Digital Camera Resolution

Second Look

My Nikon Coolpix 4600 has "normal" and "PC mode" settings for image resolution. In normal mode, the pictures are about 1.5 mb - 2 mb. In PC mode, they are more in the 150 kb - 200kb range. Naturally, the lower-res images aren't so good for making photographic prints.

What about battery life? Does anyone know how much more juice it takes to shoot the hi-res pics?

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Second Look home improvement www.SecondLookHome.com
Handyman and Home Repair Specialist in Rhode Island
RI Licensed Lead Safe Remodeler/Renovator, RI Registered & Insured Contractor

concretemasonry

Your battery is used maily for turning on, running the lens, shooting the flash and turning off. It has little to do with the resolution.

To get the most out of your camera is buy a big (1/2 or 1 GB) card and shoot everything on mormal. Then you can shhot to your hearts contention. Even my little camers saves over 900 picyure on a card before i have to erase or clean house.

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Dick

Engineer, designer and consultant recently active domestically and internationally on construction and design in about 35 countries.

DerrickVWS

I agree with concretemasonry. The resolution will have minimal effect on battery life. I've followed digital cameras very closely over the last 5 years and have never seen anyone concerned about battery life and resolution. I'd imagine you could take an extra photo or 2 if you did all PC resolution. If you are really concerned about battery life, don't use the LCD to frame your photos, use the eye hole. Only use the LCD to view shots after the fact. However, most digital cameras made in the past couple years are using more battery efficient LCD's.


In my opinion, NEVER USE the PC mode. It will completely limit you. I take a lot of photos and like to think I'm near professional level now and I still have to crop my photos. The high resolution mode will always allow you to crop your photos. Cropping helps center your photos and cut out stuff that distracts the viewer from your main subject (e.g. maybe you didn't notice some distracting trash at a jobsite and you want to cut it from a job photo).

Why use PC mode?

1. If it is not easy for you to resize your photos using the software that came with your camera or other 3rd party software. And you need a small file size.
2. You only plan to use the photo on the web or other low res use (e.g. cell phone background, email).
3. If you're away from your computer and your memory card is almost full. The PC mode can help you squeeze in a few more photos in a pinch.

Battery Life
Nikon claims you can get 230 photos with regular cheap batteries. If you use Nihm rechargeables, you can get 360! I'd say you don't need to worry about battery life. Buy some rechargeables and keep use cheap alkalines in the camera bag as backup.

Good Luck!

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Derrick Delliquadri
Vision Web Services | Contractor Websites

AAPaint

Yup, resolution doesn't mean jack as far as battery life goes. Rechargables are the way to go with digi cams. I just bought me a new one as a tool for job photos (snicker)....It's a Canon PowerShot S3 IS, and this thing rocks. There are probably 20 more modes to select from and it's fully programmable. I enjoy photography, but it's not easy to learn for sure, but a good camera helps a lot.

The canon:

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-AAPaint

AA Quality Painting & Pressure Washing LLC
Jacksonville Painters
Jacksonville, FL.

Second Look

No-one over here is terribly concerned about battery life, just a propeller head lookin' for answers. I'll tell you this though: pics don't frame properly using the eyepiece. LCD is by far the superior way of framing photos.

__________________
Second Look home improvement www.SecondLookHome.com
Handyman and Home Repair Specialist in Rhode Island
RI Licensed Lead Safe Remodeler/Renovator, RI Registered & Insured Contractor

concretemasonry

Definitely use the normal mode as much as possible. Sometimes you never know exactly what is in the photo. Often, when I go back to look at something and zoom in, I have enough resolution to see things I never though of when i took the shot.

Also, shoot as many shots as possible since you don't have to print them all. - Its like they are free and you can always dump them later or keep them If you have a good method to find them later.

__________________
Dick

Engineer, designer and consultant recently active domestically and internationally on construction and design in about 35 countries.

Second Look

Oh, definitely normal mode. The reason this came up is I was copying pictures from the camera and they were about 185k. I asked my wife if she changed it (it IS her camera after all...). She did. I asked if she did it to save on batteries and she said it was to avoid resizing. So that got me thinking about rez and battery life.

I explained that the quality of prints won't be anywhere near as good as a film camera if the cam is in PC mode, and I promised to find an easy way to resize. It's a little bit of a pain doing it in Paint. I'm going to see if the Nikon software is any good. If not, may check out sourceforge for something reasonably spyware-free.

__________________
Second Look home improvement www.SecondLookHome.com
Handyman and Home Repair Specialist in Rhode Island
RI Licensed Lead Safe Remodeler/Renovator, RI Registered & Insured Contractor

DerrickVWS

AAPaint, that Canon S3 IS is a great camera! I've had my eye on it for a while now. But it looks like I'll have to wait a bit and maybe they'll have the S4 out. The video mode on your S3 is amazing.


FREE SOFTWARE
The Canon software is pretty good. However, I can HIGHLY recommend Google's free Picasa software. It truly is amazing. Its a terrific photo organizer, viewer, minor editor and resizer. It has some great photo fix tools built-in and is hyper fast. I love how your changes never actually overwrite the original photo. You can always go back and UNDO back to the original. www.picasa.com

Picasa - Awesome! Free photo organizer and editor
www.picasa.com

IfranView - free, OK
www.irfanview.com

GIMP - Free Photoshop Alternative
http://www.gimp.org/screenshots/

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Derrick Delliquadri
Vision Web Services | Contractor Websites