The Cutting Edge: Computing / Technology / Innovation : The Picture With QuickTake 100

Apple Computer Inc. now makes a color camera to go along with its Macintosh computers.

Although electronic cameras that record color images as digital files rather than on film have been around for several years from makers such as Canon and Nikon, they haven’t made a dent in the sales of regular cameras.

Apple’s move makes sense, however, considering the preeminent position Macintosh holds in desktop publishing and the need for photos in such operations.

As a first effort, Apple’s QuickTake 100 digital camera ($749) has a nice look and feel, and it is easy to operate. But it leaves you wanting much better image quality or a much lower price--or both, of course.

(Logitech Inc. makes gray-scale FotoMan ($550) and FotoMan Plus ($799) cameras that work with either Macintosh or IBM-compatibles. I have not tested either.)

Photography has always been a complex undertaking, and when you attempt to digitize it, the complexity greatly increases.

As a camera, the QuickTake 100 is on a par with simple low-priced fixed-focus cameras with built-in flash and automatic exposure. Basically, you point it, make sure the image is contained within borders visible in the viewfinder, then press the shutter button.

There are few controls. You can choose among three flash modes--automatic, always on, or off. You can choose whether to take low-resolution pictures (32 maximum) or higher-resolution pictures (eight maximum), and you can mix the two resolutions within the limits of the camera’s digital memory. When the memory is full, you must either upload the images to a Macintosh with the cable and software included with the camera, or erase them in the camera and start over. (Software and a cable to use the QuickTake 100 with Microsoft Windows on an IBM-compatible computer are also available.)

The camera has a plastic lens with fixed focus of from four feet to infinity, and a field of view equivalent to a 35mm camera with a 50mm lens, the most common lens on 35mm cameras. It can’t focus close enough for portraits. You can’t control depth of field or exposure, so you are limited to basic snapshots.

The QuickTake 100 is a color camera with 24-bit color, which means it can capture 16 million colors, a full range of the spectrum. But its big limitation is that it divides its images into relatively few digitized pixels. In low resolution, the picture is 320 pixels wide by 240 pixels high. In high resolution, it is 640 pixels by 480 pixels.

You may be aware that 640 by 480 is the number of screen pixels displayed on a standard VGA color monitor. That means that the high-resolution pictures will look pretty good on your computer screen--even magnified to double their normal 4.4 inches by 3.3 inches--but not that they’ll look so good in print.

At their highest resolution at normal size, there are only 144 dots per inch of data. Contrast that with most color scanners these days, which are able to provide up to 600 dots per inch. Even a low-end 300-dot-per-inch color scanner captures more than four times as much data from a photographic print.

You can buy those for about the same price as the QuickTake 100, and sometimes for less.

With a scanner, you can get images from nearly any source into your computer, as well as text that can be converted into computer text files with optical character recognition (OCR) software.

But the QuickTake 100 has the advantage of simplicity and speed. You can take pictures and immediately transfer them to the computer.

In fact, you can even take pictures with the camera connected to the computer and store them on your hard disk faster.

The software that comes with the QuickTake 100 is not adequate. Although it can resize and rotate images, it offers no control over either brightness or contrast, both of which are desperately needed to get the most out of the limited data contained in these photos.

The software normally displays pictures on the screen at 200% normal size, but the default printing size is 100%. If you don’t make sure the print magnification matches the screen magnification, you’ll wait a long, long time for your print.

In short, you need good image-manipulation software to use the QuickTake 100 successfully, so add that cost when you’re figuring out how much you’ll be paying. And if you’re trying to decide whether to buy the camera or a scanner, keep in mind that scanners usually come with such software.

So what is the camera good for? Ironically, it’s pretty good for printing black-and-white photos, even though they’ll be taken as color images. The 144 dots per inch make for decent black-and-white halftone images on an Apple LaserWriter, even enlarged.

But if you expect to print color pictures in your publications, figure on reducing the size of high-resolution QuickTake 100 images to about 3 inches by 2 inches to get acceptable quality. And forget about taking low-resolution pictures with the camera. This means you’ll run out of storage after eight pictures.

If you want to take the QuickTake 100 on the road with you, better plan on also taking a PowerBook with large disk capacity. That’s one more argument for a regular camera, film and a scanner.