[Radiance-general] Digital Camera recommendations?

[Greg Ward]

Hi Rob,

There is no perfect camera for capturing HDR sequences.  The main 
things you need to be able to control are the white balance, ASA, 
aperture and speed, and an autobracketing mode that can cover +/-2 
f-stops or more is ideal.

The thing you want to avoid is a camera that does weird processing on 
the images, and this is often difficult to determine until you get it.  
I believe the Olympus C series and the Canon G series are pretty safe 
in the price range you're after.  I've owned an Olympus C-3030, C-3040, 
and C-4040.  I'm sticking with the last one, as the newer in the C line 
add megapixels and features but nothing I'm interested in.  Generally, 
the more megapixels you have in a small camera, the more noise you're 
going to see.  The current race to 10 MPixels in a consumer-grade 
camera is lunacy in my opinion.  Who wants to blow up an image to 20x30 
inches?  Even if you do blow up an image to that size once every year 
or so, you're paying for the privilege with image files that are 3-5 
times larger than you would need otherwise.  (End rant.)

My main problem with the C-4040, which you can't even get anymore, is 
purple fringing caused by the lens at the edges of high contrast, 
wide-angle shots.  It also has a very occassional knack of painting 
white, blown-out areas blue.  This must have been an ill-considered 
feature some Olympus engineer came up with it for making washed-out 
skies look more natural, and it sometimes backfires.  I've only had a 
few images this happened to in the thousands and thousands I've shot, 
but another fellow with the same camera (but different firmware) has 
seen it more often with his.

-Greg

> From: "Fitzsimmons, Rob" <Rob.Fitzsimmons at Summit.Fiserv.com>
> Date: March 8, 2005 5:53:48 PM PST
>
> I think this may have been discussed, but I can't find the threads...
> Does anyone have camera recommendations for creating HDR Probes?
>
> Something that has manual override, shutter / aperture priority for
> bracketing
> Auto bracketing?
> Anyone guessing on when digital cameras will be taking native HDR 
> picures?
> Don't think I can wait that long
>
> My budget is $500
>
> Thanks,
> Rob Fitzsimmons