I Guess You Can't Believe Everything You Read in the NYTimes
The good thing about gadget reviews is that the columnist who writes about them is supposed to be "an ordinary guy" and not a technologist who knows how things should work. But the bad thing about gadget reviews is that the columnist is an ordinary guy and hence will miss the obvious flaws any technologist knows is wrong and would tell folks about. So since Dave Pogue, actually a good columnist for the NYTimes, missed this, I'll tell you what's wrong with his digital camera chart this week so you don't make the mistake of buying a lousy camera...
The chart in the NYTimes is misleading. For the Canon A95, at 320x240 it's 15 fps (frames per second). At 640x480 it's 10 fps. The higher resolution with such a low frame rate is hence useless (who needs more pixels of jerky motion?), but the lower resolution is just fine. Don't bother with this camera - there are better.
The same is true for the Canon A400 - 640x480 is also 10 fps. QVGA is an adequate 15 fps. Again, it is useless at higher resolution. And isn't this one reason why people buy a higher resolution camera - to get better quality and a "motion picture" experience? So why is Canon selling brain-damaged cameras when they've got so many good ones?
The grapevine says this may be due to concern that the higher resolution cameras are stepping on Canon's digicam product line turf. In other words, it's too good otherwise. So don't buy these cameras. Canon's are great cameras generally, with wonderful color saturation. My kids use a Canon A60 for video clips (QVGA, 15 fps) and it works great for Internet video. For higher resolution, get a Canon SD200.
Internet video given bandwidth limits and size of email attachments to send to folks constrains most people to QVGA mode (another reason why we produce and deploy for the customer at ExecProducer). But remember, these clips grow fast in size. Use the edit features on the camera to keep clips interesting. Canon has a good on-camera edit function - I never use edit software for this anymore.
In sum, higher resolution implies better quality to the customer - not lower. Canon should be called to task on these misleading cameras. And serious gadget reviewers should disrecommend *any* 10 fps cameras for clips. They look like old jerky silent movies and are unpleasant to watch and adding more pixels doesn't improve the experience - it actually makes it even more obvious. In this case, seems like even the NYTimes made a mistake.