On Fri, 07 Jul 2006 21:54:00 +0100, arthur.thomson <arthur.thomson@which.net> wrote: > Am I missing something? I find my, now ancient (bought in 1999) Fuji > MX-1700 Zoom camera with a mere 1.5 MegaPixels perfectly adequate for > anything from well-worn tombstones to microfiche-reader screens and > small-print documents. I don't think you're missing anything Arthur. If what you have works for you then, of course, don't change! > The essentials are a good lens, zoom, and ease of over-riding automatic > settings. But I think that to get those things /now/ on a camera, you have to go above 1.5Mpix. A 1.5Mpix camera on sale now (other than 'used') is likely to have everything else at the inferior end of the scale. My guess is that any such will be a cheap camera built around a warehouse clearance from a CCD sensor maker. I fancy 1.5Mpix would be inadequate for copying a full census page and printing it on A3 but as long as you can make what you want fill the frame then it will produce decent A5 images. > Even at only 1.5M pixels the computer storage space needed can become > a problem needing back-up onto CD-ROM or better DVD. Hee, hee, you think you have storage problems - my recently purchased Fuji s9500 can produce 50Mb uncompressed TIFFs (but I usually settle for 5Mb JPEGs). A large USB hard disk and DVD writing is a essential companion to the camera. For comparison, the 9Mpix of my new camera is quite up to printing an A3 image of an A3 original which I think you'd agree 1.5Mpix would not be up to. I was impressed when I got my last camera (a Fuji 4700 Zoom) with 256Mb of storage (on four 64Mb cards) ... now I carry a camera with a single 2Gb card in it. CDs seem very inadequate as storage devices! But don't think I'm saying everyone needs 9Mpix - there are lots of good 5Mpix cameras around, and at decent prices. I would want to check closely on the optical (and other) quality of any new camera with less than about 3Mpix. = Malcolm.