Batteries not lasting very long
Several things to check if you have poor battery performance.
- The battery me be old and nearing the end of its life, even recharageable batteries need replacing eventually.
- The charger may not be delivering a charge to your battery properly, check the contacts are clean and if possible try charging another battery, if this does not charge then it is most likely to be the charger,
- The battery may not be holding a charge and may be faulty. Try charging another battery to check it charges ok. IF it does you know it’s the battery at fault.
- Make sure you are using either NiMh batteries of at least 1800 mAh in cameras that accept AA batteries or are using a fully charged and not too old Lithium Ion battery (see point 1)
My memory card wont record any images what’s wrong ?
Check to see if any protection switches on cards like SD are not set so that you cannot record.
Check that the card is not full, if so free up some space be deleting images or try some house keeping on your card, see our “maintenance” section for help.
There is an error code on my camera what does it mean ?
Digital cameras are very sophisticated and when something mechanical goes wrong it may report and ERROR message with some number after it. You may find the error in your manual but generally it means it need to be looked at by an engineer and may need a warranty repair.
Camera dies when turning on.
(see Batteries not lasting very long above)
My camera suffers from slow focusing, is it me doing something wrong or is it my camera?
- Pre Focus for faster response times by half depressing the shutter to lock the focus and meter reading then fully depress to take the shot to avoid the shutter lag problem on some cameras.
- It may be that the camera is experiencing difficulties in focusing due to low light or low contrast. Many compact use contrast focusing as their method to ensure a sharp picture. If there is low contrast in the scene the camera may tale time to hunt around to find enough contrast between to objects to lock focus. To increase the cameras chances or add more light into the scene to increase contrast.
If I buy a better card will I get a better image?
It is a common misunderstanding that buying a brand of memory card that you may never have heard of like "DaneElec" over buying a well know brand like "Sandisk" will affect the quality of your images, this is not true, the image is stored in exactly the same way and if it is standard compact camera the cheapest card will do just fine.
If I buy buy a faster card will my camera will go faster ?
No not really , only if you have a camera that can use the speed of the card, such as a high end compact or more appropriately a Digital SLR.
Buying a faster card for your compact such as a Sandisk Extreme III card is not really going to help you camera very much. Your compact camera can only transfer data at a set rate, mostly this rate only needs to be fast enough to record good movies (at around 640x480 resolution at 30 frames per second). A card that can record data at this pace is around 1.6 to 3 Mega Bytes per second or a standard card.
Can I zoom movie mode?
On most digital stills cameras you cannot use the zoom during taking a movie, Why ?, its because the microphone would pick up the sound of the zoom lens motors and ruin your movie.
What is Digital Zoom
Digital zoom is not actually a very useful feature. Digital zoom is a process where a centre portion of the image is cut out and then stretched back to its original size. The gaps in the data are filled in with "interpolated" information, basically non existent colour obtained from the surrounding pixels. Thus the image turn out less defined and blurry. We suggest that you not use digital zoom if you want the best from your camera. It may be used but be wary of what can happen.
Useful Resources
- Advice Center
- Camera review sites
- www.steves-digicams.com - outstanding Independent reviews
- www.dpreview.com - outstanding Independent reviews
- www.imaging-resource.com - comparison site for specs and image quality with links to
- www.robgalbraith.com - Professional Digital SLR website and related software and accessories
Archiving
Archiving, the best way to archive your images is to the latest medium available. At present it is DVD ROM, as we are all aware technology moves at a rate of knots and every 5 – 10 years a new format is released for storing digital information. So its best to archive to the latest medium as no doubt if you don’t , you’ll come to read that CD and there will be nothing around to read it on.
If you have the facility then take everything in RAW and archive in RAW format, you’ll go back to those files one day and wish you had when you need to dramatically alter an image. I’m sure that most of us do anyway. There is of course not as many applications that can understand a RAW file as a .JPG so it would be wise to keep half an eye open to check you have the latest version of your RAW editor as you don’t want to get behind with this either in case future operating systems don’t function with your older version.
Noise reduction
- If you want to keep the noise down or digital grain to a minimum then its best to soot in ISO 100 or less and don’t let the camera use auto ISO it will always let you down with added gain or grain.
- Use a software program Neat Image at, is a very useful and powerful tool for reducing grain by analyzing the grain pattern and significantly reducing noise. Especially for lower resolution photos or where low light has caused a grainy photo.
- Use RAW format if your camera has this capability. It will save an uncompressed image and reduce noise to the barest minimum. You may have to convert the image into another format for processing. This does depend on the software supplied with your camera.
