Digital Camera

[lost1]

What I want to do is buy a compact digital photo camera. I want something light, tough small enough for world travel. Probably need at least 2 megapixels. I looked at the Canon digital elph S100 and liked it. I dont want to spend an absurd amount of money.
I am new to digital photography, and will also carry my trust SLR. I wont be travelling with a laptop, but would like to send images from internet cafes etc. Please any suggestions or recommendations would be a big help

thanks

[Photog Rob]

Whoa. Er, next question, please.

Seriously now, this is what I call a Huge can of worms. Whichever camera I point you to, somebody else will probably challenge, so I'll give you the fishing rod and you do the fishing:

First: I assume you're familiar with digital cameras. If you're not, get yoursef into it before you depart and make very sure that the quality suits your needs, and that you can live with their quibbles, specially their hunger for batteries. In case you have not used one much, digital cameras will eat up a set of Energizers in a matter of minutes, rather than hours. For travelling, you'll need three times as many batteries as you think you'll need before you can buy more(cameras using regular AA ones are best so you can swap them around with anything else, like small flashlights), or a good, rugged multivoltage charger and a couple sets of rechargeables at least. Have the battery deal thoroughly worked out before you depart!

Second: This is my best piece of advice: If you need to buy meat, you don't go to a plumber. If you want a camera, you want an experienced camera maker, not an electronics brand that also does cameras. For once, buy brand and not features and you'll be rewarded with a good lens, better image performance, and a more solid design, which are the really important features (and the ones that don't get any hooplah). I like and use Nikon, but Canon is just as good and Olympus is just there with them, though only for digital. You are sure to find something that suits you within these brands, but do your own research. I personally would go for the Nikon Coolpix 880, but your needs and budget will be different. There is also a Ricoh (can't remember the model) that's way cool for this purpose and much cheaper.

Third: Ruggedness is important, and if you're doing any significant trail or dirt road riding, essential. Avoid "hinged" designs this time, you want a boxy camera with as few seals and moving parts as possible. That's why I'd go for the 880 instead of the 990 for riding. The 950 and 990 have poor card compartment doors that are not up to Nikon quality.

Fourth: If you're planning to email and download pics from internet cafes, you'll need as easy and speedy a download procedure as possible. There's nothing better or faster than a card reader (USB is fine), but do you want to carry it? will serial port do? In any case, remember many internet cafes around the world run on dismal machines, won't let you install your own software or attach your hardware, and so on. In this situation a Sony Mavica is good because it writes to standard disks, but the camera is... not that good, let's say. Be prepared to have to keep your pics in the camera until you find a better cafe, and have enough capacity for that. 32 Mb is the absolute minimum I'd recommend.

Roundup: Digital cameras are ridiculously power hungry, be ready for that. Buy from a Camera company. Buy small, boxy and rugged, not feature-laden. Check the download procedure: fast is good, fail-safe is better. Carry an extra memory card, or a big, big one (I prefer two, just in case).

Bonus (for reading this far): NEVER store your camera in a magnet-type tankbag, it'll sooner or later ruin its electronics. This is twice as important for digitals. And never wear it on you while riding, even in a minor spill it will be bashed and it might hurt you as well (Murphy's law of the camera-carrying biker: you'll always fall camera-first, smashing it against your body and breaking bones in the process).

Let me know if you need more pointers!

Roberto.

[Chris Scott]

I researched digi cams last year for a desert trip (making vids and DVDs) and came to the conclusion choose between 3 CCD Canon and Sony at around 1000 quid if you are serious about quality and all the rest.
I ended up with a Sony TRV900 but sometimes wish I'd got the smaller PC100 - certainly that is what I'd choose for a bike. The Canon X ...series are a bit big for a bike but Helge P taped his Siberia m/c tour last year using one.
Make sure you have digital in and out plugs - not all UK cameras have this (some tax thing).
My small experience: accept what you tape will be 90% crap - I learned a whole lot from 'Home Movies for Dummies or Idiots" book (orange).
The good thing about digicams is that you can edit them on a computer with software like iMovie, something I'm about to start on.

