DIGITAL CAMERA BUYING GUIDE

Throughout this guide dashed links will take you to filtered product lists.

 

INSTANT GUIDE TO BUYING A DIGITAL CAMERA

• Buy a "point-and-shoot" style camera.
• Five to eight megapixels is plenty for most users. More won't hurt you, but five is enough for most situations.
• Buy extra memory cards (or memory sticks): Buy at least one of 1-GB or higher capacity. (Get the right type for your camera.)
• For the average user in most situations, most point-and-shoot digital cameras have good-enough lenses, zoom, flash, and automatic features. So get one you like the looks of, and that feels comfortable.
• Super-cheap digital cameras (under $100) are only suitable for kids or as gimmicks.

Now let's expand on all this.

Introduction to Digital Cameras: Why Digital Is Winning Over Film

In only a few short year, digital has won out over photographic film for popular consumer cameras. Even many professional photographers have switched to digital. What are the advantages of digital cameras? The quality of digital photographs has improved so much in recent years that for the average snapshot photographer, digital produces just as good quality as film. The price of digital cameras has come way down, so you can get very good pictures from very affordable cameras. Because you don't have to buy film, taking pictures is basically free. No more worries about "wasting" film! You save money on printing because you can select only your best pictures to print, and delete the rest or save them to your computer.

Digital cameras are convenient because they can be very compact, slipping into your shirt pocket or purse. They can hold hundreds of pictures at a time, so you aren't changing film every 24 or 36 shots. You can even print your own pictures at home on your color inkjet printer, or on an even more convenient photo printer, rather than dropping them off at a photo shop and picking them up later. Besides printing, you can post pictures on the Web, email them to friends, show slideshows on TV, and store thousands of pictures on CDs instead of shoeboxes of prints and negatives. These benefits are so persuasive that the consumer film-camera business has almost disappeared! You can choose from a wide variety of digital cameras at many price points to suit your needs. All you have to do is figure out what all those choices mean!

Choosing Between Point-and-Shoot Digital Cameras and SLR Cameras

"Point and Shoot" cameras, the most popular kind, are aimed at casual photographers. More expensive models have advanced features also suited to more advanced users. You can just turn on your camera, point it, and snap a picture. Sophisticated computer processors inside the camera figure out lighting, focus, and other factors to produce good, well-lighted pictures. The typical point-and-shoot camera is compact and light, so you can take it with you everywhere. That's especially convenient when you travel, as you don't get weighed down with bulky and heavy camera equipment, yet you are always ready to snap that memorable picture. Point-and-shoot models are available to suit every budget and almost every photographer's needs. Point-and-shoot cameras are all one piece: There are no extra lenses or flashes you need to worry about. Most will let you zoom in to bring a scene up to threefold closer for a better picture. There are also models with extra zooming power, called "superzooms," that will zoom in ten times closer, especially useful if you like to shoot pictures of birds and other wildlife – however, superzooms are a little heavier and a lot bulkier than compact digital cameras.

Professionals, and serious amateurs, are attracted to "SLR" cameras. SLR stands for Single-Lense Reflex, which refers to the mechanism it uses to take pictures. An SLR is a camera that comes with a removable lense. SLRs are more sophisticated than point-and-shoot cameras, offer many more manual controls over how the picture is taken, and you can buy and attach a variety of lenses as well as filters for special situations. The lenses are typically of much higher quality (and much higher cost) than the lenses built into the point-and-shoot cameras. Because SLRs are so much more expensive, but even more because SLRs are so much bulkier and heavier than compact point-and-shoot digital cameras, you would typically shop for an SLR only if you are a serious photographer, willing to make the investment and also to lug around all the cool extra lenses and equipment that serious photographers usually take with them. You sure won't be sticking them in your pocket!

How to Buy a Point-and-Shoot Digital Camera

Basic point-and-shoot digital cameras all come with enough "megapixels" of resolution (sharpness of the picture), automatic focus, plus automatic flash, and many other automated features, as well manual options to suit the average user's needs. Higher prices buy you higher-quality lenses, faster focus, even more automated features, and more sophisticated manual options.

