Digital Cameras - test drive before buying.

Let me open this discussion with a plain and simple fact. I can be cheap sometimes. I think it was a little over a year ago that I purchased a digital camera from Gateway - I have it on my desk right now as a paperweight - the DC-M50.

I think you can probably tell I was not impressed with it. I had a very different perspective on digital cameras before I purchased the DC-M50. I figured technology could not get worse over time - and how could a camera possibly be a piece of garbage when it takes 5 MP pictures.

And I was very wrong.

I had purchased 2 digital cameras before the DC-M50. An Olympus D-460 and an old camera that only took 640 X 480 pictures.

The oldest camera - that only produced 640 X 480 pictures was actually pretty good. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world with its SmartMedia (now not used in any new cameras that I know of) and low resolution pictures. It did a couple of things really good. When I wanted to take a picture - it was ready. Then, when I wanted to take the next picture it was ready for that too. And a third thing that it did was most of the pictures came out. You could recognize that a barn was a barn, an owl and owl or that indeed that was an owl in a barn. The pictures did not print well at all, so there was major disappointment there. At the time I bought the digital camera though, that was not really what I needed it for. I just wanted to take pictures and be able to see them. Later in the life of the camera, I would be disappointed by the fact that even though SmartMedia cards now existed in larger capacities, 32MB was the most my camera could ever handle. This kind of programmed in limitation really annoys me. I could (and would) have extended the life of that camera - if someone had simply designed it to hold a larger counter when it goes to address numbers of locations on the media.

The second digital camera I purchased with little or no research was the Olympus D-460 Zoom. This was a 1.3 Megapixel camera - and it seemed to me that no matter what picture I took - it worked well. The reality of the matter is that I probably realized a 1 : 10 crappy picture to good picture ratio - and I'm willing to live with that. The pictures printed ok - I suppose - but they really shined on the computer screen. And this was great.

But as it is with digital cameras - I get itchy for new technology after a while. You read about being able to print 8X10s from your digital camera - or even cropped images in 8X10 - and a little drool starts to escape the side of your mouth... AHem - not that really happens.

Anyway, wanting a 5 MP camera and actually getting one - a little over a year ago - meant laying out some serious cash. So, it wasn't going to happen. But then Gateway had this great offer - 5PM camera for $250.

So, we bought one. We got suckered in to getting the repair plan for however long it lasts and we purchased the additional memory at the Gateway store as well.

There are some serious problems with this camera.

First off when you boot it up - it makes a sound like a very small person farting. We even went back to the Gateway store and asked if this was normal. They said it was normal. Well, normal it may be, but it is one of the most annoying sounds in the known universe.

So, we took a lot of pictures - and the problem is - none of them were really coming out all that well. Most were incredibly grainy. Practically all the ones that were not grainy were - well - blurry. The blurry is a neat effect in a picture - once in a while. So, I'd have to say that 1 out of every 8 pictures - was useful. Messing with the settings only made things worse. And the DC-M50 was slow to start up and the camera - even without the flash took 10 to 15 seconds to recycle between pictures. And sometimes the camera would actually, well crash. You had to remove the batteries and put them back in and then everything would be ok.

Here I was - out cash, time, and a lot of potentially good pictures of my son.

A lot of the pictures of my only child - were messed up because of this camera. Buyers remorse set in quickly. And - after the buyer repair plan for the camera, and the memory - we ended up spending as much as we would for some other digital camera at 5 MP.

So, a digital camera should last a lot longer than a year, but basically after a year of owning it I had completely had it.

This time I did research - and I knew my camera before I purchased it. I knew that it would have some problems taking pictures in low light conditions even with the flash on - and that there was no hot-shoe for a secondary flash on it. The FujiFilm FinePix E550 - was actually a 6 MP camera, with Fuji's neat octagonal sensors on the CCD - it could produce 12 MP pictures. It has a 4X optical zoom and who cares about the almost worthless digital zoom. I mean, crop your regular picture afterward and you get the same effect. There is no real zooming going on with digital zoom.

I can say that I am very happy with the camera - it operates much more like my Olympus camera that I had previously. I didn't go with Olympus, because they did not seem to have an equivalent camera - for a good price. And $336 at new egg - this camera is really good.

Not that I don't get pissed at it when I miss a picture once in a while. Or when I zoom in, the pictures tend to get really dark. And the flash not being strong enough turned out to be a real problem, instead of a minor problem. But I can live with it. My ration of good to bad pictures is waaaay better. More like 1 : 5 pictures gets screwed up - and a lot of the time - I know what I did to screw it up.

There are some things that in general I am annoyed about with digital cameras.

How is it possible that people come out with newer stuff that is actually worse than the older stuff. We need a QA patrol out there - to say hey man, if you put something new out there - it has to operate at least as well as the old stuff. I do not care that you are doing X times as much processing. If it can't run as well as the old stuff, you might as well keep it until it does run as good as the old stuff.

Now, I like my FujiFilm E550 a lot, but if almost every review I read said 'it takes pictures a little dark, and the flash is not as good as necessary to take pictures in dark rooms' - I have two questions about this: 1) If some nerd like me can buy this camera and analyze it and say here are the problems, why couldn't Fuji do that before the camera came out? 2. If some nerd like me can buy this camera and analyze it and say here are the problems, why couldn't Fujy have another nerd surf the web - find out about this things and report like a good minion to his master and say - 'if we want this camera to be really good, we should fix these things?'.

I know, I know, once the cameras are rolling off the line, it would cost them a bundle to even change small things.

And like I said, I really like my FujiFilm FinePix E550. But some things have got to make you wonder.

And my biggest beef (which I almost forgot about) was that when you are in the stores you pay a premium for the camera - at least a little bit. So, what do you get out of going to the store. You can possibly hold a camera. You can look at it. You might be able to read all the fine print on the box. That's about it.

Let me tell you something - until you have taken a picture and see what that picture looks like on the computer screen - you know nothing NOTHING about the camera. And your purchase of the camera is based solely on how pretty it looks and how well the marketing people did with the box.

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