$25  Digital  Camera

The Argus company made the Argus C3 camera, a 35mm rangefinder model popular in the early 1950s.  (Before the War they made both ‘A’ and ‘C’ models which helped to popularize the 35mm format.)  This one is made in China, doesn’t use film, and has a lens smaller than the diamond that no-good boyfriend of your daughter’s gave her.

 Office Max had a $15 coupon on the model DC1500 Argus reducing the price to $25.  There’s no flash; the lens doesn’t zoom, and the resolution is insufficient to make larger prints, but if you’d like to send E-Mail pictures to the family or put them on a website where multi mega pixels are a hindrance to download time (and if you’re cheap) this is the camera for you. 

 There are more considerations than those mentioned so far.  The camera has only 2M of memory and saves pictures in ‘bmp’ format (bit map) so you won’t be bragging to friends about 2.1 Mega pixels per shot or the multiplicity of choices in how to save each picture.  Choosing the ‘Low Resolution’ format at first because I wanted 80 pictures and was only going to use them on the Web (sent to other guy’s computer), I found the pictures came out awfully small.  Like two inches square or something like that on the computer screen.  After the Ak-Sar-Ben club’s April meeting on QRP rigs I went to Saturday morning breakfast over here in Council Bluffs and took pictures of the guys in high resolution.  Came home with six larger pictures.

 You have to have one of the newer computers with Windows 95 or better and 200 Megabytes of free space on your hard drive.  (That’s why we upgraded to Win98 and a 10 Gig drive.)  The camera comes with cables for either a serial or USB port and turns on as soon as you plug in the cable, operating then on DC power from the computer rather than three (3) triple A cells.  That’s another negative for me, using the equally expensive but less capable AAA type cells in these smaller electronic items.  Couldn’t they make them a little bit bigger and install AAs?

 However, it does work as designed.  Pictures taken of QRP rigs indoors Friday night at Omaha’s Red Cross came out fine and the higher resolution ones at the Saturday breakfast made snapshots worth saving.  If you have a computer with 200 Meg free on the hard drive and another couple of dozen Meg for saving the pictures, maybe you’d like one of these cheaper camera models.  There are also a couple of undocumented features in this one: 

 - goes ‘boop’ instead of ‘beep’

     when the light level is too low.  Cannot be forced to take it.

 - other sound combinations indicate  when it’s ‘out of film’ or

     turning off.

 - shuts down by itself after 30 sec.   (saves those triple A cells)

 - loses all the pictures if you   remove the batteries

     (One hopes it’d have sufficient power left to save the images in memory when they’re too weak, to run the camera.)

 In case you didn’t catch it, there’s no LCD picture in back either.  This is the cheap one remember.  Just an LCD display with remaining picture count or mode.  Besides choice of ‘Hr’ or ‘Lr’ (high res. 20 pictures, or low res. 80 pictures) the other modes are ‘Ct’ and ‘St.’  That’s continuous picture taking mode - you get 80 frames taken at 10/sec, or a Self Timed picture so you can run around in front.  I haven’t used either of those yet and don’t expect to.

 The one real problem is the viewfinder.  It covers a much larger area than the picture in a horizontal rectangle rather than the resulting square picture.  Oh well, at least I didn’t waste any ‘film.’ 

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