John Larkin wrote:

On Fri, 13 Apr 2007 18:28:23 -0500, "Anthony Fremont"
wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
We just spent about an hour taking pics of a scope trace, to include
in a manual. Three cameras:

Fuji S5200 5.1 mpix 10x optical zoom

Sony CyberShot 7.2 mpix 12x

Sony Mavica, floppy disk, 800 kpix I think, 14x

See the winner: Mavica!

A friend of mine has one of those, it takes pretty good pictures and movies
with sound. My first digital camera was an HP 315 IIRC, what a POS and only
$400. I figured they knew what they were doing, boy was I stupid. I then
spent nearly that much for a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W/1 a couple of years back
and it can't take macro shots for crap. The autofocus will screw you every
chance it gets. So the only hope is fixed focus mode and bracketing the
distance. The flash is a nightmare on it as well. It takes decent pics
most of the time if you let it do it's thing, but trying to treat it like a
"real" camera is disappointing at best. I wish I simply had a 5MP digital
back for my Canon EOS Elan and I'd be happy.


Yeah, I'd love to have a digital camera that behaves just like my
Olympus SLR: manual focus, split image optical finder, light meter,
nice things you turn to adjust focus, exposure time, and f-stop. I
haven't seen an autofocus that works right, and the LCD screens aren't
good enough to get a really sharp manual focus, and the manual focus
controls tend to be very clumsy.

Grrrrr.

John


Do any of your cameras have a NTSC video output that is live while
shooting? I haven't tested it on the S5200 yet, but I have an uncased
5" color monitor that runs on 12 VDC. It will make a nice viewfinder, if
it works. Mount it in a small case in top of the tripod, and put the
battery case on one of the legs. A small gel cell battery should power
both the monitor and camera through any event.


--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida