Best Coolpix for HD and low light too?

Ï "Neil Harrington" Ýãñáøå óôï ìÞíõìá
...

"John Turco" wrote in message
...
Neil Harrington wrote:

heavily edited for brevity

The Great Megapixel Race serves no purpose as far as I can see except to
help
manufacturers sell more cameras to people who think their pictures
aren't sharp
because they don't have enough megapixels.


Hey, don't forget the hard disk manufacturers! They're the ones that are
really cashing in on this "Great Megapixel Race" -- as those larger (in
file size) images demand increasing storage space.

Maybe, but I wonder how many ordinary camera users keep that many of their
image files. In the 35mm days I'll bet most people just had prints made
and eventually lost or threw out the negatives, and they're likely to do
essentially the same thing with digital.


At the moment, I'm feeling the crunch, personally. I've barely over
14GB free, on my 160GB IDE data drive. (A 500GB SATA puppy is ready to
be installed, but...I won't do it, until I purchase a suitable external
HDD, to back it up.)

Yes, it's amazing how HDDs have grown in capacity. My first one (about 25
years ago) was 30 megabytes (MEGABYTES!) and when I bought it I wondered
what I'd ever do with all that space. Now you couldn't even put an
operating system on a drive that small.
Yes, you can. Msdos v 3.3. I remember in the early '80s when hard drives
came in 2 capacities: 10 and 20 MB. Now you could hardly squeege a couple of
RAW files into one. And they were 5 1/4", not like todays 3 1/2" and slow as
molasses. I remember my best friend had a C 64 and he had a floppy drive,
which was as large as a shoe box, and sloooow (5 1/4"). But it was great, at
the day. Our favourite pastime was to play games on the C 64 (you could
hardly do anything else, except making trivial programms on basic-back then,
home micros didn't even have a OS, or BIOS-only IBM combatibles had these
features).



--
Tzortzakakis Dimitrios
major in electrical engineering
mechanized infantry reservist
hordad AT otenet DOT gr

"Neil Harrington" wrote in message
...

"John Turco" wrote in message
...
Neil Harrington wrote:

heavily edited for brevity

The Great Megapixel Race serves no purpose as far as I can see except to
help
manufacturers sell more cameras to people who think their pictures
aren't sharp
because they don't have enough megapixels.


Hey, don't forget the hard disk manufacturers! They're the ones that are
really cashing in on this "Great Megapixel Race" -- as those larger (in
file size) images demand increasing storage space.

Maybe, but I wonder how many ordinary camera users keep that many of their
image files.

Personally I think most do, most hardly lookm at what they have saved and
tehy rarely delete anything. Note we are talking about ordinary camera
users.

In the 35mm days I'll bet most people just had prints made and eventually
lost or threw out the negatives, and they're likely to do essentially the
same thing with digital.

probably but maybe they won;t have prints made before they lose their data.

At the moment, I'm feeling the crunch, personally. I've barely over
14GB free, on my 160GB IDE data drive. (A 500GB SATA puppy is ready to
be installed, but...I won't do it, until I purchase a suitable external
HDD, to back it up.)

Yes, it's amazing how HDDs have grown in capacity. My first one (about 25
years ago) was 30 megabytes (MEGABYTES!).

My first way a 20MB that my work place had thrown out because it didn;t
start up properly, I tok it apart separated teh circuit board from the HD,
which allowed me to push start the fly wheel to the Disc, then stitch on and
it worked fine for about 2 years, but always needing a 'kick start"

and when I bought it I wondered what I'd ever do with all that space. Now
you couldn't even put an operating system on a drive that small.

About the same capacity as most DSLRs RAW for 1 picture . :-o

"Tzortzakakis Dimitris" wrote in message
...

Ï "Neil Harrington" Ýãñáøå óôï ìÞíõìá
...

"John Turco" wrote in message
...
Neil Harrington wrote:

heavily edited for brevity

The Great Megapixel Race serves no purpose as far as I can see except
to help
manufacturers sell more cameras to people who think their pictures
aren't sharp
because they don't have enough megapixels.


