Computer Arts 200: Digital cameras

March 14, 2012 | Be the first to comment

Back in 1995, digital imaging was very different. Find out how different in our round-up of digital cameras from issue 1

Today, it's easy for a design studio to get hold of a quality SLR or compact system camera for very little cost indeed – and with GBs of storage available on SD cards hundreds or even thousands of shots can be taken in one shoot. It wasn't always like this though. Back in 1995 when we launched Computer Arts, digital cameras were in their infancy, and we were at the cutting-edge. Have a look at our group test from 1995 below...

Digital cameras

It’s the visual equivalent of sound sampling. Chris Lloyd tests the latest digital cameras.

The best way to capture an image from the real world is to photograph it. The basic process hasn’t changed since its invention and getting the processed picture into the digital domain has meant scanning. Digital cameras bring that process right to the sharp end and turns the image seen through the lens directly into a digital image. There’s no film, chemicals or wait. You take your picture, download it to your PC and you’re ready to process, edit and print.

Digital cameras are still an emerging technology but it’s developing fast. The market is split into two distinct camps – professional studio cameras and general purpose portable cameras. The former are horribly expensive, starting at a few thousand and rising to a few tens of thousands. The latter have now developed from crude black and white affairs taking tiny snapshots into useful 24-bit colour cameras. Anytime you want a digitised image you simply photograph it and you’ve captured it. What once could take days now takes minutes. The uses are endless: DTP, image editing, as raw material for digital art or just photographing the cat for your Windows wallpaper. Whenever you would normally use a camera or a scanner you can use a digital camera, only it’s quicker and easier. Another advantage is that once you’ve got your camera, and paid for the batteries, it’s all free. The results can be copied perfectly as many times as you like. There’s no waste – if you don’t like the shot you simply erase it. You can send them around the world using a modem in minutes. Digital cameras can also work with a wider range

of light levels. Traditional film cameras seem awkward in comparison.

There are a few problems of course. Fast moving action is very difficult to capture and it takes a moment to process each picture so you can’t rattle off shots in quick succession. Image quality is high but it doesn’t rival real film. There’s also the little matter of the cost; it’s still a pricey option.

The sticking point at the moment is an engineering one. The memory and CCD arrays used in the cameras are difficult and therefore expensive to make. As this is overcome you can expect the cameras to get a lot cheaper.

For the latest digital camera reviews, why not check out Techradar?

Apple QuickTake 150

The QuickTake is based on the same technology developed by Kodak and used in the DC 40. The Apple designers have been at work and made it smaller and sexier than the Kodak. It’s also the simplest of the lot. A small LCD panel on the back shows everything you need to know. There’s a timer, flash and resolution selector, each with a button next to them. There’s also a tiny recessed button that wipes all the pictures.

It’s a fixed-focus, point-and-click camera. Everything is automatic, although you can override the flash if you want. There’s no way to alter the exposure. It comes with a clip-on close-up lens and a battery charger and a set of rechargeable batteries – a nice touch. The lens is the best of the bunch, equivalent to a 50mm although there is no mounting for extra lenses. It’s still optically very simple though.

You can mix resolutions as you like during the same session. The lower resolution is achieved by reducing the picture quality and using more aggressive compression, rather than reducing the size of the image. It doesn’t take the biggest pictures but the quality is good and it matches the VGA resolution of 640 by 480 pixels.

Transferring the pictures is covered by QuickTake. You just plug in the cable and the software pulls the images off the camera and onto your PC. It’s pretty much the same program as the Casio uses. You can view all the pictures in the camera as thumbnails before you download the individual images.

The biggest plus for the QuickTake has to be the price, it’s under half that of the Kodak. The main reason is that it’s only packing 1Mb of Flash RAM. This is where the pictures are stored. It’s a non-volatile memory that keeps your images safe even when you take out the batteries. It may keep the cost down but it does mean you only get 16 high resolution images before you have to get to your PC to download them. This means it’s not a lot of good to take on holiday with you.

Despite the low capacity and smaller image size the price/performance ratio works in favour of the Apple. For now it’s the best buy.

Price: £470
Company: Apple
Picture capacity: 32 or 16 at 640x480 pixels
Minimum PC: 386 with 4Mb RAM
Our 1995 rating: 4/5

Kodak DC 40

Kodak make some very serious digital cameras costing the kind of money you normally associate with new cars. The DC 40 is its first attempt at a camera not destined for heavyweight professional use. The technology has also been used by Logitech and Apple for their cameras.

The DC 40 is a large and simple beast. It’s all automatic, you point and click and a second or two later it beeps, informing you it’s ready for the next one. There’s a built-in flash which can be set to manual or automatic. The optics aren’t the world’s most sophisticated, a fixed focus affair equivalent to a 42mm lens. You can screw in close-up or wide-angle lenses if you need them. You can adjust the exposure but it’s a bit fiddly. There’s a timer too. The viewfinder doesn’t look through the lens, so at close ranges you have to watch your framing.

