On Digital Photography
And Review of Nikon Coolpix 950
On my way home from photographing the waterfront recently, I visited the local newsagent's, and dragged the nice couple owning it to the street and photographed them in front of their shop. I went home, and came back to them fifteen minutes later with a super-quality 8 by 10 print of the picture, which looked great. How could you do that without a digital camera? ...And they really liked it despite the fact that only the (very cute) woman was smiling broadly. The man had a slightly doubtful look on his face. This turned out to be due to the fact that I had told him to "put his arm around his wife", and they turned out not be married…
Anyway, you are considering getting a digital camera? Good for you. Now, what are you in for?
I have been watching the market with interest since… well, since there were no digital cameras, in fact. One of the first was the Canon Mavica a decade ago. It had a totally lousy resolution, of course. But already then I decided that it looked bright ahead for the technology, because even when you could see big pixels clear as daylight, I did not really find it disturbing or ugly. I did not think that it was as bad as when a image on traditional film was badly grainy or just blurred.
I thought, as did many, that the great digital revolution was imminent. But things went very slowly for a long while. Apparently the image-capturing censors, CCD ("charge-coupled device". Don’t you feel much better now?), which is the little plate of light-sensitive points (like a monitor, only in reverse), is much harder than expected to produce and improve. Up until the mid-eighties I was very disappointed that there was nothing happening. Oh, some bulky pro cameras arrived, but these were in a price range I thought were reserved for luxury cars.
Then Olympus came out with an amateur model, which took over the bulk of the amateur and semi-pro market. It still had a resolution that was only good for images to be shown on screens, or for quick illustrative purposes. But the price had come down to a point where the serious amateur could play, and in general it was a very good camera.
But then things seemed to slow down again for a couple of years… where were all the competitors who should rip Olympus to shreds for the good of the rest of us? Well, they did not arrive for real until about 1998, but then things finally started moving. And move they did. The past two years has seen so much progress that it is hard to keep up mentally, not to mention financially.
In ’98 a "megapixel" camera was a big deal. A megapixel obviously means a million pixels, which is a bit larger than 768x1024, which is becoming a pretty normal screen resolution. Maybe 800x600 is more ordinary still, but this is just so you know what ballpark we are in. A megapixel can give a very good print of 4x6 inches. Perhaps a bit larger. In 1999 the breakthrough was 2-megapixel cameras, typically with resolutions of 1200x1600 pixels. And in early 2000 the 3-megapixel barrier was dust (about 1600x2000 pixels). The two-megapixel camera, such as the Nikon 950 I have, will produce a handsome 8 by 10 print. And of course it could be considered a bit of an overkill if you only plan to make pictures for web publication. This can be debated, though, for survival is based on abundance, and a nice bit of extra quality to throw away never hurts.
As with any and all new technology to be introduced to mankind, digital photography has its attackers too. The point most often leveled against it is that it still is not of the same quality as 35mm photography. This is true, but only kind of. If you take the best camera and lens you can get, take a fine-grained (slow) film, and put the camera on a tripod, yes, you can certainly capture more detail than even the 3-megapixel camera can manage. But how often is this the case? I have seen a lot of photography from hard-trying amateur enthusiast in my day, and I can assure you that most of it was not markedly better than what I get from the (2-megapixel) 950 camera. Much of it was worse. There are people who have a king’s ransom’s worth of equipment, and still never manage to take a sharp picture. "35mm quality" varies wildly according to the camera, the film, and the photographer.
What it boils down to is that if you are a pro photographer getting your work printed in slick magazines and on posters, a camera like Nikon Coolpix 950 will not be enough. It will take far more money than that to get what you need. The good news is that for 90 percent of work that falls short of that goal, the camera is very excellent. (A big brother just arrived, the 990, which is 3-megapixel. This has even more manual options, and is clearly a professional camera.)
I did very exhaustive research before committing to a digital camera. Why did I choose the Nikon? Two good reasons: I came first in every test I had seen, and I really liked the set of features it has.
I advice you not to shop for "features". The number of buttons a camera has is not proportional to quality. And the longest zoom is not necessarily the best (there are always trade-offs in quality). One thing one might not notice in the midst of the scream of fancy features, for instance, is the option on the Nikon cameras to capture pictures with lower contrast. This is so useful as to be almost essential, because there are many, many motives that have a contrast that outstrips the standard setting, or indeed the contrast range of ordinary color film. Actually most motives with a highly directional source of light might benefit from this. (They can also capture with higher contrast, but this is easier to correct on the computer afterwards. With too high contrast, details are lost that can never be regained.)
Also important in the extreme is that pixel count is not necessarily proportional with image quality either! I very strongly recommend getting some magazines with comparative tests, and you will see that two cameras with similar features and identical pixel counts can have very different output quality. Of course the lens is a huge factor. But also the interior electronics, and even the software in the camera! Huge differences, both in how the camera handles compression of the image, and how the light meter handles different lighting situations, etc etc.
Buying a digital camera, like so many things, require some study of what exactly you need, as well as what you might need in the future. As an example, I was quite in doubt whether to get the Coolpix 950 or the new 800. They have identical pixel resolution, and (probably) identical image quality. So why pick the more expensive one? Well, it has a longer zoom, but that was not hugely important to me. (Though I admit that after have gotten a zoom camera for the first time in my life, I really appreciate the ease with which you can get a very exact composition without changing the perspective.) It also has two rotating parts to the camera, one of which holds the lens, and the other the LCD display. This means that unusual shooting angles, like close to the ground, over your head, photographing yourself, or even just shooting from the hip so to appear less intrusive, is much easier. It has the possibility of using an external flash, which can be important, you can use bouncing flash off the ceiling, for instance, and the camera measures the light through the lens. It also has a bigger LCD and a closer macro function. You can get a PDF document on the 950 from Nikon’s site here.
There are a ton of digital cameras on the market, but it would take a lot for me to consider straying from Nikon’s short, but excellent range. You can see some of my pictures taken with the camera here.
- Stobblehouse
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