Digital Camera Criteria

Ah, the anguish, the anguish. Six months have gone by since I decided that digital cameras had matured enough to be a real contender and set my mind on acquiring the perfect consumer level model. Kinda pretentious, isn’t it .. well .. it’s battleangel.org after all ..

As a means to sort my own thoughts on digital cameras I have converged on the following criteria whereby the candidates must be selected and graded. Unnecessarily complex as they might seem, a rational choice is crucial in this area. Just imagine how traumatizing it would be to just having snapped the photo of a lifetime only to realize that you’ve rather missed it for various reasons.

Advanced Compact vs. Prosumer vs. dSLR: It’s all a question of four things: Price, Weight, Image Quality and Settings. While not so obvious, the bulk of a prosumer or dSLR (digital single-lens reflex) camera can clamp down on the ambition to always have the camera with you. As one wise photographer put it, if you haven’t got the camera with you, you wont get ANY shots at all. No matter how fancy the camera is.
As for the most common advantages and disadvantages of the three types I can recommend CNETAsia’s Digital Photography Superguide 2. I know many are unsure of the dSLR systems so here it is. The advantages of dSLR as put forth by CNETAsia and that I think we can all agree on are:

Obviously, by choosing a dSLR you can negate many but not all criteria below. But then again dSLRs are in a different price segment altogether.

Memory Card: This is perhaps the biggest problem. Memory cards are expensive. And some more than others. The xD and Memorystick technologies are out of the question. So is the Microdrive. The latter is not as neatly priced as it used to be if you compare it. And it has moving parts and is much more sensitive to environmental issues. Plus it drains A LOT of power from the camera.

Compact Flash 4x	600 kB/s
Compact Flash 8x	1,2 MB/s
Compact Flash 12x	1,8 MB/s
Compact Flash 24x	3,6 MB/s
Compact Flash Ultra II	9,0 MB/s read
	10 MB/s write

Multimediacard	300 kB/s
Smartmedia	600 kB/s
Memorystick	800 kB/s
Secure digital	1,5 MB/s
xD	3,0 MB/s

(read/write speeds for various cards)

The best choice at this time seems to be a 12x-24x CF card. Card read/write speeds with CF is quite frankly a problem. I’m a afraid most ppl don’t realize this little quirk when they go for a CF card. At any rate, the CF technology represents the best value.

Build Quality: Believe or not but there is such a thing as a camera that can be dropped without breaking. Thus, build quality can be one of the best long term investments. Even if it’s difficult to pinpoint what I’m looking for specifically. And of course I have no way of knowing how well the entrails of the camera are protected. But a casing made of metal and rubber is in many ways more reassuring and durable then a plastic one.

Speed: Generally there are three areas that one can measure and compare. Bootup time, Shot-to-shot speed and Shutter lag. Out of these three, only the latter two are really of interest. Nevertheless I was looking for something on like this …
Bootup time: >2.0s (not including lens extension)
Shot-to-shot speed: >1.0s
Shutter lag / reaction time: >0.5s - negligible
Of course, final processing speed also depends on the speed of the memory card, buffer speed and configuration, the settings you apply, ISO, shutter speed, focus etc etc etc. But a slow camera is still a slow camera regardless.
My previous encounters with digital cameras have always been tainted by operating and processing speed. Action shots were out of the question. And shot-to-shot speed was so slow that when I attempted wildlife photography, the motif had time to get out of dodge before I could snap a second shot.
And while on the topic of speed, a USB2 / Firewire port wouldn’t be too shabby. Although I’m not sure if that would save me the trouble of buying a stand-alone card reader anyway. In all probability you’ll have several small CF cards instead of one just one big card. Eggs and baskets you know. Or was it apples? Besides, card readers can be found dirt cheap these days.