Aside from price, the main differences are in size and weight of the camera, the resolution, the zoom, the size of the display on the back of the camera, anti-shake (image stabilization), battery type and capacity, less "shutter lag" and faster startup time and recycle time, and the number and sophistication of some automatic and some manual features. One more very important differentiator is fashion, in the sense of how attractive the different cameras are.

Key Features of Digital Cameras, Decoded

Resolution/Megapixels

The resolution of digital cameras – how detailed the pictures are – is measured in "pixels" or dots on the screen or page. The more pixels, the more dots, and the more detailed the pictures can be, more or less. Resolution of digital cameras is given in "megapixels" or "millions of pixels." Your cell-phone camera is probably under one megapixel, and you know how fuzzy and "dotty" its pictures can be. Digital cameras these days are typically five to ten megapixels (with professional SLR cameras going up to 12 or more megapixels). Every year, the number of megapixels you get in your average digital camera in a given price range goes up a notch or two: A few years ago, 2 megapixel cameras were pricey; today, you can hardly find a camera with that few megapixels (except for "Web cameras" for your PC). More megapixels at a given price can be better, but you won't necessarily get a better picture by spending extra for more megapixels. That's because you only need 3 to 5 megapixels or less to get a terrific 4 x 6 or even 5 x 7 photo print, and 6 to 8 megapixels for an 8 x 10-inch print. Professional photographers like lots more megapixels because they tend to do a lot of cropping and resizing, so they can never have too many megapixels for the kinds of image manipulations they do. But that's probably not you.

In fact, there can be a down side to getting more megapixels in your camera than you need: Photos take up more space on your memory card, and on your computer or on that photo CD you will eventually make. A typical 6-megapixel camera takes pictures that use about two megabytes of storage space each. (The difference is due to the fact that there's not a one-to-one correspondence between pixels and bytes; more complex and colorful images will be larger.) Our recommendation: 5 to 8 megapixels will make you happy – unless you plan to blow your pictures up into large posters!

Automatic Focus

All point-and-shoot digital cameras automatically focus so you don't have to do it manually. In fact, point-and-shoots don't offer manual focus. One of the manual settings you can make on most cameras is to vary how many points on the image the camera checks before deciding on the right focus. With more focal points, you won't run into the problem of taking a picture of two people, pointing the camera between them, and having the dumb camera focus on the trees in the background because that's what the center of the camera was pointed at! Instead, the camera looks are several points in the picture, decides the best focus to get them all, if possible. You can change how many points the camera uses, which can also change how long it takes the camera to do its focusing. Because low light conditions can make focusing harder, most cameras have a "focus assist" feature that shoots out a brief pulse of light from the flash to help the focus feature figure out where everything is and get a better picture.

Flash

All point-and-shoot cameras have built-in automatic flashes. Remember that these flashes are only meant to work at things that are pretty close – three to ten feet away from the camera. Your camera can flash away like a champ but it won't be able to light up things that are more than twenty feet away – which is why it's so funny to see all those people flashing their cameras are nighttime sporting events, or taking flash pictures of monuments and natural wonders at night. (All these flashes going off uselessly from the stands during night football games!)

Fortunately, for low-light and nighttime situations, cameras also have "programmed settings" that will give you a good chance of getting at least an adequate picture under poor lighting conditions. Just turn off your flash! There are also a variety of flash features that you should learn and experiment with to get good pictures at, for example, evening parties. Besides automatic flash, there is always-on flash, which is good for "fill flash," or adding some light to a scene to even things out, especially if the natural light is backlighting your subject. There is also a "red-eye reduction" setting that's especially handy at parties. Some cameras have a "party" setting that tries to balance the flash in a way that still captures things like candlelight and fainter images in the background, so you don't just get that glaring-flash-face look to all the shots.

Zoom

The typical compact point-and-shoot camera includes a "3X" or sometimes "4X" zoom feature that lets you get closer to a subject. For those of you who know what it means, 3X is usually a zoom of around 38mm to around 80mm – enough to be helpful. Some of the camera zooms start at 28mm, which is a bit wide-angle, useful for taking pictures indoors when you have to be close to the subject, and especially useful for cramming more people into a group shot.

