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[OM] Re: olympus-digest V2 #1248

Subject: [OM] Re: olympus-digest V2 #1248
From: Paul Wallich <pw@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 1999 18:39:46 -0500
At 12:01 PM -0800 11/18/99, you wrote:

>Date: Thu, 18 Nov 1999 08:54:45 -0800
>From: George A <george@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>Subject: Re: [OM] Impressions of the Oly C-2500L digital camera
>
>I'd like to comment on a few points here. These are just my thoughts on
>digis at this time and the c2500 in particular.  Negative comments (if
>any :>) would apply maybe more forcefully to competing cameras.
...
>
>Chuck Norcutt wrote:
>>
>> Several of you have asked recently whether any of us owned the new
>> C-2500 and what we thought of it.  Someone had also queried about a
>> rumor that the batteries would only last about 20 minutes. (Not true as
>> you'll see)  I don't own any digital camera but I was recently talking
>> to a good friend (Jon McGrew) who just bought one and asked him if he'd
>> be willing to share his impressions with us.  What follows are his
>> comments:
>> ----------------------------------------------------
>> Thanks for your note, Chuck.  I have been using my new Olympus
>> C-2500L digital camera quite a bit (...I took over 150 pictures while
>> I was in Pittsburgh last weekend, 70 of which I had posted on a
>> website the next evening), and I am quite pleased with it.  I think that
>> Olympus did a very good job.
>
>I looked at the camera briefly at the Boston photo show when I was there
>last week.  It looks to be one of the top digis available.  And it
>reminds me very much of another Olympus camera, which I'll id later.
>Of course, at 1712x1368 it is still far inferior to film.

(Depending, of course, on what you're going to use it for. For anything
that's going up on the web, it's more than enough, as it is for display
photos up to at least 8x10 and probably 11x14...)

>> The camera uses both SmartMedia cards Compact Flash cards.  My
>> one chief complaint is that they didn't go the one slight extra step and
>> also allow the use of Compact Flash Type II cards.  If they had done
>> that, I could have used the IBM Microdrive hard drive in the camera,
>> which is faster, bigger, and cheaper than equivalent solid state cards.
>> I ended up with the 32MB SmartMedia card which is supplied with the
>> camera and an additional 128MB Compact Flash card.  A full-resolution
>> picture can be stored as an uncompressed .TIF file; at that rate, it's
>> about 8MB per shot, so those two cards give me about 20 shots--
>> in other words, a roll of film.
>
>Two cards (160 mBytes) = 20 shots.  That's not a roll of film, but more
>like 1/2 a roll of film. So, 4 cards is more like it per roll.  Gotta
>buy and carry a lot of those (fairly delicate) babies. Or buy and carry
>a laptop. And 8 MByes per uncompressed full res photo - that's about 1/5
>of the necessary size for a high quality large blow up on a laser
>printer.  8x10s on dye-sub, yeah it'll certainly do that pretty well.

This, in my experience, is a crock. I've done some fairly exhaustive
comparisons on the C2000 between TIFF and 5:1 JPEG, and the differences
just aren't there. (It would have been nice for Oly to put in a mode for
lossless JPEG, which is about 3:1 for most pix, but that's another flamewar.)
Unless you're shooting particularly pathological scenes, sensor noise
and diffraction effects will outweigh compression artifacts. (Allow me
to complain how sharpness goes to hell above about F8 because of the tiny
focal lengths that go with the tiny image sensor...)

So for practical purposes, you're talking more like 1-2 MB per image, or
20-80 pictures per card. Not quite film, but in the ballpark. (Btw, the
smaller image size means that you can take a picture every 1-2 seconds
pretty much until memory runs out.) And, of course, in-camera review can
extend your shooting capacity substantially if you're a klutz like me...

I don't pretend to claim that digital cameras equal film cameras for all
purposes, and I know what I pick up to take "real" pictures. But for a lot
of purposes, including web work and sketching, they're more than adequate
now.

paul

Paul Wallich                                            pw@xxxxxxxxx



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