While looking for a new digital camera, I noticed that most camera's provide only 2 resolutions, the maximum resolution and the VGA resolution of 640X480. I had a Canon Powershot 600, which had a maximum resolution of 832x624 and found this a good size for the regular pictures. Now it seems the high-resolution cameras don't support this resolution, which I think is a big handicap. A picture of 800x600 is full screen on many screens, so very suitable according me. So if I would make a picture with a modern camera, I need to resize most of the pictures from 1600x1200 to 800X600. This means a lot of work and while taking pictures it requires a lot of expensive storage capacity while I don't actually need it! Else I could take 4-times more pictures with the same storage capacity! Isn't this a handicap? Or am I wrong and do the new camera's support 800x600 resolution? Which camera does? I asked everywhere, but nobody could confirm this.

-- Timo Rietveld (t.rietveld@oreade.nl), December 09, 1999

Answers

The Sony DSC F-55 has three modes: 1600x1200, 1024x768, 640x480. I will often use the middle setting. I haven't seen many (if any) cameras that support 800x600 but the 1024x768 is a nice high quality image using significantly less storage space than the 1600x1200. The Zeiss lense on the Sony is also second to none in my opinion.

-- Todd Smith (toddsmi@rocketmail.com), December 09, 1999.

Th Nikon cp 950 also has the same three modes and each mode can save in three different jpg compression modes. So using 1024x800 in the 'good' compression mode would save a lot a disk space. However I bought a 12g hard disk for $178 a few months back, so disk space is not too much of a problem. Also the cd writer with 650 meg for $1 really makes disk space a no brainer. I have over 400 pictures on my current cd and am only using 300 meg. Plan to give these cd's to family members for Christmas. Sorry, got off topic!

-- Dave Clark (daveclark@mail.com), December 09, 1999.

I do not know why the majority of digicams don't have 3 modes, but I do have an idea why they have 640x480 and not 800x600. 640x480 is good for webpages. 800x600 will start out too large and will then have to be adjusted.

-- David Erskine (davide@netquest.com), December 10, 1999.

With expensive storage capacity I meant the expensive flashcards or smartmedia cards. In January I'm going to the Philippines for 1 month and I don't know if I will have a possibility to transfer all the pictures to cd in the meantime. So I should have enough space in my camera to store all the pictures. 64 MB probably would have been enough if I could take all pics on a lower resolution. But 640x480 is too low...

-- Timo Rietveld (t.rietveld@oreade.nl), December 10, 1999.

My Olympus C2000Z does 640x480 (50KB), 1024x768 (150KB), 1600x1200 (400KB), 1600x1200 (750KB) and 1600x1200 (6MB). (File sizes are, of course, approximate. The "best" quality image uses the TIFF rather than the JPEG file format that is used for all of the others.)

By using a tripod to take the "same" photo at several different compression settings, I've found very *little* difference in the "quality" of the three largest (best quality) formats. Does anyone know why this should be? Thus, I use 1024x768 (150KB) when I want to email someone or provide background pictures for my computer desktop and the 1600x1200 (400KB) for everything else.

After showing people my nbew "toy", a common critisism is that setting of the picture quality should have been simpler - the C2000Z allows only "SQ", "HQ" and "SHQ" from the main settings menu and, to use the lowest and highest quality, one has to change camera "mode" and use a *seperate* menu. (In fact, it would have been nice if the user could set the size and compression ratio to their *own* specification.)

-- Mark Davis (glod@hotmail.com), December 12, 1999.

The Canon Powershot s-10 has three res. sizes with the lowest setting at 600x800,also a great camera.

-- Steve Colburg (steven.colburg@gte.net), December 14, 1999.

My Casio QV-2000 does 1600x1200 and 800x600, you can choose from three compression modes, SHQ, HQ, and SQ.

-- Al Landry (alandry@mediaone.net), December 14, 1999.

My Toshiba PDR-M5 shoots at 1600x1200 and 800x600, and three different compression ratios (quality). While you can get excellent results shooting at the 800x600 size, I have discovered you can actually get even better results (sharper, more detailed) shooting at 1600x1200 at maximum compression (basic quality) and then reducing image size in the camera. This really keeps file size down. File size obviously won't be a problem if you take along several smart media cards. I suggest copying the keepers to another smart media card, which this camera can do.

-- Frederic C. Monfils (centaur53@iccas.com), December 18, 1999.

Hoi Timo. Nou, dit zijn toch al drie camera's die 'het' hebben...

-- Michiel (michiel.vanheek@student.uva.nl), December 23, 1999.