Digital Camereas in Investigations

[fireng25]

I am currently lookng for a digital camera for our Investigation Bureau. If anyone has any information, good or bad, on a specific make, model, or type of digital camera that they may use in conducting fire investigations please contact me.

Lt. Ron Stemen
Colerain Twp. Dept. of Fire and EMS
fireng25@msn.com

[George Wendt, CFI]

Ron;

My agency just purchased a Sony Mavica CD1000 digital camera. It is an amazing machine. It is easy to use, is durable and is wel-suited to investigation because of the fact that it stores the images on a mini-CD (cost-.90) instead of an expensive memory stick. At the lowest reolution, you can get over 1000 images on the disc.

It is an expensive camera...about $1000. But it is worth it if you consider the film and processing you won't use.

George

[Parafiremedic]

Our Department also purchased a Sony Mavica FD80 for the Fire Marshals office. Ours is slightly less than the one mentioned in the previous post, and uses 3.5 floppies instead. I agree with George about the memory stick issue, and that was the bases of purchasing the Sony. You can carry a whole mess of floppies for the cost of one memory stick, as well as retaining them for court presentation. Memory sticks have to first be loaded into a computer, and then transfered to a disk.

As far as a digital pictures wieght in court as compared to standard photos, they are the same. Remember that a picture is nothing more than a reprensentation of what the investigator saw, and is only as good as the testimony of said investigator. I know that there are some digitals out there that assign a numbe to each image, and won't let it be altered, but they are big bucks, and even a normal photo can be altered in the right hands.

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All comments are the opinion of the author, and not of any service they are a member of.

[This message has been edited by Parafiremedic (edited 03-22-2001).]