't Pricey
Obviously, the digital camera market is going through a revolution. What's a purchaser to do?
Well, in my case, I'm going to revisit some of the less expensive 3-megapixel cameras. They produce really good pictures, and I've decided, with things changing as fast as they are, I don't want to drop $2,800 on a Fuji S-1 that offers only a third or less of the resolution that's going to be possible with a Foveon CMOS sensor.
Besides the 990, Nikon also makes a camera called the CoolPix 880 that retails for about $200 less that its top-of-the-line consumer model. I've narrowed my choice to those two models, figuring I'll be buying another camera in a year -- or maybe two if I can withstand that urge to shop, Pon Far.
And there's one more option.
A local dealer has dropped the price on the Olympus CL 2500 camera, the model that preceded the E-10.
Never overlook a good deal on a camera being "demoted" in the product line-up.
--Tom Egan has worked the information business from photography and journalism to video production and online editing. He writes about technology from his home in Saint Paul, Minn., within three blocks of four bars that serve Guinness on tap. He can be reached at egan@ibsys.com.
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