Sometimes the smartphone is not the camera you want to use …
Lets face it, the camera market is struggling because most of the phones that people are buying come equipped with pretty decent cameras. They offer high enough megapixels that they can be used for more than just posting pictures to the web and actually have some decent quality. But even though that smartphone camera will work just fine for the majority of the pictures you take, there are still instances when the pictures just don’t live up to what they could be or it is just too impractical to use. Find out five instances where you will probably be better off using a dedicated camera rather than your phone …
Are Super Zoom Cameras All Hype?
Telephoto zoom lenses are very popular with consumers as it allows them to use a single camera for just about any situation. Need a wide angle lens to fit in a group of people into a portrait? That is the wide angle portion. Need to zoom in a ton on that animal across a field to get a closer image? That is the telephoto end. Many compact cameras feature telephoto lenses with many different ranges of zoom. Zoom refers to the focal distance between the widest and narrowest portions of the lens. Thus a 30mm-300mm would be a 10x zoom.
Nikon announced their featuring an amazing 83x zoom. That is a range that is almost unheard of. The problem is that most telephoto zoom lenses have some significant drawbacks that make such an extreme range not that useful to consumers. So what are some of the reasons you might want to consider a standard zoom over a super zoom lens? Continue reading
Why Megapixels Do and Don’t Matter For Cameras
Ever been shopping for a camera or a smartphone and seen that the various ads and documents tout the number of megapixels that they can shoot? Back in the early days of digital photography, you were lucky to have a 1.2 megapixel camera. That same number of pixels can be found in just about every webcam for a laptop. A typical consumer DSLR features around 15 megapixels or more and the Nokia Lumia 1020 smartphone has an unbelievable 41 megapixels in its tiny body. Does this mean that the Lumia is going to take better pictures than a DSLR camera? Obviously it won’t because of other factors but it is important to learn how a camera’s sensor and number of megapixels can impact your photos for better or worse. Continue reading