Re: Digital Camera recommendations for coil photos

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: "Terry Fritz" <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>

Hi Dave

At 04:17 PM 9/28/2002 -0400, you wrote:
>(Terry--I'm hoping this is a legitimate are of inquiry)

"photography of coils" is expressly on-topic :-)

>
>Looking to buy a digital camera and one of most important criteria is the
>ability to take good shots of my coils in action.

A few years ago, a lot of use got Olympus C-3000s.  Great cameras but with
a few accessories it was like $1000 back then.  But we were all throwing
away are film cameras for the super digital versions so we could justify it
in film saved and they do take pictures better then film considering it is
in a non-pro's hands...  I use it all the time and it was well worth it.
However, I bet prices and features have changed a lot since then so there
is probably a better "one" perfect camera out there now.  I saw the store
had digital cameras for $24.95 :-)  I was tempted to get one just to play
with.  Maybe streamers from the toroid's perspective :-))

>
>What are you using? Is the RF field cause problems? Good place to buy? I'm
>looking for close up capability so that I can take shots of my system
>components and share them with the group.

Never had a problem with RF affecting the camera in any way.  I think Finn
ran has coil with his camera (not sure the brand) left sitting on it
(accident) without any harm.  Even newer camcorders are very immune to
Tesla coil interference.  

"Best Buy", Walmart, and all those big competitive stores usually have
prices with $10 of each other.  Shop around, but don't expect to find big
price differences on the same camera.  Competition is tough...  I think all
the reasonably good cameras take close ups just fine.  I see a lot of newer
"Olympus" cameras around that people seem to like.  If your going to spend
real money, I would stick with a "real" camera manufacture that builds just
cameras rather than say an HP or no-name brand who just contracts out the
"camera product".  Olympus, Nikon, Minolta...  Have a lot to loose buy
selling crappy products, so they just don't...  For less money, Sony and
Kodak seem to make nice stuff.  If you are going to go "cheap", I would get
"really cheap" since they still do 80% of what you need to do and you don't
have to worry about ugrades to a good one.  $25 is what two 35mm rolls of
good film developed well costs...

I like digital cameras in that they are really automatic and they always
can take a good picture (or you can "fix it later").  The ones with the
little TV screens are really nice but they eat batteries if the screen is
on all the time.  Even ones that don't have screens now seem to get it
perfect all the time.  I hardly look at the screen on mine unless I am
really close or fiddling with settings.  Normally, you just don't have to
worry about if it worked or not.  I think they all use "USB" serial ports
now which is very nice unless you have NT4.0 which is the only "big"
operating system that cannot do USB.  The computer also needs USB or you
can probably get a card to do it.  If you have an old PC, the "USB thing"
could be a problem.  Sony's cameras record directly to floppy disk but they
don't hold a lot of pictures and are big and heavy by today's standards.

>
>Some of these dig cams have video clip capability. I wonder how this works
>for Coil vid clips?

I have never seen digital camera video clips that were really worth much.
They spend 99% of there time making the camera and the software guys spend
and extra 1% on the video thing.  I never use it or "sound".  IMHO, those
are features you don't need that would be better done with a camcorder.
But maybe the newer cameras are better...

Cheers,

	Terry

>
>Dave
>
>
>