A few days back I finally got word from Best Buy that the “lemon policy” was kicking in with my camera, a 2-year-old Canon SD860. The camera was *not* a lemon per se, but it had had its share of troubles and Best Buy policy was to replace it if it had to go to the shop 4 times (it had gone 5 times). The closest to an equivalent camera was the Canon SD960, which was just released in March. Apart from being 12 megapixel rather than 8, and some tinkering around with the ergonomics and user interface, it’s pretty much the same camera. Except for one thing…
I always set my SD860 for the maximum image size and maximum resolution/minimum image compression. As a consequence, with a 4 gig card I could get 1138 photos. But when I set maximum image quality settings on the new camera, rather than getting fewer that 1138 images, I can get over 1200. When I downloaded the first test batch of images… yep, the were smaller filesize than the old pics, despite the fact they were larger (4000X3000 pixesl rather than 3264X2448 pixels). How is this possible? Well, one minor change.
The old SD860 had three image quality settings: Normal, Fine and Superfine. These controlled the JPG compression ratio of the files. The new camera, after poking around online and confirming, has reduced the options to Normal and Fine. Which means all the pics now have slightly higher compression than the old ones. GAAAHHHHHRRRRR. There’s no good reason for making that change other than specifically to annoy me.
Additionally, there is as yet no CDHK “hack” for this camera, so all the neato fast/long exposure shots can’t be done. Come on hackers, get on the ball!!!
5 Responses to “Best Buy comes through. Canon disappoints.”
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I would say that I feel your pain, but we are still using an HP Photosmart M401, the 110 Instamatic of digital cameras.
Does it have the option to export RAW format?
> option to export RAW
Nope.
It must do raw. All cameras do raw. I would have thought you were using raw for all of your starfield shots. The JPEG artifacts would be horrible even at “superfine” I’d think.
My 8 meg Olympus only gets a couple of hundred shots on my 2 gig card at highest JPEG quality. It’s about 5 to 8 meg per image. Raw images are all uniformly 24 meg per image.
All cameras do RAW but not all of them give you the option of keeping them. (RAW being the form the image is in before it hits the compression algorithm.)