It takes pictures at two resolutions. Interestingly enough they are the same size, it’s the quality that is different. You can take 99 pictures on the lower setting. You have to decide which you want before you start because changing resolutions deletes all your pictures.

There is also a delete function but you can only delete the last picture you took and it uses up valuable memory, cutting the storage capacity to 32. Again you need to decide if you want this function before you start. You can always delete all the pictures if you have to.

The PhotoEnhancer software enables you to download pictures, starting with thumbnails, like a sheet of contacts. It also has some crude editing and image processing functions including sharpen and brightness. You’ll need lots of hard drive space or a stack of floppies if you want to store lots of images. You can only fit one image on each floppy.

The Kodak is easy to use and the results are excellent as long as you keep in mind its limitations. Picture quality, as with all the cameras, is pretty good. The weak point is high contrast edges such as chimneys against a bright sky – you can get odd colours appearing. It’s not particularly compact but the 4Mb of memory it carries means decent picture capacity and comparatively big pictures. A bit too expensive, though, especially when compared to Apple’s camera.

Price: £1,051.63
Company: Kodak
Picture capacity: 48 or 99 at 756x504 pixels
Minimum PC: 386 with 6Mb RAM
Our 1995 rating: 3/5

FotoMan Pixtura

The FotoMan looks just like the Kodak DC 40; that’s because underneath, by and large, it is. It’s grey rather than black and lacks a coloured filter over the flash but otherwise from the outside it’s a spitting image. It’s even exactly the same price. The software for transferring pictures is the same: PhotoEnhancer. You also get a utility called Pixtura Download, a quick and dirty program designed to transfer the images and no more. It can save in a number of formats. A full digital film is 55Mb uncompressed so the JPEG option comes in very useful. This can cut it down to a tenth of the size or more.

As with the others it’s a point-and-click job. There’s also a built-in flash. A small LCD panel on the back with three buttons is all there is to play with. You can adjust the exposure, use the self timer, turn the flash on, off or set it to automatic. If you have the delete function enabled you can also delete the last picture or the whole lot of them. You have to enable this feature using the software and it dramatically reduces picture capacity, down to 32 in high resolution or 61 in low. Unlike the Kodak, if you don’t select the delete function you can’t delete anything. The Kodak always has the option to delete the entire digital film.

It can take pictures in two resolutions, set up using the software. The low resolution setting produces pictures exactly a quarter of the size but otherwise the same quality. For some strange reason the FotoMan’s pictures are two pixels wider and two pixels shallower than the Kodak. The software also adds a five pixel white border around the image – quite why is anybody’s guess.

The camera doesn’t look or feel like a thousand pounds worth of kit; the body is plastic, it’s light and has a plain fixed focus lens. A big slice of the cost is the memory. The Flash RAM used in digital cameras is very expensive and both the FotoMan and the DC 40 have 4Mb of it. The FotoMan is a lovely thing but the results come at a heavy cost.

Price: £1,051.63
Company: Fotoman
Picture capacity: 48 or 99 at 756x504 pixels
Minimum PC: 386 with 6Mb RAM
Our 1995 rating: 3/5

Casio QV-10

This is the odd one out. The QV-10 uses Casio’s home-grown technology and is quite a different beast from the Kodak-based cameras. It’s considerably smaller and sexier-looking for starters. The big technical difference is the addition of a 1.8-inch LCD screen on the back that shows you the view through the lens so there’s no view finder. The screen update isn’t instant but quick enough. There’s a switch to enable the built-in close-up lens and another to change between an f2 and f8 aperture. Apart from that it’s all point and click.

If you switch over to Play mode you can view your pictures immediately; true instant photography. You can take a picture of someone and then show them the results a few seconds later. You can delete any picture at any time and protect images from accidental deletion. You can even have it automatically run though all the pictures in a slideshow.

The camera is the size of an ordinary 35mm compact and very delicate, so don’t drop it. It lacks a flash or any means of connecting one. The lens is a tiny thing and the section containing it can swivel around, even pointing backwards, making self-portraits easy. The LCD screen does mean it eats batteries, a new set only lasts two hours and considerably shorter for rechargeable ones. As is the norm, transfer is via a serial lead but you’re left on your own with any editing or processing – the software just transfers pictures and nothing more. The picture quality is good and free from digital artifacts, except around bright highlights.

There’s no doubting the technical competence of the QV-10, it’s a remarkable piece of hardware. The problem is the results look much better on the QV-10’s LCD screen than they do on your PC’s. They’re just too small to be of any serious use. The one big advantage is that you don’t have to be anywhere near your PC to show off your handiwork. It’s a bit of a half-way house. In a beauty contest the QV-10 wins hands down, it’s compact, sexy and advanced, but its practical applications are a little limited. Perhaps Casio will rectify things with its next release. Let’s hope so.

Price: £799
Company: Casio
Picture capacity: 96 at 320x240 pixels
Minimum PC: 386 with 4Mb RAM
Our 1995 rating: 2/5