Hey, don't forget the hard disk manufacturers! They're the ones that are
really cashing in on this "Great Megapixel Race" -- as those larger (in
file size) images demand increasing storage space.

Maybe, but I wonder how many ordinary camera users keep that many of
their image files. In the 35mm days I'll bet most people just had prints
made and eventually lost or threw out the negatives, and they're likely
to do essentially the same thing with digital.


At the moment, I'm feeling the crunch, personally. I've barely over
14GB free, on my 160GB IDE data drive. (A 500GB SATA puppy is ready to
be installed, but...I won't do it, until I purchase a suitable external
HDD, to back it up.)

Yes, it's amazing how HDDs have grown in capacity. My first one (about 25
years ago) was 30 megabytes (MEGABYTES!) and when I bought it I wondered
what I'd ever do with all that space. Now you couldn't even put an
operating system on a drive that small.
Yes, you can. Msdos v 3.3. I remember in the early '80s when hard drives
came in 2 capacities: 10 and 20 MB.
In the early 80s I brought my fist computer a BBC Micro with 16K or RAM and
used cassette tape for storage. The OS was in ROM 32K I think.


Now you could hardly squeege a couple of RAW files into one. And they were
5 1/4", not like todays 3 1/2" and slow as molasses. I remember my best
friend had a C 64 and he had a floppy drive, which was as large as a shoe
box, and sloooow (5 1/4"). But it was great, at the day.

My first floopy drive was a single sided 100k 5 1/4"

Our favourite pastime was to play games on the C 64 (you could hardly do
anything else, except making trivial programms on basic-back then, home
micros didn't even have a OS, or BIOS-only IBM combatibles had these
features).

Well the BBC micro has two chips IIRC one was the OS and another was Basic.
The Standard Word processor was Word which was also in ROM, and a Speadsheet
in ROM Lots of apps were sold to load into ROM.

On 6/30/2010 11:32 AM, Neil Harrington wrote:


Yes, it's amazing how HDDs have grown in capacity. My first one (about 25
years ago) was 30 megabytes (MEGABYTES!) and when I bought it I wondered
what I'd ever do with all that space. Now you couldn't even put an operating
system on a drive that small.



Really? The first hard disk I bought, in 1971, was 256KILObytes. And I knew
I would soon fill it up ... the overflow was saved on AUDIO CASSETTES!!
(And I still have that data, transferred to 8" floppies, then to 3 1/2
inch floppies, then to cd-roms.)

Doug McDonald

"David Ruether" wrote in message
...

"Neil Harrington" wrote in message
...

Yes, it's amazing how HDDs have grown in capacity. My first one (about 25
years ago) was 30 megabytes (MEGABYTES!) and when I bought it I wondered
what I'd ever do with all that space. Now you couldn't even put an
operating system on a drive that small.

My first HD upgrade was to a "big" 10 megabyter(!), and I twice(!) bought
4 used RAM chips of 4 megs each for $360 a set! I think I've finally
learned,
though, not to splurge on the "newest and greatest" computer gear, since
it
so quickly comes to have been a waste of money... :-(
I'm definitely in the "buy-older/buy-used/build-my-own" mode now.
--DR

Absolutely. The last "cutting-edge technology" computer I bought was in
1997, had a 266MHz Pentium II and Windows 95 OSR2. Since 1998 I've been
building my own and I *never* buy the latest, biggest, fastest of anything
in the parts department. Most every part I buy now was much more expensive
two or three years ago, now has the bugs worked out of it and is more than
adequate for me today.

"Tzortzakakis Dimitris" wrote in message
...

Ï "Neil Harrington" Ýãñáøå óôï ìÞíõìá
...

"John Turco" wrote in message
...
Neil Harrington wrote:

heavily edited for brevity

The Great Megapixel Race serves no purpose as far as I can see except
to help
manufacturers sell more cameras to people who think their pictures
aren't sharp
because they don't have enough megapixels.


Hey, don't forget the hard disk manufacturers! They're the ones that are
really cashing in on this "Great Megapixel Race" -- as those larger (in
file size) images demand increasing storage space.

