Digital Cameras

By David EssexSpecial to GCNThe Internet has made digital photography a medium for our age, enabled by affordable and convenient digital cameras.Now you can snap a picture and quickly transfer it to a PC, where the image typically resides in the Web's ubiquitous Joint Photographic Experts Group file format, ready to be linked to a Web page or attached to e-mail messages. People all over the world can see what your eyes had seen just seconds before. This basic functionality is available for less than $200 in consumer-class cameras that make predictable compromises in quality, features and reliability. For business or government users and professional photographers, the best digital cameras offer substantial increases in image quality, image manipulation and convenience that are more suitable for office uses, such as creating marketing materials, product brochures and e-commerce catalogs.Top professional cameras can cost up to $5,000, but many government agencies will be happy with midrange professional and high-end consumer cameras, a few of which cost more than $1,000. They're the focus of this guide.These 'prosumer' cameras'part professional, part consumer'are segmented into three levels, according to the resolution, measured in millions of pixels, or megapixels, of the electronic charge-coupled device (CCD), which processes light bouncing off photographed objects.Cameras of around 1-megapixel capacity generally cost less than $400, while 2-megapixel cameras are in the $600 to $800 range. Nearing the $1,000 level are the 3-megapixel cameras'3.34, to be precise'announced in late winter and recently shipping from several major vendors, including Epson America Inc., Nikon Inc., Olympus America Inc. and Toshiba America Inc.The lenses for these cameras are almost always made of glass, although the sub-$200 models often have inferior plastic ones. They are rarely interchangeable with lenses from standard 35-mm single-lens reflex (SLR) cameras. And as you go lower in price, you will find fewer of the fine-grained controls favored by photographers, such as a high number of aperture settings and shutter speeds.That's the word from Ron Glaz, a senior analyst in the digital camera and scanner program at International Data Corp., a market research firm in Framingham, Mass. Glass lenses provide better image quality than plastic lenses and more f-stops, or aperture settings. Glass lenses' faster shutter speeds also make it easier to adjust to lighting conditions.The best lenses tend to be in digital cameras sold by the well-known vendors of traditional cameras, such as Canon USA Inc., Eastman Kodak Co., Nikon and Olympus, Glaz said.As with any digital medium, storage type and capacity are issues that must be managed by the user, and the challenge is especially acute on such compact devices.Although some high-end cameras have small areas of memory to hold a quick series of burst mode shots and short videos, the vast majority of cameras rely completely on removable, miniature memory cards that contain a type of erasable read-only memory for storing images.The most popular is CompactFlash, a cookie-size wafer that holds between 8M and 192M of memory. Olympus has SmartMedia technology, with capacities up to 64M, which has been adopted by a few other vendors. Sony Electronics Inc. has the Memory Stick, which is about the size of a stick of chewing gum and can store up to 32M.Although a small memory card usually comes with the camera, the high-capacity ones are expensive, costing as much as several hundred dollars each.Removable miniature drives, such as IBM's Microdrive and Iomega's Clik, are also available, but only on a handful of camera lines. Sony's Mavica line takes 3.5-inch floppy disks that fit inside the camera.Because of these storage limitations, you may have to pace your picture-taking according to the capacity of your memory card and the file format and resolution of each photo. The largest cards can hold hundreds of the most tightly compressed files, while the smallest cards can only hold perhaps a dozen uncompressed files.Some of the higher-priced cameras offer the option of saving in uncompressed format, which retains more of the details of the original photograph, providing more image-manipulation options and the best possible quality and largest sizes for color printing. JPEG is fine for almost all uses, however, and offers several file size and image quality options to choose from.Obviously, the speed and convenience of transferring photo files to a PC is a critical factor in convenience, though many people carry several memory cards with them, just as you'd carry extra rolls of film with a traditional camera.Internal memory card readers installed in a PC drive bay or attached externally via serial or Universal Serial Bus offer one convenient option. The latest generation of cameras have added the USB connection, which runs more than 100 times faster than the painfully slow, 9,600-bit/sec serial standard, which provides a link to older PCs that lack USB ports.You also can download from cameras directly to PCs using either USB or serial, but this method isn't as convenient as plugging memory cards directly into a reader when you have dozens or hundreds of images to transfer. With USB, the reader or camera appears in Microsoft Windows Explorer as if it were a drive, with all the usual drag-and-drop file and directory controls.Digital cameras come with the necessary cabling'card readers are optional'and communication software, as well as at least a basic program for manipulating images. Higher-priced models come with brand-name graphics software such as Adobe Photoshop.Also new in the past year are cameras with limited sound recording, which is great for attaching short narrations to Web site images, and video for shooting short clips of up to a minute or two, saved in the Web's popular AVI and MPEG formats.The near future holds further migration of SLR-like lens control into the less expensive cameras, and a likely increase to 4-megapixel CCDs within two years. CompactFlash cards will hit 256M within six months, with 512M products arriving next year, predicted Michael Rubin, Nikon's senior product manager for digital cameras. Glaz said Speed Stick cards will soon jump from 32M to 64M.Eventually, the big names in cameras will likely make lenses from their SLR cameras interchangeable with those on some higher-end digital models, allowing serious photographers to better integrate digital photography into their work styles. And digital cameras and handheld computers are likely to continue to merge functions.But today's state of the art is more than adequate to satisfy most government users' needs, and any of the cameras in the accompanying chart will give you a good start.XXXSPLITXXX-