I bought a Kodak digital camera in the year 2000 which still works well
but has the disadvantage that it is rather bulky compared with the
latest Canon models with a similar, or better specification. So I
recently bought a Canon Powershot A520.
To see a detailed review and specification go to
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/CanonA520/
Or go to www.dpreview.com and search for any digital camera you have in
mind, or in fact lots of stuff about digital cameras generally.
There doesn't seem to be much difference between the pictures from my
5-year old Kodak and the new Canon, but the Canon scores in two
important respects: firstly the batteries (it uses two AA size) last
much longer than the Kodak, which uses four AA size. And secondly it
uses the tiny MMC card to store images. It's supplied with a 16MB card
and you can get around 30 images on this depending on the quality you
want. However I was recently abroad and wanted more capacity so I
bought a 128MB card. This holds between 59 and 1096 images. For most
of my pictures I used a picture size of 1600x1200 pixels. This prints
quite adequately at a size of 148 x 100 mm and I could get 212
images on the 128MB card which was quite enough for me on my trip
abroad.
For me an advantage of this MMC card is that it fits into my PalmOne
PDA. So I can take the card out of the camera and load all the pics
into my PDA. Very handy if you want to shows pics to other people or
you want to refer to them quickly without having to carry prints with
you.
The camera plugs directly into my desktop so I can get immediate
full-screen images; or it's very easy to plug into your TV set and it
then gives you full-screen pics quite easily.
It's possible to take a Canon out of the box and if set on "auto" use
it immediately but there are numerous functions available and to get
the best from the camera you have to study the manual for days - or in
my case weeks, and there's still a lot I don't know!
But digital photography is a wonderful technology and well worth any
study you put into it.
Brian Read
On 19 Apr 2005, at 18:57, Dave Leach wrote:
> Dear All
>
>
> Thanks to all who responded to my query. Your replies have given me
> starting point in choosing a suitable camera. Any views on the
> respective
> merits of colour versus black and white printouts of documents would be
> welcome.
>
> Dave Leach
>
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