Maybe, but I wonder how many ordinary camera users keep that many of
their image files. In the 35mm days I'll bet most people just had prints
made and eventually lost or threw out the negatives, and they're likely
to do essentially the same thing with digital.


At the moment, I'm feeling the crunch, personally. I've barely over
14GB free, on my 160GB IDE data drive. (A 500GB SATA puppy is ready to
be installed, but...I won't do it, until I purchase a suitable external
HDD, to back it up.)

Yes, it's amazing how HDDs have grown in capacity. My first one (about 25
years ago) was 30 megabytes (MEGABYTES!) and when I bought it I wondered
what I'd ever do with all that space. Now you couldn't even put an
operating system on a drive that small.
Yes, you can. Msdos v 3.3.

Yes, of course I was still using MS-DOS when I bought that first HDD. That
was 1985, a good five years before anyone took Windows seriously. I think it
was MS-DOS 2.11 that I used in that my 8088-powered PC, and that OS would
fit on a single-sided 180K floppy with room to spare.

But when's the last time anyone used MS-DOS?

I remember in the early '80s when hard drives came in 2 capacities: 10
and 20 MB.

Mostly 20 MB by the mid-'80s, the ubiquitous Seagate. I'd have been content
with a 20MB Seagate myself -- I think that cheap drive probably went into
more PCs than all the others combined -- but it was $333 and the 30MB
version (essentially the same drive) was $388 from the same place, so the
latter seemed too good a bargain to pass up.

Now you could hardly squeege a couple of RAW files into one. And they were
5 1/4", not like todays 3 1/2" and slow as molasses. I remember my best
friend had a C 64 and he had a floppy drive, which was as large as a shoe
box, and sloooow (5 1/4"). But it was great, at the day. Our favourite
pastime was to play games on the C 64 (you could hardly do anything else,
except making trivial programms on basic-back then, home micros didn't
even have a OS, or BIOS-only IBM combatibles had these features).

Well, they did have OSs or they wouldn't have run, but nothing like the OSs
that soon followed. My first computer was an Apple IIe, in 1983. The Apple
used 5 1/4" single-sided floppies but they were only 140K -- because Steve
Wozniak, who designed it, for reasons of reliability only used 35 of the 40
tracks that the drives were capable of. And each and every one of those 140K
floppies had the *entire* Apple DOS on it! Every time you formatted a floppy
it put Apple DOS on it -- which only took up 10.5 K, as I recall.

The first Macintoshes (in 1984) didn't have HDDs either, but they did have
the new 3 1/2" floppies with greater capacity -- I think they were 400K in
the earliest Mac versions. So they used a pretty small OS too.

"Doug McDonald" wrote in message
...
On 6/30/2010 11:32 AM, Neil Harrington wrote:


Yes, it's amazing how HDDs have grown in capacity. My first one (about 25
years ago) was 30 megabytes (MEGABYTES!) and when I bought it I wondered
what I'd ever do with all that space. Now you couldn't even put an
operating
system on a drive that small.



Really? The first hard disk I bought, in 1971, was 256KILObytes. And I
knew
I would soon fill it up ... the overflow was saved on AUDIO CASSETTES!!
(And I still have that data, transferred to 8" floppies, then to 3 1/2
inch floppies, then to cd-roms.)

Wow, way before my time. I remember when audio cassettes were used for
storage, but the only computer I ever actually saw using that method was a
Radio Shack "CoCo" (Color Computer). However, I think all Apple IIs
continued to keep the cassette port, long after users had abandoned
cassettes.

When you could buy a great 140K floppy drive for only $500, who would want
to use cassettes? :-)

"whisky-dave" wrote in message
news:i0i14l$8re$1@qmul...

"Neil Harrington" wrote in message
...

"John Turco" wrote in message
...
Neil Harrington wrote:

heavily edited for brevity

The Great Megapixel Race serves no purpose as far as I can see except
to help
manufacturers sell more cameras to people who think their pictures
aren't sharp
because they don't have enough megapixels.


Hey, don't forget the hard disk manufacturers! They're the ones that are
really cashing in on this "Great Megapixel Race" -- as those larger (in
file size) images demand increasing storage space.

