I am going on the Finland Russia and Estonia tour in September. I recently bought a digital camera that I love (Sony Mavica).
I am in a quandery over whether or not to take it on this tour. Or should I take my 10 yo tried and true Minolta.

The Sony is bigger and more expensive. I would have to recharge the battery with a converter on the charger. But I do love the pictures it takes. And no film, just a 3.5 floppy.

I am not a camera buff and just want some good pics of my trip.

What do you think?

My daughter took her digital camera on our tour. Sorry I don't know the model. She had quite a bit of memory & just brought an additional memory card. We had the converter kit for the outlets & had no trouble recharging the battery at night while we slept. The pictures were fantastic. She has matted & framed several & has them hanging in her apartment. They look professional and she has received alot of compliments.

Priscilla,

thats great news to hear... i'm also thinking of taking my digital (Sony Cybershot DSC-S70) in preference to the 35mm Pentax and lens....

How much memory did your daughter have with her for her camera and what resolution did she take the pics at? I can get about 1000+ pics on my 64Mb card at 640x480 but only about 60 pics at the highest resolution... not sure if i should take the laptop to download them rather than pay out hundreds for another memory stick.... (wish i had a mavica! lol)

The prints she has on the walls in her apartment... are they good resolution? what size are they?

Tihbar,

I just came back from European Marvel with my Olympus C-2040 2Mpixel camera. It was a 14 day trip and I took 1500 pictures. I have only 64 MB of memory which holds 130 pictures at median compression. I carried my laptop in the coach and down load periodically. I only run out of memory once.

I bought a voltage converter from Radio Shack and did not have any problem re-charging in the 7 countries I traveled.

One tip to down-loading. My camera names picture files by date and a sequential number. When I move all pictures off the camera, the sequential number starts from 1 again on the next picture. That causes overlap of file name in the next off-load. If not careful, you could over-write your old picture. To avoid that, down load all pictures except for the last one. My camera will continue from the last number. For those with 3.5" floppy storage, this should not be a problem.

Victor Kao

quote:

Originally posted by Tihbar:
Priscilla,

thats great news to hear... i'm also thinking of taking my digital (Sony Cybershot DSC-S70) in preference to the 35mm Pentax and lens....

How much memory did your daughter have with her for her camera and what resolution did she take the pics at? I can get about 1000+ pics on my 64Mb card at 640x480 but only about 60 pics at the highest resolution... not sure if i should take the laptop to download them rather than pay out hundreds for another memory stick.... (wish i had a mavica! lol)

The prints she has on the walls in her apartment... are they good resolution? what size are they?

Victor Kao,

Thanks for your comments...

I think the laptop will be the easiest rather than trying to find internet cafes to download to and burn pics onto cd while 'on the run'....

will check out if the tip on leaving the last pic on the memory stick works... thats a great idea because my camera does number pictures sequentially and have overwritten 'old' pics with new ones before! grrrrrrr

did you have no problems with security of the laptop during your tour?

thanks again for your comments and tips.

About the sequential numbering problem....

Why don't you just create a new subdirectory for each download? I don't know about you, but when I edit my shots, I rename them when finished (to something descriptive of the picture itself) so that the duplicate number problem goes away when I later copy them into one big subdirectory (Vacation 2000, or somesuch).

Mike

Michael,

will do that when we get home... just dont want to do that part in a rush and take up too much time while on tour....

that way we get to enjoy the memories as we rename and catalogue the pics in preparation for annoying the hell out of everyone with our travel pics show! lol

quote:

Originally posted by Victor Kao:
[qb]Tihbar,

I just came back from European Marvel with my Olympus C-2040 2Mpixel camera. It was a 14 day trip and I took 1500 pictures. I have only 64 MB of memory which holds 130 pictures at median compression. I carried my laptop in the coach and down load periodically. I only run out of memory once.

I bought a voltage converter from Radio Shack and did not have any problem re-charging in the 7 countries I traveled.

One tip to down-loading. My camera names picture files by date and a sequential number. When I move all pictures off the camera, the sequential number starts from 1 again on the next picture. That causes overlap of file name in the next off-load. If not careful, you could over-write your old picture. To avoid that, down load all pictures except for the last one. My camera will continue from the last number. For those with 3.5" floppy storage, this should not be a problem.

Victor Kao


[/qb]

I have just gotten an Olympus 3040, but I had a 2000 before. This spring I took a conventional 35mm, but now I have bought a Digital Wallet and plan to take my digital with me. It's a 10G hard drive which is battery operated about the size of the camera. I can't wait to make another trip in the spring. You download to your computer when you get home. It's not as expensive as a laptop and not as tempting to thieves. I highly recommend it to any digital user who uses removeable memory. Deliver me from floppies.

Sorry Juli, I thought I was up on digital cameras, but I'm not at all familiar with a "digital wallet"...please explain...I will be taking my Kodak digital with me in September to Europe, "Traditional Europe"...

I wish I had known about the digital wallet before our trip to Italy, it would have taken care of one problem.

See http://www.briggl.com/italy and go to day 8.

Briggl, that is one of the best narrations of a vacation that I have seen on this BB...obviously, you two had a wonderful vacation and anniversary...you must have kept a detailed diary each day to come up with that much memory...I can only hope our trip next month to Europe will turn out that well...you had a multitude of hints and suggestions which I for one will take advantage of...thanks for the great effort...

Briggl I only wish you were going to Ireland and produced the same website on it. Really enjoyed reading about your trip and pix of Italy.

Just returned from Europe and between 5 of us we had a digital camera (Kodak), digital camcorder/camera (Sony), 35 mm camera and a disposable panoramic camera. I must admit for those shots out of the bus window (which turned out very well!) it's nice to be able to immediately look and see if you caught the tree or the castle. I used the panoramic for the many mountain scenes and the castles we saw. I took two of these but only used one. I took many rolls on my 35 mm too. I'm glad we had a couple of backups because one day it decided to act up on me. I wasn't too concerned because we still had other cameras. Another (minor) thought--we usually gave our 35 mm to other people (in our tour group) to take pictures of us with. It was much easier to explain to use than our digital camcorder. As far as charging goes, my father charged his digital camera in the evenings as did my husband and I our camcorder. My husband insisted we buy this super long battery ($$) that we only used once during the trip. We used our regular length battery and just charged it up each night while we slept. It worked out well!

My digital camera takes four AA batteries, so I brought eight extras with me, in addition to the ones in the camera. I carried the extra batteries with me in the bag I carried everywhere.

So, the one time I left my bag (with the extra batteries) on the bus was when we went to see the Duomo in Milan. Here I am, up on the roof of the Duomo, and my batteries die!

I had to buy some batteries so that I could take a picture of the facade of the Duomo. I returned home with all eight of the extra batteries I brought with me.

[ August 17, 2001: Message edited by: briggl ]

By the way, jmac, I wish I could take a tour of Ireland also!