Ready to make the move to a digital camera? This week we’ll focus on features to consider when finding the camera that’s right for you.

Digital cameras, like their film counterparts, generally fall into three categories, reflective of their prices and capabilities. At the low end you find the $100 to $300, one megapixel, point-and-shoots, the “Instamatics” of the digital age. The mid-range consumer and “prosumer” cameras (two to four megapixels, $300 to $700) provide greater resolution and creative control. The top-of-the-line pro cameras (over $1000, now over ten megapixels in some models) have all the features you’d find in a pro 35mm film camera (at twice the price, though).

Choosing a camera can be a daunting task, as there are SO many different models and capabilities to choose from, and if you are new to the digital game, a few new terms to become familiar with. Let’s focus on some features common to all digital cameras.

Viewfinders and preview screens. Most inexpensive point-and-shoot cameras don’t have through-the-lens (TTL) viewfinders. In these cameras the viewfinder window is slightly offset from the camera lens, so what you see in the viewfinder may be slightly offset in the photo you get. If the camera has a preview screen (a small LCD screen that show allows you to preview and then review the photos you take), you can actually “look through” the preview screen to line up the shot. An added benefit of the preview screen is instantaneous feedback as to whether you “got the shot” or not. My recommendation – get a camera with an LCD preview screen.

Lenses, exposure control, and zoom. You have to get into the expensive “prosumer” digital cameras to get the interchangeable lenses and exposure flexibility you’ll find on SLR film cameras. Mid-range consumer digitals have a fixed auto-focus zoom lens, and an array of automatic exposure functions to help you take the best photo in any environment. Cameras that offer zoom lenses advertise an “optical zoom” capability (like 3X) and a “digital zoom” capability (perhaps doubling or tripling the optical number). Although a 6X or 11X digital zoom looks good on paper, it may not look good on your photo. Here’s why. As you zoom in on a distant object and go past the lens’ optical capability, the digital zoom kicks in. The camera then begins to digitally magnify the image, adding pixels and interpolating data, resulting in less sharpness and resolution.

File formats. Low-end cameras store images in the JPEG format, which compresses the image with some quality loss, to create smaller file sizes so you can take more pictures. Higher end cameras offer TIFF and RAW formats, with no quality loss but bigger file sizes. If you’re looking to make high quality prints, look for a camera’s ability to store in TIFF format, or at least to allow selection of a high-quality JPEG compression setting.

Media storage. Some cameras store images on a 1.4 MB floppy disk, some record your photos onto a CD drive inside the camera. The most popular method is the memory card - CompactFlash, SmartMedia, or Memory Stick. These cards can be removed from the camera and read directly by a computer or printer, or left in the camera and their contents transferred to a computer via a USB or similar cable, and are infinitely erasable and reusable. A $300 CompactFlash card can hold up to 1 GB of data (that’s one thousand print-quality 5x7 photos). SmartMedia cards and Memory Sticks are around $50 for 128 MB.

Next time we’ll finish off our discussion on cameras and begin looking at photo management and manipulation software.

© 2003 Peter F. Zimowski