Digital Cameras - Instant Images - No Waiting by Phil Philcox Digitals are the 21st century’s solution to the old buy/process film and wait routine. Budget-permitting, you can buy a digital camera that can produce photos equal to the quality of 35mm. For the cost-conscious, the S-100 is a good solution and the amazingly-small size makes it something you can carry everywhere so it’s available whenever you need it.

As a full-time, freelance writer who shoots his own photos, I rarely go anywhere without a laptop computer and a camera. I’ve written articles on everything from freighter travel for Consumers Digest to buying a houseboat for a boating magazine and always provide the publication with photos if required. I’m not photo pro but I know how to point and shoot and discovered if you shoot enough photos, you’re bound to come up with something useable. As a result, I’ve been carrying around camera equipment for as long as I can remember...and carrying is an understatement. Lugging is more like it.

On a Europe trip a few years ago, compiling information for The Great Castle Hotels of Europe, a book I wrote for Harper and Row/Icarus Press, my wife and I both carried camera bags jammed full of film, lenses, lens covers, extra batteries and two, fully-equipped 35mm cameras with motor winds. I’d guess the bags weighed somewhere around ten pounds or so each and they dangled (annoyingly) from our shoulders as we traveled through ten European countries. At every stopover, we clung to those bags, afraid some European camera bag-thief would spot us, grab the bags, run off and sell them to the first camera-fence that came along with the best offer in marks, francs, pesetas, pounds, lira, etc.

On our last trip to Canada to compile material for a travel piece, we left the 20-plus pounds of camera equipment behind and took along one, small Canon digital camera each. I carried mine around in my shirt pocket and she carried hers in her pocket. if there were any camera thieves around, they didn’t even look in our direction. We decided the quality of the photos the publications we wrote for could be filled by a good digital camera and could be e-mailed along with the article when we returned or even on the road from our laptop computers. I lost track of how many photos we shot but I’d guess around three hundred or so. About a hundred were keepers and each night we’d check over the day’s shoot, downloaded the keepers from the camera onto my laptop computer through a cable, erase the camera’s disk and start all over again the next day. We could even e-mail our photos to our desktops at home via our e-mail boxes. Summary: weight comparison (not counting the laptop which goes along anyway)? Ten pounds vs eight ounces...including batteries. Cost for film and developing? $0.00. Time spent worrying about thieves? None Overall comparison? None again!

"If you’re in the market for a camera nowadays, you have basically two choices: a regular film camera or a digital," says Skip Stevenson of The Digital Camera Company, a service-oriented Internet retailer at http://www.digitalcameracompany.com  ( 877-678-4453) in Greenwood Village, Colorado. "Film cameras are great if you need real high-quality photos and you want to go through the buy-film/load/shoot/rewind/develop/wait/pay/look/reshoot-if-necessary, etc. If you just want good photos that will serve most purposes and want to see the results seconds after you trip the shutter, consider a digital. If you’re buying the camera for business use," he says, "you can shoot product photos, locations, copy documents, post stuff on your web page, send them by e-mail or print them out."

I’ve tried several digitals since Skip mentioned it some months ago and recently settled on a Canon S-100 which has to be the smallest (theft-proof?) 2-megapixel digital camera available with an optical zoom on the market. Measuring 3.4-inches by 2.2-inches and 1.1-inches thick, it’s only slightly larger than a standard business or credit card, so you can literally drop it into your pocket and purse and not even know it’s there. This makes it useful for people who occasionally need a camera but can’t be bothered carrying one around just in case. I have one clipped to my car sun visor so it’s handy when I’m driving around and another I use when I’m walking around on a pleasure or business trip. It’s always in my pocket.

"A digital camera is basically an extension of your computer," Skip says, "You can view your photos on the camera’s built-in LCD screen or plug it into your computer and download the photos to send them to friend by e-mail or manipulate them (sharpening, color adjustments, cropping, etc.) with any graphics photo."

The S-100 comes with an 8 megabyte memory card which means you can store the photos on the card and erase them after their uploaded into the computer, then reuse the card. "How many photos the card will hold will depend on the quality of the photo," Skip says. "The better the quality, the less photos you can store. In the fine mode, an 8MB card will hold 46 photos. You can buy additional cards and larger capacity cards." I found the standard card to be adequate since I download the photos to a laptop periodically.

Weighing in a 6.7 ounces, the finished .jpeg photo images are captured in fine (640X480 resolution) and super-fine (1600X1200 resolution), so you can choose between good and better quality photos depending on what the photos are for. If you’re sending some photos of your children or a product via e-mail, fine is okay. The camera comes with one of Canon’s new lithium rechargeable battery packs and a 110/240-volt two-hour recharger which comes in handy when you’re on a trip and need a quick recharge. All of the connections between the camera and a computer are handled through one port and cables are included for video out and USB connections. Shutter speeds are automatically controlled and range from 1 to 1/1500 sec. The built-in flash offers auto, on, off, red-eye reduction and slow-synch modes. Some software like Adobe PhotoDeluxe, PhotoStitch, ZoomBrowser EX (Windows), ImageBrowser (Macintosh) usually comes with the package.

Card Readers

When you’re back home or in the office with a camera loaded with photos, hooking the camera up to a cable dangling from a computer port and running the software necessary to see what you shot is doing it the hard way. The camera’s must stay on, so there’s battery drain while you’re doing the download. Card readers solve that problem. They come in an assortment of shapes and sizes but basically they small and round or square. They plug into your computer and just sit there, waiting to accept your memory card and give you quick access to your photos. Turn the camera off and put it away. Slip the card into the slot and up come the photos on screen. "It’s so effective and simple," says Alistair Gladstone of Chase Advanced Technologies ( http://www.chase-at.com  or write sales@chase-at.com ), a major source of card readers and accessories, "you don’t even have to load the viewing software that comes with the camera. Using the card reader extends the life of the camera’s battery, so you won’t be recharging that often. Depending on the model, the readers that plug into a USB port can transfer photos at speeds up to 80 times faster than cards that plug into serial ports. If you have a choice, buy one with the USB connection," he recommends.

Digitals are the 21st century’s solution to the old buy/process film and wait routine. Budget-permitting, you can buy a digital camera that can produce photos equal to the quality of 35mm. For the cost-conscious, the S-100 is a good solution and the amazingly-small size makes it something you can carry everywhere so it’s available whenever you need it.