Compare High Speed Digital Cameras

Video Transcript

"My name is Anthony Maddaloni, and I'm going to be talking about how to compare high speed digital cameras. One of the newest technological innovations with digital photography is that you are able to shoot at a higher ASA, ISO, without getting that much noise. And for me, I think that that's a really interesting thing. So, when maybe two to three years ago, if I was using a digital camera, and I was shooting at an ASA of 1000, when I went back to my computer and I edited my images, had a lot of noise to them. Meaning that a lot of....almost like, fuzzy static around them. And I had to clean them up quite a bit to make them usable. With the new technology and some of the new chips that are out there, you can shoot at 1000 ASA, sometimes all the way up to 32000 ASA, and get considerably less noise. This is very, very interesting to me, and very exciting. But, like all things, it comes with a price. The more money I want to pay, the better I can shoot at a higher speed. So, again, it's sort of this really neat, you know, advantage to this camera, but you're going to pay more money. So, I always try to look at, well, what model just came out, like last month. That's very expensive. Maybe it's four thousand dollars, compared to the model that came out last year. And that may be dropping down to as low as a thousand. But the cheaper one still...you're still able to shoot at a pretty high ASA. So that's what you want to look at. There's no really just high speed camera, so to speak. Cameras have a chip in them that gives them the possibility to go up to a speed that high. That's something you want to consider. Whenever I pick up a camera that I'm looking at, potentially buying, or I'm in the studio and I have a camera, one of the first things I do is I put the camera up to the highest possible ASA, and I take a couple of frames with available light, and I look at it on my monitor. And I see how well that camera was able to handle a low light situation. I also go and I shoot it at the lowest ASA, and see how well that camera can handle a low ASA. All this kind of goes back to basic camera functions, and basic techniques in photography. So there's no magic here. There's pretty amazing advantages in technology about what chips can do. So that's really what a high speed, digital camera is. And that's how you can compare and see which one you like best."