Pan and zoom

Ch

------------------
Author of Sahara Overland and the Adventure Motorcycling Handbook, among other things

http://www.sahara-overland.com

[Jeremy Andrews]

I'm also stuck on the same question at the moment, and just because I work for Agfa is not helping me either.

I'm on the look out for a Digital Camera that can connect to a Joe Average desktop to upload jpegs for a planned internet site while doing my Pan American in January. Rob is correct in assuming that most Internet Cafe's will have old equipment, so I'm ruling out anything with a smart card or USB possibilty as that is most likely too modern.

Sony's new Mavica's are just huge, but there is an alternative ( who's model name escapes me right now ) which saves imgaes onto a Mini CD ( not a Minidisc ) storing up to 150 Mb per CD. The supposed advantage here is that this Mini CD clips into a normal sized CD adapter, which in turn loads into a normal CD-ROM player. Possibly perfect, but costs around 2500 DM. So far this is the only solution apart from the Mavica which doesn't need a driver to be loaded on the desktop.

If anyone has any bright ideas I'd like to hear them - otherwise I'll come back when I've had my Eureka moment.

Cheers

Jeremy

[Kevin Beretta]

I faced the same problems you all mentioned before. I was in Laos for 7 weeks and took lots of pictures. As a camera, I settled on an Olympus C3030, 3.3 megapixels. It uses little smart cards. I carried a 64MB and a 20MB card and that was plenty. Remember, what you do during the day is shoot lots of pictures and then in the evening you walk through them and toss 90% and keep the best 10%. That way, you end up with 10 good shots per day (if you shoot 3 "rolls" per day). On high resolution and quality, that gave me 254 pictures. So basically if you can get to an internet cafe once a month where you can upload pictures, it'd be worth it. I didn't and took them all home without downloading. However, each picture is about 700K, so remember that as well when you want to upload them to a safe spot from a 14.4K internet cafe in some outback place.

The way I am going to do it for my RTW is to take an old Libretto laptop (available on E-Bay cheap) and an HP CD burner. That way, I can burn two CD's once in a while and ship them home. At least one will make it home, and if not, the laptop hopefully makes it home too. If the laptop and camera get stolen, at least I have pictures at home etc. You get the idea. With 6 GB of space on the Libretto, you can have all the pictures you want. As well, you can then use the computer for e-mail etc. through one of the world-wide e-mail providers (about $5/hour in Laos) and carry all your stuff with you and not have to spend time in an e-cafe to write e-mail etc. In my case, I'm taking a satellite phone as well.

As well, I had some print made from pictures taken with the C3030 via www.ofoto.com and the results were better than any print film I ever made (much sharper and brighter).

The total nexus is when it comes to slide shows. Borrow an Infocus projector from your office and shoot the slides on your slide screen at home. You won't believe how bright it is.

[Jeremy Andrews]

Well - dug into my wallet and bought a Sony CD Mavica, the MVC-CD300 3.3 MP.

It saves directly in jpg, gif, tiff, or even mpeg onto a Mini CD-ROM which slots in without adapters into a normal Desktop CD-ROM drive. Just what I wanted for the trip, enabling fuss free uploads at Internet Cafe's. Each CD hold 156 MB, and considering how light and small they are - there is no need for a laptop anymore.

The writing time to CD is 1 or two seconds for the top quality jpeg ( approx 1.2 MB ) just as quick if not quicker than most digital cameras. A real nice touch is the shutter sound effect when a picture is captured. The sales guy assures me it's a recording of a Nikon with an MD4 Winder !

Now let's see if it survives the trip !

Cheers

Jeremy


[This message has been edited by Jeremy Andrews (edited 22 August 2001).]

[pylofm]

With regard to digital camera's I have found that this has in the past limited me to having to find a pc to download the photo's and then remove said photo's.

I now have a Sony MVC 73 which stores all pics on a floppy diskette, whilst I need to get to a pc to view them, I am at least able to take many disketts which are cheap and reliable.

The camera is I admit a point and click, but the quality is good enough for holiday snaps.

I have used this camera in Gambia and Senegal for many visits and it does not seem to be affected by the heat at all.

S/hand cost in UK is around 200 - 300 pounds.