Do digital cameras reduce or eliminate the problem of red eyes?

-- Holly Walsh (hollyw@tconl.com), March 18, 2000

Answers

No, their small physical size makes it worse, if anything.

-- Pete Andrews (p.l.andrews@bham.ac.uk), March 21, 2000.

I back you on that! The red-eye on my C-2020Z is terrible. The red-eye reduction helps, kind of. But, the flash is so close to the lens, it had to be removed later...

-- MikeB (airlinestuff@yahoo.com), March 28, 2000.

It all depends on the camera and the flash/lens arrangement. I have an Epson PhotoPC 600 that I bought when it was about 1 yr on the market. I have NEVER gotten red-eye and my subjects are frequently people indoors and using the flash. I have taken hundreds of flash people pictures. Of course, the flash is about 2 inches North-west (if you are looking at the front) of the lens and the lens is small, fixed focal length, wide angle. The Epson 800, which I have also used and seen flash pictures from, doesn't suffer from extremely bad red-eye either and it is smaller than the Photo PC 600.

I at first thought the lack of red-eye was the result of the digital camera, but soon came to discover, as a result of reading recent reviews on newer models, that red-eye is very frustrating. I think the larger lenses also tend to exacerbate this effect.

I am facing upgrading to several cameras which suffer from red-eye severely and have given serious though to staying with, perhaps, the Epson 750Z instead of the 850Z and to live with the limitations is has over the 850 to avoid having to process my pictures before I share them. The Epson 600 has literally "set me free" to with my picture taking like no SLR or auto-focus compact snapshot 35mm has before, despite the obvious limitations in manual control. I am able to take pictures and immediately enjoy them with no additional processing in most cases. Losing that to severe red-eye, correctable with software or not, matters to me and might to you too.

-- Jarrod Rominske (deepsnow@freewwweb.com), April 07, 2000.