Linux Compatible Cameras...Cool

John Bailo

What are you using the camera for - if only for adding pictures to a web page then it's just good enough, if for taking serious photos where you're likely to want to print any of the pictures then forget it - it still suffers from the poor resolution problem that the vivitar has.

Personally for semi-serious use I'd not even look at anything under 4m pixels - for serious use I stick with film and scan the negatives to 2700dpi on my Nikon LS-1000 film scanner that has 10-12m real megapixels - most cameras have 2-4 of the quoted pixel count filtered green and 1-4 each for Red and Blue so the output is partially interpolated - a 10m pixel film scanner does 3 scans with spinning filter (or has 3 CCD's depending on model) to give a true 10m green, 10m blue and 10m red pixels.

Digital camera output when enlarged can have nasty colour fringing when 2 adjacent pixels are widely different colours due to the interpolation - a problem not present when scanning film plus I can upgrade my resolution later by changing the scanner - 35mm can now be scanned at over 20m pixels - Digital is stuck with whatever technology it was taken with so pictures taken with my first crappy VGA camera years ago will always be crappy - in a few years my current 4m model will probably look just as bad compared with the entry level models that will be available.

I'm about to start scanning my parents old kodak slide films taken in 1960's and 70's at 10m pixels so their photos taken 20-30 years before anyone thought of digital photography will look better than most Consumer Debt digital kit which I find real sad - technology taking a big step back in quality just for convenience (TV is just as bad - here in the UK quite a few digital terrestrial channels, mostly shopping ones, are transmitting with lower resolution than the old 405 line system that was replaced in the 1960's).