www.ukbutterflies.co.uk

My trusty Canon A70 finally went to digital heaven, and I needed a new camera. I'd been reading this forum, but to be honest I'm not a photographer, so I couldn't understand more than about one word in two on here
When I went to camera shops, I took with me a small ribbon pin from a Charity, the idea being that I'd test cameras because I wanted something that would work well on things the size of small butterflies. It's surprising how unhelpful most shops were; they immediately pushed me towards expensive DSLRs. Whilst I'll eventually take the plunge, I really wanted something smaller for now.
I played with a lot of cameras that had big digital zooms, 10x, 15x even 18x, but they all seemed to have difficulty with the autofocus when using the zoom and macro. Without exception their manuals said they could do it from about 100 or 120 cm away, but in fact none of them actually worked very well. It was possible to eventually get them to focus, but by the time they managed it any self-respecting butterfly would have flown off, had its tea and gone to bed.
I eventually bought a Ricoh Caplio R5, with 7MP and 7x digital zoom. The macro seems to work well and the autofocus works quicker than I'm used to. It's by no means the camera of my dreams, but I'm happy with the pics it's giving me....

Here are a few samples.......

I think you can be very happy with those shots - very nice! I started with a compact digital myself

Cheers,

- Pete

You used the term Digital Zoom.
Digital Zoom is, effectively, cropping the final image in-camera.
Optical Zoom is actually changing the focal length of the lens to fill the frame with the chosen image.
My advice is to turn Digital Zoom off, and crop at home if you need to.
HTH
Ham
(Say Goodnight Sooty)

Oops - I meant Optical Zoom. I used to use Digital Zoom quite a lot on my Canon, as it only had 3x optical - I used to find that the quality was still OK on close-ups; not so good on longer shots. I still sometimes use it, on the premise that sometimes it's the only way I can get a shot, and I'd rather have a half-decent shot than none at all.

Wow! I want to go butterflying in Australia.
What great shots of lovely butterflies.
Well done Sooty

Denise

Sooty, you should take the advice from Ham. Enlarging/cropping in a program such as Photoshop will give better results than using digital zoom for those times that you can't get close to the subject.
Like the pictures btw!
Alexander