A Pleasant Surprise from a very small package - New Camera

FatMan

Santa brought me a new digital camera (Pentax Optio s5i) for Christmas. I told Santa I needed it for hiking / backpacking because the one I have is way too heavy. To hiking enthusiasts, weight and size means everything. The camera is really cool, weighs 4 oz (including battery) and is 3.4x2x.8" and is loaded with too many features to mention. Well I'll mention the cool panorama mode that will line up a 360 degree image display.

Anyway, I was setting up my pack tonight and opened the camera box for the first time. I thought I would give the camera a shot at a coin after I discovered it has a macro and super macro mode.

All I can say is this is gonna be fun.

Here's my image after a couple of minutes of playing with the features.

IrishMike

Heh, they can be a lot of fun not only for panoramas but the macro world too. Good start.

FatMan

Another up close and personal

mgoodm3

Nice Oregon trail.

LanLord

That's a pretty half, what grade is that? (66, 67?) It looks way clean.

Mark

FtaMan:

Those are really nice pictures and I don't care if you took only a couple of minutes or a couple of days: They are super!

Mark

shylock

Those are really nice pictures and I don't care if you took only a couple of minutes or a couple of days: They are super!

Agreed, great Oregon pic!

FatMan

<< <i>That's a pretty half, what grade is that? (66, 67?) It looks way clean. >>

Thanks Tom.

It is a solid 66. Very clean but the strike is a bit mushy. The slab adds just a touch to coolness factor. You don't see many of these anymore.

FatMan

More fun. A little dark though. Will have to figure out the exposure thing.

K6AZ

That seems to do very well on coins for a super compact camera. Very nice coins. Here is the review if anyone wants to see how small this camera is and all the specs:

Steve's Digicams

lordmarcovan

FatMan

Tassa

Gemini

I agree with the rest very nice pics and great looking coins too.

Baley

Wow, great pictures, teriffic coins!

USMC_6115

Fatman,

I've had the same camera for months and I CAN'T get pics like what you did in a couple of minutes

How are you doing it? Freehand, tripod, special lighting??? WOW!

FC57Coins

Great Pictures John!

FatMan

massscrew,

I'm using my setup that I already had for my old camera. It is a make shift setup using an old tri-pod and three desk lamps with GE Reveal bulbs 40-60 watts. For these shots I used one lamp with direct light from the left (9:00) and one lamp with indirect light from the right (2:00). The camera is setup about 4" from the slab.

The camera is set in user mode with adjustments to the following settings:

Focus Mode - Super Macro (s w/flower)

Recorded pixels - 1600 x 1200
Quality level - 3 stars
Manual White Balance - need high quality white paper for camera to set. This is key to set the white balance manually under the exact lighting.
Focusing Area - Spot
AE Metering - Central area setting
Sensitivity - Auto
Sharpness - +1
All others - Auto or Default setting

All I did with the Computer was re-size as at 1600 x1200 the image is really big.

I am really surprised with the results. I didn't think a compact camera would be able to shoot this well in macro mode. As I said above I really purchased it for backpacking use.

Good luck with yours.

tmot99

Fatman:

I love the Bay Bridge half. I would love to find a nice toned one like that.

Cool pics.

Jdurg

My Sony DSC-P73 isn't bad, but it's nowhere near as good as some of these $1000+ cameras. Thankfully, while my photography skills aren't the best, my photoshop skills are great so any problems I have in my photography with light levels and color balance are pretty easily corrected post photography.

I also have to say that those pictures shown here in this thread are great! Nice job with getting the coins and the pictures.