I'm a working pro and have been tasked with doing something that's is (technically) outside my sphere of expertise and could really do with some suggestions from you helpful lot.
I work for a large international education provider and one of their major colleges has an intake of anything up to 1000 new foreign students every year. All these students are required to wear ID badges with their photograph/portrait visible.
For the past few weeks (it's a new school), students have been photographed using the most perfunctory of web cams, the reason being that photographs can be streamed straight into the software which prints up and delivers the cards. But a problem has arisen: many of the students are not recognizable from the terrible quality images.
I want to set up a camera and stream images direct to the computer system. That way I can simply set up the camera on a permanent tripod, use a 50mm lens at about F 2.8 and train someone to simply oversee the process. I can't guarantee good light for every shot... but not sure how I can tether a flash that doesn't need batteries changed all the time.
But I don't know the best way to do this. I shoot tethered to my mac with my 1DS etc, but I'm wondering of there is a better (and more foolproof) way? I'm not sure I trust someone to successfully manage this process without my endless attention.
I've been given a budget of around £500 and really need the most straightforward solution which produces good quality jpgs (small).
Should I be thinking DSLR (like a 400D), mounted on a tripod and USB'd to the computer?
I would think you should be able to get adequate quality out of a P&S or even a low end machine vision camera. Do you know how to interface with the software? Or do you just need to get a jpeg in a directory and the operator has to deal with it from there?
You can certainly setup a way of placing the images in a certain directory and the software should be able to find them there. My concern on that would be identifiying what image goes with what name. How does that work with the web cam system?
I don't think a DSLR would be necessary and might not be the best way if a minimally trained person will be operating it. You might check with the agency that makes drivers licenses and see how they handle it. Where I live(Washington, USA) they use an integrated camera/compter system that makes the licenses. That would probably not help you much.
These are monochrome, so you should get better resolution than with color models. At $290 and $390, they are most of your budget, but this is (generically) the kind of camera used by larger organizations when they are taking license or ID photos.
Based on your feedback here I am currently in dialogues with a manufacturer of firewire cameras which stream images into a directory - which our operator will be able to deal with from there.
