Digi Cams

[NewYorkYankee]

What are some good digital cams? I want one ATLEAST a 5 mp, and takes GREAT night shots. Mine I have now sucks at night, VERY blurry from the ESB. Also blurry when zoomed in.

[Deimos]

How high-end are you willing to go? Canon makes some great SLRs that are just under the professional level... although you'd be dropping over $1,000 to get it.

http://consumer.usa.canon.com/ir/con...categoryid=111

[NewYorkYankee]

Im going to stay $350 and under.

[NoyokA]

Let’s see if I can help you as there are a lot of misconceptions with digital photography.

First you do not need a 5 mp camera. You can take quality photographs with a 3.2 mp camera, the reason these are so popular is because at the typical size paper these are equivalent to a 35 mm camera. Also you will be able to have attachments on this forum with a little bit of resizing.

I would recommend a 4mp camera. Anything more than 4mp and the resizing looks improper.

If your goings for quality go with a 4 mp camera, any source you will tell you that for your purposes 5mp and more is superfluous.

The only update I would make to my camera is its zoom. They sell 4mp camera’s with 10X optical zoom for around $350, you just have to watch the circulars. Under no circumstances fall for a camera that advertises high digital zoom, digital zoom is the equivalent to the number of mega pixels. All cameras have digital zoom and you never want to use it, Digital zoom reduces the photo quality, you’d be better off using your optical zoom and cropping the object at its full size, which for a 4mp camera is around 2300 X 1700 pixels.

Here's a sample from my Camera:

[ZippyTheChimp]

I'll tell you what to look for, and you can research these 2 sites for recommendations:

http://www.dcresource.com/
http://www.steves-digicams.com/

The number of pixels is not as critical for night photography as other factors.

The common problem with older models is the image sensor. It could not be exposed to light as long as film without a lot of noise. That has mostly been corrected in all models.

Choose a camera with separate manual controls for shutter speed and aperture. You want to be able to set a shutter speed of 2 secs or more.

Manual adjustment of ISO. Setting it to a higher number makes the sensor more senitive to light, and allows faster shutter speeds. Photos will be less blurry, but more noisy (grainy). Some cameras have noise reduction (NR) to clean this up.

Image Stabilization. Reduces camera shake. This is usually a feature of more expensive cameras, but I've seen it in cameras under $500.

Self-timer or remote-trigger. This makes sense, even without a tripod. Pressing the shutter release button makes the camera shake. If you use the self timer, you can brace the camera and keep it steady while the timer counts down.

A note on zooms: Digital zooming is nothing more than cropping in Photoshop or equiivalent. For night photography, unless you use a tripod or there is enough ambient light, do not zoom in. Any camera shake will be magnified.

Don't rely on flash. It is useless over 20 ft

[NoyokA]

My camera as most camera's come with shooting modes.

To simplify it, just choose the nighttime setting and buy a $20 tripod to stabalize the camera.

[NoyokA]

Zippy has a fantastic camera:

[TLOZ Link5]

Stern, quick question: in your sample photo, what's the prewar building with the reddish mansard roof directly to the right of the Sherry-Netherland?

[NoyokA]

Originally Posted by TLOZ Link5

Stern, quick question: in your sample photo, what's the prewar building with the reddish mansard roof directly to the right of the Sherry-Netherland?

I couldn't find it in the AIA guide.

[WizardOfOss]

Last saturday I bought myself a Nikon D70 DSLR to replace my 3-year old Nikon F65 film-camera. I bought it as a kit with the 18-70mm lens, I'll keep using the 70-300 lens from my old camera. With the 1.5x crop-factor compared to 35mm film, this gives me a total zoomrange of 27-450mm, almost enough to make closeups of the Statue of Liberty from the ESB observatory

The big advantage of a DSLR over a compactcamera is the size of the ccd. Just to compare: the D70 has a 23.7x15.6mm CCD, while the 8MP Nikon 8700 only has a 8.8x6.6mm CCD. While the resolution of the D70 is 'only' 6MP, the sensitivity is much higher, so you'll end up with much less noise. Below is an example of a picture (the view from my appartement, yesterday at 7pm, quite dark outside) taken at 1600 ISO, 2sec. shutter speed. I only resized it, no other editing, but in the original image there's still even less noise than most compact camera's at only 200 ISO. Great for night shots...



Also an excellent site with lots of in-depth reviews: http://www.dpreview.com/