digital camera capabilities / was Re: 1000+ old computer in Canada,

On 5/29/07, Gordon JC Pearce <gordon at gjcp.net> wrote: What's your cutoff for a "good digital SLR"? I have an Olympus E-10. It was top-of-the-line over 5 years ago - fixed lens with true 9mm-36mm focal length ("1/4 sized CCD", so 36mm-144mm equivalent), 62mm diameter (large compared to most digital cameras, so at f/2 - f/2.4, its lens is a bit faster than you commonly see), but being as old as it is, "only" 4 megapixel. When it was new, this camera retailed around $1800-$2000. I picked it up in 2003 for $650, when it was no longer at the top of the pack. A friend of mine just got one My best resolution with this camera is on the order of 2.5K x 1.5K pixels. That's still quite a bit less than film. For webbish stuff, though, plenty of resolution. I still have a few 35mm cameras, but with the cost of film and processing, I don't do as much with it as I used to (less than a dozen rolls of slide film per year). I do, however, use it when I want to take stunning pictures of Antarctic scenery. Between noisy pixels and contrast differences between ASA 50 slide film and a CCD, the visual impact of real film is amazing. For indoor shots of computer bits under controllable lighting conditions with a target image size of 800x600 or less, there's not much difference in perceived quality. If by "good digital SLR", you mean something in the 8-10MP range, with removable lenses that one can tailor to the application at hand (by spending enough $$$), then I would say that they are approaching SLR resolution (numbers I've heard from a Hollywood cameraman are that 35mm movie film is considered to have "4000 lines of resolution" for the purposes of generating special effects and certain kinds of image subtleties), but not quite there. $5000 worth of digital camera (body and lenses) can compete with a $100 used SLR. $1000 worth of digital camera can't in many circumstances. -ethan