Canon Powershot A610 vs. A620

[thepner]

My company is looking to purchase 4 new cameras and I am looking for some expert advise on if the increased megapixels of the a620 (7MP) compared to the a610 (5MP) could be justified in my companies situation.

Our company currently has about 5 Powershot a95 camera's that they use to take high resolution pictures of legal documents in remote county court houses. They then take those high res photos and place them into a large PDF file to insure that they are all in a single place and in order.

My assumption is that the extra 2MP would not be worth the $70 difference in these two camera's because these photos will only ever be viewed on screen and never cropped or zoomed. Then I would assume that converting them into the PDF is taking them down to a windows resolution of 96dpi anyway.

Trying to convince my boss of this, but thought I would double check my assumptions.

Also, I was wondering if there was any such tripod that would facilitate direct downward shooting. This would help alot with taking a steady shot, but I haven't found such a beast.

[Karen]

I think your reasoning for going with the 5MP 610 over the 7MP 620 is sound. The extra 2 MP really aren't necessary unless you're doing enlargements (like 10x13 or 11x14 or higher) or you're doing a lot of cropping, which it doesn't sound like you'd be doing.

As for a tripod capable of shooting straight down, I know I've seen little setups for tabletop product photography that would probably work very well. However, how about an even simpler solution: tape or tack the pages up on the wall or a bulletin board and shoot them straight on mounted on a regular tripod?

[thepner]

Thanks for the reply.

I have spent some time, unsuccessfully, trying to find downward shooting tripods (or table clamp mounts). Would you be able to point me in the right direction. The reason that your solutions doesn't work for us is that we are taking literally hundreds of photos of court records in a book. The simpliest solutions is the turn the page, line it up and shoot.