On 12 Apr 2002 at 9:31, Bruce Dayton wrote: > Mishka, > > Interesting perspective. Earlier, I was also enamored by digital. I > ended up with a Nikon Coolpix 990 and have taken 3000 pictures or so. > The quality is ok, but no better than you said. For me, picture > quality and control really came forward as things that are important > to me. The instant part was usually to overcome the weaknesses of the > digital P&S.
Hi Team, I've been quiet for a bit but I'll bite on this one. I've been using digital (Olympus E-10, optical SLR, w/ full manual focus and exposure options) fairly intensely since last November. I must say that there are areas where digital imaging shines but overall I have found that film still has a mighty edge over digital WRT picture quality and resolution (pixel count is of minimal concern). Aside from the obvious advantages of digital like immediate image availability and lack of film/processing costs I have found digital cameras brilliant for shooting still life and macro images particularly where you have plenty of light with good control (little need for flash). Also the generally small sensor size and reduced focal lengths of the non-interchangeable lens digital cameras provides excellent macro DOF as a great side benefit. The potential for learning though experimentation with lighting is excellent as is the fact that colour temperature offsets can be easily applied with out the need for optical filters. However digital imaging sensors are slow, you might as well disregard the array of ISO settings and leave any digital camera set to it's minimum ISO setting as image quality degrades significantly as the ISO is increased regardless of hyped techno innovations. The trade-offs of setting the ISO of a digital camera to a higher speed are similar to pushing film but more so as often errors like dark noise, hot pixels and banding become prevalent. Be aware too that shooting digital is like shooting slide since once the highlights are saturated all detail is obfuscated. In my experience photographic exploits that require good photographic quality on media with a speed faster than 80-100 ISO are best shot on film where the images aren't required for immediate distribution. This is based on my experience with over seven digital cameras now including the very recent Canon PowerShot S40 4MP PnS. I'd love a Pentax digital body and I expect to pay a lot for it but it won't supersede my use of film. Lets hope that the Pentax engineers spend time concentrating on quality image delivery, user interface and processing speed than simply joining the pixel count war. Cheers, Rob Studdert HURSTVILLE AUSTRALIA Tel +61-2-9554-4110 UTC(GMT) +10 Hours [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://members.ozemail.com.au/~distudio/publications.html - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
