On 30 Sep 2004 10:05:47 -0700, Phil Stripling
wrote:

Lila Duncan writes:

My daughter's doing a graphic design course and I want to buy her a
digital camera as part of her required equipment. She got a hand out
from college that gave a list of suggested cameras covering the whole
price spectrum. I've spent some time researching a selection of them
and have ended up further away from a decision than I was in the first
place. :-\

Is part of the coursework expected by the professor that the _students_
would do the research and actually make their own decision based on what
they determine to be their needs? Then the students would have the parents
cough up the dough, of course, but the students would then profit by seeing
how their selection actually fit their criteria and whether their process
of analysis actually worked? And could be improved the next iteration?

Yes I expect there might be an element of those things, except for the
part about the parents coughing up, which is much more of a total
certainty. You should understand that even at the student level, there
is a lot to be said for the skills associated with the delegation of
responsibility. My daughter has to leave college at 1:30 pm today and
eat her lunch on the move while she travels to work where she will be
until 8:30pm. For her this is a typical day during at least 6 days a
week. Having such a timetable would certainly encourage me to take
what help I could get, were I in that position.

Judging by the vast range of possible cameras suggested by the college
for use within this course, it's quite clear that the main criterion
is affordability for all, rather than suitability for the work
involved. This being the case, my daughters camera will be selected
with much more consideration for it's purpose than might have been
possible if the affordability issue was more acute.

Congratulations Mr Stripling on showing how smart you are without
giving any useful information.
I've done some more research this evening and have been considering
the Canon Powershot S45, partly because it's the first camera I've
encountered, moving up the price range, that has a RAW file output
option. I've read several learned discussions about the relative
merits of JPEG, RAW and TIFF without fully understanding them but I do
feel that there's some advantage in having the uncompressed file
option.
--
Lila Duncan