Maybe, but I wonder how many ordinary camera users keep that many of
their image files.

Personally I think most do, most hardly lookm at what they have saved and
tehy rarely delete anything. Note we are talking about ordinary camera
users.

Yes, you may be right.


In the 35mm days I'll bet most people just had prints made and eventually
lost or threw out the negatives, and they're likely to do essentially the
same thing with digital.

probably but maybe they won;t have prints made before they lose their
data.

At the moment, I'm feeling the crunch, personally. I've barely over
14GB free, on my 160GB IDE data drive. (A 500GB SATA puppy is ready to
be installed, but...I won't do it, until I purchase a suitable external
HDD, to back it up.)

Yes, it's amazing how HDDs have grown in capacity. My first one (about 25
years ago) was 30 megabytes (MEGABYTES!).

My first way a 20MB that my work place had thrown out because it didn;t
start up properly, I tok it apart separated teh circuit board from the HD,
which allowed me to push start the fly wheel to the Disc, then stitch on
and it worked fine for about 2 years, but always needing a 'kick start"

That first Seagate of mine had starting up problems in cold weather. I
suspect because Seagate used a cheap stepper mechanism in their low-end
drives and they didn't find the tracks very well unless the temperature was
roughly the same as when the drive had first been formatted. On cold
mornings I'd have to start up the computer and let it run for 10 or 15
minutes before it would actually boot up.


and when I bought it I wondered what I'd ever do with all that space. Now
you couldn't even put an operating system on a drive that small.

About the same capacity as most DSLRs RAW for 1 picture . :-o

Yes, close enough. :-)

"Neil Harrington" wrote in message
...

"Doug McDonald" wrote in message
...
On 6/30/2010 11:32 AM, Neil Harrington wrote:


Yes, it's amazing how HDDs have grown in capacity. My first one (about
25
years ago) was 30 megabytes (MEGABYTES!) and when I bought it I wondered
what I'd ever do with all that space. Now you couldn't even put an
operating
system on a drive that small.



Really? The first hard disk I bought, in 1971, was 256KILObytes. And I
knew
I would soon fill it up ... the overflow was saved on AUDIO CASSETTES!!
(And I still have that data, transferred to 8" floppies, then to 3 1/2
inch floppies, then to cd-roms.)

Wow, way before my time. I remember when audio cassettes were used for
storage, but the only computer I ever actually saw using that method was a
Radio Shack "CoCo" (Color Computer). However, I think all Apple IIs
continued to keep the cassette port, long after users had abandoned
cassettes.

When you could buy a great 140K floppy drive for only $500, who would want
to use cassettes? :-)



IIRC my Apple II had no port for an audio cassette. I did have two Rana
drives. the whole system with an Epson dot matrix printer cost me about
$4,200, with VisiCalc. As to ROI, I made the cost back in less than 3 weeks.
I was able to do financial analysis and projections more efficiently. When I
did such work on a computer I added a surcharge for computer hours. I
deliberately used a dot matrix printer because in those days there was a
perception that if work was done on a computer, it was accurate.

--
Peter

"Doug McDonald" wrote in message
...
On 6/30/2010 11:32 AM, Neil Harrington wrote:


Yes, it's amazing how HDDs have grown in capacity. My first one (about 25
years ago) was 30 megabytes (MEGABYTES!) and when I bought it I wondered
what I'd ever do with all that space. Now you couldn't even put an
operating
system on a drive that small.



Really? The first hard disk I bought, in 1971, was 256KILObytes. And I
knew
I would soon fill it up ... the overflow was saved on AUDIO CASSETTES!!
(And I still have that data, transferred to 8" floppies, then to 3 1/2
inch floppies, then to cd-roms.)

That's sad, I thought I was sad when I copied the data[1] from my BBC
where I had wriiten a simple bubble sort database things.
I had to make up a serial lead to connect it to a MacPlus, transferred the
data
in to macwrite, then it ended up in word format, same for my video
cassettes.

The amount of time I spent doing it would have been quicker to type in all
back in again, well not quicker for me but for someone that could type with
more than 2 fingers


Doug McDonald



1/ my music albums and singles collection (about 150 in total)