P&S - what do you recommend?

[clarence]

Hello,

I just got my BeLOMO Agat 18K from Mr. Jon Goodman. It's really cute! It's an FSU half-frame camera that's smaller than most digital or film point and shoots, has scale focus, parallax compensated framelines, and allows you to set aperture/shutter combinations.

There are all sorts of little bits about this camera that are amazing: A hotshoe, a hidden tripod mount / lens cap cum wrist strap attachment, a silvered viewfinder that lets you use it as a mirror for arms-length self-portraits. Ingenius.

I just put in a roll of HP5 which I'm rating at 1600. Pictures are on the way.


Clarence

 

[pshinkaw]

I've been using a Nikon Zoom Touch 800, aka Nikon World Date, aka Nikon TW Zoom 38-105. It's a large P&S 35mm Nikon with wide area and spot auto focusing, a terrific 38-105mm motorized Zoom, a built in flash that is really only good out to 12 feet with 400 film but is an excellent daylight fill flash. It even has a scale focusing feature which allows you to preset the focus by feet or meters on an LCD screen and move forward or backward to that distance. Or, it will tell you the distance on the screen to which the auto focus is set, basically making it a digital read-out rangefinder. It was only $10 US and came with a brand new battery that costs $11.

The biggest drawback is that the highest shutter speed appears to be 1/300 of a sec. Hence I never shoot film slower than iso 200 and I try to stick to 400 or 800 to keep the shutter speed high. Otherwise camera movement can be a problem even in daylight.

-Paul

 

[tedwhite]

It just occurs to me that a Bessa L with the 12,15, or 25 cv lenses is pretty much a "Point and Shoot" except you must manually advance the film, rather than having a little motor do it for you.

 

[DougK]

Olympus Stylus Epic question:

I know this is veering OT, but since so many people have recommended the Epic, I thought I might as well ask about its spot metering function. The buttons are fiddly and I haven't used the spot feature consistently. Occasionally I've turned it on and pre-focused on the grass in a backlit scene. But I wonder: Isn't it almost as useful to pre-focus in the same way without turning on the spot feature? Could someone make it simple for this simpleton: In what sort of scene is the spot feature really useful, and how do you use it?

I use the spot metering if I'm taking a picture of a person, if the object I'm taking a picture of is roughly 18% gray, or if I want to make sure that the subject lands somewhere in the midtones. That way, I know the camera is both focusing on the person and I'm getting a rough mid-tone off the person's face (as if I was metering off the palm of my hand). It's worked out pretty well so far.