Mechling/Mechcom Support Group   

Digital Camera Basics

When buying a digital camera you have to consider what you are willing to spend and what you will get at that price range. Set a budget and don't be overpriced by sales people. Keep in mind system requirements (what is expected from your PC to run the camera), small camera doesn't always mean underpowered (it may be just what you need), don't expect the camera to come with tons of media space (storage capacity), and most importantly....look for a manufacturer you know.

Sometimes advertised digital camera pixel counts can be deceiving.

When comparing megapixel counts between digital cameras, be careful when comparing cameras containing the Foveon X3 three-layer sensor. You may think the resulting photos will come out larger in resolution than what the camera provides.

Most digital camera sensors can detect only red, blue, or green per pixel, using what is called the Bayer filter. A moire effect sometimes appears in photos as digital cameras try to accurately reproduce colors via dithering effects. To reduce the moire effects, digital cameras may use demosaicing effects that may result in "smearing" the photo, causing some loss of sharpness. 

Foveon X3 digital cameras, however, have a sensor array, with three sensors for each pixel - one detecting red, one blue, and one green. The digital camera then merges the results together, supposedly resulting in sharper, warmer, and more pleasing photos.

Because of the extra detectors, a Foveon X3 digital camera that has, for example, 3.3 million detectors for red, green, and blue may advertise itself as being 10 megapixels (3.3 multiplied by 3 is approximately 10, though the resulting resolution of a photo will only be 3.3 megapixels). The actual quality of the photo, however, may differ depending on the digital camera's implementation, having approximately the same quality as a 5-8 megapixel photo taken with the Bayer filter.

Watch out for this trap when transferring images from your digital camera to your computer.

When you transfer images from your digital camera to your PC, take great care in that you do not overwrite images currently on your PC. 

In most instances where one transfers images from a camera to a PC, the same filenames are used when you transfer different sets of files. Thus, you see that if you don't change the image filenames on your computer, or if you don't make sure you transfer images to different PC directories, your photos on your PC can be overwritten by accident.

There are better imaging programs available than those that came with your digital camera - find out how to get them!

Chances are, when you purchased your digital camera, you got one piece of software, or perhaps a small suite, of digital editing tools. You may have received a paint program, some software to do a few special digital effects, and maybe even an image cataloger. Don't settle just for these tools! If you plan on taking a lot of pictures with your digital camera and really want to spice up your photos, give your pictures some pizzazz and try out some newer tools. There are tons more tools available from the Internet that you can use to perform what seems like magic with your digital photos. Check out Paint Shop Pro, Corel PhotoPaint  and the Adobe suite of tools.

Always resize your digital camera photos before putting them online.
 
If you plan on sharing your digital camera photos on a webpage, please, please, PLEASE do not put full-size photos on your front page! Everyone does not have a high-speed Internet connection, and even those who do may not want to see a 3-megapixel image as soon as they visit your site.

Realize that even a 1 or 2-megapixel image contains more detail than what can fit on a computer monitor at once without scrolling, so your 3+ megapixel images are way too big to fit on a web page.

Use your imaging software to resample front-page images to a smaller resolution, say, 400x300 or better yet 200x150, then hyperlink the images to bigger photos in the 800x600 range. Let people know that clicking on your pictures will result in larger versions of the images being displayed.

Also, compress your photos using the JPG format. You may lose a little picture quality, but the images size will decrease dramatically if your photos were previously in an uncompress format, such as TIF, making them download and display quicker on visitors' machines.