[Hover on a thumbnail to see the caption; Click on a thumbnail for a larger picture]
The following are taken with a borrowed Sony FD7 digital camera: a 0.3 megapixel camera which takes 640x480 JPEGs and writes to floppies. The JPEGs can be saved in "Std" quality or in "Fine" quality, where Std is roughly quality:60, Fine is roughly quality:84. (I took the first 9 photos A001..A009 on the Std setting, and used Fine since then. The filename contains an 's' or an 'f' to show which quality setting i used; a 'B' after that indicates that i brightened it on the computer; and a 'C' indicates this is a Crop.)
The lens is an impressive 10x zoom: 40mm to 400mm, in 35mm equivalent terms. The lens is really much smaller than that, since the camera uses a CCD of only 6mm. It has good "macro" capabilty (without any "mode-change"), at the wide-angle end it can focus on a subject within 1cm of the lens! However at telephoto settings it can only focus to within 100cm. It can take photos under low-light conditions (max aperture is f1.8 to f2.9 depending on focal-length), but a non-flash indoor shot of a black cat is asking for too much. It can be focused manually, but i found that to be difficult: the only "viewfinder" is the LCD screen which is only 0.06 megapixels, so focusing manually requires guesswork and optimism. My photos are mostly done with auto-focus.
The camera is mostly a "point and shoot" design - it provides no feedback about the aperture and shutter-speed that it has selected, and provides very limited ways to over-ride those settings: you can tell it to over-expose or to under-expose by up to 1.5EV (in steps of 0.5EV). This over-riding is sometimes needed, but only under unusual light-conditions. That LCD, which is near useless for manual focusing, is much more satisfactory for detecting that the brightly-lit portions have become all-white blobs - using the brightest setting that avoids these blobs usually works (meaning that the full size image also looks to be correctly exposed).
Photos from a walk along KingstonRow to the BridgeDriveIn and back along the other side of the RedRiver on 2002May23:
(These photos are my "test-drive" to get acquainted with the camera.
To visualize what a 10x zoom can do, note that the joggers are shot from across the
river - same vantage point as the preceding shot of water under the St.Vital bridge.
The only one taken with Flash is the black cat looking up from beige chair which looks orange.
The shots of far-away houses through nearby foliage, show the joys of relying on
auto-focus.)