Digital Cameras for the comon people. What do you have?

[Jockel]

i recommend photographing on ultra low iso, with a tripod.

[Turrican]

I found this cool site:

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/panasonictz5/

So mine has a 1/2.33 CCD sensor... what resolution would you use with it?

[PC Engine Fan X!]

The main disadvantage of low ISO values is that, since the sensor's sensitivity to light has been decreased, you need to either use a flash, or keep the shutter open for greater time to preserve the same level of brightness. Shaking the camera during lower shutter speed will cause blur, which is why having an optical image stabilizer in your camera is a very good thing (so look for it as well!).

While the modern consumer cameras have reached great heights in automating the process, it only hinders the result after you've gained some experience with it and understood what causes what. This is the gap you have to cross for going from taking acceptable photos to taking good ones (and I'm not talking professional level "good", just good).

I'm also still learning, but it's actually pretty fun.

For moozooh,

Would you recommend a D-SLR camera for a person who absolutely knows nothing about photography? How about those D-SLRs that can take up to two or three shots per second?

Sounds like you really know your photography stuff. ^_~

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[Turrican]

Oh, and don't shoot with the maximum resolution your camera can do, because of the reasons above. There are no cameras I know of whose maximum pixel resolution corresponds with their sensor size. I usually shoot in 3264x2448 (= 8 MP), but even that is overkill for 1/1.7", not to mention 12 MP (4000x3000).

This puzzles me a bit. Even if the sensor is small, pixel density stays the same, so how exactly reducing the photo's resolution will reduce noise?

A friend mailed me this: <<How do digital cameras generally accomplish their lower resolution settings?>>

They do this the same way you would do it in Photoshop: by resampling the image from the original full-resolution data.

the camera simply takes the readings from each group of say 4 pixels, calculates a suitable average value (which might for example, weight each pixel according to its position relative to the center of the sensor - or not) and then writes out a single pixel value. In this case, the re-sampled image will have 4-fold fewer pixels than the camera image, but (hopefully) lower noise if all the processing and statistics were done right.

If this is true, then shooting at a lower MP resolution doesn't give you any significant noise reduction more than photoshopping/cropping the pic later on a computer...

[Jockel]

Would you recommend a D-SLR camera for a person who absolutely knows nothing about photography?

Well, absolutely. You really don't need any skill to take good pictures with a semi-pro D-SLR. But of course it's a shame to let an amateur on a great camera, because it's a lot of wasted potential. Thing is, with a reasonably "good" camera, you just need to klick, no thinking involved - and you get perfect pictures.
But it's like 1ccing Harmful Park. You will feel empty, because anybody could do that