Digital cameras are quickly becoming more and more common in the home. Digital photography is almost as common as regular photography these days. They even have digital cameras built into pda's and phones now. With the up-swing of the quality of digital photographs, and the increasing size of memory cards, it's no wonder.

Just about every electronic and camera company has their own digital camera, HP, Nikon, Panasonic, Fuji, Kodak, Canon, Olympus, Casio, Sony, and many more, so it can be rather intimidating trying to find out which one to buy and what features to look for. While I don't have the resources to give you in-depth reviews and ratings, I can run through the basic features to look for when purchasing a digital camera, and show you some great deals i've found.

Here is a brief run-down of the things we'll cover:

Megapixels
Zoom
Features

What are Megapixels?

Digital cameras rate their size and quality in Megapixels. Basically, megapixels means, millions of pixels. If you have a 5 megapixel camera, that's 5 million pixels. With a pixel being one single dot, you can start to see the point. The more dots you can have on a picture, the better quality you can acquire. Also, the more dots your picture has, the bigger it can be without losing picture quality.

I'm sure you've tried to stretch the size of an image file before, and found that it just gets blurry the bigger it gets. With high megapixels, you can have much larger pictures, without losing picture quality. The only real downside to this is that the more megapixels your picture is, the bigger the file size is. With extremely high quality pictures, you can fill up a memory stick very quickly.

What do the Zoom numbers mean on my Digital Camera?

The numbers on a zoom simply mean how many times closer the image appears. A 3x zoom would make a 30 foot object appear 10 feet away in the picture. There are typically two types of zooms on digital cameras, digital zoom and optical zoom. Optical is the normal lens zoom you'll see with cameras that don't have fixed lenses. You can zoom, focus, etc.

Digital on the other hand is the digital method of zooming, in which it takes your current picture through the lens, and crops it, then blows it up and interpolates the picture (meaning, it adjusts the quality so that your cropped image is not blurry). Some cameras can have both of these, and in most cases when you see a camera with both digital and optical zoom, it will lump the two together. For example, a camera might boast a 16x zoom, but really, it has an 8x optical zoom and an 8x digital zoom. Just something to pay attention to when shopping for digital cameras.

What kind of features should I look for in a Digital Camera?

Here is a list of the most common features that digital cameras may have:

LCD Screen - very nice for viewing your pictures while you take them

Memory Stick Slots - some cameras take multiple memory stick types, while others only use floppies, make sure you know what kind it supports

Memory Sticks Included - these can be expensive, so having one included can save you money

Rechargeable Battery - this can be very important if you use your camera a lot, make sure you know how long it lasts also

Battery Charger - if it comes with a rechargeable battery, it should also come with a charger, or else you'll have to buy one

USB/Firewire - what method it uses to connect to your computer, make sure your computer supports it

Video Capturing - some cameras can take short video clips

Photo Effects - like black and white, sepia, negative, etc.

There are a lot more features to list, but I can't take up the whole page to list them. Just make sure when you're browsing for digital cameras, that you take a deeper look at everything you're getting with it.

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This article taken from Computer Discounts Guide - Digital Camera Guide. View the website for more helpful guides.

Donny Duncan, the author of Computer Discounts Guide has been in the computer field for over thirteen years.