Tips for buying a digital camera for the novice
Mar 18 '01
The Bottom Line I hope this small guide will help you in your digital camera purchase.
Buying a digital camera might make a novice feel confused, lost, and deranged with words such a mega pixels, resolution, jpeg, usb, lcd, and many more. My mother bought me an AGFA CL18 digital camera for $130 for the last holiday season of 2000. I must say that she did well for not knowing much at all about computers and digital camera's. My camera has dual mode capabilities of taking digital images and working as a videoconference camera. It takes pictures at high and low quality at a resolution of 640x480. It has a 2mb internal memory. You can load these pictures to your computer through a USB connection and you can also watch them on a play mode on your television. I have had a great experience with this camera and I've taken about 2300 pictures with it. Enough with this, now I will give you some advise for buying a digital camera.
What do all these terms mean?
Will they affect my purchase?
Now when you are a novice to digital photography, you will learn a lot of new terms. Many novices will know a lot of them. For instance a GIF or a JPEG may be something many of you people know. These are file extensions and formats of digital images on your computer. For instance the images you view on this site are GIF's. Most digital cameras save the images they capture in the form of JPEG. JPEG is a form of compression that was developed by the same creators of the mp3 and the mpeg video format. This is an ideal form for your camera to save the images, that way you could save multiple images on 2-8mb flash disk's or internal memory.
Memory. You have to think about it just like film. I recommend buying a digital camera with removable memory. That way when you travel somewhere far away from a computer, you could just insert a new memory disk or card. Some and most cheaper digital camera's like mine have internal memory, which cannot be exchanged with a fresh card when it is full. That is fine when you use your camera is intended for light use. Sony has a line of digital cameras titled Mavica, which uses 1.44mb floppies for image storage. I think this is a great ideal as floppy disks are considerably cheap compared to flash memory cards and click disks.
Mega pixels. When you look at your monitor, you are actually looking at a matrix of many dots. These dots that you are looking at are called pixels. Pixels are the way of measuring stuff on your display. A resolution is how many of these dots that are displayed on your monitor. My resolution on my monitor is set at 1024x768. Most people have theirs set to 800x600. When you have you resolution set higher, you get more space for your applications to be place at. The problem is that everything looks smaller.
This can get confusing and I get confused trying to explain it myself. When you think about resolution and pixel on a digital camera, you will want to think the opposite. The greater the resolution, the larger the picture. The more pixels (mega pixels to speak of) the clearer the picture. I recommend getting the greatest resolution and mega pixels you are willing to put down for a digital camera. That way you could have larger and clearer pictures.
Get connected
I suggest buying a camera that connects to your computer through a USB cable. USB Means Universal Serial Bus. USB is ideal for fast transfers of your images from your camera to your computer. It is also nice to have a camera that will let you view your pictures on a TV. I was glad to have such an option on my digital camera because it allowed me to share images with my grandparents even though they didn't have a computer.
Take a closer look
Having zoom controls and a good lens on your camera is a must when you want to take close-up images of wildlife or some aircraft photo's from a high level of a terminal at a local airport. But it is not necessary if you just want a replacement for your old 35mm pocket camera. Having an option of zoom will also have an effect on the price tag of your digital camera.
Use software
I suggest using some sort of image editing software. It is also nice to have some sort of software bundle that comes with your camera. My camera came with Corel Print Office and Corel Photo Shop. Unfortunately the CD was held down with a strong bond tape, which tore off the magnetic film off the CD. So I had c Paint Shop Pro 7. Paint Shop offers many tools for editing your digital images. There are blurs, sharpeners, jpeg artifact remover, and many more useful tools for editing my images. If I hadn't bought this software, none of my images would look as good as they do now. I am able to export and import images from a twain driver, screen capture, or ship the picture out as a web page.
You can choose from many titles of image editing software. But I strongly recommend purchasing Paint Shop Pro because of its ease of use, value, and the many tools that it offers. If you spent about $3000 dollars on your camera, then you sound like an expert photographer. I suggest that you purchase Adobe Photoshop. This program is very complex and offers strong tools for serious graphics artists and such.
The Internet is a powerful resource, use it!
I doubt that I have provided enough information on buying a digital camera so go look around on the net regarding digital cameras. It doesn't hurt to look because computer products get cheaper every second. Try not to worry much about how much cheaper the camera is going to be in a month from now, just buy the product because you will enjoy it.
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