Focus on a digital camera

[nicolevins]

Well when my nanny was away last year in Puerto Rico she was shopping and she came across a camera shop. The man told her that he has "real" camera's and that they aren't fake.
My nanny knows nothing about cameras (or technology) so she went ahead and bought it. It cost €180 and it "was" a Sony Camera.

When she brought it home she was explaining about the camera and how it was great because it was a Sony. I opened it up and I looked at. On the screen it says "MAX 12.0 MegaPixels" (which is good.. right?) then on the lens it says
"4X DIGITAL ZOOM F/3.0, f=8.34mm"
(whether thats any help or not, lol)

But the name on the camera says "YBERSONYCAM"
So.. she was kinda ripped off

Anyway..
It is a pretty good camera.. here is a pic

It's good quality but you have to be a certain distance away from the object. See..

The camera doesnt have a Manual Focus I dont think and the Auto is pretty ****. Any ideas on what good be going wrong?

 

[nicolevins]

and also - when I put batteries in (x2 AAA) they run out in like 3 minutes !

 

[bengal77]

I can't believe that there is no way to manually adjust the zoom or apurture. Can you post a pic of the camera?

 

[nicolevins]

http://pbckt.com/s1.dEQl

Or did you mean the features (with the camera on)?

Theres zoom on the camera but it doesnt give better picture quality or anything

 

[MikeScone]

nicolevins wrote:

Theres zoom on the camera but it doesnt give better picture quality or anything

There isn't any zoom on the camera - it's a fixed focal length lens. That's what the "8.34mm" means. And not only won't it give better quality, if it's used, the quality will be worse.

What it has is "4X digital zoom" which isn't zoom at all. That just takes the middle pixels of the image and blows them up to fill the screen, by inventing all of the intervening pixels. That can't help but be fuzzy.

The "Max 12MP" isn't good, either. By the focal length of that lens, I can tell that the sensor's really tiny - 6.4mm x 4.8mm, roughly. Cramming that many pixels into that small area is a problem - the pixels just can't help but bleed over, one into the next.

A DSLR with the same number of pixels would have a sensor more than ten times larger - which is one reason why DSLR pictures are sharper than nearly all point-and-shoots.

Raw megapixel count doesn't really matter. You can make very good 8x10" prints at 2MP - I have an office full of them. I have very good 13x19" prints from 6MP images, and the local high school has a 40x70" print of one of my aerial photos taken at that size which isn't bad at all.

 

[nicolevins]

ah, I see. Thanks for helping me out.. I now understand it