Other Photography

Although one could easily find better and easier to use digital cameras when I bought my first one, I stayed loyal to Konica and my first digital camera was the Q-M200 pictured above. However, the Konica Q-M200 is a very good camera and gives excellent photos. It was also another first for Konica in that it broke the two megapixel barrier for digital cameras.

Conceived near the end of World War II and born in 1946, I grew from infancy to adulthood during the Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy eras. My first camera was a Brownie Hawkeye, like the one pictured at left, which used 620 film.

Over my pre-teen and teen years, I had a variety of cameras in 620 or 120 format, but it wasn't until I joined the army and went to Japan that I got into 35mm SLR photography, which can be found elsewhere on this site. After I returned from Japan and was discharged from the army, I had a variety of 110 instamatic and 8mm movie cameras.

After the birth of my first grandchild in 1994 I bought my first video camera and my first digital camera, the Konica Q-M200, didn't come along until the end of the 20th Century, in 2000.

While digital photography, at least in my opinion, can not compare to film photography, it is especially useful for quickly getting quality photos on the web and sharing pictures with family and friends through websites or e-mail.

The Konica Q-M200:
The Konica Q-M200 is a small digital camera easily carried in a purse or shirt pocket. It uses compact flash cards for storage and operates on three Ni-Mh or Alkaline AA batteries. An AC adpter is also available. It has preset modes of standard, sports, infinity, macro and text operation. Flash and redeye reduction are built in. It also has a self-timer and a LCD monitor screen. Image quality is up to 2 million pixels in Super Fine (1600x1200 pixels) and Fine (1600x1200) modes and up to 1 million in Basic (1152x872), with Economy (640x480) being it's lowest setting. A 2X zoom capability is available when using the LCD monitor.

Images are easily transferred into the computer and therefore onto the Internet. It uses up batteries fast and therefore I also have the AC adapter and a AA Ni-Mh battery charger. I have 8MB, 16MB, 32MB, 64MB and 128MB compact flash cards for it and use the much faster SanDisk Imagemate for transferring images to the computer.

Camcorders:
My first camcorder was and is this RCA CC413 at left, using full-sized VCR tape cartridges. It was acquired in 1994 after the birth of my first grandchild.

Taking moving pictures of my grandchildren is its main function, but it's also used for recording family functions and sometimes on vacations. It's still working, but since I don't like the compact, smaller format camcorders I decided to get another full-sized format camcorder while they were still available. That turned out to be the Hitachi VM-8500LA in 2001. It's very similar to the RCA, with the added feathers of a 3" color LCD monitor, built-in light source, color viewer, image stabilization, and various digital effects.

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