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Kodak DC-4800 (Digital Camera) |
I think there are mainly four reasons for "going digital":
I use the "high-quality compression" setting of the camera, which stores the 3.1 megapixel
for the image as JPEG (2160 x 1440). The resulting file is usually on average 850 KB.
Thus, the camera can hold roughly 140 to 150 pictures with a 128 MB memory card!
Unfortunately, the camera came only with a 16 MB memory card, which is by far not enough
for any serious use. The 128 MB card was roughly 130 Euros (June 2001) and is suitable
even for a full week of vacation.
The colour display at the back of the camera is bright, and it helps you to see the shot
immediately after it has been made. However, I think the display is too bright.
Pictures that look good on the display are often darker when opened on the PC in Adobe
Photoshop. Also, the display allows you to zoom into the picture (2x and 4x), but again
this does not really help you in determining whether a photo is sharp. Always be prepared
for a disappointment when you open a picture in Photoshop!
While you can display the "live" camera picture of the photo you are about to shoot.
This is a very useful function when you are shooting from difficult angles (e.g. from close
to the floor), but it drains the battery quite quickly. I prefer to use the optical
viewfinder, which gives you an almost correct impression of the image. If you set the
lense to wide-angle, be prepared to see a difference between viewfinder and resulting
image. If you use the zoom function, the viewfinder will adjust as well. Most of the time,
the viewfinder works for me.
The image quality is almost always okay, but sometimes I am really disappointed when I
zoom into it with Photoshop. Often there is "noise" or "grain" that really destroys
the whole image. Some pictures carry more noise than others, and I have not really
figured out why. I find that pictures with enough light (e.g. shots in the bright sun)
have better quality (less noise) than those with little light.
This is an image I created for the Web site. Please have a look
at this full-size detail (129 KB)
from the original image file that has been saved in Photoshop with the best quality
setting of "12". This is as good as a shot gets with the Kodak DC-4800. Here is the
luminance histogram from the above picture:
You can see that there are no drop-outs, and that almost the full range has been used.
It seems that the picture is a little over-exposed, but I like it exactly the way it is.
Another funny thing is the built-in flashlight. It is really easy to operate, and it has
enough power for standard situations. Often I do get "wiped" results like this:
Finally, a word of caution: please develop a backup strategy when starting to work
with digital photography. Without CD-ROM burner you are pretty much lost should your
computer seriously crash. With slides, negatives or Kodak Photo CDs, you can build huge
archives completely independent of your computers health. With digital photography,
everything is lost if its lost!
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Important Update 20/07/2004 |
Yesterday, almost exactly three years after purchase, my DC 4800 died a mysterious death.
In the afternoon I made a few pictures of an appartment that Petra and I had been looking
at (no art stuff), and after picture # 1,893 the camera simply quit working. The screen
stayed dark (even in setup mode and when connected to A/C), the LCD display would not show
the usual set of information, and the lense would not retract properly into the camera any longer. Also, the camera switched itself off after a few seconds.
At home, I found that I still could download the images to the PC, all nice and sharp,
and even when connecting the camera to a TV screen, all the menu items could be seen
and navigated as usual. Even the output from the camera (live video feed) would show up on
TV, but the cameras screen was still dark. The Kodak website hardly bothers with such
legacy users and is no help at all in solving this. From various newsgroups I gathered
the information that Kodak charges $150 for just looking at the camera, regardless whether
they are able to repair it or not. What a pile of rubbish!
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Reference photos made with a Kodak DC-4800 |
The following photo sets have been done using the Kodak DC-4800:
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