I was incredibly skeptical about digital cameras for a long time, but after I got my own, I became a believer. For me, a digital photograph is more useful than a regular photograph. I can instantly share them with friends and family, and when I make a portfolio or publication, I don’t have to deal with scanning in tons of photos. If you’re in the Art School, or the School of Architecture, I don’t even need to tell you why a digital camera is handy. Also, because I’m not the best photographer, I can instantly delete a lousy photo. Digital cameras also have some significant virtues for the environment. Developing regular photographs requires toxic chemicals which have to be disposed of and are unhealthy to work with. As good as digital cameras have become, there are still a lot of crappy ones on the market, so before you buy you’ve got to do your research. This article will take you through some of the terms and features. A lot of times camera manufacturers will tout the number of “megapixels” (MP for short) the camera has, and use that specification to justify the high cost. However, unless you need extremely high-quality images, 3MP probably enough and higher isn’t always worth the extra money. The number of megapixels is the maximum number of pixels in an image the camera can capture, and the more pixels, usually the higher the quality. So the most pixels a 5MP digital camera can capture will be around 2592 x 1944 pixels for a total of 5,038,848 (i.e. 5 million=mega pixels). For 4MP and 3MP, the numbers really aren’t that much smaller, at about 2288 x 1712, 2048 x 1536 respectively. Also, cameras allow you to select the size of the images that you’re shooting. So even if you have a 5MP camera, you might end up taking mostly 3 MP images (which are smaller files) to fit more pictures onto your memory card (see below).

The more important characteristic is a bit more elusive; this is the optical quality of the camera lens. Better lenses will yield less distortion, fuller, brighter colors, and crisper focus. In general, there are two rules of thumb that apply to this: 1) glass lenses are better than plastic lenses, 2) lenses from traditional camera companies are better than those from tech companies (i.e. Olympus, Canon, Nikon, will have better lenses than Casio, Gateway, or even some Sonys).

Lastly, one final characteristic is important to understand, and this is the difference between optical and digital zoom. Optical zoom uses the camera lens to move in closer on a subject. Just like on a standard camera with a zoom lens. Digital zoom allows for enlarging beyond the zoom of the lens. However, all this is doing is digitally enlarging the image when you capture it, much like on a computer when you zoom in very far on an image and see all the little pixels. So doing this causes the image to lose a great amount of quality. Fortunately, most cameras allow you to turn this feature off.

Every manufacturer offers different features on its cameras. For instance, many cameras will capture short video footage, but not all have microphones to capture sound. Also, some cameras can save the images in uncompressed TIF format, which is ideal if you plan to print the images for more formal purposes (like a portfolio). So it’s important to evaluate your own needs, and have those features well-researched. Concerning memory cards, Digital cameras store images on little memory cards that slide into the camera. The various types are Compact Flash, Smart Media, Memory Stick, and xD picture cards. They all do the same thing, just some formats are more adopted than others and they’re entirely incompatible with each other. So when you buy a bigger memory card, make sure it’s the right one for your camera.

For more information, go to www.imaging-resource.com. Almost every digital camera is reviewed there in lengthy articles with tons of sample pictures. Also, there are a lot of good recommendations for all types of consumers.

Stay tuned in to Cadenza for an upcoming article on recommended digital cameras.

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