crossfire139

If you want to study a skydiving community suffering from the influences of self -interest and bureaucracy, come to New Zealand. New Zealand, the back-stabbingest, bad-mouthingest, small-minded, bureaucratic bullshit capital of the skydiving world. A complete embarrasment to those of us who live here. My apologies to those guests from overseas who are subjected to this crap.

I've been researching digital still cameras for freefall use and IMHO I dont think they really do the job yet. The problem I have with good mid priced 5Mpix cameras like the Nikon Coolpix 5700 or the new 5400 is the download time. That is the 2 - 3 seconds that it takes to load the image to the storage medium before you can take another shot. You can speed this up by reducing the image quality until you are left with the same crap still images that you get off digital video. Personally I like to be able to shoot in bursts and immediately be ready to shoot again, which you can only do at present with a film camera. Also, with film you are getting an image quality equivalent to 18 - 20 Mpix. If you dont want the camera for serious freefall work and dont want to print larger than say A4 then a good quality 3 Mpix digital would be great. Convenient to use and cheap to run. Anything more than that is, I think, an expensive toy. I've no doubt that eventually film will be obsolete and digital will rule but its not yet.