There are point-and-shoot cameras with "superzoom" capability, where the zoom goes up to 10X or 12X or more! This is equivalent to an SLR zoom of up to 400mm, which is amazing – you can fill up the lense with an image you can barely see with the naked eye! You can tell when you're looking at a superzoom because it has a humungously large lense fixed in front (it can't be removed) – this is not one of the compact cameras where the lense disappears when you turn the camera off! Superzooms are of course bigger and also heavier than a compact camera. Another issue is that when you are zooming in at the extremes (like 400mm!), it's hard to hold the camera steady enough to take a well-focused picture. Superzooms usually include "anti-shake" image stabilization features, which can help steady the image, but you'll also want to have a tripod handy if you can.

LCD Display

Most cameras have viewfinders; you hold the camera up to your eye and squint through the viewfinder to see the image. Digital cameras have added the novelty of a screen on the back of the camera that shows the image before you take the picture. That can be very convenient. The display also shows the pictures you've taken, so you can see how the picture turned out. Basically, the bigger the display on the back of the camera, the better. And the brighter the image, the better. Most cameras these days have displays bright enough to see easily even in bright sunlight.

Some point-and-shoot cameras don't have viewfinders at all; you aim and shoot using the image in the display. One downside to this is that the display uses battery power; if your camera has a viewfinder, you can turn off the display and save juice. In actual fact, however, few people end up using the viewfinder – the display is just too convenient, large, and bright, and easy to see.

Video

Most point-and-shoot cameras today can take short videos. It's just another selection on the camera. The videos aren't of the high quality you'd get from a dedicated video camera – but they aren't bad! And how long you can shoot is limited by the capacity of your memory card; a 1GB memory card can hold about five minutes worth of video. Still, it's nice to be able to capture a few moments of motion along with your still shots.

Anti-Shake/Image Stabilization

Not all point-and-shoot cameras have this feature. In those that do, a computer chip in the camera calculates the movement of the image as you take a picture, and shifts the image to counteract the slight tremors from handholding the camera, so the picture can remain in focus and crisp. A more expensive version of this feature actually moves the light-sensitive chip in the camera to counteract the shakes. (This is amazing: The chip can calculate and react so fast that it can cancel your jiggles with counterjiggles instantaneously!)

Image stabilization is useful in two situations. First, when you zoom in one a subject, any shaking your hands are doing is exaggerated; the anti-shake feature makes it possible for your zoomed-in pictures to be in better focus. Second, in low-light conditions, when your camera slows down and holds the lense open longer to capture more light to get a good picture, any shaking you do makes the image fuzzy. An image stabilization feature can let you get a better picture in such conditions. It can let you get a more natural shot without having to turn on the flash. The anti-shake features in these cameras are pretty simple, and work somewhat adequately under basic conditions, but they aren't miracle cures for shaky snappers. It's still a nice feature to have, and at least some of your pictures, especially the indoor ones without the flash, will turn out a bit better because of it.

Batteries

The old film cameras had batteries, but these mainly ran the auto-focus, the flash, and the auto-winder. Digital cameras burn a lot more juice to run the whole show, including the sophisticated computer chips inside, so good batteries are critical. There are two ways to go with the battery issue, and it's a tossup which is best. Most point-and-shoot cameras use standard-sized rechargeable AA batteries you can buy in any store. You'll buy a bunch of them, try to keep them charged, and run through them fast: A typical set will handle a hundred to 150 pictures before needing recharging. Some cameras use special, expensive, custom batteries you can only get from the maker. These, however, can take 300 or more pictures between charges. Even so, if you buy a camera with its own type of battery, buy a second such battery as a backup. (The special charger needed for the special battery will be included with the camera.)

