For years now, my digital camera and color printer have been providing
me with something that lacks the precise edge and color matching of a
faithful reproduction, but cannot aspire to being great art either.
That's about to change with three products I recently evaluated.
Megapixels in
Even though it's not something you need to focus with a twist of the
lens, the four-megapixel FujiFilm S5100 is a cameraman's camera. It's a
chunky black handful with a thumb-operated 10x optical zoom control
augmented by a 3.6x digital zoom, so you effectively take pictures more
than 35 times closer than you actually are. It has various settings
buttons that take a while to figure out, but once you have mastered
them, you can do things like hold down the shutter button to take
multiple pictures (great for sports shots) and take the obligatory MPEG
video clips.
The results are beyond decent, and I've ordered up 8-by-10s that look as
sharp as the ones I've taken with the 33mm Ricoh SLR I've been hauling
around since the 1980s. Because of the decades I carried around that
SLR, I like a camera with a range of accessories. The FinePix 5100 is
just such a beast. It features a tubular lens protector with a 55mm
screw thread on it for adding extra lenses and filters at the front. I
use a skylight filter to protect the lens and filter out UV, and
sometimes screw in a macro and a wide-angle attachment for close-up and
panoramic views.
Of course, it's not quite professional grade. The built-in flash is
great, but I miss having a hot-shoe to house a flash I can position
myself (instead of illuminating front-and-center all the time). The
self-timer is also fine, but not quite as controllable as a remote
switch--which this camera doesn't support. It also uses thumbnail-sized
xD storage, which means that I have to trade in my SD and CompactFlash
cards for more storage. But hey--these are gripes about an otherwise
great camera.
Reproducing screen images
Most people who write step-by-step instructions for software programs
know the trick for capturing the image onscreen: You hit the PrintScreen
button, or to capture just the active window, press Alt+PrintScreen.
This saves a pixel-perfect copy of the screen to the Clipboard, ready to
paste into a graphics program or even direct into a word processor.
But this trick doesn't work with streaming media in RealPlayer or
Windows Media Player. Instead of seeing a frame from the movie, you end
up with a blank box, because streaming media players use a hardware
acceleration technique to bypass the layer of Windows that PrintScreen
captures. When I wanted to capture some frames from an old public-domain
movie from the wonderful Prelinger Archives >www.archive.org
