Digital Camera Buying Tricks For The Layman
Posted on 27. May, 2009 by chris campbell in Photography
If you're looking for a digital camera, either to give as a gift, or for your own use, you'll probably find it hard to choose one, as the number of cameras that are available is huge. They come with a large number of different features, which makes it hard for anyone to pick one, unless they know already what they want.
This article will try to help you decide, by giving you a number of questions that you need to answer. Those answers will help you decide on a camera by removing the ones that don't fit your needs.
If you can find a web page without some kind of advertising, let me know. While advertising is a necessary evil, the trick these days, is to be able to determine what information is useful, and what isn't.
Megapixels would be one of those digital camera attributes that we can simply ignore. 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 or even 12 megapixels just don't matter. Unless of course your a professional working for National Geographic. Otherwise, for the average photographer anywhere from 6-12 megapixels won't affect your final image quality enough to worry about.
Features: besides auto focus, the camera also has the ability to take candlelight photos, portraits, panoramic and night photos.
You know the small hole that lets you see how the picture will look like? That's called an optical viewfinder. Some digital cameras that are small will have in many cases a small LCD which displays the photos. If you don't have a viewfinder, it can be difficult taking photos when there is a bright sun outside.
So, if you think that you'll use the camera outside a lot, and you want a small and portable one, you should find one that has both an LCD screen and an optical viewfinder. That's not really an issue if you already decided you want a bigger digital camera.
Bring along your own memory card, and snap a bunch of different pictures at various settings. Upload them to your computer at home and enjoy a good side by side comparison of the picture quality from each camera.
