Digital imaging has made dazzling leaps in the half-decade since the first cameras appeared, yet even with three-megapixel sensors available, the glass remains half full. And anyone who's ever picked up a decent 35mm camera knows the drinking glass is also half-empty when digital imaging is concerned. In this issue, we review nine of the newest digital cameras, those with two- and three-megapixel sensors from Canon, Casio, Hewlett-Packard, Kodak, Nikon, Olympus, Ricoh, and Sony.
HIGHLIGHT, LOW LIGHT
Cnder ideal conditions, you'll get good to excellent pictures. We're now seeing printers such as the Epson Stylus Photo 2000P with a claimed image stability of more than 100 years--better than photographic paper. But under less-than-ideal conditions, you have to be lucky, good, or well prepared to get great photos. We found that moving subjects or monochromatic scenes took longer for the auto-focus to lock in. Now that cameras have surpassed the two-megapixel mark, lens quality is extra important for accurately transferring gathered light to a ccd (charge-coupled device). Traditional camera makers have always had good optics on their higher-end digital cameras; others are following suit.
If your camera came with alkaline batteries, set them aside and buy rechargeable nickel hydride batteries. There's no excuse for a camera costing what these do not to come with rechargeable batteries. Several cameras use lithium batteries, which are great for longevity, although lithium batteries tend to die with only a few minutes notice. Alkaline batteries are in no way suited to the high drain of digital cameras. In a pinch, however, buy costly extended-life or high-drain alkaline batteries; these can work well in digital cameras. We were also uniformly unimpressed by the electronic zoom features on the cameras that had them. As with dv camcorders, the only thing that matters is the optical zoom. A 2x digital zoom gets you twice as close, twice as many artifacts, and twice the fuzziness. A huge advantage of three-megapixel cameras is that if the subject is far away, you can enlarge the image's centre and still have a relatively sharp picture.
A three-megapixel ccd typically gives you a 2048 x 1536 image. Some cameras interpolate to a higher resolution with varying degrees of success.
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