Hi, I own an epson 500 and they are very good except for Faceted stones ,
the resolution is 640x480 I would suggest going with a higher resolution
camera for jewelry like the Kodak 210 or Consumers rated one the Afga 's
excellent, If you get bare with an inexpensive camera for a couple of
years the quality will get better and better and the prices will get lower
and lower! There are too many changes going on right now, every day their
is a new feature coming out!
I have been using the Kodak DC210 for a few months now and I couldn’t be
happier with it. It has excellent resolution and it is very easy to use.
One feature of interest to jewelers is the macro mode - great for taking
photos of rings, etc. Now I found out from another thread that you can
hook it up to your computer and snap pictures using your mouse - what will
they think of next?. It cost just under $800.00 including the case. I
purchased it mail order from a place called Data Vision in New York City
(1-800-771-7466). I recommend buying extra memory because it only comes
with a 4Mb card, which only holds about 15 images at high resolution. I
added a 15Mb card and a 40Mb card afterwards. I hate to say that the two
additional cards together cost about $500.00! Oh well, you’ve gotta have
memory and it’s not cheap, but my film-buying days are over for good. I
also use the memory cards at the same time to hold data for my palm top,
laptop, and my desktop computers and that is a big bonus when I am on the
road or out of the office.There is an adapter that turns the mini-memory
card into a full blown PCMCIA card, which is one of the few things ever
created that works across any platform. I love it.
Doug your camera & setup would be brilliant for your work, and I think
because your using a laptop, memory within the camera would be most
beneficial, my earlier reply was more generalised towards the cameras and
alternatives to the expensive memory when using a normal desktop computer,
nice to see other people enjoying and using digital cameras, very
interesting article doug, best regards from Heather Casey
Re: The Kodak 210 Digital camera, it’s a great unit for jewelry photos and
you will be very pleased with it’s performance, incidently in our recent
article (thread) we were using the dc120 for most of our work. What’s very
interesting about these kodak cameras is that when kodak released the
DC200 & DC210 they did not drop the DC120 as a product, this is because
each of these cameras has something very special to offer in itself. The
macro range of the DC210 will be fantastic for closeups and if you require
a closer view than that, try placing a diopter lense in front of the
camera lense to provide even higher magnifications. Something for buyers
of digital cameras to consider is to check out if the camera can zoom back
to take a close up and wide angle type view of say a necklace, because
that in itself is difficult with some cameras. Concerning memory…we
never purchased any spare memory because we have never needed it, we just
shoot a batch of images and download them straight into the computer, we
shoot hundreds of images and we set the camera transfer software to
transfer and delete the shot from camera memory at the same time via the
provided facility, this provides a clear memory to continue shgooting. But
take care new camera operators, may be best to keep a duplicate within
camera’s memory until you are sure that you achieved what you want. It’s
all a matter of practice, after a while you may even consider using the
camera on a fixed copystand and taking several images of the same jewelry
piece as it revolves, thus creating an animated gif for your web pages.
This gear is real fun to work with but the memory is too expensive,
cheapest ram is on your computer’s motherboard. A word of warning to
persons that have found designs on the internet for homebuilt battery
packs to extend the portability of theses cameras, and it can be done,
please make sure that the polarity and voltage is identical to camera or
disaster will result. Plenty of this info is available from the internet
search engines but please be carefull, firstly question warranty of the
product. best regards from Heather Casey Lyncre Pty Ltd. Australia @Lyncre_Pty_Ltd_Austr