Tuesday, December 07, 2004

Über Cameras, Why bother?

What is the point of these über cameras (yes I love that word, über. über, über, über, über!) that people have if they don’t take advantage of the resolution? I am a sucker for extra rez (though limited finance has helped bridle that love for pixels) so I have a nice 256Mb SD card that I either take full rez/highest quality JPEG pix or go all out with full rez TIFFs, but I seem to be the minority among my non-techno-weenie friends. In many case they have cameras that make mine look like the Sony Mavica floppy disk cameras of yore with 5 mega pixel, 5x zoom, 512Mb mem, etc (all I gots is a little Minolta Xt, love the size/ speed, and pix are ok [barely] but are mediocre for inside shots). Not sure how obvious it is but I love travelling and try to get pictures etc, and when with friends we all snap off pictures whenever but then when we get around to swapping pictures I get these gimpy 640x480 or 800x600 pictures?! The rez problem is exacerbated with bad shots (which I seem to be taking a lot of with my camera… grunt), you can’t Gimp/Photoshop them because they use some jpeg quality of 50% or less with a 640x480 resolution so touching up is (for me) impossible.

Come on people, the price of memory is dropping pricipitusly, you can now get a gigabyte of memory for under $70, you could store butt loads of RAW or TIFF files on something like that and it probably doesn’t cost 1/3 of what you paid for that camera!