Digital Photography: Cheap Shots
Are you the type of shutterbug who loves disposable cameras and gets excited by the corner drugstore's free double-print offers? If so, the idea of spending $400 or more on a fancy digital camera may not provide quite the same rush. Fortunately, you don't have to dish out that kind of cash to join the digital photography revolution.
For starters, I found the slim and simple SiPix StyleCam digital camera for only $70. This no-frills, point-and-shoot model is about the size of a box of Altoids. It runs on two AAA alkaline batteries, stores about 60 shots in its 8MB of internal memory, and connects to a PC via USB cable to transfer photos. As you might expect, the StyleCam lacks features typically found on more expensive cameras, such as a built-in flash, an LCD, a zoom lens, and a slot for a memory card.
Still, I was satisfied with my SiPix snapshots; they looked nice enough to e-mail to friends and post on a Web site. And if you take pictures in a sunny setting, the camera should produce images that are bright enough for satisfactory prints on 3-by-5-inch paper. But with a maximum resolution of 640 by 480 pixels (compared with 1200 by 1600 for models in the $350 or above price range), the SiPix won't produce Ansel Adams-quality photos.
If you'd rather scan the shoeboxes of photos that are currently stacked in your attic, the $99 Canon CanoScan N670U scanner is a good bet. It produced good-quality color scans but was a tad slow. It's slim and light, and the model's front panel has three quick-start buttons for scanning, copying, and e-mailing. The N670U's design does away with the bulky power brick accompanying many scanners; instead the unit draws power from the USB connection to your PC. On the downside, the N670U lacks accessories that other scanners in its price range offer, such as a transparency adapter (useful for scanning slides or negatives from a film camera) and an automatic document feeder.
Enhance and Print
The Canon scanner has a generous software bundle that includes Adobe Photoshop Elements, an image editing program notable for its clean, easy-to-follow interface. Elements costs about $90 on its own, but it comes free with the CanoScan. The software can do such tasks as sharpening and resizing photos and removing red-eye effect in flash shots.
Elements has a thumbnail browser, as well. But I prefer ACD Systems' ACDSee 4.0, an image management program with a pumped-up Windows Explorer-like interface (with folders on the left side of the interface and thumbnails of photos on the right). I was able to convert file formats and perform minor image enhancements such as cropping and brightening. ACD Systems offers a free 30-day trial of the program, or you can buy it for about $50.
Manipulating photos in Elements and ACDSee uses a lot of computer resources, so it makes sense to add RAM to your PC--especially if your PC has less than 256MB. Though not essential, the extra RAM can speed up opening, editing, or saving images. Memory prices fluctuate almost daily, but at press time you could get 256MB of DDR memory from Crucial for about $85, or 128MB for around $45.
After taking (or scanning) and editing pictures, you may want to share printed versions with friends and colleagues. The $99 Epson Stylus C60 can do the printing job quickly. It performed well with graphics and text, and produced pleasingly subtle details in photos. Glossy prints were colorful but had a slightly reddish cast.
One more nifty tool for shutterbugs: If you own or are planning to buy a digital camera that uses a CompactFlash or a SmartMedia memory card, I recommend getting a card reader. It's a small external device that lets you transfer images stored in a camera's memory card more quickly and easily than using a USB cable. A card reader also helps save your camera's batteries--downloading pictures to your PC through a USB cable drains the batteries.
Because I use both CompactFlash and SmartMedia cards with my cameras, I'd go with a dual-slot card reader that accommodates both formats, such as SCM Microsystems' $45 Microtech USB CameraMate. If you need to support only one memory card type (such as CompactFlash, SmartMedia, Memory Stick, or MultiMediaCard/Secure Digital), you can purchase a single-slot card reader for as little as $25.
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ACD Systems: ACDSee 4.0
$50
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SCM Microsystems: Microtech USB CameraMate
$45
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Crucial: 128MB of DDR memory
about $45
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Grace Aquino
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