Want to repaint your breyer model horse, resculpt and rehair your fashion doll (aka Barbie), make a genuine quill pen? (All things I've researched, some times for days on end, but never actually gotten around to trying.) These and a fount of other information is available to you on the internet, an observation I've made a time or two before.
Today's rave comes out of my desire to upgrade my trusty coolpix 990. I've had this camera nearly 5 years and have been very happy with it; and for the last couple of years I've been watching the capabilities of digital cameras increase towards my next big goal, replacing film for jury slides. And my tool for evaluating these capabilities?
A little (well, actually quite a large) site called Digital Camera Review . I think it was originally started by some guy named Phil Askey, and he did such a good job it grew; now I believe he mostly just looks at the high-end professional stuff—but the prosumer and point and shoot cameras I was interested in get put through much the same paces and documentation by other reviewers.
The average review of even a simple camera is 20 pages or so, and to my mind, exhaustively details a given product's specifications, construction, software (this doesn't sound that crucial, but it is) as well as its (forgive the pun) raw picture taking ability. There are also online tools for comparing one camera to another, and bless their hearts, they maintain archives of older, out-of-production cameras (my 990, which the wizard picked out for me after evaluating my specifications, did very well—he may have even used the site to choose it.) There's tutorials. There's precious little advertising, except a list of sites at the bottom (oh thank you, thank you, thank you) of each page that sell the product being reviewed, and as one of them is a vendor we use and had a good price, I was happy to ‘support this site’ by buying from that supplier. This is, to put it plainly, a great site and a wonderful resource.
I'm not a technically oriented person (that is, I'm your usual Luddite artist who just happens to have a geeky spouse who dragged me kicking and screaming to the, let's be honest here, sheer incredible power of techy computer-based tools,) so I admit it's taken me most of the two years I've been lurking, on and off, to become comfortable with wading through all that technical detail, and I haven't learned how to take advantage of all the site offers, by any manner of means. But I have managed to pick out an upgrade by myself (the wizard is usually in charge of that sort of thing, in this household), and I was pretty pleased with myself. Now, of course, we'll have to see whether my choice will take jury-quality slide images...:)
End Part I. (Part II, below, is 700+ words on what I picked—great if you need a tranquilizer; otherwise, you might want to check out some other more interesting part of the site.)
At this point you might be forgiven for wondering what I chose, and I'm afraid that's kind of a letdown: basically, the new version of what I have already. Yup, I spent two days intensively reading the site above to come to this exciting conclusion. I'm not enough of a photographer to go whole-hog professional: I started looking at the ‘prosumer’ market, 8 megapixel cameras with good manual overrides that a pro might use as inexpensive backup to his regular camera (most of the folks commenting on this site seem to be men, and a surprising number of them complained about their wives having that british form of outbursts, ‘cows’, over their photography purchases) or a dedicated hobbiest who couldn't justify the top-of-the-line.
At the other end of the range for (possibly) taking jury-level pix would be a good-quality pocket point and shoot. Even these take 7 megapixel images, theoretically enough to make an acceptable image (though it's not just megapixels—the lens has a lot to do with it too); but I was saved from decoding the ‘resolution chart comparison’ data by the realization that, convenient though the pocket cameras are, they don't offer the manual overrides I wanted.
As it happens, Nikon will be releasing a nice, small, slightly simplified version of their prosumer, the D50, in May. I was mightily tempted, as it would do everything I needed, for a pretty reasonable price. But it meant I'd have to go back to carting a big camera bag, multiple lenses and the like. Frankly I was glad to give those days up when I switched to digital (for everything but slides), and so I knew I was willing to sacrifice quality for convenience. It also meant I'd have to start buying lenses again: for a SLR interchangeable lens camera, the body is just the start—the real expense is in lenses.
My ideal in life is to reduce the number of media I pursue: there are jillions of great photographers out there; for me, it's a means to an end. Since I don't and won't cart around a heavy camera bag—in a couple of years, I hope to have something that will take nice 8x10 size images that I can drop in my purse—I didn't want to go that route. At the same time I do like having manual overrides, settable white balance and the like; and the wizard is really keen to try processing RAW images, so the coolpix7900, which has neither the manual overrides nor the easy RAW setting wasn't ideal. The 8400 can be switched to raw mode on the fly (the one I have now has a hack that be loaded from the computer to do that, but what a pest. Not that I don't deeply appreciate the guy who's opened the RAW world to us [would-be] photographers.)
So I ended up choosing the coolpix 8400. It's not the most highly rated of its class, but it has much better macro capabilities and as a bonus a wide angle lens, good for architectural photography—well, now that I've moved into an area with a lot of really cool houses, that's become more of an issue. It's also on the smaller and lighter end of the range. Though I'll still have a lot to learn, having used Nikons before, it will be easier to find my way around the menus. And I can continue to use the compactflash cards I already have, not an option with the other two. If that this point you're wondering why on earth you're reading this, the last several paragraphs were supposed to illustrate how I modified what I learned to fit my needs as opposed to simply picking the ‘best in class’ —which would be very frustrating for me.
(Now the wizard would've gone for the D50, ’cuz it takes the 8400 a while—a couple of seconds—to start up, and it has noticeable lag, and he hates missing shots from this—something he wouldn't have to endure with the higher end product. I'm willing to live with this issue a little longer. Good days are here, and great ones are coming.)
But without the review site addressing all these issues and more, it would've far more difficult to come to the conclusion that ultimately I still want more of the same.
Oh, you were hoping for the magic link to redoing your barbie? Well, that was what I was referring to when I spoke about ‘days’. In other words, I've collected a bunch of links, but need to write ’em up into a page. Even the crow quill tutorial isn't the one I had in mind: the first time I looked this up, I stumbled across Randy Asplund's instructions (he does authentic medieval illumination, what with the paint-grinding, leaf-gilding, etc., or at least used to—but I've lost the link over the years, so simply did another Google search. If this page is more than about a year old, you'd probably be better off researching on your own, since my links will no doubt be dead by then.)
file originally created 30apr05
Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.
