I JUST RECENTLY BOUGHT A KODAK DC290 CAMERA AND AM JUST NOW GETTING INTO DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY. WHEN I TAKE PICTURES THEY LOOK FINE ON THE PREVIEW SETTING ON THE CAMERA BUT WHEN I DOWNLOAD THEM THEY REALLY LOOK AWFUL VERY DARK AND BLURRED ALL THE CAMERA SETTINGS ARE ON AUTO 9FOCUS, EXPOSURE) IT SEEMS TO ME THEY SHOULD BE AS SHARP AS THEY LOOK IN THE PREVIEW. I USE AN eMACHINE 500ix WITH A CELERON PROCESSOR I ALSO USE CANON AND COREL SOFTWARE. WHAT DO YOU SUPPOSE THE PROBLEM IS?

-- LONNY ROWLEY (ROWLEYLonnyr@cs.com), June 05, 2000

Answers

The first problem is your caps lock, please turn it off as reading uppercase messages irks people. Anyway, if the shots are blurred its the camera, your computer is just telling it like it is. Try some regular outdoor sunny day shots, if you cant get a decent picture outside in bright light, your camera is the culprit for sure. The DC290 LCD is really lame and you can only use it for making quick judgements, certainly not to tell if the picture is critically sharp. It sounds like you might be shooting indoors with the flash and the camera is underexposing since your subject is out of flash range. That would give you dark pictures with the blurr. I'm assuming you have a half way decent monitor since an old burned out monitor is not appropriate for photographs. Make sure your brightness and contrast are properly setup as the monitor could be lying to you (and probably is).

-- Cris Daniels (danfla@gte.net), June 05, 2000.

Most digicams have fairly low resolution lcd displays, that's probably contributing to the confusion. Anything would look good on them. Some have the ability to zoom into an image in playback mode(my Toshiba's do), does yours? That's a really handy feature that more manufacturers should provide as an option in the camera firmware.

As stated in the post above, low light focus is a problem for many units, but it could be camera shake[human shake? :-)] in low light conditions. Were you using a flash? The simplest way to tell is to try the shots with, and without, a tripod in the same or similar lighting and see what you get on the LCD and then your computer. Also ensure that your software is saving your images in the same compression format as the camera stored them. I had a nasty brush with that when I got my first digicam, since the software defaulted to saving the images at a moronically high compression ratio and really mucked up the images... ;-)

Look for a calibration procedure in your image editing software (search the help or look at setup options on the menus) that will help you set your monitor's brightness, contrast, and gamma. If you're using an LCD monitor I hope it's a TFT... I "love" my laptop, but it's display leaves a bit to be desired compared to a CRT.

Good Luck.

-- Gerald M. Payne (gmp@francomm.com), June 05, 2000.