Seriously, there’s massive design flaws on our Sony DSC-H3 camera, and it’s starting to piss me off. We mainly bought the thing because it performed really well with macro photography, and despite it being a point-and-shoot you could attach extra lenses to it to better that affect (as well as other things, like a polarization filter for photographing aquariums)… considering that at the time, DSLRs were much more expensive (though within about 6 short months they’d fallen down into our price range, boo!) it was a pretty good deal.
Except that with some shots, the flash is obscured by the lens housing itself. It’s not uncommon at all for many of our shots to have elliptical dark patches covering the bottom border of the image.
The flash is so high, it’s really hard to take tight-spot shots like the inside of electronic devices too. Just today I decided to do a little work on Hungry Hacker and update my article on DVD player repair – I think it’s still relevant and it’s still a popular article despite the fact that they just about give DVD players away in promotional bags at trade shows these days… heck, it costs more for an HDTV converter box than it does for a DVD player, and they have no moving parts!
So anyway, I decide that the old image taken with a crappy USB webcam just wasn’t going to do, so I opened up our old faithful DVD player – the one that just happened to be used for the original article and is now pushing a decade old – and took some real nice macro shots. Except that in almost all of them, some parts of the image are completely dark because the flash is so damn high on top of the camera.
I like to think the final result isn’t a terrible picture, it just makes me grumpy to think how much better it probably could have been. 