So, you want to buy a camera.

Thinking of buying a camera?

The first thing to consider when thinking of buying a camera is what you want to do with it. There’s a bit of difference in what different types/makes/models of camera can do. There’s also a big difference in what they cost. It has been ever thus.

The second thing to realise SLR isn’t always the answer. There’s a lot to be said for the SLR design, but it has its drawbacks. If you are thinking about something which is easy to carry about, can be dropped in a purse, pocket or knapsack, SLRs are not the camera for you

Finally, while a poor camera may not capture images well, a “really good” camera won’t really improve them. If you think you need some piece of equipment to take, “good” pictures, you’re wrong. It’s a common line of thinking; pretty much all of us have, at some point, thought that a new lens, or camera, or flash, was what we needed to fix some problem. Once one has a decent camera blaming the tools is counter-productive. Usually the fault lies in ourselves.

What are the concerns? Most commonly talked about today is the sensor density; described in mega-pixels. All things being equal this is a useful measurement. All things are never equal. If the sensors are the same size you can make some general assumptions about the ability of the sensor to more smoothly move from one color to another. It also ought to be better at dealing with contrast. After that things stop being so straightforward

The first thing to remember is each pixel can only record one color (unless you are looking at a Foveon sensor; the only company using them is Olympus, so we can, pretty much, ignore them for the moment). Each one needs to be filtered, so that only that color can be collected. They also (save for Fuji) only measure two things; the color and the brightness. Fuji has a sensor which has two receptors per pixel, and can measure “vibrance” as well as brightness. They say it gives smoother gradations of contrast, and more accurate color rendition.

Which means a 6 megapixel camera has 6 million different specks of Red, Green, and Blue. By doing some math, and making a grid of groups (say a selection of 5x5 pixels) the color, and intensity, of a spot can be figured out. If the grid is displaced a little, and the math is done again, the color can be mapped a little more accurately. How many times, and what assumptions are made about color will determine the color profile for a given camera.

Each manufacturer makes different assumptions about what the best color balance is. e.g. Nikon tends to be slightly blue.

You also have to think about how large the sensor is. There are some, “full-sized” sensors on the market. They aren’t cheap. Then come the “digital format” sizes, which are, roughly 25 percent smaller. After that, things get strange. A Coolpix sensor isn’t the same size as a SureShot, isn’t the same as an Elph, isn’t the same as, well you get the picture. All things aren’t equal.

If you want to make prints, larger sensors (not density of pixels) means you can make larger prints before the image starts to degrade. This is as true now as it was when film was the primary medium. That means most really small cameras aren’t ideal. That said, there aren’t any cameras out there which can’t make 4x6 prints of decent quality, which is fine for most applications. How many of us are looking to make 13x19 in. prints? Not many.

Cameras are a means for trapping light. The lens is how the light is corralled. So a good lens is crucial. SLRs have the advantage of interchangeable lenses. The lenses they use also have adjustable irises, which allows for controlling the amount of light, which gives another set of controls.

Compact cameras tend to not have interchangeable lenses. This requires compromises. The smaller sensors allow for smaller lenses. It also makes it easier to move the lens back and forth, which allows the camera to have different focal lengths, and so gives wide-angle, and telephoto options to most of them. This is usually referred to as “optical zoom”. Depending on the maker a camera may come with the option of “supplemental lenses”. These make it possible to take closer, or farther, images. They are, basically, a filter, with all the advantages; and drawbacks, thereto.

Some cameras (and not just cheaper ones, the Nikon D2X is in this category) have a different means of adjusting the image, referred to as “digital zoom”. Mostly, it’s a worthless gimmick. It works by decreasing the number of pixels being used. To get the “longer” focal length the image is cropped in the camera. You can do the same thing in your editing program. The image is not going to be any more (or less) enlargeable if you do it in PhotoShop, but you will get to choose what to crop (the Nikon does the cropping as a side effect. To get a faster frame rate Nikon is reducing the file size. Since it takes a given amount of time to process information, the only way to speed things up was to reduce the amount of information).

That’s the skinny on the actual image. Once you’ve made a decision on the style of camera (really small, compact, SLR), the thing to do is test them. Assuming all the cameras you are thinking of getting use the same recording medium, go and buy a disk. Then go to some reputable dealers and use your disk to take some pictures. Make sure you know which camera was used for which shots. Try to take similar photos (since most places won’t let you take the camera outdoors this probably isn’t much of a problem). Then go home and compare the pictures. The LCD on the back of the camera is useless for this. You need to be able to compare them in an equivalent medium. Then monitor on your computer (calibrated or not) will let you do that.

