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| The Oly C-1000L |
Bought in December 1998 (price: DEM 1000, would be EUR 511) -
Optical resolution 850k Pixels (1024x768) -
SLR system - 3x optical zoom ("50"-"150"mm).
The point where this camera REALLY annoyed me was during the total solar eclipse of August 1999: all pictures of this event (the most beautiful thing I have seen in my life so far) were both blurred and overexposed, because there is simply NO way to get this camera to focus on infinity with "zoom" at maximum "tele" position. Who invented "you can't switch me off"-autofocus in the first place? Grrrr...
I still own this camera, but rarely use it. A (decreasing) number of older pictures on this site were taken with this camera.
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| The Oly C-4000Z |
Bought in November 2002 (price: EUR 600) -
Optical resolution 4 Mega Pixels (2288x1712) -
3x optical zoom ("32"-"96"mm).
My second DSC camera. After using the C-1000L for nearly four years I knew needed the 16 seconds shutter mode and all the other manual settings this thing offers. Also the automatic and manual white balance works much better than C-1000L's automatic.
The "movie mode" doesn't really deserve its name though: 320x240, 15 fps - and it's that ubiquitous QuickTime MOV format... *ack*...
Yet some things are strange about this device as well: when using manual focus in wide-angle mode, I always had to set the focus distance to 60 cm (2 feet) when shooting very distant objects (such as the starry sky or the ISS). Even though I know about this for a while now, I still shoot more than half of the night sky pictures totally blurred with the wrong focus setting...
In April 2004, I saw this camera for sale at a price below EUR 250.
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| The JVC GR-AX380 |
Bought in August 1999 (price: DEM 700) -
VHS-C tape System -
Optical resolution 768x576 (PAL color TV) -
22x optical zoom.
I suppose there is nothing worse in image quality than the VHS-C system that this camera uses. Colors bleed out by more than 40 pixels sometimes and the general scenery color usually has nothing to do with what actually was there. The only function that I like in this device is the time-lapse mode, in which the camera records 1/4 second every 15 seconds (so that the camera can run up to 60 hours without changing the cassette, given mains connection of course). It seems to me only JVC - at least to a point - thinks of time compression as a "creative" function while Sony and other brands still consider sepia-toning and blockification the most necessary video manipulation functions (during RECORDING!).
This is a very cheap (15 Euros on ebay) but useful 640x480 USB camera. I bought it in Spring 2004 and so far used it mainly for recording bicycle rides from strange perspectives (with the Vaio notebook in a well-ventilated backpack) and creating quick time-lapse videos. The image quality is actually better than that of the JVC GR-AX380, except for one totally dead pixel at the center.
I'm currently experimenting with alternative lenses for this camera. I found that with the eyepiece of an old Soviet telescope (which does not have an infrared-blocking filter, of course), this camera achieves an infrared imaging sensitivity comparable (if not better than) that of an actual Sony NightShot DV camcorder, only in color!
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| The ZTV ZT-811T wireless camera |
A wireless 2.4GHz analog camera module, bought on ebay for 65 Euros. You don't see the brand name ZTV anywhere on the device or in the "manual", but Google can tell from the Model number ;-)
Without its bulky plug, the camera weighs only 10 grams and is not much bigger than a piece of lump sugar!
The image quality is said be "380 TV lines" - in fact I'd say it's just a bit worse than that of the Mustek, but acceptable for surveillance purposes as intended by the manufacturer. It delivers 352x288 pixels' worth over a USB video digitizer - this device is the "eye" of my aerial imaging project.
It also transmits low-quality-sound and is ready for infrared imaging; its maximum transmission distance seems to be around 50-70 meters, with occassional interference "kchhhhktfwap"-ies from about 10 meters on.
As far as I know this is the only modern raytracer package that relies entirely on a code editor and command line options, and the only one that uses Constructive Solid Geometry instead of polygon meshes. There is no built-in wireframe preview, no drag-and-drop (at least not of scenery objects), no visual texture editor... and still I like it, because once you've learned the SDL (scene description language) which feels like C or Java (only a lot more forgiving), you'll be able to work nearly as efficient and much more precise than users of normal WYSIWYMG scene modifiers. There are visual 3D editors for POV-Ray scenes as well, like Moray, but I don't use them. The official website for this thing is povray.org
. Even better, POV-Ray is free!
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