I am looking for a digital camera to shoot product shots for our catalog (both print and web). The final images will be knockouts no bigger than 2 to 3 inches at 300dpi. We are trying to stay under the $1,500 price range and have been looking at both the Nikon Coolpix 900 and the Olympus D-600L. Do you have any other suggestions of cameras that are of better quality in this price range? Which of the Nikon or Olympus cameras do you recommend? I've been comparing the sample images on your site and find them both close in quality.

-Thanks

PS. Your site is a great resource! I've been using it as a main source for my research on digital cameras.

-- Bryce Morthland (bmorthland@involved.com), July 08, 1998

Answers

For your purposes you'd save a lot of money by going with a tethered camera (one requiring a nearby computer rather than being portable). There may not be any consumer tethered cameras with sufficient resolution, though. Pro tethered cameras (usually digital backs for medium format cameras) would be excellent for your purposes but out of your price range.

Almost all of the current crop of consumer digital cameras (in your price range) are going to require you to use "hot" lighting because they are unable to coordinate with strobes. You might want to try and find a camera with fixed white balance settings, because auto white balance would be a headache with product shots.

I personally have a D-600L and have used it in an extremely low budget "studio" setup to do some product shots for a friend's web site which turned out to be excellent. They'd look great printed at 2-3" as well (judging from my results with other images from the camera). Even in my brief experience I encountered color matching problems, though. Luckily it wasn't critical for this application. I don't know if the CP900 would offer any features that would improve on this, and you might find its auto-power off and slow restart annoying in a studio setting.

The new Kodak DC260 might be worth investigating, but the jury is still out on this camera. The Canon PowerShot Pro70 is coming soon and would allow you to use a Canon strobe setup.

If you don't get a camera with a USB connection for image downloading, make sure you have the appropriate flash memory reader because serial transfers would probably be too slow for your application (if you do any volume).

-- Ben Jackson (ben@ben.com), July 10, 1998.

Check out the CMOS-PRO at http://www.soundvisioninc.com

-- Bob Caspe (caspe@soundvisioninc.com), July 21, 1998.

coolpix 950 for under $1000 - great digital camera used it on product shots such as photoframes and framed paintings

you might also need to use Adobe photoshop or Corel photopaint for adjustment (colors and such)

also bought an Epson Sylus photo 750 for printing my shots and it's great! under $300 .... After that I said to myself... goodbye resources.. (photographers and other people that used to make my catalog)

hope this helps you... goodluck

-- Elmer (elmerbb@earthlink.net), May 18, 1999.