[ description | image samples | links ]

Olympus D-340R

description

I think this camera is great for an entry-level megapixel cam. It's perfect for web stuff. I got mine from amazon.
If you are a print person you may need a 2.x MP camera.

Digicams eat batteries, particularly when you use the LCD viewer (so don't do that). You will need rechargeable batteries no matter which cam you choose. I recommend www.thomas-distributing.com for price, quality, and speed of order fulfillment.

Uploading pics through the serial port is somewhat slow, but seems to be MUCH more stable under NT. Under Win9X, all TWAIN stuff bogarts the entire machine.

The photo-stitching software supplied with the cam makes decent panoramas; see below.

Camera Memory is coming down in price and up in capacity. Figure out what resolution you plan to shoot at, and how many shots you'll need. To help you understand, here is a listing of quality choices for this camera, and the resulting number of shots storable on its 8MB SmartMedia card:

modesizeshots
SQ640x480, standard compression122
HQ1280x960, standard compression36
SHQ1280x960, low compression18
SHQ tiff1280x960, no compression2

Note: it is not obvious how to get the 340 into tiff mode. Here's how:

  1. Turn on the cam
  2. advance the HQ/quality button until it says SHQ (highest quality jpeg)
  3. hold down the HQ button until it beeps and and display lashes

image samples

In the following section "original" means straight out the camera and "corrected" means imported into Photoshop, auto-levels corrected, and exported through Ulead Smartsaver (optimized, 70%, YuV411 sampling). You will notice that digicams are notoriously poor on landscape shots, and that I am no photographer.

links

This page best viewed with a monitor.

You can if you are not a spammer.

Amazon.com 100 Hottest Books, CDs, Videos, and DVDs.