On Monday 24 January 2005 16.13, Mark wrote: > Thanks Guys. I'm in the market for a new digital > camers so I'm clearing out the stull I have > accumulated and don't need. Any suggestions on a > camers? I'm leaning towards a Nikon 8700 or 8800.
I scouted the market before buying my second camera, an Olympus C-8080WZ, and it sure had all the things you could want, and a lot more, but it just is too fiddly to be very useful, and its colour rendition leaves a lot to the user, so you'll never get it perfectly tuned for outdoor use. At least I have not managed it, even after having taken a few thousand pictures with it! Indoor it is very good, it just don't like blue skies, I guess! So I tend to rely on my old digital, the Konica KD-500Z, which has a few faults, like a wee bit too strong flash, a little too brightly exposed pictures, so you set it at maximum under exposure. The flash you cover with a bit of tape to soften it - works perfectly! And it starts up very quickly, darn durable, fantastic colours (far beyond the Olympus), and I have taken it paddling, in the Atlantic, without any problems at all! Two batteries was enough power for two weeks paddling. Due to a design quirk it works much better with 128Mb cards than bigger cards, but you can use both SD and Memory Stick, at the same time! As Konica gobbled up Minolta the design was updated, and I now think the flash can be adjusted (not sure) and I think you can change the ASA setting now (not sure). I guess it now can use Memory Stick Pro, too! It is now called Konica Minolta G-530 and it can be bought for about $300 in the US. A steal. It's 6Mb brother G-600 is a bit more expensive, but otherwise comparable. The KD-500 is sometimes still available and is then really, really cheap! At one time a professional photographer wrote to me and asked what camera I used for my nice photos at http://foldingkayaks.org/gallery/tord He was exceptionally impressed by the water reflections, et cetera. He thought I had used a studio camera, or at least a Hasselblad ... I live just a few miles from Hasselblad HQ, so it wasn't so bad a guess :-)! No what I do is underexpose so that I have details in the lightest object, as the eye hates white flats, but accept pitch black shadows. Then in Photoshop, or GIMP (the Linux equivalent) I adjust levels till the output range covers everything, from the lightest to the darkest, and hey, presto, you've got really nice photos! This works a bit when you use the Olympus, but you have to have the white balance set exactly (no fun at all), and the reds and the blues - especially flowers - will never be exactly right, while the cheap Konica is almost always dead on the money! The Olympus takes nice panoramas, is excellent when the weather is overcast, is not a bad DV camcorder (film as long as you card manages), takes superb high resolution, nice B/Ws and really at home in a studio - with video out, remote, et cetera. And you can brag with your 21 (yes, twentyone) buttons to press and the world's most entangled menu system! And the lens is really superb, the lack of a good manual focus isn't! And it sure takes a lot of photos between charging is needed - at least a a few hundred at maximum resolution (8Mb!). So, buck for buck KD-500, (G-530) is a superstar! And the G-600 with 6Mb is not far behind the Olympus, resolution-wise! Tord RCSE-List facilities provided by Model Airplane News. Send "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please note that subscribe and unsubscribe messages must be sent in text only format with MIME turned off. Email sent from web based email such as Hotmail and AOL are generally NOT in text format