The holiday season is almost upon us, and one question I’m asked again and again is “what kind of digital camera should I get for my sister\mother\father\grandmother\father-in-law???”
The truth is, there is no “correct” answer. Everyone has different needs and different budgets, so I honestly don’t know which digital camera is best for you… or your mom or dad or sister or mistress. And, to be honest, although I have a reputation as being a “gadgethead”, I really don’t keep up with the digital camera market that much. I have a nice Canon S400 that I’ll use until it either breaks forever, gets stolen, or is laughably out of date.
Having said all that, I have put together a quick guide that’ll help just about anyone buy a decent digital camera at whatever price point they choose. Keep in mind, though, that the following guide is for people just wanting a decent “point-and-shoot” camera, something for taking snapshots of vacations and birthday parties. If the person you’re buying the camera for is a serious photography enthusiast or professional photographer… stop reading this guide immediately and seek the help of a professional camera salesperson.
1) Buy a camera from a company that’s always made cameras. Following this single step will help you bypass 90% of the issues that come with buying digital cameras. Companies like Canon, Pentax and Nikon have made cameras for decades and know what they’re doing. Digital cameras sold by companies like Dell and HP might be good. Or they might not. They might have been designed by highly-qualified engineers at HP. Or the company might just rebrand cameras made by Korean or Chinese companies. You’re just more likely to get a lemon from one of these guys than from a traditional camera maker. The sole exception to this rule is Kodak. I’ve never read a good review of a Kodak digital camera, so I’d advise you to stay away from them… unless you want “easy to use”, which Kodak cameras usually get good marks for.
2) Megapixels ain’t everything. Digital images are made up of dots called “picture elements” (or “pixels” for short). As a general rule, the more pixels you have, the better your pictures will look. However, pixels don’t really come into play until it’s time to print the pictures. You see, a 4×6″ piece of paper is a fixed size, right? One of those $12.99 digital cameras you see in the checkout lanes at Walgreen’s or Target probably takes pictures that are 640 pixels wide by 480 pixels tall (307,200 pixels total). 307,000 pixels simply aren’t enough to fill a 4×6″ piece of paper, so if you try to make a print from a 640×480 image, the photo lab will have no choice but to make the individual pixels larger so as to fill the space on the print. The resulting print will look grainy, something like a photograph from a newspaper that’s been enlarged a time or two in a photocopying machine. A 7 megapixel camera, by contrast, takes images that are 3072 pixels wide by 2304 pixels tall (7,077,888 pixels total). This is more than plenty for a 4×6″ photograph. If all you’re ever going to print is 4×6″ pictures (with the occasional 5×7″ thrown in), then just about any camera that takes 4 megapixel photographs or above will do. More pixels is almost always better, but “more megapixels” isn’t the end all be all. If two digital cameras – a 6 megapixel Canon and an 8 megapixel Kodak – fit your budget, buy the Canon, no matter what the Best Buy or Circuit City salesweasel says.
3) Digital zoom sucks. Most compact digital cameras don’t have optical zoom (a lens that moves in and out). They rely instead on “digital zoom”, a bit of electronic trickery that uses complex algorithms to make a “best guess” at what a zoomed image should look like. As a general rule, digital zoom doesn’t work that well. In fact, it kind of sucks. If you (or the camera’s intended recipient) might want a zoom feature, make sure to look for “optical zoom” on the camera’s specs sheet. Note that the machinery needed to make the lens move backwards and forwards takes up room, so cameras with optical zoom tend to be thicker than those without zoom.
4) Buy a camera that uses Compact Flash or Secure Digital cards. Most cameras come with a tiny bit of storage space, so it’s a given that you’re going to have to buy a storage card to use as “digital film”. Storage cards come in a number of formats, but the two most common are Compact Flash (CF) and Secure Digital (SD). Because these are the most popular storage card formats, prices have been driven down over the past couple of years while competition has driven capacity and performance ever upwards. On the other hand, less popular formats (such as Sony’s “Memory Stick” and Olympus’ “xD”) generally lag behind CF and SD in terms of price and capacity. Also, there are practical concerns about your choice of memory card: while most any decent photo lab can process photos from any type of card, I promise you that any photo lab anywhere on earth that does digital prints can do so from CF or SD cards. The popularity of CF and SD also means that if you lose a storage card in the middle of nowhere, you can buy replacement CF or SD cards at “Timbuktu Home Electronics”. Will the store carry xD or Memory Stick cards? Maybe. Maybe not. Note that SD is slowly mutating into several variants, such as mini-SD, micro-SD and SDHC. Although these variants are somewhat harder to find than “original” SD cards, they are slowly coming into the mainstream as cameras get smaller and smaller. Lastly, if you have any other gadgets that use storage cards, it might be worth your while to buy a camera that uses the same type of card. My digital camera, for example, uses CF cards, as do my PDA and Archos portable video player. If I take the Archos player with me on vacation, I can easily copy the pictures from my camera to the Archos’ 20GB drive to free up space on the storage card if necessary.
5) Don’t buy a “photo printer”. I’m not talking about a standard inkjet printer that prints photographs in addition to letters and envelopes. I’m talking about those tiny printers – usually about the size of three video tapes stacked on top of each other – that are sold in the photo section of stores and only print 4×6″ prints. I’m sure that they print decent pictures… but they’re a genuine, bona fide rip-off for consumers. Consider their cost: a low-end photo printer costs around $99. My local Wal Mart offers digital prints for 17¢ each. So you could have your local Wally World print 582 4×6″ photographs before you’ve equaled the cost of the printer, to say nothing of the cost of ink cartridges or photo paper. My local Sam’s Club has prices as low as 13¢ per print if you’re willing to wait 2 days; that’s 761 prints you could pay someone else to do before you’ve even paid for the cost of the printer! Amusingly, my local Wal Mart has a display of photo printers right next to the sign showing Wal Mart’s photo processing services and prices. One of the HP printers has a huge sticker that proudly proclaims “Prints as low as 29¢ each!”… right next to Wal Mart’s sign that says that the same prints are only 17¢ each.