 BetterPhoto Member |
Best Camera for Sports I go to a lot of sporting events and generally and sitting high up or far away from the action. I have a Kodak c340 and when I zoom in , it is always really blurry. What is the best digital camera for those kind of events to zoom in on?
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BetterPhoto Member |
Canon
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W. |
The blur can be caused by 2 factors: subject movement and/or camera movement (well, movement by YOU, really), during exposure. Subject movement during sports is a given, of course. Camera movement can be minimized if you use a tripod, monopod, or beanbag. Try it, Stephen. You'll find you get a lot of improvement.
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Jon Close |
The C340 has a 3x zoom lens (35-102 35mm equivalent). If you zoom in closer with the 5x digital zoom, you lose resolution. The digital zoom is simply a crop of the center of the sensor, so fewer pixels are used.
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robert G. Fately |
Stephen, from your description it would appear that no advanced point & shoot type of camera will be suitable - you would need to consider getting a DSLR (from Nikon, Sony, Olympus, Fuji, or yes, even Canon). The real question is "what kind of lens do you need"... since this is the major contributor to the quality of the final pictures. And that will lead to the question of affordability. Let me explain: As WS points out, blur has two sources; either your movement or the subjects - when using too slow a shutter speed. With most DSLRs, a reasonable rule of thumb is to use 1/(focal length of the lens times crop factor) to figure the slowest shutter speed you can hand hold. So, with a 200MM lens on a camera with a 1.5 crop factor, figure anything slower than 1/300th of a second will start to give you blur problems related to your own movement. Understand that, even though you might think you can hold very still, even the blood pulsing in your veins will cause a certain amount of movement that, when magnified by the telephoto lens, can create blurry effects. Of course, if the subject is also in motion, a faster shutter speed will better freeze him or her as well. But to get a faster shutter speed, you need to use a high ISO setting 9which leads to noise in the image) or a fast lens (which is expensive and heavy). But this is why you see pro's toting around $5000+ ginormous lenses at the sidelines - they're using 400 or 500 or 600MM f2.8 or f4 lenses to afford them the highest shutter speed possible wihtout resorting to too-high ISO settings. So, if money is no object, get a DSLR (one that you like, which means you need to play with a few rather than just take an outsider's opinion of what's the best) and plan on spending way more that the camera body price on the lens. At a minimum, you should consider the 70-200 f2.8 offerings from the branded versions or Sigma (which is about half the cost). The other thing a DSLR offers is a more instantaneous shutter response time - in sports you don't want to press the shutter button and have the camera take 2/10 second to actually take the shot - and virtually all ZSLRs (as they're called) have this issue - all that I've experienced, anyway. SO, by all means use a tripod today, to see how much improvement you get. If that's not god enough, start saving your sheckels/lire/yen/pesos...
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