Focus and Zoom: The keyword here is manual. And for a multitude of reasons. Among other things, manual control is still faster even if it of course depends on the skill and speed of the user. Not to say that automatic focus is useless, but I still want the ability to control it manually.
Second of all, I don’t think I need to point this out but digital zoom effects are a joke. And everyone knows it. With recent models, digital zoom isn’t even being advertised anymore.
As for the focal range of the zoom lens around 7X (equivalent to 28 - 200mm) would suffice. There are many low-end prosumer models with ultra zoom 10-12X lenses but the quality of these lenses is questionable. And none of them have sufficient hardware to handle a lens of that magnitude anyway. In the end it comes down to a somewhat nonessential feature. Unless you have some specific paparazzi urge, then a big lens is just in the way and a gimmick that you’ll seldom use to the full extent. Plus it’s a fairly large part of the total price.

Stabilization: Built-in or by the use of a tripod. There are always ways to get around this problem. One thing is for sure though. Using the electronic viewfinder is guaranteed to cause blurry images. It’s like putting your camera at the end of a flagpole and trying to compose good images.
But recently, some prosumer models (like the Minolta A1) have been launched with an advanced CCD stabilization that can actually make a difference. But it’s NOT going to save you from those situations where you’d really have needed a tripod.

Image quality: Maybe the most trivial of all. Of course a camera has to produce stunning and vibrant images. No jaggies, minimal purple fringing and the right balance between smudging and pixelation. I’ve seen far too many cameras that just can’t hack it. They produce grainy images for example, and then you have to tweak the camera to the max just to get decent images. That’s NOT why digital cameras have a sharpness setting you know, just to correct inherent mistakes.
Sheer megapixels is not the issue here. It’s really not. I would be very happy with just 3 megapixels when it comes down to it. It seems that last generation of 7-8 megapixels cameras have had major problems with pixelation and fringing. But it’s futile to disregard progress. If I could I would surely want a camera like the Sony DSC-F828 with a 4-5 megapixels CCD retrofitted. It’s like the focal length I talked about earlier. The biggest fear is that you’ll never use those 8 megapixels and instead downsample images to around 3 megapixels using the camera or photoshop. That’s more than enough for the cover of national geographic and A3 posters as long as the actual image quality is up to the task. If not, then I CAN see a point in using those extra three megapixels as photoshop cannon fodder for downsampling. But is that something you should have to do with a $800+ camera?

Flash: While built-in flashes never really get the work done it’s kind of pointless to pay for something that isn’t working at all. Hence, a reasonable powerful flash is a must. As well as the possibility to hook up a bigger flash if and when you feel like it. Even better would be a camera that didn’t have to resort to artificial lighting all the time.
As for built-in flashes I prefer them as big as they come. And of a manual pop-up type of course.

Battery: Another major but often overlooked pitfall. Two things are of interest here. The type of battery and how many shots you can squeeze with the camera. The latter is often acceptable.
However, batteries come in two varieties. The standard AA NiMH cell and the custom type. Many see custom batteries as a gripe and I have to agree. Especially if they are filthy expensive and cannot be recharged outside of the camera. I’ve noticed that many manufacturers, including UniRoss, have their own brand of camera batteries at maybe half the price so this could be less of a quirk than I imagine.
But AA cells are still unmatched if you find yourself in the last gas station on the brink of the Patagonian Desert and realize the camera is dead.
This is still not a critical feature but rather something that you can work around if you have to.

Image compression and resampling: Most cameras today apply a satisfactory compression level. However, many fail at resampling. By this I mean when you don’t save the images at the optimum / maximum resolution as set by the total available megapixels. Maybe you are content with shooting 1280x images because they aren’t going into print or because you’re running low in memory cards. Well, in that case, a faulty resampling algorithm can ruin everything. And I’ve seen it on some pretty expensive cameras so there is no sure way of avoiding this .. except by doing your homework.

Pixel mapping: This is another essential but little talked about feature. Digital Cameras have an image sensor and image sensors are made up of pixels and pixels can effectively burn out. Either you can pray it wont happen, let a workshop remap the pixels for you or get a camera with pixel mapping built-in.

Video recording: Nonessential really. Whats the point as long as the resulting video is anything less than DVD quality and memory cards usually are in the megabytes instead of gigabytes?

And the contenders at the moment are …