Digital cameras are now pretty much the norm for most people these days. Yes there are still some traditional film cameras out there, but the vast majority of people are using digital cameras. If you are yet to get your first digital camera, or even if you already have one, you will no doubt have encountered the wonderful techno babble that goes with them. You go to the shop on a simple mission to buy a camera and all of a sudden, the salesperson is talking to you about how much memory you need, what kind of image you require and the amount of mega pixels you want, you become so confused you could end out leaving the shop with a hairdryer at the end of it all! Well relax, here we are going to hopefully strip away some of the jargon and give you an understanding of what it means and how it affects your buying decision.

Before We Start:-


Before going into the jargon, you need to decide what it is you want from a camera. Do you want to have high quality pictures you can print yourself or are you more likely to view your pictures on your computer?  Are you going to be using your camera as a keen amateur photographer or are you simply looking to take pictures every now and again of special events and the like? OK now you know what kind of basics you are after lets look at how much memory you will need.

Memory:-


In a nutshell a memory is to digital as film was to a traditional camera. There are loads of different types of memory cards such as  Secure Digital, CompactFlash, and Memory Stick, to name a few.  Now when you are at home having a big memory card is not too important as you can easily put your images onto a PC, However if you are away from home on a vacation then you are going to need a decent sized card so you can take plenty of images and preserve your memories.  For those of you that are computer savvy then you will be aware that memory card capacities are measured in megabytes or gigabytes. So what does all this mean? Well in a nutshell, I would recommend  that you get the largest memory card you can afford, to fit in with your lifestyle, especially if you like going away on vacation., as this is where you will be storing your images.

Images:-


As mentioned prior, all the images taken on your digital camera are saved as data files in the camera’s flash memory card. The good thing about this compared to the traditional photo is that images can be viewed on the LCD panel on the back of the camera straight away, so if you have made a mess of your shot you can take another one straight away, rather than fins out after your films have been developed. If you are going to be mainly viewing your images on your PC rather than printing them, then the good news is that a computers resolution is not too high , so any half decent digital camera should give you a good image when you view it on your computer.

Resolution:-


Other than by brand, a digital camera is mainly identified by its resolution, or to put it a bit more simply, how many pixels each digital photo file contains. Now you can start off with a camera of about 2-3 mega pixels which will give an OK image, but most people prefer to be in the 6-7 mega pixel range for that better quality. Of course you can get higher than that, but higher resolution does not always translate to more detail., quite simply It allows you to print larger pictures with a sharper image, so again it comes down to what size prints do you want.

Megapixel:-


So we have mentioned mega pixels, but what exactly are they? Well one way to describe it would be for you to think of megapixels as millions of dots of light that are being stored for each picture. Now as I mentioned before, most popular cameras these days are at the  6 megapixels mark. If you did decide to go to seven megapixels then you could expect to see outstanding picture quality, and you will probably not need to buy another camera, bar you breaking that one.  One lat thing to take into consideration when buying your camer is the zoom. An optical zoom is superior to digital zoom because when using a digital zoom you are using the mega pixels which can distort the final image, but an optical zoom wont do that.. 

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