[SGVLUG] Camera recommendations?

[Michael Proctor-Smith]

On 9/28/05, Dustin <laurence at alice.caltech.edu> wrote:
-- snip snip
> We have a digital camcorder (what new parent doesn't these days?) with a a
> still mode and we even bought a card for it, but we found that the
> resolution isn't good enough to be satisfying so we've only used the
> feature a couple of times (when the Powershot was in for repair).  I don't
> remember what the latency is like, though.  I bet you're right--it has to
> be able to take video at <mumble> frames a second anyway, so the
> still-photo shutter delay is probably good.

The thing is that while NTSC is 30 frames interlaced (60 fields, field
is half resolution) a second. At most it is 720x480, but total
vertical scan lines are not in the spec(the TV automatically scales
the lines to fit the screen). Inorder to be that 1.3mp image the
camera has to take a couple images and combine them or do line
doubling and software interpolation. In other words video cameras do
crap stills, still cameras do crap video.

The main bottleneck in shutter latence seems to be focas and iris
(figuring out how much light to put on the CCD). Then the flash
interface is slow, for example my camera can take 3 pics in
-- snip snip

> I guess I'm a photo-snob. :-)

As long as you are not demaining 8mp non-interpolated you are not,
some people are just more bothered by digital artifacts then others.
The thing is that a lot of cameras have stated resolution twice that
CCD, as they use onboard software to generate there hightest
resolutions. Which slows them down and came be done better on your
computer as you have a lot more cpu to use.