Best Coolpix for HD and low light too?
in [Digital Cameras]
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From: whisky-dave on 1 Jul 2010 08:29 "Tzortzakakis Dimitris" <noone(a)nospam.com> wrote in message news:i0huam$4ej$1(a)mouse.otenet.gr... > > � "Neil Harrington" <nobody(a)homehere.net> ������ ��� ������ > news:kYednV9TvKMt7LbRnZ2dnUVZ_qednZ2d(a)giganews.com... >> >> "John Turco" <jtur(a)concentric.net> wrote in message >> news:4C2AB5F3.9E1440FE(a)concentric.net... >>> 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. > > >
From: Doug McDonald on 1 Jul 2010 11:51 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
From: Neil Harrington on 1 Jul 2010 23:56 "David Ruether" <d_ruether(a)thotmail.com> wrote in message news:i0g426$9b4$1(a)ruby.cit.cornell.edu... > > "Neil Harrington" <nobody(a)homehere.net> wrote in message > news:kYednV9TvKMt7LbRnZ2dnUVZ_qednZ2d(a)giganews.com... > >> 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.
From: Neil Harrington on 2 Jul 2010 00:28 "Tzortzakakis Dimitris" <noone(a)nospam.com> wrote in message news:i0huam$4ej$1(a)mouse.otenet.gr... > > � "Neil Harrington" <nobody(a)homehere.net> ������ ��� ������ > news:kYednV9TvKMt7LbRnZ2dnUVZ_qednZ2d(a)giganews.com... >> >> "John Turco" <jtur(a)concentric.net> wrote in message >> news:4C2AB5F3.9E1440FE(a)concentric.net... >>> 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.
From: Neil Harrington on 2 Jul 2010 00:38
"Doug McDonald" <mcdonald(a)scs.uiuc.edu> wrote in message news:i0idd8$2g5$1(a)news.eternal-september.org... > 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? :-) |