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Tuesday, June 23, 2009
What can a $40 Digital Camera Gives You?
[ZOMBiE CyGiG] ranted at 11:00 PM --- Post#5540107537805913469

I own a Nikon D80, it takes wonderful images, lots of features, interchangeable lens...the list goes on and on. But it has one very major disadvantage - BULKY!

Alot of our life's random shots are among one of the most interesting images around, which serves as a very good blogging material - to inform others of what you observed, and keep it as an archive of your life. Other than that, good random shots gives me opportunity to practise the usage of Photoshop and its relevant skills.

Whenever I see something interesting, I would use my handphone to capture the scene without hesitation, but my Nokia 5320's photo are beyond hope. My BlissView T8 takes acceptable video, but when it comes to photo, it seems only to be a little better than my Nokia. And most of the time, I would be taking photo instead of video.

Thus I decided to head down to VR-Zone's Market Place and hoot a second hand digital camera. Though I put "$100" as the price of the digicam in the thread, I was actually targeting at "50". I was offered:
- Sanyo Xacti VPC S6----$50
- Canon Ixus II---------$80
- Minolta Dimage E223---$20

As sample pics aint available, I can only choose via specs. And S6 wins in this case. I decided to push the price down to $40 and carry on with the deal.

The above shows the EXACT S6 I got. Note the bursted LCD sides. I was shocked to see the damaged LCD when I received the unit as it was not mentioned before to me. Further more, the sample pics he showed me was really chui and he told me he had problems with the cam, namely
- Shutter speed too slow, need to always use Sports Mode
- Rechargeable Battery dun work well
- Unable to delete images off the SD card.

The lens are pretty scratchy+dusty.

Still, I was confident that I would be able to solve all these problems and still bought it for $40 in the end. Im will not post the spec of S6 as it looks like a joke when compared to DSLR, you can Google it easily if you want to. Mainly, it has a 3Mp sensor, about 2.4" LCD, powered by 02xAA batteries and uses SD non-HC cards as storage. It has a "Touch Sensor", which will auto focus the camera once your finger touches the shutter button, and all you need is to press all the way down. Conventional camera normally need a half press to auto focus, and then a full press to activate the shutter. I find this "Touch Sensor" feature useless as Im not used to it.

Anyway, later on I found out that there aint any problems with the shutter speed, you just got to know where your lights are and how to hold the camera still. I got a mini tripod and its very helpful if a long exposure is needed. Tweaking the ISO and EV settings helps too. I used Konnoc 2000mAh NiMH low self discharge batteries and they are working perfectly fine, I had taken near 100 shots since and yet to change batteries. The SD card was partially corrupted and full formatting it helped, I had got the same memory card problems for my old Olympus cam too.

Talk less, here are the sample pics (They are NOT additionally enhanced aka Photoshopped other than cropping and resampling):

The Neighbourhood Cats

The tail lights of a car.

A stone tablet near my house.

Closed up shots of toys.

Small object photography under studio lighting.

RC car chassis.

EDIT: Indoor shots at Plaza Singapura.
*Thanks sihui for reminder. Its PS not Vivo.

Food Photography: LAKSA!

Cropped macro shot of an opamp.

So do you think its worth $40? I think quite worth it leh, and also skills (photography+photoshop) can sometimes greatly overcome low end hardware...

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