Harder to measure are the features. What’s the sensor response time (i.e. how long does it take the sensor to be ready to take the picture. Cheaper cameras can have notable lag times between pressing the release, and the actual capture of the image)? Does it have external controls? Are they easy for you to use? Are the menus you want right on top? Does it keep settings when the batteries are out? Does it have batteries which are easy to replace? Does it drain the batteries quickly? Does it have a viewfinder?

That last is a personal peeve of mine. I am not comfortable with LCD screens as the means of composing the image. They are hard to see in bright light, and they wobble and jiggle. The image I see is a little behind the actual image on the sensor. I find that looking into the viewfinder, and excluding most of the world, save what I am looking at, makes it easier to keep in mind the picture I am trying to take. There are cameras which have a combination of both. Panasonic makes one with an LCD panel, and a viewfinder, which looks onto an LCD. It’s not bad, but the jerky movie effect of it is still not quite what I like.

The rangefinder style is fine. It can cause some parallax problems when shooting up close, but that’s not too hard to deal with. Odds are, if you have such a viewfinder, you won’t be shooting a whole lot of pictures which suffer from the problem. If you do some practice will teach you how to adjust for it.

When it comes to controls I am not a huge fan of purely menu driven systems. Why? Because they require learning a complex set of step. This morning I wanted to us the interval shooting setting on my camera. I lost about 10 minutes of light, while the flower was opening, because the method wasn’t plain to me. I’ve used that setting before, but I forget, in between uses, just what the pattern of buttons and decisions is. Every mistake I made meant starting over.

If manual focus is an option, it ought to be a button, or a switch, on the outside of the camera. White balance, and ISO also ought to be some sort of external control (button, wheel, switch, or some combination). My dSLR has a switch for the modes of autofocus, another one for metering modes (spot, matrix and center weighted). Pressing a button, and turning a wheel lets me adjust ISO, white balance and the file format I’m using to record images.

I like that. There is a vast selection of things I can do from the menu. I can program some of the external buttons, I can set frame rate (and how many frames I can shoot in a row, before I have to take my finger off the button) That’s swell. but those are things which take time. If I need to kill the AF, I need to be able to do it without stopping and finding it, three levels deep in the right set of menus.

To be good with a camera it has to be something you can use without having to stop and think about how to make work. The more time it takes to perform regular tasks, the harder I think it’s going to be to get to that level of familiarity.

The tests in the store won’t tell you that you can get to that level of reflex with a given camera, but it can make it plain you won’t.

If you decide you want an SLR, you have some really important decisions to make. An SLR isn’t just a camera, it’s part of a manufacturers “system”. Canon lenses don’t work on Nikon bodies. Nikon flash units don’t communicate with Olympus bodies. Fuji does use Nikon mounts, so Nikon glass works on them. You can use third party lenses (I am fond of Tamron), but the body you choose will determine a lot of the accessories you get later.

Pretty soon you are locked into it. After you buy a $600 camera body, a couple of $300 lenses and a $200 flash, you aren’t likely to be willing to repeat the process. That makes it a lot more important to get what you want.

I’m a Nikon user. I got started on them, and when I moved to digital I already had a huge investment in the system. Some of it didn’t work as well (My flash unit was a SunPak 400, the adaptor to use it with the D2H was 1: expensive and 2: didn’t give me all the features of the SB800, so I bit the bullet and added more gear), but none of it was useless. If I’d bought a Canon... all of the lenses, bellows, extension tubes: everything which attaches to the body, would have had to be duplicated.

That would have been fine for Canon but a little bit foolish for me.

If you don’t already have an investment, the trick is pretty much the same. Figure out what you want to do. If you aren’t shooting sports, you don’t need camera which shoots 8fps. If you are going to be doing macro, find out who makes the better lenses, and get the body which goes with it.

If the lenses you want are provided by a third party, then what light do you need? Who makes the flash which has the most control of light? After the question of glass, flash is the largest consideration when considering a system; which flash system lets you combine the units best; to your needs?

After that you think about things like sensor size, pixel density and color balance, because those will change. The film is in the camera now (like a Box Brownie), and when you get a new camera those things will change. Some of it will very from body to body in the same model.

Don’t let me, or anyone else, persuade you that you needa Nikon, Canon, Hassleblad, etc. You are the photographer, not them, and when all is said and done When all is said and done, the camera you can use comfortably, and which produces images you enjoy looking at, is the one you want.