Camera suggestions?

[KentuckySawyer]

I've been thinking of getting a digital camera to click pictures of my trees jobs, but don't know what to buy. Ideally the camera would be inexpensive and durable (water and dust resistant).

Am I asking too much?

 

[jason j ladue]

i havent seen anything that answers that descripton too well. i have a canonpowershot (4.3 megapixel). i dont think it is designed to be water/dust resitant though. i do have a pretty sleek little case for it. i dont climb w/ it. i have it tied onto my line for taking the aeriel shots. click, click, then sendit back down. had it for about a year now. love it. i want a phone w/ a decent camera in it...

 

[tomreeve]

Got a powershot too. Good pics take abuse while hiking. There is an underwater case that is a little bulky,but you can take pics swimming or ina downpour
t

 

[vharrison2]

I recently got the nikon coolpix 5400;had a 250 $ rebate. Don't know how durable it is but is a good camera. Doesn't take great shots though without alot of light. I knew that going in and still bought it. 5.1 megapics

 

[R Schra]

I've been thinking of getting a digital camera to click pictures of my trees jobs, but don't know what to buy. Ideally the camera would be inexpensive and durable (water and dust resistant).

Am I asking too much?

I started with a "cheap" digital snapshot. It lasted only 1 year or so. Its up to you how you use or abuse it. I liked that cheap one for its simplisity and results. But it did get banged around so it broke. With the new one i am MUCH more carefull.

So i have bought me an bigger one, a fuji SLR digital cam. Its an old generation, the Fuji finepix S2 Pro is outdated this spring by the S3 Pro. I got me a very sharp deal on the SLR body and could use the lenses and flash from my old manual (analog)Nikon camera. I paid less for new including 2 year warrenty then the same second hand camera's are sold here at this time. I use that cam also for tree inventories ,and landscaping pics if i have the oppurtunity, and for a hobby. I always did a lot of analog picturing.

rgrds, Ronald

 

[Old Monkey]

A lot depends on what you want do with your pictures. I have a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P71 with 3.2 Mega pixels. I don't take picts on the highest resolution and I still have to downsize everything for the web. You can see some of my picts on http://www.arboristsite.com/showthread.php?t=21935

Don't get carried away with any of the following stuff:
Mega-Pixels, three or four is enough unless you want to print photos larger than an 8 by 10.
Digital Zoom, the optical zoom is more important. The digital zoom is just the same as cropping it on your computer, make it bigger and you lose quality.
Special Effects, they are just a novelty item and you will use them very little.

Things that I think are more important:

White balance, the camera should automatically sense what the light source is and adjust accordingly. Take a pict inside the store without the flash and see how true the color is with incandescent light.

Feel, does the camera feel good in your hands? Are the controls where you think they should be? I have big hands and wanted a larger camera to fit me.

Optical zoom, no matter what type of camera you get, optics are still the most important thing. I've always heard good things about cannons lenses. Compare the lense info on the different cameras you look at. Zoom is important but so is light gathering ability as expressed by minimum aperature.

I like having a slow flash setting, one that lets me take longer exposures in combination with the flash. With that I can take fun picts of blurred motion mixed with a solid image .

 

[pantheraba]

OM is right on track..3-4 megapix is plenty, camera should feel good to use, optical zoom IS more important than digital zoom.

I'm using a Canon Digital Rebel, came into it kind of bassackwards...sometimes it is overkill, but the high-res does allow a lot of flexibility to "zoom in" once I get the picture on the computer.

Before that I was using a HP 200, a 1 mpix camera. It was OK but had no optical zoom and pictures were usually about 700-800K, marginal for some picture printing...and zooming on the computer leads to pixellation at that resolution.

 

[DLK150]

I'm kind of late to the game here, but you can buy underwater housings for some digital cameras. They can be pricy, though.

Also, some people overlook them, but HP makes some decent cameras. We had a Photosmart 850, and loved the thing. We got the newer model of the same camera because we found an offer we couldn't refuse. The 850 is 4.3 MP, has 8X optical zoom, it allows for adjustment of white balance including manual, has selectable ISO speeds, as well as options for manual selection of shutter speed or aperture size, though not both at once. It's successor, the 945, is 5.3 and has the same features but makes some of them more accessible. It also allows you to focus manually, and has a "digital flash" which brightens dark areas of pictures. They also take small video clips with sound. The 945 is $350 or so.

I sold the 850 for $175, and the person that bought it called me 3 weeks afterward to thank me for such a bargain, they liked it so well.

 

[Ekka]

What's important besides the amount of magapixels is the lens quality.

Everything that is recorded has to come thru the lense and this is where the traditional camera makers such as Olympus, Nikon, Ricoh, etc come good as they been making high quality lenses a long time.

You can have a great shot come out of a 3.2mp camera and look better than a 5mp camera because of superior lenses and better camera design.

I just bought an Olympus C-760 3.2mp 10x optical zoom camera, it's very good, yes there is better and a lot worse. But in the $400 (Australian) price range you won't beat it. HAs a bunch of manual over ride functions and a neat panoramic function where you take 3 photo's in a row and the software on you PC joins them into one panoramic shot ... a great feature so you can do this.