Need a digital camera for taking black and white line art pictures in low light without using a flash. Is there a camera made for this type of application? Do not want to spend the extra money for color.

This type of camera would be very useful to genealogists and people doing research in libaries.

Any ideas?

-- Lou Hills (LouHills@aol.com), November 05, 1999

Answers

The Agfa 1680 has a B&W high res mode and is good in low light situations. It is fully configurable, so you can turn off the flash and set it on a tripod for exposures down to 1/4 second, or you can open up the F stops to get more light. It also shoots macro down to about an 1 1/2" from the subject. The trick for what you want is to get the camera absolutely perpendicular to the subject so that you can convert the resulting file with an OCR program to text. Any camera with a B&W setting would work. There are no strictly B&W camera that I know of; that is not what the market wants.

-- Tony Reynolds (treynold@gte.net), November 06, 1999.

If the Agfa works for you, also look for a small, table-top tripod that you can add a swivle head to. Swivle heads have a ball on the bottom so you can tilt the camera at a 90-degree angle to the tripod, with the lens pointing straight down on the page. It isn't real stable so hold it steady. But the tripod would help with focusing.

-- Jim Martin (jfmartin@nr.infi.net), November 28, 1999.

I have a Casio QV8000sx,this takes really good low light shots. You can do black and white with this as well. Not made now but still available s/h - good luck with this!.

-- Robert Hardy (rhardy@appleonline.net), February 01, 2001.