How to Buy a Digital Camera – Digital Cameras
How to Buy a Digital Camera
Gary Hendricks
Are buying your first digital camera Well, you must be confused by the bewildering range of models out there. How do you know which model will suit your needs To make things worse, digital cameras do not come cheap. Choosing a bad camera will easily cost you a few hundred dollars.
In fact, buying a digital camera need not be a difficult task. Ill highlight the key considerations you need to think through before making that purchase decision. Always, always remember to consider these factors when buying a digital camera:
Battery Life
Number of Megapixels
Zoom Lens
Exposure Control
User Controls
Battery Life
This has got to be one of the most overlooked features in digital cameras. I know many people who go for the latest and greatest digital cameras which are short in the battery life department. If you want to take good photos, your camera needs to powered for extended periods of time. Ive found that cost and battery life dont go together - many cheap cameras have good battery life, while some high-end models drain your battery really fast. Make sure you choose a camera that has good battery life.
Number of Megapixels
The megapixel rating of a digital camera determines how much fine detail you can capture in your shots. Typically, the number of megapixels can range around from 2 megapixels to 8 megapixels. How do you decide how many megapixels you need As a rule of thumb, if youre only interested in taking small snapshots to send via email or for posting on the Web, you wont need more than 2-megapixels. If you want large print outs of your gorgeous photographs, then youll probably want to get 5-megapixel cameras and above.
Zoom Lens
Youll definitely want a camera with decent optical zoom. Now the keyword here is optical zoom as opposed to digital zoom. Optical zoom physically moves the camera lenses to zoom in on a subject. Digital zoom, however, digitally averages and magnifies the image within the cameras microchip - resulting in poor picture quality. Many manufacturers advertisements talk about digital zoom instead of optical zoom - so do be careful when choosing. Id recommend getting at least 3x optical zoom in any camera you buy.
Exposure Control
The ability to control exposure settings such as shutter speed and lens opening is critical to professional photographers. Cheaper digital cameras only allow you to shoot photos in automatic mode - just press the shutter release and voila, your picture is taken. More advanced users prefer to tweak the shutter speed and aperture to capture fast moving objects or blur the image background. Choose a camera with good exposure control if you foresee yourself taking on photography as a serious hobby.
User Controls
If you are getting a point-and-shoot camera, make sure you find one thats easy to use. User controls to set resolution, macro mode, flash and exposure should be within easy reach. Of course, if youre a serious photography buff who wants to take the time to tweak all sorts of manual settings, then this many not be so critical. I prefer to try out the camera first in the store - play with the controls and get comfortable with them. Only then will you know whether its comfortable enough for you.
Conclusion
Well, I do hope this article has helped you understand what factors to consider when buying a digital camera. A general piece of advice I can give is - if youre a total newbie, dont go for the latest digital SLR. It may be tempting to get that Nikon D70 right from the start, but Id reckon its much better to start off with a cheaper camera first. Learn, experiment and build up your digital photography skills. Once youre more skilled, then proceed to upgrade to a better camera. Good luck and happy shopping!
About The Author
Gary Hendricks runs a hobby site on digital photography. Visit his website at http://www.basic-digital-photography.com for tips and tricks on buying digital cameras, as well as shooting great photos.
gary_hendricks@basic-digital-photography.com
The Top 3 Best Photo Editing Softwares – Digital Cameras
The Top 3 Best Photo Editing Softwares
Maui Reyes
Being a photo editor is not rocket science. All it takes is a lot of creativity and a mastery of some of the best photo editing software available in the market.
Photoshop Elements 3
This is almost like a primer for Adobe Photoshop
Digital Zoom Versus Optical Zoom – Digital Cameras
Digital Zoom Versus Optical Zoom
Jakob Jelling
The digital camera is but a technological advancement of the conventional analog camera. And thus every component of the analog camera must have been upgraded or changed to bring in some improvisations. This discussion is an effort to unravel alteration and make one comparison between what was and what is! This discussion is thereby focused upon a very critical component of a camera analog as well as digital, the zoom!
Before making a comparison it is important to discuss the significance of the subject matter, in this case the zoom. Well a zoom lens has more than a few portable glass components inside it. By adjusting these components, the focal length of the lens can be altered. Modifying the focal length alters the view distance as well as reduces the field of view, thereby making the projected image to appear larger.
It must me noted that both the optical zoom and the digital zoom are components that are used to magnify an image, but they work in fundamentally different principles and acquiesces drastically different results. In general, optical zooms always produce a far finer and advanced image than digital zoom.
Looking at the functions of these zooms, in digital cameras that offer optical zooms function the same way similar to a zoom lens of a conventional analog camera. A conventional lens works by accumulating light rays that are projected over a portion of a film, and in this case of a digital camera optical sensor. The distance of the lens from the focus point where all of the light rays converge is known as the focal length of the lens. Unlike the optical zoom, the digital zoom works by ranging the pixels in the ultimate image after the image has been captured. The fact remains that the same number of pixels are collected when the photograph is magnified. The only thing that alters is the light rays that are projected over the optical sensors to figure out those pixels.
It is a common intuition that optical lenses are far better than the digital zooms. The reason is that the digital camera zooms are more prone towards computer applications in them rather than mostly human interactions and expertise. Yet, it also remains a fact that beginner photographers find it more useful to handle a digital zoom and also its computer friendly nature. There the computer does the intricate tasks of finding some levelheaded approximation of colors that pixel might take up as it had captured the images or photographs. Many algorithms are existent in this area, but perhaps the most abundantly used algorithm involves looking at the pixels that are quite nearly like neighbors and come up with a kind of an average. Anyways the process remains too complicated and its end result is what the digital zoom users are interested in.
Thus the ultimate truth remains that it is useless to compare digital zooms with optical zooms. Perhaps it is more logical to compare optical zoom with optical zoom and digital zoom with digital zoom. Both these two types of zooms, the optical as well as the digital, have some good and bad qualities. Both of them have some extra features and preferences over the other. And thus it is not wise to compare them, even though a comparison may exist. The efforts would then perhaps look like comparing oranges with apples!
By Jakob Jelling
http://www.snapjunky.com
About The Author
Jakob Jelling is the founder of http://www.snapjunky.com. Visit his digital camera guide and learn how to take better pictures with your digicam.