Memory Cards

Digital cameras don't store images on film; instead, they are stored on something called "flash memory," which is similar to the memory in your desktop computer, except that it doesn't need to be plugged in to keep its data. The memory is packaged in "memory cards" or, in the case of Sony cameras, something called a Memory Stick. These look like half-pieces of flat chewing gum that go into a slot on the camera. They range in capacity from one gigabyte (1GB) up to 4 or more (with ever-larger capacities coming to market every six months or so). A 1GB card can hold two or three hundred 6-megapixel snapshots. This is one of the best things about digital cameras. One memory card holds as many pictures as ten rolls of film! That's convenience!

It's quite an experience to slide a 2GB card into your camera, turn it on, and see the number "620" on the display representing how many pictures you can take and store on that one chip! Still, you might as well have too much than too little capacity. When you buy your digital camera, you will find it usually comes with a laughably small chip in it, to keep the price of the camera down for competitive purposes. So when you buy your camera, take the opportunity to buy one or more additional gigabyte-sized memory cards. They are relatively inexpensive, and get less expensive with every passing day. Also, once unlike film that can only be used once, these memory cards can be used over and over again. Once you fill up a card, just upload your pictures onto your computer, set your computer to delete the pictures once they have been uploaded, and then start using the card to create lasting memories all over again. There are several types of memory cards; be sure to buy the right one. Just take out the memory card from your camera and show it to the photo retail clerk.

Automatic Settings and Overrides

As they come out of the box, digital cameras are set up to take pictures automatically adjusted for light, focus, flash if necessary, and speed. In addition, you can fiddle with the various automatic settings to tune them to your needs. Typical automatic settings you can adjust include white balance, sensitivity, picture size, picture quality, automatic focus mode, color effects, and exposure. More expensive cameras offer more such settings, or ones with more sophistication.

• White balance adjusts the camera to the kind of light you have: sunlight, florescent light, or incandescent (light bulb) light are typical settings.
• Sensitivity or ISO refers to how sensitively the camera reacts to light; this is the same as the "ASA" number for film: You can buy film rated at 100 or 200 ASA/ISO for outdoor photography, or more sensitive film at 400, or high-sensitivity film at 800 or higher. Most consumer point-and-shoot compact digital cameras can be set to a sensitivity as high as 400; more expensive models can go higher, which means they can take good pictures in lower light without having to use a flash.
• Picture Size lets you deliberately reduce the number of megapixels used by each picture. Since even three megapixels is adequate for most snapshots, you could buy a 6-megapixel camera, set its picture size to "3" and fit more pictures into a memory card. Then if you see a shot you might want to blow up to 8 by 10, you can push buttons to reset the picture size to 6 megapixels for that shot.
• Automatic focus mode is used to decide how many points in the picture you want to camera to evaluate before deciding what the right focus is. The more points, the less likely some important feature in the picture will be left out of focus, but the longer it takes the camera to calculate the focus and take the picture.
• Color effects is a feature of many digital cameras that lets you tweak the colors; you can tell the camera to give you warmer colors, cooler colors, or take black-and-white pictures, or even take sepia pictures that look like photos from the frontier days.
• Exposure is the adjustment most used by semiprofessional photographers. There's nothing more annoying than taking a picture of your friends outside and finding that you overlooked the fact that the sun was behind them and so their faces are all in the dark. If you happen to notice, now you can push some buttons to get the camera to open up its lense more, let in more light, and thus lighten the faces properly. Or if you are snapping pictures of snow or sunlight water, you can dampen down the aperture so the whole picture doesn't turn out overexposed.
• Face Detection is a new feature appearing on consumer digital cameras that actually figures out which are the faces in a picture, and makes sure those faces are in focus and adequately lit.
• Burst mode is a setting especially useful for sporting events: You hold down the button and the camera takes a series of five or ten shots, one after the other, half a second or a second apart.
• Panoramic mode lets you change the proportions of the picture from the standard 3 by 2 to something that looks like a wide-screen shot, sometimes called 16:4. It actually does this simply by cutting off the top and bottom of the picture to it's wider than it is tall, but it still can look very cool, especially when you're shooting landscapes.

