Good digital cameras for the price?, Suitable for taking pics of customs, good Macro settings Options

[Llwynoh]

I want to start taking pictures of my custom figures and for figure reviews. I was curious what I should look for as far as brands, and stats. It seems Megapixels don't matter as much anymore since even the cheap cams run 5+ MP, I am more concerned about clarity, especially with close up shots. I understand lighting and stands are important too, but I need a camera before I can work on those (IMG:style_emoticons/default/icon-waspy.gif)

[ExVee]

On 2005 I've seen people with Kodak EasyShares doing things I thought should be impossible. My usual place to do this kind of research is dpreview.com. But I'd figure point and shoot tech at this point may be to the stage where almost anything that's not Big Lots fodder could well satisfy your needs. If a store near you has a display of working cameras also, it helps to actually play with a few. Take an SD card with if you want to compare the photos on your computer later, too. Those LCD viewfinders can sometimes be misleading.

[Llwynoh]

Yeah, that is what I am worried about. My friend Jody had a decent enough camera, and it had preset Macro defaults, but no matter how good your lighting was or how secure the camera was, the images always scewed yellow and had noticable artifacting on Macro settings. Other settings it looked great. I guess I can go in and take pictures of the cameras with each other, since they have alot of sharp lines and detail like a Transformer would have, and compare them.

[ExVee]

The yellowing is a white balance issue, and usually there are settings to deal with it. Worst case is you'd have to manually color correct later. The artefacting either means that a junky camera is substituting digital zoom to get the macro effect, the sensor is crappy, or the ISO is turned up too high. Possibly even a combination. Avoid any camera that is only or appears to heavily rely on digital zoom, as it'll be essentially worthless for any kind of quality photos. A real manual focus will drive your price up, but may be to your benefit pretty quick.

[Llwynoh]

The yellowing is a white balance issue, and usually there are settings to deal with it. Worst case is you'd have to manually color correct later. The artefacting either means that a junky camera is substituting digital zoom to get the macro effect, the sensor is crappy, or the ISO is turned up too high. Possibly even a combination. Avoid any camera that is only or appears to heavily rely on digital zoom, as it'll be essentially worthless for any kind of quality photos. A real manual focus will drive your price up, but may be to your benefit pretty quick.

The couple of cameras I had a chance to play with, seemed to dump most of thier color correction settings when in Macro mode, including white balance and type of light source.

It does make sense that camera's that use digital zoom would also use digital macro settings, though I had never mentally made the connection. I know to avoid digital zoom, I will keep that in mind when hunting.

[ExVee]

One thing you can do to figure out a particular camera is to look through photos of stuff similar to what you want to photograph, and when you find something you like how it looks, try checking the EXIF data on the photo. It'll tell you among other things what brand and model of camera it is. if you use Firefox, there's an add-on to read the info right from the browser so it's even easier. This might not specifically point you to a particular camera, but it's at least a starting point to figure out what to read up on.

Or if you have plenty of money to throw at it, a digital SLR could be your best friend. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/icon-arcee.gif)