Digital Camera Purchase Guide For Casual Photographers
It seems that with every passing month, different manufacturers are coming up with new advances in digital cameras to entice us to buy
. There are so many high tech features in today's cameras that the array of options available is enough to overwhelm anybody. So how do you make the right decision when buying a digital camera?
Prior to buying, you should think about what kind of photos are going to you be taking and under what circumstances. If you're a casual photographer who likes to always have a camera available, then features like size, ease of use and battery life are going to be a lot more essential. If you are looking to learn how to take detailed digital photographs you will need to look at cameras with greater resolution, better zooming capability and a lot more memory capacity.
You need to familiarize yourself with a few technical terms that describe the functions of digital cameras. The most talked about feature is the megapixels the camera has. The megapixel rating is a measurement of how detailed your pictures could, measured in pixels or points of color. Every pixel is a single dot within the image. Your computer monitor also has pixels and photo printers have settings for just how numerous pixels per inch to print. If you plan on copying your pictures to your computer then printing them out as 8x10 inch photos, a five megapixel camera should be sufficient resolution. If you're just going to display your photos on a computer, TV screen or internet site, even an old 3.2 megapixel camera will work! The newest cameras have as much as 15.1 megapixels and even the smallest point and shoot cameras have 8, 10 or even 12 megapixels!
But you must be aware of one thing. If you learn how to use photo editing software on your computer, like the free paint.net program, you may only want a PART of a photo. You may just want to crop a section of a photo. If you have taken the picture at a low megapixel setting and then crop out part of it, that cropped part is not going to look so good. If you may be cropping, then you will want to take pictures at a higher resolution and you may want to get a camera with 8 or 10 megapixels.
To give you a point of comparison for megapixels, on a typical computer screen the resolution setting is around 1024 by 758 pixels. An 8 megapixel camera can take photos of up to 3456 by 2304 pixels in resolution! Perhaps you can start to see how you may not need all those megapixels being advertised. Also consider that higher resolution pictures take up a lot a lot more space in the camera's memory. For casual point and shoot users, the newest cameras have a lot more megapixels than you require.
Any digital camera you consider should also have the capability of accepting memory cards. The newest cameras can store up to 32 Gigabytes (GB) of information. Every gigabyte is one BILLION characters of data. But, just like the resolution, many new cameras have more capacity than most people need. The lower the resolution of the pictures you take, the less memory they will take. For instance, a memory card that can hold up to 100 photos taken with a resolution of 2048x1536 photos can hold 400 1024x768 photos! Also the highest capacity cards cost a lot more than purchasing several smaller ones. Most people probably will never need more than an 8GB card but, if that card fills up, you can by more and still not be spending nearly what you would have on the largest card available!
The LCD on the camera helps you to frame your subject without having to squint to see the viewfinder. This is also helpful when you want to review your images on the camera. You should look for at least a 2.5 inch LCD display. Some cameras have larger ones, but that will also make the entire camera larger, so you need to decide if that is important enough to you. There are many shirt pocket sized cameras that still have 2.5 inch LCDs.
Digital cameras have both digital and optical zoom, but you should look only at the optical rating. Most cameras have between 3x to 10x and the cost generally goes up with the zooming capability. Base the choice of zoom on the kind of photos you plan on taking. For those primarily taking photos of friends and family a zoom of around 3x will work fine. But if you plan on taking shots of outdoor scenery a 5x or better optical zoom can help you take photos further away without sacrificing detail.
In the final analysis, the best camera is the one that you will enjoy and use, so for casual photographers small point and shoot cameras are usually a great way to go. The nice thing is that, these days, you don not have to give up any needed features to have a small camera. Instead of buying the newest and most expensive camera, focus on what you need a camera for and make your final comparisons on points like battery life and how long the camera takes to save a picture.
by: Allen Webb
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