Washingtonpost.com: FFWD: Image Conscious -- Decent Exposure



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Decent Exposure: With Digital Cameras, Who Needs Film?

Digital Camera Reviews Ricoh photo

Overview
Epson PhotoPC 550
AGFA EPhoto 307
Canon Powershot 350
Casio QV 700
Kodak DC200
Olympus D-320L
Ricoh RDC-300Z
Sony Mavica FD5

By Rob Pegoraro
Washington Post Staff Writer
March 27, 1998; Page N41

Digital cameras have always seemed like a good idea – they give you instant access to your pictures but, unlike a Polaroid, look cool. So far, though, they've remained a fashion technology for most people; that is, the biggest benefit of owning a digital camera is showing it off instead of using it.

Amateur photographers don't need to see their pictures right away, nor do they take so many shots that they will soon recoup their investment by no longer incurring film-developing expenses, nor are they likely to have a photography budget big enough to accommodate these $500-plus gadgets. Serious photographers, by contrast, can both afford a digital camera and take enough shots to save real money, but they're also not going to be satisfied with the picture quality most digital cameras have offered.

In the last few years, technology has advanced impressively as prices have retreated; the Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association predicts that hardware sales will jump by more than 50 percent, to 1.1 million this year. Are these things now tools for everyday folks? No. They still cost more than they're worth for vacations-and-parties snapshot artists. But we can see how they might work well for more intense photographers, and why, if they ever drop below $200, could take a place next to many Instamatics.

Basically, digital cameras take the penalty factor out of picture-taking. Our reviewer Hope Katz Gibbs put it this way: 'Since [my daughter] was born I've taken about 8 million photographs,'she wrote. 'Recently, I've cut back because it is expensive to develop 8 million photographs. But the Ricoh gave me back my desire to point and shoot. I've actually been picking up the camera on an hourly basis, just snapping away.'

Plus, most digital cameras offer an undo function that's not an option on any analog device: If you screw up a shot, just delete it and try again, although you do need a camera with an LCD (liquid crystal display) screen to show the shot you just took.

The current crop also features some clever design innovations that do things that just aren't possible with analog film. For instance, the Casio QV700 has an LCD that swivels separately from the body of the camera, allowing techno-narcissists to preview their own self-portraits. The Epson PhotoPC 550 includes a microphone to record six-second voice annotations of each shot. Recent Canon models offer a panorama-assist mode, in which the LCD displays half of the last shot taken so that you can line up the next shot properly. Not all of these features are actually useful, but it's good to see this kind of creativity at work, what's the point in duplicating the functions of the analog camera you already own?

If you do decide to snap up a digital camera, keep these issues in mind:

Battery life. Generally, the better the camera, the worse the battery life. Those beautiful LCDs consume batteries at a ridiculous rate, in our tests, the otherwise exceptional Olympus D320L had munched four AAs after only 25 shots. If a camera includes a regular viewfinder as well as an LCD, you can conserve juice by shutting the screen off, but you lose much of the camera's utility and you'll still be swapping batteries more often than you would with the average analog camera. Fortunately, every camera reviewed, save the Sony Mavica, uses standard AA batteries, so at least you won't have to track down exotic battery fauna during your next vacation.

Wait states. There's no such thing as rapid-fire shooting here. Expect to wait from three to seven seconds between pictures, as the camera takes a moment to compress the image and record it on whatever storage medium it uses. You'll also have to wait when you transfer images from the camera to your computer, which in our experience usually took from five to 10 minutes. Except for the Sony Mavica, which stores its images using a built-in floppy disk drive, you'll have to use a serial cable, and therefore will have to brave the rat's nest of wires behind your computer, or buy an adapter to read images off the tiny removable-storage cards most cameras use. (See at left for life-size shots of two of these cards.)

Image Quality The highest-resolution camera we ever tested – Kodak's $600 DC200 — captures "1152 x 864" images. That's 1152 pixels (short for picture elements), for nearly a million pixels per shot — enough to saturate a 20-inch monitor, but much less detail than 35mm film, which offers 20 million picture elements. For plenty of applications, however, for instance, 5 x 7-inch printouts, it would take a magnifying glass to detect the difference (see our printer coverage). Color reproduction is another issue. Most of the tested units failed to capture the vividness of flowers or other bright colors.

The digital camera reviews (see box above) summarize what we learned from these gadgets. We list the basic specs of each model: supported operating systems, weight (with batteries) and number of images you can store at various levels of image compression and so on.

Next comes our own assessment of what it's like to use it, including measurements of battery life and the time to transfer a full "roll of film" — as many images as we could fit on a camera's internal memory or memory cards. Finally, we list what each reviewer would have paid, plus general comments.

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