To support you wade through the myriad models on the shelves and in online store bins, we've prepared an informal review of some of the hottest digital cameras on the market. In general, the more money you spend, the better the camera and software that goes with it are going to be.
A Primer Before taking the pixel plunge, though, you will probably want to assess your camera needs and priorities. If you are primarily using the camera to post pictures on the Internet, then one with a maximum resolution of 640 x 480 dots per inch will probably do the trick. If you want to print your pictures, or alter them in any sort of way, then you probably want to go for a camera that can shoot 1,280 by 1,024 pictures.
Basically, the overall quality of a digital picture's related to the number of pixels it contains and/or its resolution in dots per inch. The more pixels a camera has, the more not cheap the camera and the higher the image resolution. Top performers, like the Nikon Coolpix 990, can produce pictures that have more than 3 million pixels, or three megapixels, and resolutions of 1,024 to 1,280 dpi and greater.
It's also wise to familiarize yourself with your computer specs and go armed with that knowledge on your digital quest. Doublecheck how much hard-drive space and RAM you have available to make sure you can run the software. Find out if your computer has a SCSI port, a serial or parallel port or a more versatile (and faster) universal serial bus (USB).
There are currently two digital imaging technologies used in cameras: charge coupled device, or CCD, sensors tend to make higher quality images at the moment than complementary metal-oxide semiconductor, or CMOS, sensors do. But the CMOS technology holds a lot of potential, and as it improves, costs will drop --- a slow-moving trend that promises to pick up over the next many months. (See related story at right.)
We are going to concentrate on mid- to high-end CCD cameras here, so the prices will be on the high side.
Depending on how much functionality you want, and how good your pictures have to be, you can spend anywhere from $250 to upwards of $1000 for a good camera.
Thanks for the Memory
While you don't have to worry about film with digital cameras, you do need to cognize a bit about memory: how much comes with each and how it is stored? Camera capacity is measured in megabytes, usually starting with as few as 2-MB and going through 16-MB and upwards. The more megs a camera has, the more pictures you can take. Translating megabytes to the number of pictures the camera can store is difficult because the number depends on the quality of the image you choose. For a very, rough rule of thumb, think 12 JPEGs --- a commonly used format for digital picture files --- at standard quality per megabyte. If you take high-resolution images, this number, of course, shrinks. We found a minimum of 8-megs was a good place to start.
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