Time To Test Some Cameras

If you have the opportunity to test a camera before buying it, jump at it. Test the camera in your shooting environment and take pictures of the things that you plan to photograph. If you're a geologist, take pictures of rocks; if you need to do a lot of close-up work, shoot close-ups.

Most likely, your chance to test a deluxe point-and-shoot or professional lite camera will come by borrowing a camera from a friend or by shooting files at a camera store. You can checkout a point-and-shoot camera from the Pierce College library at either campus. However these cameras are for people that are not interested in making large prints. If you're in the market for a professional camera, most resellers will work with you in your studio to see how the camera performs in your shooting conditions.

Trade shows allow you to see the cameras in action, handle them, and look at files coming straight off the cameras. When checking out a camera, hold it to feel how it lies in your hands, look through the viewfinder, and see if you are comfortable with the controls. Take a couple of exposures, ask the sales rep to put the files on a floppy or Zip disk that you brought with you, and take the files home to see how the files look printed on your printer.

The lens gathers light coming from the subject and focuses it on the image plane. Even a perfect digital capture cannot compensate for corruption of the image at this stage. When buying a camera, therefore, pay close attention to the quality of the lens. Inexpensive entry-level cameras are likely to have inexpensive plastic entry-level lenses that will never give you the quality you need.

Examine files and prints (and not ones that have been worked on) for the following characteristics:

Sharpness
Check that the image is sharp-side to side and top to bottom. If the image isn't sharp in the first place, there is nothing you can do
to fix this. When judging sharpness, make sure that the image was captured at a high shutter speed (1/125 second or higher) and/or that the photographer used a tripod.

Exposure evenness
Look to see if the exposure is even over the entire image.
Are the corners darker? Take a picture of an evenly lit white wall and look at the corners of the image for exposure fall-off. Although this problem can be corrected in the digital darkroom, it's not something you want to fix on every picture you take.

Distortion
Does the image bow in (pincushioning) or out (barrel effect)?
Don't mix this up with the widening effect that you get from shooting with a wide-angle lens.

Flare Shooting toward the light source can create flare, which appears as diffuse light areas, shutter-shaped blotches, and a general loss of contrast. This problem is minimized by quality coated optics that reduce the amount of light bouncing around inside the lens before it reaches the CCD.

Resolution
is the ability of the camera to capture fine detail; it refers to the number of pixels on the sensor. This is not a strict definition of the word, but it is common usage. The resolution of your image determines how large you can print it without having it look like it's made up of little pixel squares (which, in fact, it is). The higher the resolution, the bigger you can print a picture and have it look good.