College Theatre Camera

[robear84]

Budget

* What budget have you allocated for buying this camera? No more than $500

Size - Does not matter.

Features

How many megapixels will suffice for you? No more than 5 mp

* What optical zoomwould you need? I would like ultra zoom capibilities but a 3-4x zoom would sufice for now

* How important is “image quality” to you? 10

Do you care for manual controls? Yes, would need them.

General Usage

* What will you generally use the camera for?
It will be used for both outdoor pictures (both day and night) and of the thearical stage. A quick time between taking shots is a important feature for most of the pictures I will be taking in these locations.

* Will you be making big prints of your photos or not? Biggest would be 8x10

Will you be shooting a lot of indoor photos or low light photos? In theatrical setting a good portion of time

Will you be shooting sports and/or action photos? Some action of actors as they move will need to be somewhat quick.

Miscellaneous

Are there particular brands you like or hate?

Are there particular models you already have in mind?
I have liked the features of Cannon's A95 and Minolta's Z3.
Cannon: Somewhat compact while allowing for manual control, has a decent zoom. Has 5mp which would allow for extra croping if needed.
Minolta z3: 12x zoom would be a nice feature for the times I will be taking pictures outdoors. Thought a 4mp would be enugh to get the size of pictures I am wishing for.

The only thing I am worried about in any camera that is not DSLR (which I would buy if I had another $1500+) is the quality of shots in low light conditions. I may be in dream land buy I was hoping there would be someone out there that knew of a camera that would be able to do this type of shot.
Thanks in advance.

[PhilR.]

While there are cameras that will do most of what you want, the action theatrical shots will be a problem with cameras in your price range. Since you want some zoom, you might consider the Panasonic FZ series of cameras, which have 12x lenses that are as fast as most normal (~3-4x) zooms. These should get you very good theatrical shots, as long as the subjects are in good lighting. Of course, you will not get very high shutter speeds, so you will not be able to freeze subjects with high-speed movement.

One camera that I've read just a slight amount of that you might look into further is the new one from Fuji, which has a very high ISO range, something like 1600 or so. Although it doesn't have much of a zoom, it might do quite well for the action shots. I don't remember the model #, but it would be simple to do a search for it.

PhilR.

[speaklightly]

The Fuji digital camera that Phil referenced in his post is the Fuji Finepix F-10, which is due for release in 04/2005. It is not yet on the market. However, it only has 3X optical zoom which might not work well for your proposed purpose.

It does have a high available ISO number of 1600 however, when the F-10 is at the maximum 3X optical zoom, the maximum available aperture falls to F 5.0. This presents another serious limiting factor.

I personally take many concert type and stage production digital photos and I did a lot of work with the Panasonic FZ series digital cameras. After several years of getting digital photos that did not quite have the quality that I desired, I relented and switched to a dSLR camera. After that switch, the quality of my digital photos really improved a great deal.

dSLR prices have dropped a lot in the last 12 years.

Sarah Joyce