Choosing a Digital Camera
//Buyer's Guides // Digital Photography
If you’re still using film cameras, you need to join the 21st century! There are enough advantages to digital cameras that many camera manufacturers either don’t make film cameras any more or don’t make as many. With digital, you store the photos on a computer or on another electronic device and only print the shots you want. You can easily do manipulation and touch-up of the photos yourself.
A digital camera records photos by converting light to megapixel (A megapixel is a dot which represents a tiny part of the photo). When all the megapixels are combined, you see the picture. The fewer megapixels a camera producers, the grainer / blurrier the pictures will be. Therefore, you need to purchase a camera with as many megapixels as your budget allows.
Once the camera has recorded the photo, the camera stores these megapixels on a memory card. You can find these small cards in various sizes, everything from the size of a stick of gum to a size that’s just bigger than a postage stamp. They’ll hold between 16 megabytes and 8 gigabytes of data. The larger cards hold more photos, so again, the higher the number that your budget allows the better. Today, an 8 Gb memory card can be purchased for under £10.
There are three subcategories within the digital camera market: point-and-shoot, ultra-compact and advanced. A point-and-shoot is a camera with no advanced control features. You just aim at your subject, push a button and that’s all. An ultra-compact model measures under an inch in its thickness. They’re usually very user-friendly without many high-end features. An advanced camera is one with many control features that let you change the lighting, lenses, special effects, and so on, and are a lot more complicated to use.