Holiday camera options; decisions, decisions.....

It's the time of year when the holidays start to be a key event in many family lives, it's half term holidays for many schools. So what camera would you take on a family holiday?

Whilst photo centric holidays almost pack themselves in terms of camera kit - everything you own plus a new accessory or lens or two, the family holiday is often a case for lightweight reduced camera kit. Maybe it's time for the 'day off' camera to earn it's keep. Holidays involving flights and children (yours plus a plane full) often mean a compromise. Do you take just a Digital IXUS and give the serious photography a break - will the family care if you take simple pictures of them on holiday?

Right now I'm considering exactly this, and the options are EOS 500D + EF-S10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM lens, PowerShot G10, Digital IXUS or just a video camera shooting stills and video to flash memory, which would you choose? I'll let you know in a week or two what I took and how it was to be restricted in photographic hardware, liberating or constraining.

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A simple tip for Monday

Every been to a rugby or football match? Even taken a little compact camera with you to capture the action? If you can answer yes to both of these, then do you remember seeing little flashes going off all around the ground?
Only yesterday I was watching the England-France game on TV and seeing loads of little flashes firing all around the stands. Seriously, do they really think the flash will help?

If you're ever in that situation, make sure you turn the built-in flash off - it'll reach about three meters at most so unless you're pitch side and the action is in front of you, you're wasting your time.

As a reminder for why this may be the case, see the latter part of this post on Speedlite flash - the box with the formula is the bit you want to take note of!

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RAW support added to the PowerShot SX1 IS

A tiny bit of news, but valuable for those who use Canon's Digital Photo Professional software for processing their RAW images.

With the announcement of the PowerShot SX1 IS for the USA market yesterday Canon also announced that they are making a firmware update to add RAW image support to the camera for the exisiting customers. Let's not forget that the PowerShot SX1 IS already has a Canon CMOS sensor and full HD video capture; RAW is a nice addition for free. The new firmware will be available to download from Canon's BeBit site http://web.canon.jp/imaging/BeBit-e.html from mid-March, and there will also be an updated version of Digital Photo Professional to work with the RAW images. This now means that photographers who mostly use EOS cameras can also work with the RAW images from the PowerShot G10 and (soon) the PowerShot SX1 IS. Maybe this helps your choice of compact camera, because it seems like there's no new Canon DSLR going to be announced for PMA, the first time since 2001.

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New photography products from Canon

A quick bit of new products news from Canon, they've got a new entry level consumer camera, the PowerShot A480, a 10MP, 3.3x zoom model that comes in a range of four colours and has a 2.5" LCD. Seems like only yesterday people were asking how would they cope if cameras could reach 6MP, surely that would be enough for almost anyone!

The next product, and this one slipped by unnoticed at the beginning of this month, is the new low cost two thousand + VAT, XEED SX800 projector. We're a fan of XEED projectors in the main, they are just about the best way to show your photos off with a digital projector we know. Professional photographers and The Royal Photographic Society like them too, praise indeed. This new SX800 model is the lowest cost XEED projector with 1400 x 1050 pixels resolution you can get. From reading the specifications it looks like there's no digital connection to the projector, just the old analogue VGA ones. This means you can't plug a camera with a HDMI port straight in to the projector with a DVI to HDMI adapter. Also DVI connections are preferred for picture quality and the possible lengths of cable runs.

1400 x 1050 pixels is termed SXGA+ resolution, and is much higher than a lot of mainstream projectors that only offer 1024 x 768 pixels. The benefit of the higher resolution is your projected images look so much better; fine detail is only part of the story, the colour and smooth transitions of tone are simply amazing.

If you are a professional portrait photographer you might want to consider a XEED; we've all heard that showing clients images projected large encourages larger print sales, now you can show large and with higher detail. As an extraordinary number of visitors here seem to be using Apple MacBook Pro computers with 1440 x 900 pixel displays, it's important to point out that the XEED's resolution almost matches the computer exactly.

Considering the typical DSLR image with it's 3:2 aspect ratio and plenty of megapixels, projection needs high resolution to show images at their best. When projected on a typical 1024 x 768 resolution projector your countless megapixels become 1024 x 683 pixels projected, or about 0.7 megapixels. A higher resolution SXGA+ machine like the XEED SX800 would be 1400 x 933 pixels or almost twice as much resolution with 1.3 megapixels.

If you have vertically oriented images don't do the calculation for a 1024 x 768 pixel projector!

Here's the press release and product information pages on Canon's website

PowerShot A480 : Press release : Website

XEED SX800 : Press release : Website

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