Product Reviews
Digital Camera Update Notes
April 2003

The manufacturers and retailers will tell you the good stuff. We'll tell you the good AND the bad from a user's perspective. These are comments on our experience with various products.

This article is based on questions from someone looking at updating their digital in April 2003. They wanted to know if I still liked the Sony FD91. Here's what I said.

We use a number of digital cameras in our website and publishing work. For the web, almost any camera will work because screen resolution is so low. For publication, we want the highest resolution we can get... within reason. We send our publications to the various printers in electronic form (usually Acrobat PDF files.) If the images have too much resolution they can make the files very large and slow to send.

We have several models of the Sony Mavica's. In fact, we bought one of the $300 diskette versions last month weeks ago for a client to use. It's only 1.2Mb resolution, but the diskette and the simplicity make it ideal for this client's needs.

I've tried a lot of the new cameras and I'm not overly impressed by any of them. But I'm really picky. I was a hard core film hobbiest most of my life. Although I've spent hundreds of hours in the darkroom in the past, I like having creative control at the camera level. I almost never do more than crop and slighty tweak my digital pictures.

Here are a few things I do NOT like about many of the new cameras I've tried:
  • Confusing controls.
  • Tiny buttons
  • Too many buttons
  • lack of viewfinder
  • complicated connection to computer
  • lousy battery/power management
  • digital zoom
My Sony FD91 remains the best digital I've used for many reasons. I had anticipated that later models would build on the good points of the FD91 and I would be able to upgrade and get MORE and BETTER features. That's not how it worked. It's like the Sony folks hit a high point then forgot all the good stuff with later cameras.

(Maybe cameras are like computer software: A small tean of inspired programmers write a great program that becomes very popular. Then a big company buys them out and turns the software over to their in-house programming crew. Those programmers haven't a clue about what made the original product good. But they're instructed by the marketing people to "add features" so that a new version can be sold for more money. In the end the great original product loses it's edge, becomes slow and confusing, but gets a great advertising budget.)

Sorry... back to the case at hand: cameras.

The best thing about the original Sony FD91 is the lens. It's totally optical and it's 15x. That equates to over 500 mm for a film camera. Even at 1.2 Mega-pixel, I can zoom in so close that my image comes out better than the same shot, from the same distance, with Sony's latest 5 Mega-pixel camera (which gets 5x optical zoom, then 10x via digital zoom. Getting the 15x requires software tweaking on the computer).

I'm ready for a new camera, but I'm waiting till I can afford a professional one. One of the guys who contributes photos to our on-line magazine MyBayCity.com, uses a Nikon digital. It's amazing. But the body alone cost almost $5,000. His entire rig of body, a couple of lenses, and an external flash probably tops out over $8,000.

The Nikon takes some fantastic shots. This is partly the great camera, but it's also the benefit of great lenses. Still, any image makes a BIG picture file for the computerr. A simple "snap" can be a file of almost 1 meg. I'm told that shooting in "raw mode" for the best image can create a file of over NINE MEG! Not the sort of thing that you'd e-mail to grandma.

Sony 707 NOTES - 2/19/2002

In February 2002 I was asked by a client to try his new Sony 707 and then teach him how to use it. There was a lot to learn.

The 707 is the "coke can" model. It's almost all lens on a tiny body. (I believe that there's a new model now which looks the same).

Although the 707 had some amazing sounding features, the final assessment for this client was "set it on automatic, point and push the button".

Here are some notes taken at the time. These are offered in raw form for now.
  • FD91 takes better shots. Even at 5.2 megapixels, the FD91 zoom gives the edge
  • the 707 does not have a "steady shot" feature to stabalize the image.
  • The viewfinder was NOT comfortable to use.
  • The viewfinder blacks out when shooting.
  • There was a tendency to get bright streaks in finder under some lighting conditions which made it very difficult to compose pictures.
  • The finder video does not pan smoothly. There's a jerkey, ratcheting image. I've seen a number of new cameras with this problem. (The FD91 finder is smooth as silk no matter how fast you pan.)
  • The 707 body is far too small for the hands! The balance and feel is awful.
  • There are too many buttons and controls and they are TINY!
  • The USB connection was a pain to use. It didn't work at all on some windows 98 computers.
  • There is no external battery charger included. Sony has started doing that with a number of their cameras. Either you charge the battery by tethering your camera to the wall, or you buy an expensive external charger. Earlier cameras came with a charger. I bought two batteries. While one was charging I could be off shooting with the other. Without the charger you can't do that!
  • The flash is on the side and awkward to use.
  • The optical zoom was only 5x. The digital zoom takes it to 10x, but loses much of the advantage of 5 megapixel resolution.
  • The digital soom required the use of the menu. That's slow work.
  • The so-so macro focusing also requires setting a button. Terrible design
For more information send e-mail to the Peddler.
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