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CitizenBBN
05-04-2014, 11:55 AM
OK, I need a camera for work. Taking pictures of everything from glassware to furniture to firearms. Almost all of it will be indoors. We've put up diffusion lights, etc. but the big challenge I have with the current camera is white balance/lighting. Some white stuff turns out bluish, stuff is dark, etc.

The camera I have now isn't super quality, but it has a very special feature - it reads barcodes. I've talked about this before on here, and Pedro sent me to a great possible solution, which is a higher quality camera but one that is programmable so we can still use it for inventory without manually attaching 1-2 thousand photos every other week (yep, that many). The Samsung Galaxy cameras have Android OS, which means I can write apps for them to properly name the images and even send them over wifi potentially.

Now the question, how much camera do I need, or put another way how big a step up in handling brightness/lighting/white balance is a "real" camera versus a $200-400 one? They have two basic lines of Galaxy camera, one is a $200-400 type that seems "good" but is still just a family vacation type camera. The other is an Android version of their NX cameras, which is a mirrorless CCD, 20 mp with interchangeable lenses. About $1,300 with a 18-55mm lens.

Is it worth it to spend $1K more? I need good quality photos but remember the people using it aren't photographers and won't be obsessive about settings. I can get some compliance on that, but it is in the end a production environment, we don't have all day to mess with staging and lighting. Stuff is shot against a curtain backdrop (black usually) and I can set up lighting around the area, but ideally we do an item every 1-3 minutes.

What I have now is lots of fussing though b/c the camera can't handle the white balance/quality issues well. I need one that can auto adjust as well as possible and give me a good clear pic with decent color accuracy. Doesn't have to be perfect, but people need to see what they're buying.

here are the two cameras in question:

http://www.samsung.com/us/photography/galaxy-camera

Other than the one we use these are the only ones I've found that are programmable/barcode capable, so it's a limited set of choices. I'm leaning to spending the big bucks but only if I get enough bang for it.

Point of reference -- my Galaxy 4 phone camera shoots a better picture than the camera we're using for inventory IMO, so anything SHOULD be a step up in quality. A big factor is people holding still and images blurring too, so something that can take a good pic on a fast shutter is big and I know that's mostly lighting dependent and I'm going to work on that in the setup

dan_bgblue
05-04-2014, 04:48 PM
I know nothing about either of the cameras, but I did download the user manual for the cheaper point and shoot model. It does have the ability to allow the shooter to set the white balance depending on the light source that is present at shooting. It will compensate for the color differences between daylight (flash), 2 different florescent sources, tungsten, auto white balance, and custom white balance.

The camera will only attempt to adjust the WB in the auto mode, and most cameras suck at this unless it is only adjusting between cloudy and bright sunlight outdoors. If you are using a constant light source in doors, then using one of the factory preset choices should work fine. You could set it, leave it, and never worry again as long as the light source does not change. You can increase or decrease the lumens to suit your needs without having to reset the WB as long as the type of light does not change.

It also has an anti shake feature that claims to reduce blur in images where the camera is twitching around during the shot. Some cameras do this wonderfully and others just so-so. I can not make an educated guess as to the effectiveness of the feature in this camera. I also do not know how bad the shutter lag is with the unit. P&S units are notorious for shutter lag and some are worse than others.

The more expensive has all this and more but is a bit pricey for what you are doing I think.

Edited to add, that the more expensive unit should have no shutter lag at all which might help with blurring the images depending on shutter speed. If you can provide enough artificial light to regularly shoot at 1/500th of a second or faster then even some twitching of the camera should not have a chance to blur the image

CitizenBBN
05-04-2014, 07:33 PM
Wow Dan, really appreciate you going to all that trouble.

Oh it's very pricey, lol. From what I can tell it's a Samsung NX that has about $600 tacked on for the android OS.

The one we have has WB settings, but even when I manually set it it only works soso. We shoot on a black backdrop/table and small white stuff will turn bluish sometimes, or it will be dark and no matter what I do it wont' get lighter. Then we put something darker on it and it's fine.

I think/know a lot of it is our lighting, but it seems like it actually works better with less light. I'm setting it up to get more natural daylight on it to see if it helps, but the diffusers don't seem to really diffuse it enough, we still get glare. There's a manual WB setting but it doesn't seem to do anything useful, messed with it a bunch.

I may try the cheaper one and see how it works, if it doesn't then I'll have a choice to make about the big one I guess. It may be the lighting, may just be a less capable camera. I figure if my phone camera is doing better on average then the one we're using isn't all that great.

If the pricey one doesn't really do WB/etc better but just has more setting and better image quality it probably won't help much, but if it had some kind of better firmware/algorithms/sensors to do a better job with such things then it may be worth it.

Trying the cheaper one won't hurt me much, may go that route.

dan_bgblue
05-04-2014, 07:53 PM
I should be in your neck of the woods week of the 12th of this month. If you want to try and hook up, I would not mind taking a look at your set up and see if there is anything I might see that could help solve the problem.

btw, for product photography, like you are attempting, I would stay as far away from natural light as I could. It is not reliable and changes throughout the day. jmho