Mobile Phones - Battery Life

[Mark]

Nice pics. It's hard to predict what they would have been like if they were taken with a £400 camera though.

Would you mind telling me where the countryside pics were taken?

[DerbyBorn]

Grimly Curmudgeon wrote in news: [e-mail]:

I find it annoying that we continue to refer to 35mm equivilant when describing focal length. Many users will have never owned a 35mm camera in the past. I think we should use "Angle of view" as a universal description.

[polygonum]

+1 - Agree. The use of focal length at all has plagued real cameras for non-specialists. Fine as a secondary part of the description, but angle has got to be the best. I do have a mental idea of 35mm focal lengths - but as soon as the format changes, I am thrown and have to think everything through - slowly!

[The Natural Philosopher]

well we had better stop referring to horse power, since no one owns horses for doing work with.

...it is however nice that my DSLR with a 400mm strapped on the front behaves like a 600mm used to on the old film camera..

About the same power as a pair of binoculars.

Now if only the air would keep still.

[Mark]

I took some pics the other day using a 400mm lens on a DSLR just holding the camera in my hands. I was amazed that the pictures were not a complete blurry mess. However next time I must remember to take a tripod.

[The Natural Philosopher]

If you have a VR lens its surpising how good they can be.

I seldom use the 400, because its manual focus and my eyes are poor these days..have to go on the 'in focus' light and that keeps flickering.

mainly for bird table shots.

pre focussed, tripod.

[DerbyBorn]

I have had several lenses for my 35 mm cameras and several enlarger lenses. I would however,love to see a "Angle of cone of view" description though. I also wonder how long modern cameras will continue to offer the sound effect of an old mechanical SLR. Perhaps we also need a new description for "footage" when describing video.

[Roland Perry]

In message , at 10:17:02 on Tue, 23 Apr

2013, The Natural Philosopher remarked:

I was out in the fens last Sunday and passed a horse-and-cart. Haven't seen one for a while. Although the "Steptoe" ones were commonplace in London when I was growing up.

I think some breweries still have a few horse-drawn drays as a publicity thing.

[Phil W Lee]

"Steve Terry" considered Mon, 22 Apr 2013

11:16:37 +0100 the perfect time to write:

Best I've seen is 1500mAh - do you have a source for the larger ones? Also, does the handset still fit into the CARK-91 cradle with one of those large batteries?

[Java Jive]

Some nice pictures, especially of the surrounding countryside. Roughly where is that? Looks like Welsh borders to me, Shropshire say, or possibly a bit further south, Herefordshire, west Gloucestershire.

Talk>

[Peter]

Mark wrote

I have got a fair selection of pics of the same scene taken with the

808 and the Canon S95 (£360 a year or two ago) and the 808 outclasses it very obviously.

I also have taken some comparison shots with a Pentax K5 and those are better, as one would jolly well expect given the K5 body alone was £1000 when it came out, but not massively better.

In fact I would sell the K5 now, if it wasn't for the much greater flexibility / control (shutter speed etc) and much better low light performance. For "easy" targets in daylight I would not bother with a DSLR at all.

The raw camera in the 808 is awesome and if Nokia bothered to deliver some decent control (AV, TAV, M, etc) - which they won't because they can't be bothered - they would have an amazing product whose only weakness would be the low light performance.

Let me see if I can take a pic with all three...

The latitude and longitude should be in the EXIF data ;) ;)

As is sadly all too often the case nowadays! And google trawls the net and picks up all photos it finds with GPS data in the EXIF header and drops them all over google maps...

It's in Sussex, mostly, I think. North of Brighton.

[tony sayer]

In article , Peter scribeth thus

No doubt about it England's is still in most parts a fine looking country:)..

You can see some differences like the blue fringing on the extremities of the top of the 808 pix but all in thats very good...

[Peter]

When I get a moment I will do a comparison of cameras.

What is especially impressive on the 808 (BTW I am using the Camera Pro 3rd party camera app, which offers some advantages over the built-in camera app) is the way the jpeg compression handles vegetation (leaves, grass) well. On most cameras you get a mess.

But I shoot with a 100% jpeg quality setting, which produces ~10MB files. The built-in app does ~2.5MB files. Obviously there is bound to be a difference in the image quality...

tony sayer wrote

[Martin Brown]

You shouldn't unless you are daft enough to use any of the less than highest quality settings of in camera JPEG compression. They are all hyperbolically named so that "good" = poor, "very good" = good etc.

You are right that high contrast green vegetation is amongst the most tricky things for a JPEG encoder to get right. The others are faint black detail on a blue or red background. eg Veins in flowers.

You should find that around 98% gives the best size performance trade-off without faithfully digitising thermal noise for posterity.

Regards, Martin Brown

[John Williamson]

I'm happy with the 9/14 megapixel (1) RAW files from a Fuji 9500, myself, but I rarely print bigger than A4, and crop in camera. I can live with the larger file size now that storage is so cheap and plentiful, and the increased time to store a frame makes me think more carefully about what I want to shoot. No compression artifacts at all, so no coloured fringes on high contrast edges, apart from some slight chromatic aberration.

(1) (9 megapixel using third party applications, 14 using Fuji's own converter, which can access the stored information from the smaller, interposed sites that the sensor design has in it.)

[Peter]

I am uploading three versions of the same photo here

I didn't take any care to match shutter speeds etc... The K5 was in TAV move, 1/250 F7.1 auto-ISO. The S95 was in P mode.

Martin Brown wrote

[Andy Champ]

The exposure is rather different. However look at the pigeon behind the bush on the bottom left, and the twigs.

Andy

[Peter]

Andy Champ wrote

What is your view (no pun intended)?

[Andy Champ]

Pentax canon nokia in that order.

Andy

[Java Jive]

No interest in these shots then? FTR, the thing that a little different about them is that they were taken using only moonlight. I was pleased with the first, disappointed with the second (which was chronologically earlier, and my first attempt to use moonlight - the most difficult thing about it apart from judging the exposure was getting our Pyrenean Mountain-of-a-Dog to lie still for long enough - finally he did settle down, but the picture was still rather disappointing) ...

I just thought some>