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Digital cameras buyers guide

With so many digital cameras on the market and new models arriving almost weekly, just how do you decide which one to choose? By Byer Gair.

Today's barrage of sales literature is enough to send you batty: it's not so much that you get a torrent of misinformation stuffed into your letterbox, it's more a case of an overload of info about features, specs and techy detail. And that's before you even walk into a store, credit card in hand, with your eyes gleaming 'buy'.

Let's set out the case: any camera from a major company - Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Sony, Panasonic etc - is an OK buy. The odd store brand sold by general retailers may well be OK in terms of performance but could be well down the ladder in the areas of sturdy build, reliability and after sales support. It's worth noting that these store brands are rarely reviewed in magazines such as this... they're never offered to journalists for evaluation in the first place.

If your aim is to take digital photos with the intention of printing them I would suggest you walk away from the current crop of mobile phone/cameras. Their pictures are mostly of low resolution, noisy and poor in contrast; phone cameras are fine for web use - but little else.

Which level?

Plenty of people were surprised and delighted last Christmas when major makers offered digicams at sub-$100 prices. My guess is that next Santa-season we'll see Woolies and Coles selling $50-100 cameras. Believe it!

And the good news was that these low budget models were not half bad as personal picture takers. They had all the right things for easy family or personal photography: enough megapixels, sufficiently powerful zooms and a reasonably small form factor. Here, we're talking about fixed lens compact digicams; we'll get into digital reflex cameras (DSLR) later.

What to look out for

The good things about digital cameras: they can be small, easy to use, take great pictures.

The less than good things: over-confident photographers should not rely on the technology too much... a $5,000 camera can take as bad a picture as a $100 model. It's the driver, not the car!

Set yourself a budget, then figure out what zoom power you need, then settle on the megapixel figure that suits your sort of photography.

Better pictures

With a new digital camera you stand a good chance of taking worse shots than your rusty (and trusty!) old film camera. Fresh-faced, new digital camera owners often notice that the moment you press the button is not necessarily the very moment the camera takes the picture. Cheaper digicams may take a few seconds to capture the image while more expensive cameras such as DSLRs have nearly no lag.

Here's how to shorten the lag. After you've lined up the picture, press the shutter button down about halfway... this will preset the focus point. Learn to aim the camera - and the auto focus marker in the viewfinder - at a specific target part of the subject; the clearer the target, the less work the auto focus system has to do. Aim at a face or an obvious subject.

Then, press the button fully to capture the image.

Now, read on for a look at the features you need, those you should ignore, handy accessories, a buyers checklist and more...

Page 1 of 7  Next - Megapixel and zoom essentials  

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In this article

• Digital cameras buyers guide
• Megapixel and zoom essentials
• Camera size and style
• Features you might want
• Cards and formats and connections
• Photo editing software and photo printing
• Accessories and a buyers checklist