I am a facial surgeon and I take a lot of 1:1 photos of my patients before, during, and after surgery. Many of the slides are later used during formal educational lectures. I am interested in switching over to a digital camera capable of producing quality projected images. Please let me know what you would recommend. How many pixels are required to provide a quality projection? Are there other features that are important regarding projection resolution? What do I need as far as projection equipment?

Thanks for your advice.

-- greg (procerus@yahoo.com), February 11, 2000

Answers

If you look at a computer generated presentation such as powerpoint, you will probably be looking at a video projector. These normally have a resolution of between 600X800 or 1024X768. In that case a digital camera that has equal or slightly better resolution than that like a nikon coolpix 950 or equivalent camera should be adequate for your purpose. A camera with a 1600X1200 pixel CCD will allow you to crop images sligtly for emphasis, but should work well for your purposes. For presentation purposes, a laptop computer with your images loaded and a video projector will serve your purpose adequately

-- jonathan ratzlaff (jonathanr@clrtech.bc.ca), February 12, 2000.

You might want to check the computer mags for a a few companies like Viewsonic and others that make presentation projectors to get hooked up with a good local vendor. That way you could probably get set up with detailed information and a good try-out under your using conditions. The projectors are fairly big ticket items but are far superior to trying to work to a projection/big screen TV set-up or overhead projector display projector. Some of the problems you need to deal with are the same ones you would see with traditional slide projectors, room size, viewing distances and angles, projector locations, darkness of room, etc. You might want to get a couple of representative slides scanned onto disk to support some checking of projector performance.

-- Craig Gillette (cgillette@thegrid.net), February 13, 2000.