Tiga's Tech Tip of the Week UPDATED 7/1/04

[tiga]

Hi all, this will be the thread for my weekly tech tips.

A bit of background on me, I am a senior network engineer involved in enterprise network and security installations but have also been a qualified PC and Mac technician, provided software support for adobe and other desktop publishing products and have been tinkering with computers since 1981. My first computer was a *smile* Smith System 80 with a tape drive, and a whopping 16k of RAM. I progressed to the commodore 64 and also purchased an IBM XT computer. Now as with most I try to have the latest in PC technology but these days it's almost impossible to keep up.

Feel free to fire away with any questions on this board and I'll try my best to get an answer for you.

 

[tiga]

Re:Tiga's Tech Tip of the Week

My Tech tip for this week is on Digital Still Cameras.
Digital cameras are becoming extremely popular and very good value for money. There are plenty of brands and models to choose from. I recently purchased an Olympus C5060WZ which is brilliant. So from my experience here are a few things to look out for.

Megapixel resolution.
When choosing a digital camera, many people judge a camera on it's megapixel resolution. They think the higher the megapixels the better the camera. Well there is a Yes and No answer to this.
Yes, a camera with a 5 megapixel resolution has advantages over 3 megapixel camera but only if you wish to print larger A4 photos. But if you are wanting standard 8 x 5 prints there is no difference in the quality as far as megapixels are concerned.

Shutter Lag
This is something I looked at closely when choosing a digital camera. Shutter lag is the delay between pressing the button and the photo being taken. There is nothing worse that trying to capture a special moment only to realise that the camera took the photo a second or two after the fact. The camera I purchased has a shutter lag of 1/4000 of a second which is considered to be very good. Top of the line digital SLR's have about 1/8000 of a second lag which is almost perfect while you entry point $150 camera would have a shutter lag of about 1/1000 of a second.

Memory storage options
There are a few types of memory cards that are available for different brands of various sizes. Basically the bigger the memory card, the more photos you can store. The 3 main types of cards are Compact Flash or CF, XD and Sony Memory stick. My camera takes both CF and XD cards which is very handy as I can have 2 cards in the camera at once. CF cards can go as high as 2Gb capacity, XD 512meg and Sony Memory stick or memory stick pro's go quite large but are also quite expensive and are generally only used in Sony Cameras.
You dont need to go overboard on memory size as you can get approx 60 SHQ 5 megapixel pics on 1 x 256meg CF card.

Well I hope that info helps and feel free to post any other queries you may have. I will continue with digital camera tips in later TTTOTW's.

 

[Rosy]

An interesting and timely thread for me tiga. I was thinking of a present to get my son for graduating from uni and I thought a digital camera would be the go as it would be handy for his honours project this year.
What kind of price range would I expect to pay for something like you mention?

 

[feisty tige]

This tech board/thread sounds like a great idea Tiga, I currently own a PC running Windows Xp a Mac ibook with both OS9 and X (about 10.2 i think) and work on both operating systems at work.

I also use Photoshop, Illustrator and In Design from Adobe and Quark Xpress.

The boss also owns 2 digital SLR cameras which are very nice.

If I have any questions I will come to you first. Thanks.

 

[tiga]

An interesting and timely thread for me tiga. I was thinking of a present to get my son for graduating from uni and I thought a digital camera would be the go as it would be handy for his honours project this year.
What kind of price range would I expect to pay for something like you mention?

Rosy, I won't scare you with the price of my camera ($1000+) but if you let me know what your budget is and I'll recommend some good ones for your price range.
There are some pretty good cameras in the $500-$700 range. If you could give me a little indication as to what he may use it for also like family snaps, sports photography, landscapes, Tourist, Nature and wildlife etc....

 

[tiga]

This tech board/thread sounds like a great idea Tiga, I currently own a PC running Windows Xp a Mac ibook with both OS9 and X (about 10.2 i think) and work on both operating systems at work.

I also use Photoshop, Illustrator and In Design from Adobe and Quark Xpress.

The boss also owns 2 digital SLR cameras which are very nice.

If I have any questions I will come to you first. Thanks.

Feisty, sounds like you're well kitted out there. I used to be a Quark Xpress wizard but it's been about 3 years since I've used it. I'm not too bad with photoshop and Illustrator as I use them regularly. I keep the office folk amused with mocked up pics created in photoshop. The most recent one was I put one of our technicians head on the body of a guest of the Queer eye for the straight guy show promo poster.(the same one that has been doing the rounds of the internet with Saddam Husseins head) ROFLMAO it was a classic. ;D