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Part One: Digital
Camera & Memory buying tips
How to buy a
digital camera without going broke
When buying a camera, stick to
any of the major brands, do a little homework and you pretty much can't go
wrong: Canon, Kodak, Nikon, Olympus, Agfa... They all produce decent
to excellent models with different features- It just depends on your budget.
As with all gadgets,
technology changes rapidly, so last year's model digital camera may cost 200
or 300 dollars, whereas that latest wonder cam that just came out today with
all the new bells and whistles, might go for several thousand bucks.
But do you really need that much camera? Probably not.
Unless you are going to double
as a professional photographer in addition to your booming online auction
career, you DO NOT need to spend a fortune on a digital camera. A few
hundred dollars buys a fantastic model these days, and the prices are even
lower online.
The camera technology you can
find for a small price, is awesome. This is stuff that barely existed
a few short years ago- Now, you can point, shoot, click, transfer to
computer, and upload to websites, all within a few seconds or minutes.
Grab a Kodak Easy Share system or similarly docked camera outfit, and
transferring is even faster!
Save money on developing film,
and preview your shots instantly. If you are taking photos for
auctions, you have got to get a decent, reliable camera.
For more info on cameras
available, click here:
Digital Cameras &
Accessories
What's a megapixel?
This refers to one million
pixels. A pixel is a computerized dot, that is lit on or off- your
television and monitor are also based on pixels. A digital camera's 'brain'
is it's imaging chip (or chips) which capture the rays of light entering the
lens, and then store them in the chip's memory as pixels. This chip is
known as a CCD (or in some newer cameras, CMOS). CCD stands for
'Charge Coupled Device', and CMOS stands for 'Complementary Metal Oxide
Semi-Conductor'.
If you've ever been around
pros who use digital video cameras, you'll hear them possibly referring to
how many chips their cameras have- This usually refers to how many CCD chips
it has to process color images with. Most news and professional
cameras use at least 3 chips to process image attributes and colors
separately. Don't confuse the number of chips with the number of
megapixels.
Remember, megapixels refers to
the resolution of the imaging chip inside the camera, expressed in millions.
The higher the megapixel, the higher the processing power of your camera.
In other words, the more megapixels, the better your camera's possible image
resolution.
How many megapixels does my camera
need?
Most new digital cameras have at
least 1 MP (megapixel) or more. If you are just shooting pics
for auctions, a one or two MP camera should be sufficient, but the more megapixels,
the better the image quality, unless your camera manufacturer dropped the
ball somewhere else in the design process. When digital cameras first
became widely available commercially, this may have been a bigger issue- But not
today.
Browse cameras:
1
2
3
4
5 + Mega Pixels
Compare models at
amazon.com
What
type of lens and zoom do I
need?
The amount of zoom or
magnification required from your lens
will vary with the type of images you are shooting. If you are
photographing small items where detail is important, like fine jewelry or
rare postage stamps, then you definitely want as much zoom as possible. Zoom is
expressed by a number followed by 'X', which stands for 'times
magnification'. So, if you have a 2x zoom lens, your picture is
magnified two times, a 3x lens equals three times magnification and so on.
There are two types of lenses
you will see in digital camera advertising: optical, and digital. Look
for the highest optical zoom you can find. This is very
important. Optical zoom is an
indication of the type of zoom the camera's optical lens is capable of on
it's own, without digital enhancement. Digital zoom picks up where
your optical lens leaves off, and can get you in even closer to your
subject. Digital magnification is good to have, but your image
quality will tend to suffer from pixilation and fuzziness the more you rely
on
it over your optical lense.
Many cameras today have a
built in optical zoom of 3x to 10x or more. It pays to shop around and
look for the highest amount you can afford. Current, entry level
cameras in the two to three hundred dollar price range should have at least
a 2x or 3x optical zoom.
Digital zoom is usually equal
to, or slightly higher than the optical lens amount. So, a digital
camera with a 2x optical lens, might have an additional 2x or 3x digital
zoom. Again, look for the highest optical zoom lens you can find in
your budget, and don't be too 'wowed' by the manufacturer's own accolades
for their nifty digital zoom amount. The optical lens will deliver
your clearest and sharpest results.
The actual type of built in
optical lens the
camera manufacturer uses can make a big difference as well. For
instance, a
specially made Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonnar lens can yield better results
than just a generic factory lens. Both types of lenses will probably
deliver very fine pictures if the camera is simply used in auto mode with
factory settings- the higher quality lens features will probably only yield a more
noticeable benefit to experts, who know how to use their manual camera
settings for more controlled and professional results.
