sd 200 Question

[gr7797]

Im new to this, so ive just been trying to do some research and reading on my own, just picked up an SD200. I was wondering if there is a way to check the status of the battery, from reading the manual it seems like there is just a warning before the battery goes dead, but no way to check ahead of time. Also could somebody tell me what the difference between resolution and compression is? Do they both affect the quality of the photo?

[MobstaJ]

Unlike sony's info-lithium batteries, there is no way to check the battery on most canon cameras until they're almost gone and then a little battery drain icon blinks on the screen. Usually when that appears I know there isn't much time left. Not a really big deal if you have an extra battery.

Resolution and compression both affect the quality of the picture. One way to think of resolution is as how many dots or pixels that make up the picture. In the case of the sd200, this maximum resolution would be 2048x1536. That's 2048 horizontal pixels by 1536 vertical pixels. Multiply those together and what do you get? 3.2 megapixels. This is your best detail resolution. You can go lower to conserve memory card space but most people don't do that, they want the best resolution so that you can crop photos and make good prints.

Compression has to do with how much the image processor squishes the image down after the picture is taken, in this case the image is compressed into the jpeg compression format. Obviously a higher compression allows more photos to fit on the memory card but at a cost. The more you compress a picture, the more image data is lost. The compression technique used actually gets rid of or simplifies the picture to save space. I myself only shoot at superfine compression. It produces the clearest images with hardly any compression artifact as they call it. Some people go a step beyond that and use the raw image format which is basically not compressed at all. The sd200 doesn't allow this though.

Sorry for the novel, ;)

Peace

[gr7797]

Thanks alot for the reply, That definitely helped clarify things for me. I will probably get a larger sd card and shoot mostly with the higher resolution and a lower compression, although I think that with this camera it would take great photos even at a lower resolution. By the way, I had asked a question to you at the end of the "best sd card for canon sd200/300" thread,regarding your SD card, so if you have a chance maybe you could take a look at that. And thanks again for the very thorough answer.

[c2ironfist]

Wonders if that applies to video as well :D

[MobstaJ]

Videos are a bit different in that they are encoded I think in the Mpeg or motion jpeg codec. Don't quote me on that though. All you have control over with the videos is resolution and framerate. You can set the resolution at 640x480 or 320x240 and the framerates at 30fps or 16fps. You can also shoot at the horrible resolution of 160x120 but who would want to do that. Higher resolution means higher quality movies; higher framerates mean smoother movies. My favorite mode with the sd200 is 640x480 at 16fps. The movie isn't as smooth as it should be but all of the detail is still there.