my new digital camera
My digital camera finally came! I had some complications with a different billing and shipping address which delayed the shipment, but it is here now. When I first started thinking about getting a camera, I actually had my mind set on a non-digital SLR (Single Lens Reflex). I wanted (and still do) to learn more about photography; I am never going to be a professional photographer, but it would be nice to know how to capture some of the scenery I see whilst on a trip.But the more I thought about it, the more I realized a digital camera suits my needs better. My primary objective is to post photos on this website from the trips I take. If I had a non-digital camera, I would have to scan all the photos and good scanner costs a couple of hundred dollars. I would also have to pay for the processing of the film, which would not be cheap given how many photos I take per trip. And it is pretty easy and convenient to print out digital photos these days at stores.
So I decided on a digital camera. Of course, there is a wide range of digital cameras on the market and I posses very little knowledge about the differences. So I did a little research and decided a digital SLR – possibly Nikon or Canon – would be prefect. But then the black market for spare kidneys crashed and I had no other way of coming up with a grand for a digital camera – back to square one.
I did some more research and realized I really didn’t need an 8 megapixel, SLR with interchangeable lenses that controls satellites kind of digital camera… The megapixels number is kind of a marketing ploy I think (I kind of work in marketing, so its ok if I say this). Sure a camera which captures more megapixels sounds great, but do really need more megapixels? If you don’t plan on printing large photos (8 by 10) and you do not need to do serious cropping, you really don’t need an 8 or even 6 megapixel camera. More megapixels simply means that the camera is capturing more pixels per square inch. When you blow up a photo, this becomes important, since less pixels per square inch will make the picture very grainy.
This pixel thing might be a bit confusing; at least it was to me when I first heard about it. Think of a pixel as a square which can be any color. A digital picture is made up of millions of these pixels and your eyes cannot see the different pixels because they are so small. The difference between 3.2 million pixels (3.2 megapixels) and 6 million pixels in a 3 by 4 inch photo is very hard to tell to us non-professional photographers. However, if you blow the photo up, the difference becomes appearant as the 3.2 million pixels start to become visible to the eye – hence the grainyness (is that a word?) of the photos. Buying an 8 megapixel camera won’t make my photos any better, that comes through practice and understanding photography, although I will still feel envious when I see someone pull out their $2,000 dollar camera.
Enough on the digital camera lesson already… I ended up getting a Minolta Dimage Xg, which is a 3.2 megapixel camera. Why did I get it? It is cheap, I bought it online for $256 including shipping, it has a quick start time, I don’t want to wait 10 seconds after I start the camera to snap a photo, it is very small, a little larger than a credit card (of course not as thin) and it received good reviews from people who know a whole lot more than I do about cameras. Most of the photos you see from now on will be from this camera and I’ll let you know what I think about it after I get some use with it.