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At 19:41 -0400 2001-10-23, TomDeVrie@aol.com wrote: >I may have been the person who recommended the Nikon Coolpix 990. It does a >good job, including getting in close on specimens down to about 1 cm in >length. I'm not sure how well it will do with micro-mollusks. The macro of the Minolta Dimâge 7 accomodates objects down to 5 cm object, though with a frame width of 2560 pixels that corresponds to about 3.5 cm on a 1800 pxl camera. >I wish the depth of field was better (f-stop only to 10.8 or at best 11.1). The Minolta only goes down to 9.5 (in macro mode). >The remote switch for taking pictures is too expensive ($130) but it does >remove a pixel or two of jitter induced by manually depressing the shutter >button while the camera is on a stand. Delayed exposure is a built-in feature of the Minolta. > The direct download of files to a >Mac with a USB port has been problematic and slow with Nikon software. My >best results are obtained by moving the image card from the camera to a card >reader that is directly connected to a USB port. As my Mac does not have a USB port, I've been transferring by flash card. No problems there, although at top resolution and no compression even a 128 MB flash card holds only 8 pictures (with JPEG compression you can fit 62 high-resolution images onto one card). >The typical image size of about 1500-1800 pixels for the long dimension of a >fossil is enough to produce a 2.5-3" printed or digital image of up to 600 >pixels per inch. Larger images for reproduction on plates would start to >lose some resolution. Thus, I suppose a >3.34 megapixel camera would be >advantageous for some kinds of specimens. 600 dpi is overkill for most or all publishing purposes - an image of 1800 pixels' width can easily be printed at 6" width (at 300 dpi). But then you normally would like to have some margin, in case you want to blow up details of the picture. Nikon has announced a new Coolpix 5000 for release in November. Pixel resolution like the Minolta, macro focusing down to 2 cm, and interchangeable lenses. Price around $1100. Looks like it might be worth the wait. See http://www.steves-digicams.com/2001_reviews/nikon5000.html. Stefan -- Stefan Bengtson Senior Curator (invertebrate fossils) Swedish Museum of Natural History Department of Palaeozoology Box 50007 SE-104 05 Stockholm Sweden tel. +46-8 5195 4220 +46-8 732 5218 (home) fax +46-8 5195 4184 e-mail Stefan.Bengtson@nrm.se
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