Beginner's Guide To Buying A New Digital Camera

I confess, I’m a relatively new owner of a digital camera, I didn’t think that I needed one because, let’s face it, lots of mobile phones these days include a reasonable digital camera and so I thought did mine. But because of this Digital Camera manufacturers have raised their game and the latest digital cameras are affordable, small enough to carry in your pocket and produce photos of far better quality than any mobile phone could.

What’s more, most of the latest digital cameras take reasonable videos too and, because the price of digital camera memory cards has fallen so much you can get one that will store hundreds and hundreds of photos time and time again… Now, isn’t that better than fiddling about with rolls of film?

After thinking about it for some time, I decided that I wanted a new digital camera. The camera on my mobile phone just wasn’t good enough any more!

But what should I buy, what features did I want on my digital camera and what did all that jargon relating to digital cameras mean?

I had to do some research to ensure that I ended up with the right digital camera for me and didn’t end up wasting my money on something that didn’t do the job properly and I would soon want to change for something that little bit better.

With that in mind, the following are points that you should consider if you are thinking about buying a new digital camera.

Digital photos are made up of millions of tiny coloured dots called pixels. One million of these tiny coloured dots is called a Megapixel. At the time of writing, the latest digital cameras have around 10 or more megapixels, this means that the photos you take are very detailed and can be enlarged up to around A3 size without much loss in quality.

If you will be mostly viewing your digital photos on a computer screen or will be printing off regular 5x7 prints then an older, cheaper digital camera with around 4 or 5 megapixels will be fine for most photos.

On the other hand, if you want to print out great quality, detailed prints up to about A3 in size, the relatively small extra cost for a 10 megapixel digital camera is well worth it.

Not sure what you want? Then simply go for the best that you can afford, you may just avoid the frustration of your new digital camera not performing as well as you want for some tasks.

The optical zoom of your prospective new digital camera is something that you should consider.

Optical zoom is basically the zoom lens that lets you get close up shots of objects without reducing the quality of your photo.

If you are new to digital photography I would suggest that you look for a camera which has about 4x or 5x optical zoom (Making objects 4 or 5x bigger without loss of quality). Of course you can get digital cameras with larger digital zoom lenses but I found that the results can be too shaky if you don’t use a tripod.

Digital cameras all have what is called a USB socket. This is so you can connect your digital camera to your computer. This is the quickest way to copy your pictures to your computer and indeed the only way if your photos are stored on the internal memory of your digital camera. Alternatively you can plug your memory card into a reader to transfer them to your computer.

The memory card is what your digital photos will be stored on. Their capacity is measured in what is called Gigabytes (GB). The price of these memory cards has fallen considerably and a 2GB card, which can hold around 500 photos, can be obtained quite cheaply from the high street or online.

There are two types, or formats, of memory card –

• SD (secure digital) memory card which currently are available in up to 2GB in size, although if your camera is compatible with SDHC (SD High Capacity) these are currently available in sizes up to 8GB.

• XD (extreme digital) generally used in Olympus and Fujifilm digital cameras.
  

Some digital cameras also have internal memory but generally this is only big enough to store a handful of photos, so unless your new digital camera has a memory card included you will also need to buy one, check the information for the camera to find out which type you need.

In the end I went for Olympus FE-5000 Compact Digital Camera- Black (10MP, 5x Zoom) 2.7 inch LCD from Amazon UK.

It has all of the features I need (for now), is easy to use and takes great photos.

I have no doubt that as I get more interested in digital photography I will be wanting a better camera with more features, but for a snapshot camera or for a first digital camera I can recommend this one.