Choosing a camera for highly detailed b&w line art (wood engravings)

[Jean-Paul]

I have a very specific use. I need a digital camera to photograph finely detailed 19th century wood engravings. They are all line art, but are often so finely detailed that they appear to be grayscale. They will be shot from old books, primarily 18th and 19th century.

An example would be the animal illustrations used on the covers of all the O'Reilly computer books.

The digital photos will be used to prepare negatives for printing on offset printing equipment. The printed sizes will be no larger than 8 x 10 inches.

Cameras I was considering are the Olympus C-5060, Olympus C-7000, Canon Powershot
S 70, Canon Powershot A95. Other suggestions would also be welcomed.

Do you think a camera capturing raw images is a necessity? If so, would that mean I should eliminate the reasonably priced Canon Powershot A95, which only offers JPEG images.

I would prefer a camera using Compactflash or SD cards for reasons of cost.

Any suggestions?

Your help is greatly appreciated. Most camera reviews I see focus on outdoor color, etc.
I have yet to see a review which mentions much about capturinig finely detailed grayscale.

Paul

[Rhys]

Assuming you can get decent lighing on your subject, my Nikon 3100 compact would do a very nice job of those engravings. Nikons focus the closest of all and the 3100 (probably the 3200 also) has a copy feature which does produce black and white copies. It'll focus as close as 2 cm from the subject. 3 megapixels is all you really need for 10x8 so try a 3100/3200.