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SILICON
CHIP
www.siliconchip.com.au
Publisher & Editor-in-Chief
Leo Simpson, B.Bus., FAICD
Production Manager
Greg Swain, B.Sc.(Hons.)
Technical Editor
Peter Smith
Technical Staff
John Clarke, B.E.(Elec.)
Ross Tester
Jim Rowe, B.A., B.Sc, VK2ZLO
Reader Services
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Advertising Enquiries
Lawrence Smith
Benedictus Smith Pty Ltd
Phone (02) 9211 8035
Fax: (02) 9211 0068
lawrence<at>benedictus-smith.com
Regular Contributors
Brendan Akhurst
Rodney Champness, VK3UG
Julian Edgar, Dip.T.(Sec.), B.Ed,
Grad.Dip.Jnl
Mike Sheriff, B.Sc, VK2YFK
Stan Swan
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2 Silicon Chip
Publisher’s Letter
Low-cost digital cameras no
match for 35mm equivalents
Have you been considering a change to a digital
camera? You’ve seen all the hype, everybody’s
doing it and perhaps you are getting the strong
message that your old faithful 35mm camera is
just “old hat” and nobody who is anybody would
be seen dead with that old clunker!” That is how
it was with me and my techno-savvy daughters
who thought it was time I “got with it”. Of course,
at SILICON CHIP we have been using a high-end
Nikon digital camera for some time now, so I do
know the capabilities of digital cameras, or so I thought.
And since I was about to depart on a world trip, I was seriously thinking
about getting a compact digital camera to substitute for my old favourite SLR
camera which is rather heavy and not one you can “point and shoot”.
So I did a quick survey and it quickly came down to a choice between a
Fuji Finepix S3500 and an Olympus C725. I wanted something I would be
reasonably happy with and that my wife could operate easily without a long
and tedious study of an instruction book.
Both cameras look like miniature 35mm SLR cameras but they’re not. They
are both reasonably compact and do not have buttons and controls which are
so small that a mature (!) male has difficulty using them. And they both have
good optical zoom ranges which is important when you’re taking photos as
a tourist. In the metal, the Fuji proved to be a lot bulkier than the Olympus
although it is probably the better unit. So since I was travelling, I chose the
Olympus. Unfortunately, you cannot try them in the store and that is a trap.
And I had to buy bigger memory cards because the supplied 16MB is only
good for about 20 shots.
So I got it home and put it all together, spent an hour with the instructions
and turned it on to take some shots.
First problem is the LCD screen and viewfinder. The LCD screen is fine but
try to use it outdoors for picture composition and it becomes very difficult,
especially in bright sun when you need to use sunglasses. Alternatively, you
try to use the LCD viewfinder but its pixels are so coarse that it is really not
possible to tell whether the image is sharply in focus or not. In practice, the
viewfinder needs to be optical (most are) rather than LCD.
In fact, focus is a problem, because in the normal automatic mode, it has
aperture priority which means that the aperture is normally wide open at
f2.8 (with shutter speed setting the exposure). That means that depth of field
is always poor. Minimum aperture is f7, by the way. And then I found that I
could not focus manually! Other than that, digital cameras require so much
paraphernalia that you need to carry when on an overseas trip: extra memory
cards, battery charger, USB cable, memory card reader, extra batteries, etc.
Ultimately, I decided that the almost $500 I had spent was not a good
photographic package and certainly nothing like equivalent to a 35mm SLR
camera purchased for the same money.
So what to do? I took the Olympus back and instead purchased a small
automatic 35mm camera with a good zoom and automatic focus, for just over
$100. It’s a simple “point and shoot” camera. And for under $25, I purchased
enough film for 200 photos. My wife loves it.
I will buy a digital camera, eventually. But not yet. By the way, it now looks
as though a much better choice, for not much more money, would have been
a Fuji E550. So there you go.
Leo Simpson
siliconchip.com.au
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