sambo. said:
the advice about having a play with different cameras is very good. being able to use a camera comfortably and without always having to look at the dials is a great aid to getting better pix. you are concentrating on the picture, rather than the means of capturing it so to speak.
personally, i have been a Nikon/Leica user for my whole photographic career. i have always found Nikons to be great bits of kit. i have never been too keen on Canon's, but thats just a personal preference, many colleagues use them and love them
look for megapixels in the CCD (at least 4), optical zoom (don't use digi zoom, ever) and lens quality.
lens quality is of extreme importance, i would only buy a digi camera with one of the following makes of lens: Nikon, Leitz (Leica), Schneider, Rodenstock or Carl Zeiss. there is no point having a 15 megapixel camera with the optical equivalent of a coke bottle jammed on the front.
also, budget for a BFO (thats Big F$@& Off) memory card, whatever comes as standard is too small. 😀
These are all excellent points. One piece of advice I would add though is don't buy a camera that is too much for you. If you want professional photos, etc., then buy all means look at a Pro model, but for all intents and purposes, and for the average user who just wants nice pictures of his family, etc. on trips and the like, you don't really need anything more than 4 megapixels. With a 4 MP camera you can essentialy print out 8.5x11 pictures in photo quality, and you only actually require 3.2 MP (probably less) for 4x6 photo quality, the size of a normal photo. So honestly, I would never purchase anything with more than 4 MP, but that's just personal preference, and what my requirements are. Even on my S410, there are a lot of features I do not use, and with the higher-end models there are even more of these features! Things like white balancing, color correciton, ISO speed settings, apeture settings - I'll probaly never play around with these, so my camera actually does more than I need it to - I just need it to take good pictures.
🙂
Optical zoom is very nice, my camera has 3x which is definitely acceptable for everyday shooting. Digital zoom is a scam, don't even care about that - all digital zoom is, is
cropping - something that can be done later when you're editing your photos. Having a digital zoom on on your camera is essentially useless.
And yes, a larger memory card is definitely required, because you'll be wanting to shoot (presumably) with the highest settings turned on (max resolution and superfine compression). Also, the more MP your camera is, logically, the larger each photo will be, eating up more space on on memory card. I bought a 256 MB card to supplement the 32 MB card that came with my camera, so now on the highest settings I can take about 140 pictures which is more than adequate. When I go on longer trips and fill my memory cards up, I just find an Apple store (even overseas there are quite a few), ask to use one of their machines, and dump all my photos from my camera to my iPod, wipoe the memory card and start shooting again. It beats having to buy that expensive flash card reader for my iPod! Plus, no matter if it's been in the Orient, Australia or Europe, I've always been able to find a store selling Apple gear which has let me do this.
🙂
Anyway, just some more food for thought.
😎
