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Non-Tech : Any info about Iomega (IOM)? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mel Boreham who wrote (43507)	1/15/1998 8:15:00 AM
From: Teddy	Respond to of 58324

Thoughts on Digitals Cameras from The Wall Street Urinal. Of course they don't like them. Maybe Clik! could help. (i cut parts of the article and added the bold) Digital Cameras Improve, But Still Waste Time, Money By JARED SANDBERG Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL It sounds so liberating: taking snapshots with a digital camera, then instantly cropping and printing them from your computer. Gone are the trips to the photo lab and the disappointment of dimly lit or blurry images. That's the promise of some new digital cameras that offer higher resolution than previous generations did. But they're not quite there yet, and they remain expensive. The four I tested are in the $900 range -- and the photo quality doesn't always match that of film, especially for bigger photos. To produce good prints you need a high-quality ink jet printer costing at least $400 and special paper that runs about 60 cents a letter-size sheet. The four cameras come from some tried-and-true photographic names -- Kodak, Olympus and Agfaalong with printer maker Epson. They take relatively high-resolution images, producing roughly one million tiny dots, called pixels... For fumbling amateurs like myself, digital cameras can even the odds. You can erase a bad picture seconds after you snap it. And with smaller-format prints -- 4-inch by 6-inch shots -- their output can pass for photos from a film-based camera..... All the cameras come with cables that your computer uses to sip out the digital photographs. And all but the Olympus have video-out jacks so you can see the stills on your TV set. Some of the models also have a jack to link to a photo-quality printer, eliminating the need for a computer. That feature could be appealing. Setting up the cameras on Windows 95 was a struggle. The software produced some irksome "IRQ" conflicts-meaning the cameras argued with another device for the computer's attention. Once I resolved the problem by removing some scanner software, the cameras all proved easy to use, though the Olympus's awkward, multilingual manual seemed cluttered.... But the biggest problem with all of them is their tendency to squander resources. They guzzle both batteries and storage memory. The Olympus stores only three images at a time on the supplied two-megabyte memory card. The Agfa and the Epson store about six high-resolution images on four megabytes, while the Kodak manages to store as many as 13 pictures on its four-megabyte card. Memory cards cost $100 or more for eight megabytes. ALL THE CAMERAS require four AA batteries, which can run out in as little as an hour of shooting. Agfa and Epson had the good sense to include rechargeable batteries and a recharger. Users of the Kodak and Olympus models may want to buy batteries in bulk. That means any savings from printing only good images is erased by the cameras' need for batteries and extra memory. As the resolution of digital cameras improves, their convenience may suffer. Moving snapshots to your computer through cables can be painfully slow and will get slower as the files containing the digitized picture grow larger with the increase in pixels. By the time the cameras produce images that give film a real run for the money, the files may take so long to transfer to your PC that a trip to a one-hour photo lab could seem like a blink. It took the Agfa, which had the slowest transfer rates, six minutes to funnel four high-resolution images to the PC. That's 54 minutes for 36 exposures, and you haven't even made prints yet. The manufacturers say speed improvements are on the way. Moreover, they are increasingly going with rechargeable batteries while examining displays that won't deplete battery life as quickly. They also point out that the memory cards can be fitted with adapters so they can be inserted directly into the computer's card slot to make transferring images a snap. But while a picture may be worth a thousand words, the question is whether a digital camera is worth nearly a thousand bucks. For about the same money you can get an advanced film camera like a Nikon with two exceptional lenses that surpass the optics of the best amateur digital cameras. If you absolutely have to get a digital camera, wait. Better models are due out later this year, which could push down the prices.