Confused About Purchasing A Digital Camera?
Posted on 01. Jun, 2009 by chris campbell in Photography
With the explosion of digital camera models in the last few years, it's quite hard, if not impossible, to keep up with the evolution and assess which gadget fits your needs. This article is meant to be a brief digital camera buying guide, in the hope it will guide you on the right track. There are three main categories of consumer cameras, and we will try to brief them here.
If you need a camera that is easy to handle and don't want to worry about adjusting functions manually, then point-and-shooters are for you. They come with perfect tools for amateur photographers, like red eye removal and hand shake reduction. They are lightweight, easily portable and can fit in your top jacket pocket. They usually come with a tiny 1.8" LCD screen, enough for most users to frame the shot.
No matter where you look, you will find that one of the Kodak digital camera suggestions pertains to the Kodak EasyShare V610. This camera usually sells for about $450, but it has many features of a big bulky digital camera, but it is slim and compact. Although the price might be a little steep for some people, you are getting Bluetooth wireless networking support and a VGA movie mode plus many scene modes.
All this information is recorded on memory cards, from which you can get them on hard drives. While a memory card is similar to a hard drive, they're smaller, so they fill up fast if the photos are too big. While old cameras needed films to stock photos, digital models need memory cards, but they can fit more photos and they're reusable.
Some of these also allow attaching lenses and filters, yet they don't rise up to the performance of a full blown SLR. Regarding the size, they are usually big and should be carried in a bag. The screen is 2.8 or 3.0", as large as the one on DSLR's.
If you want something very easy to use, you need a simple model, a point and shoot camera. Just like the name says, point and shoot models allow you to simply point the camera to the subject, then click and the photo is taken. Because the camera is automated, you can take photos even if you're not a professional, and the quality will be very good.
These cameras come with a whole lot of functionalities you can adjust manually. They can be extremely tricky to handle by amateurs (the user manual, for example, for my Nikon D60 is 250 pages long. You get the point...)