Programmed Settings

Beyond that, most digital cameras offer "programmed" settings, which are pre-set combinations of lense aperture, shutter speed, and sensitivity (ISO) suited for specific situations. Typically you will find programmed settings for sports (a faster picture to capture motion), portraits (a balance of aperture and shutter to unfocus the background if possible), scenery (which ensures that the focus is always at infinity, so the camera doesn't accidentally focus on that tree when you're trying to take a picture of that mountain), and a number of nighttime settings designed to take better pictures in low light, especially at parties and events. More expensive cameras offer more, or more sophisticated, programmed settings for more varying situations.

Connections: To Printers, Computers, PrintBridge, Wireless Printing, Email Share

There are several ways you can use the pictures you take. Instead of dropping off the film canister at the drug store, you can print your own pictures, put them into your computer, and put them up on a Web site. And you can accomplish these tasks in several ways.

You can plug your camera in to various devices and display or offload the pictures. Your camera will come with one or more cables for this purpose. One cable lets you plug the camera into your computer's USB port. Another might let you plug it into your printer if both use the so-called PictBridge connector feature. Or you can take the memory card out of the camera and plug it into your home printer if it accepts memory cards, or into your computer if it accepts memory cards, or through a special memory-card reader that plugs into your computer.

You can also plug the camera into your TV to show the pictures, even to run a slideshow directly from the camera. Digital snapshots can look really good when they're blown up to display on your TV set!

Regular inexpensive inkjet printers can produce good-quality prints if you use photo inkjet paper that you can find at your camera store. Special photo printers, which are also quite affordable, are designed to print 4 by 6 inch photos from your memory cards or camera quickly and easily. You can also take your memory card into retail stores that will make prints for you, just like the old days with film. And there are Web sites that will let you post your photographs to share online with friends, and also let you order many different kinds of prints from them – even prints on mugs and t-shirts and custom Christmas cards –and your friends can order their own prints directly from such Web sites.

Shutter Lag

Shutter lag refers to the time it takes for the camera to take the picture after you've pressed the button. When you press the button to snap the picture, the camera has to do a lot of calculations very quickly: It has to figure out the lighting conditions, and the focus, and whatever special settings you've requested; then it has to move the lense into focus, change the internal settings to match, and charge up the flash if needed. All this can take a second – or two seconds, or three – and meanwhile, you're waiting there for the picture to snap, and the thing you're taking a picture of is moving! It can be maddening, and the amount of shutter lag can vary a lot from one camera model to another.

It costs more for a camera to have less shutter lag. Also desirable is faster startup time, and faster cycle time to take the next picture. The optimal camera for this purpose is an SLR camera, which typically has no shutter lag at all, and takes pictures as fast as if it were a film camera. For those of us who like compact, handy, affordable, lightweight digital point-and-shoot cameras, all we can do is try out the cameras in the retail store and see what works best for the price we're willing to pay!

Fashion

Since point-and-shoot cameras are all so capable and suited to the average customer, the biggest differentiator for many consumers is how the camera looks and feels. They can be very thin, very small, and sometimes come in colors that make them fashion accessories. Fashionable looks sell lots of cameras.

Our Best Advice: Go To the Store and Play With Some Digital Cameras

See what feels comfortable, see how fast they take pictures, see how well they work for you, see how you like the size, weight, and display.

How to Buy an SLR Camera

With an SLR, when you look through the viewfinder, you are looking through the main lense of the camera (through a series of mirrors). This means that when you change to different kinds of lenses, you always see exactly what the camera sees. This gives you a lot more flexibility and accuracy in composing your pictures. (By contrast, a point-and-shoot camera's viewfinder has it own lense that's matched to the lense fixed on the camera. If you were somehow able to change the camera lense, you'd have to somehow change the viewfinder to match how the new lense sees things.)

The main advantage of the single-lense reflex camera is its ability to change among a wide choice of lenses to suit your picture-taking situation. There are short lenses and very long lenses, a great range of zoom lenses, highly light-sensitive lenses, and lenses that distort the picture in interesting ways. There are also many filters available, and a "hot shoe" connector for attaching more powerful flashes. The lenses available for SLRs are of much higher quality. The cameras themselves offer more programmed settings, more manual control and manual options, more sophisticated internal computer for evaluating automated settings and taking better pictures. They typically suffer from no shutter lag, with fast response time between shots. They offer the highest available resolutions.

