Buying a digital camera was too confusing, and I had almost givin up when I found the great Comparometer. From here, using the "save as" method I printed on my HP 820Cse a set of the 8 pictures for each of the 25 cameras shown. I want pictures which looks good "out of the box" without spending hours in the Photoshop - asuming I could learn to use it. Of the pocket size cameras it came down to the Toshiba PDR-1, the Nikon 900S and the Kodak 210Plus. I now see you have many good reviews of the Olympus D-400Z and I wonder, if you might know why I had such poor result. The indoor shot was dark and faded and the brick in the house picture much too red. What did I do wrong? Also does anybody have any comments on the Toshiba PDR-M1. It's so inexpensive I worry that I might get what I paid for. Please help me make up my mind. Eric

-- Eric E. Jennings (eej@home.com), January 23, 1999

Answers

I've found that various printers tend to handle the color spectrum quite differently. Also, there are likely to be big differences in the assumptions the printer driver is making about what the screen looks like. (Screen "gamma" varies quite a bit betwee platforms. This is a goodly part of the reason we encourage people to print the pictures on their own printers, to see what works best in their own environment. From other correspondence, it appears that the Oly D400 is built around a screen "gamma" that's about mid-way between those typical for Macs and PCs. The result is that images look a bit light on the Mac, a bit dark on the PC. If your printer is tending toward the dark side anyway, and you're on a PC, you'll find the D400 iamges tend to be rather dark, and highly saturated (the bricks getting too red). Bottom line, buy what gives the best results under the conditions you'll be using!

Hope this helps, Dave Etchells

-- Dave Etchells (web@imaging-resource.com), January 23, 1999.