Can you believe a 14 megapixel camera? Apparently they’re available now. I’m not a professional nor a “prosumer,” so I don’t follow digital photography updates as closely as that crowd. But 14 megapixels? Holy cow
The guy who has the 14MP camera is a quasi-professional. He thinks of himself as a amateur, but he’s really good.
I’m sitting here looking at my Canon Digital Rebel, which I believe is only 6.3 megapixels. A pittance. Well, it was stunning for 2004 when I bought it.
Has it been that long?
I remember back to my first digital camera.
Photography was my thing before computers. I still have a “real” darkroom setup: An enlarger, trays, timers, jugs for chemicals. All that jazz. I don’t know why I hang on to it; I haven’t developed a picture since about 1987 or so.
Being a quasi-photographer, I’ve always had a nice camera on hand. I still have a really nice Canon SLR with several lenses. And I used that camera up until I bought the Digital Rebel in 2004. Now it sits on a shelf.
Digital photography came to the masses in the 1990s. That’s the first time that you could buy a digital camera, but the cameras available back then were really jokes. You can find a better camera inside a Barbie doll today.
My first digital camera was an Epson-something. I don’t remember the specifics. It had two modes: 640-by-400 pixels — which was the high-resolution — and 320-by-200 pixels. The thing cost me $600.
The camera didn’t have removable media. It didn’t have a USB cable. (Remember, this was back in the 1990s.) Instead, the camera had a serial port adapter you could use to beam the pictures into your PC. And, of course, Epson had some silly “photo editing” and photo gallery programs.
Images were saved in the camera using the GIF file format. Here is such a picture that was taken with the camera back in 1999. That’s me at my son Jeremiah’s birthday party. The image is cropped from its original size.
A GIF picture taken with my first digital camera.
It’s amazing how silly that shot looks these days, and I’m not talking about my cheesy facial hair. But back in the day, if you wanted a “digital” camera, you paid good money to get something that took awful, low-resolution images. That’s how it all began. And it was impressive back then, just really silly today.
My first and only camera is a Kodak EasyShare CX6330. 3.1 megapixel. I love it. I bought it in 2003 and it cost me $200. It still takes very good pictures. The good thing about having this out-of-date not-so-cool camera is that I don’t feel bad about damaging it, so I take it with me on amazing camping trips or to the beach and fill it with mud and sand, something I wouldn’t do with a brand new camera.
Comment by samus250 — December 13, 2010 @ 1:25 pm
I still have my second digital camera, which I loaned to my son for his photography class. Never saw it again, but before then I used it as my “don’t mind damaging” camera. It was nice. Came with an 8MB (yes, megabyte) CompactFlash card. It think it was a 2.2MP camera.
Comment by admin — December 13, 2010 @ 1:56 pm
Where I work, we sell compact cameras between with resolutions between 10 and 14MP.
In a compact, I think anything above 12MP is overkill, because most people are printing their photos out at 10cm*15cm, sometimes slightly bigger.
What is also important in a digital camera is the sensor size. A camera with a resolution of 10MP and a 1/2.3″ sensor is more likely to produce better quality prints than a 14MP camera with the same sized sensor.
There are also other factors that will affect the quality of photos as well, not just megapixel counts and sensor size as well. The lens itself, shooting conditions, flash or no flash, and so on.
It is highly amusing to hear people who think they know everything about cameras go on about how a 14MP camera will take better pictures than a 10MP one, completely ignoring the fact that megapixel count doesn’t equate to image quality in the slightest.
Comment by Douglas — December 24, 2010 @ 2:16 am
That’s excellent info and advice, Douglas. Thank you!
Comment by admin — December 24, 2010 @ 8:44 am