The main disadvantages are three. SLRs are pricey compared to most point-and-shoot cameras, especially once you start adding costly high-quality lenses. The cameras are bulky and heavy compared to compact point-and-shoots, especially as you add the weight and size of all those wonderful extra lenses and external flashes you'll be lugging around. And you will need and want to acquire an extra degree of expertise to make best use of your investment in an SLR.

Features of SLRs

SLRs have a wider range of features and capabilities than piont-and-shoot digital compact cameras. Here are some of the most significant.

Types of SLRs

The mainstream SLR camera offers a removable lense and through-the-lense viewing. There are also fixed-lense SLRs, where the lense can't be swapped; the advantage of these fixed-lense digital SLRs is they offer much longer zoom and higher-quality lenses than you can get with a point-and-shoot, but at a lower cost than a regular SLR with a quality lense.

Lenses

This is where SLRs shine over point-and-shoots: Manufacturers offer an enormous range of lenses, including specialty lenses such as fisheye lenses and footlong telephoto lenses for special uses. Some makers like Canon have a line of 40 or more different types of lenses. There are also third-party lense specialists for each camera brand with many more, more affordable, or more specialized lenses.

The quality of these lenses is better than you'll get from all but the priciest of fixed-lense cameras. They can also be very expensive � if you decide the replace the (usually inexpensive, modest-quality) "kit" lense that comes with your $600 SLR, you can find yourself paying the same amount or more for a quality zoom lense. Professional photographers spend thousands of dollars on their high-end lenses. But then, professional photographers buy $5,000 SLR camera bodies, too!

Megapixels

Performance and Functionality

SLRs usually autofocus faster, have less or even zero shutter delay (on more expensive models), offer more and better burst modes, and have a bigger memory buffer so shot-to-shot times are better. There are lots more buttons and dials and readouts on SLRs so you can set more options faster and see what's going on in your camera more easily. Accessories for digital SLRs are more wide-ranging, more professional, more flexible and capable, and more expensive: external flashes, wireless transmitters, and wireless triggers, are just a few examples.

One interesting shortcoming of most digital SLRs compared to point-and-shoots is that SLRs don't typically show you the through-the-lense view on the LCD monitor on the back of the camera. You can only see the shot you want to take through the viewfinder. You can review the pictures on the LCD after you take them – you just can't frame your shot using the SLR. This has to do with a peculiarity of how the LCD works: It gets its image from the sensor, which is normally blocked until the shot is taken.

Other Features

• Image Stabilization: SLRs offer more sophisticated image stabilization or anti-shake features than less-expensive compact cameras do. There are two main approaches used by the brands. Nikon and Canon build image stabilization features into their lenses. Sony, Pentax, and Olympus build anti-shake into their camera bodies, so you don't need special lenses for this feature.
• Dust Removal: Because you remove and replace lenses in an SLR system, dust gets inside and onto the sensor. Most major brands now offer a mechanism for shaking off the dust. Pushing a special button results in the sensor vibrating rapidly for a moment, which tends to knock dust off and onto a sticky tape inside the camera. This is a great feature, because it save you from the trouble and expense of taking your SLR into the shop from time to time to get the sensor cleaned.
• Focus: Many SLRs use a faster ultrasonic system, rather than infrared light, for autofocusing.
• Viewfinder Info: SLRs tend to put information about the picture and settings in the viewfinder so you can see what's going on while framing the picture, which is convenient (once you learn the meaning of all the codes and symbols!).
• Picture Format: Consumer point-and-shoot cameras store the pictures they take in a compressed format called JPEG. This is plenty good enough for the average snapshooter, though purists hate the tiny distortions introduced by the compression process. While digital SLRs can also take JPEGs (which take up less room on the memory card), they like to save files in an uncompressed format called RAW. Its files are much larger, but they don't' throw away any data, and they include a lot of extra information about the picture that makes it possible to do an enormous amount of tweaking of your photos with computer software.

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