Any Recommendations for Linux Friendly Digital Still Camera?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Apr 29, 2005 at 10:44:16PM -0500, Sy wrote:
> /me clutches chest and falls over
> 
> A friend of mine was working in the industry and mentioned that the
> "high end"cameras were bloody expensive and not nearly as good a ratio
> of quality:cost as the mid range stuff.  I don't know how applicable
> that is today, or with that model though.
> 
> For the google impaired:
> http://nikonimaging.com/global/products/digitalcamera/slr/d70/
> http://nikonimaging.com/global/products/digitalcamera/slr/d70s/
> 
> OMG, reading the specs of some of those cameras.. there's a 12
> megapixel model.. dayum.  Looking more.. the picture rate is
> astounding.  Time-to-photograph from completely off to picture one and
> two is something I've been interested in.

Remember that picture noise (which affects quality a lot) depends a lot
on how much light the sensor gets, so in low light you want a larger
sensor to get a good image quality, otherwise you get noise in the image
(missing dots/graininess). 

Most small to mid range digital cameras have 50 to 100mm^2 sensors
(even a $1000 8Mpixel olympus is about 97mm^2), while most of the DSLR
cameras from nikon and canon are in the 200 to 400mm^2.  As a result
they can tak good pictures in about 1/4 the light level of the low to
mid range cameras.  They cost more for a reason, since you are really
paying for the size and quality of the sensor, but especially the size.

Of course a $2000 camera may be much more sensible than a $50000 camera
in terms of feature/performance per dollar.  At the same time a $1500
might be better value than a $750 camera if you want good pictures in
low light conditions.

I believe you can get DSLR's up around 30 - 40 Mpixel.  12 and 16 is
pretty easy to get (but still not cheap).  30+ is very much not cheap.

Lennart Sorensen
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