Also, look for a camera that
allows you to attach extra lenses like telephoto, wide angle or other specialty
lenses and filters. You can get extremely close photos with a quality
telephoto lens, and filters can help you achieve certain image effects
without using specialty image software.
What does it take to use your
camera like a pro? Not much, due to the great technology behind
today's digital cameras. As with all gadgets, professional features on
your equipment can deliver higher end results if you know how to use them
properly, so read your camera documentation carefully. If you paid
extra money for the best camera on the market, make sure you harness its
true power.
For more info about lenses,
check out this cool resource:
Interactive Lens Demo @WolfCamera.com
What's a memory
card?
Megawho? Gigawhat? For
newbie's: one megabyte equals 1000 kilobytes, and one gigabyte equals 1000
megabytes.
Most pictures you see online have been
optimized for
fast loading, and are around 10K to maybe 30 or 40K (kilobytes) or so at
the most. When you shoot digital pictures on your new camera, you
might get images 100 K to 400 K in file size at first. Don't worry,
you can crop them, resize and compress them down to much smaller, more
manageable file sizes that people will want to look at.
Lets say your raw files on the
memory card after taking pictures are about 250 to 300K each when using a
JPEG (or JPG) setting. This means a memory card with 128 MB (128,000
K) will hold roughly 475 to 500 high quality jpeg images. So, a 256 MB
card will hold twice this, or about 1000 images, and a 512 MB card will hold
at least 2000 images. That's a lot of auction items! Set your
camera's
dpi resolution (dots per inch) lower, and you'll be able to hold even
more images.
Remember how much it would
have cost to develop that many pictures a few years ago? Now it's
free- unless you are printing them onto photo quality paper, of course.
What kind of memory card
should I use?
The type of memory card you
will use can be determined after you buy your digital camera, as one usually
comes with it from the factory, usually a dinky little 4 or 8
megapixel version. You'll probably
want to hang on to this as an emergency backup to keep in your camera bag,
but definitely consider getting a card with more megs, 48 to 64 MB is a
starter amount. The 128 to 256 MB cards have really come down in
price, and are great bargains, costing around .75 cents to a dollar per
megabyte.
However, we recommend choosing
your camera based on the type of card you will buy. Suppose you go out
and buy a camera and love it, but then quickly realize you want more memory-
So you do some research, and finally spot that really great deal on a 1
gigabyte or higher flash card. Of course, it turns out that you have a
Sony camera that takes a Sony Smart Stick, and what you found on sale is a
Compact Flash Type II card. The solution? Know your cards in advance.
If you are liquidating your
entire baseball card collection from that Honus Wagner card on up to your
Sammy Sosa cards, then you might even want a memory card that is one gigabyte
or higher: you could then take over 4000 pictures of sports cards at a
comfortable 250 K each, without ever having to transfer pictures or take the
card out of the camera once. Of course, you could just leave those 4000
cards in the cardboard box, and take a single, giant, one gigabyte sized
picture... which might take all night to transfer.... Nah!
If you already have bought
your camera, don't worry. There are almost certainly plenty of types of memory cards
available for it, they just may not all be down at the local Walmart.
Check here to find memory
cards for your camera:
Digital Cameras &
Accessories
How many memory cards do I need?
We recommend having at least
one or two empty memory cards in reserve in your camera bag.
Two or three hundred pictures
worth of free space on
a memory card may sound like a lot, and it is fine for many auctioneers who
only use their camera once a month to take 10 or 20 pictures or so. If
you fit this category, then owning just one memory card will probably be
fine.
But if you're like most people
in our fast-paced world, you'll probably end up with vacation photos,
birthday pictures and auction images all on the same card at some point, and
people tend to set their DPI on the camera higher for personal pics. Higher
DPI settings gobble memory from your card quickly!
Or, if you are an ebay
powerseller shooting 200 or 300 pictures every day or two, then you know
what we mean- even small pics add up fast, as time constraints make it
easier to shoot several shots of each subject before positioning the next
auction item for it's snapshot. Why? It's always faster reviewing
images on the computer than fiddling with camera settings. And of course,
the practice of taking multiple shots of each antique or product, although a
timesaver, does eat memory from your card much faster.
You don't want to run out of
memory in the middle of a photo shoot. Trust us, whether your'e taking shots
of lions on the Serengeti Plains, or pictures of Beanie Babies on your
kitchen table, nothing is more annoying that running out of room on a camera
card, especially when working under hot lights and the battery in the camera
is running low- and it's always running low, of course.
The bigger the memory card,
the better. The more cards, the better. Several manufacturers
even sell 'Digital Wallet' devices that you can download your memory cards
into, on the go, if they fill up.
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Trying to take a good
auction picture, but having problems? Need info on what to do with your image,
once it's on the computer?
