Digital Cameras – a future of photography
Digital cameras are the most obvious choice to almost anyone who just began the adventure with the photography. Conventional analog cameras are increasingly rare, although many professionals still prefer them. For a beginning photographer choosing a digital camera has many advantages. The ability to preview a just-taken photo is one of the more prized by them, although it is not the only one. Analog films has limited capacity, usually up to 36 photos in case of a standard 35mm format and even less in bigger formats. Digital cameras are limited only by the memory card used, and they have an ability to store even several hundreds of photos at a time, depending on photo's quality.
Common types of digital cameras
The most common type is a compact digital camera. Usually it's small enough to put it into the pocket, digital cameras have usually 3x zoom lens, simple targeting scope and LCD display used commonly to frame the scene and preview images. Relatively simple, they rely mostly on automatic settings to provide good results, although manual settings are possible in most models. To increase flexibility, manufacturers provide usually several programs, designed for portrait, landscape, and other common scene types.
Next type are “prosumer” digital cameras. They resemble digital SLR cameras, but should be considered simply as high-tech compact designs. Usually they have no targeting scope, relying instead on electronic viewfinder and LCD display, and large zoom lenses, often backed up with some sort of the image stabilization. Their lenses cannot be replaced, and such long zoom is a compromise between do-it-all ability and generally large optical distortions.
For most professionals the only good choices are digital single-lens reflective cameras. They mostly resemble externally their analog counterparts. They have removable lenses, and image composing is done through viewfinder using mirror-reflected image. They have also LCD, but it is used almost exclusively for viewing photos and configuring camera, although some new designs have also the ability to compose scenes using a LCD screen. SLR digital cameras use bigger CCD sensors, with less noise and overall image quality much higher than in compact designs. They also are much faster, especially when we talk about the time necessary to auto-focus the lens. Recently prizes of SLR digital cameras dropped significantly, and the cheapest are comparable in prize with prosumer digital cameras, so they probably replace them soon.
Which type is the best?
Answer is simple: it depends on the needs and skills of the photographer. A good, artistic photo can be taken with any camera if a photographer has a good taste and artistic skills. And even the most advanced camera will not convert a layman into the photographer. More advanced digital cameras are more difficult to use, so they are harder to master, and choosing the proper settings even with automatic can be so overwhelming, that the photographer will not think enough about image composition, which results in ugly pictures.
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Class Discussions on Digital Camera Revolution
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