Allen, I am confused. For Christmas 1997, I put a Nikon Coolpix 900 under the tree for my wife and after three days, took it back for a full refund.Among other things, it was power hungry, terribly slow in uploading data to the Mac not to mention less than great resolution.
Went to THE photo store in the Boston area this afternoon to try to get re-educated on the general subject.Looked at AGFA, KODAK, OLYMPUS, SONY, RICOH, as well as one or two others. (NIKON entry has been pulled from the market).
My conclusion is that the digital photo market is changing so rapidly that it is not possible to make an intelligent buying decision. I went home empty handed. You can buy the latest and greatest today but you are totally blind to what may be coming tomorrow or next week.
I suspect that power consumption needs to drop, image resolution needs to rise, storage capacity will need to rise substantially. They try to work around this now with compression and by letting you select a lower image resolution but the result is still a far cry from traditional film.
Anyway, I have a collection of four Nikon 35mm SLR cameras from the last 40 years and given the choice of spending another $1000 on a camera, I would buy a real camera, not a digital toy. Of course, my opinion is always subject to change.
The camera store I went to does a big business in used equipment and the most telling fact of all I learned today was that digital cameras have zero resale value. Another surprising bit of information was that this store had no knowledge of any Iomega deals to bundle Clik with digital cameras. |
