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Subject:Re: Using digital photos in technical doc From:John Cornellier <cornelli -at- CLAMART -dot- SRPC -dot- SLB -dot- COM> Date:Thu, 18 Jun 1998 09:40:50 +0200
In the past few years digital camera technology has come a long way and prices have been dropping. It's true that with film you have a higher printed resolution, but resolutions on the top cameras are as good as most people need in practice. You can take a pic at 1280 x 960 pixels, which prints at 320 dpi at 4in x 3in. Do you need a higher resolution than that?
If you take pix with film then develop & scan them, you taking an electronic photo of the print. So why not cut out the expensive and time-consuming film stage?
With a digital camera you can view the image immediately on the LCD display. So if someone blinked, delete the image & reshoot it.
Disadvantages? The LCD display is a battery hog. You need at least two sets Ni-MH rechargeables. You can only take one picture about every 15 seconds, because of the time the camera takes to compress (usually to JPG) the image and write it to memory. This is offset by the fact that after 15 seconds you can print the image. I've seen 1-hour photo shops, but never one minute!
There's also a lag (maybe one second) between when you click the shutter and when the image is captured. This is only inconvenient when photographing fast-moving subjects.
For product reviews, see http://www.pcphotoforum.com/
If anyone would like some more detailed info feel free to write me offline.
John Cornellier, tech writer, Paris France mailto:cornelli -at- clamart -dot- srpc -dot- slb -dot- com
