A Beginners Guide To Digital Camera Buying

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Are you still stuck in the stone age using an old film camera to take your pictures? You must have a ton of money to burn, what with all the film and developing costs. Not to mention the shelves and cupboards full of photo albums. You could be saving a mitt full of money by breaking down and buying yourself a digital camera.

Choosing a digital camera doesn't have to be that hard, even for the most extreme technical Luddites in the crowd. Here's a few simple tips to use as a guide to digital camera buying.

Itty bitty memory cards are used to store your pictures on instead of film with your digital camera. While most cameras come with a some card, it's usually barely enough to hold a few pictures. The camera companies really cheap out here. Some memory cards are expensive because they have faster read/write times. Only buy the faster cards, if you plan to use them in a camera that takes pictures in rapid fire mode. Like an SLR that takes 20 pictures in 30 seconds.

Megapixels refers to the amount of resolution (detail) that a picture can hold. Generally, the higher the better, but only to a point. For the average photographer, anything over 6 or 7 megapixels is overkill, and not worth spending the money on. Check out sensor size, if your really into camera specs, and want to check out something meaningful.

Image stabilization is a cool thing, and becoming more popular these days. It helps to keep your pictures from being blurry, when you've got a case of the shakes. Especially when your shooting pictures at lower film speeds (ISO settings).

Most digitals these days offer video options as well. If your interested in shooting occasional videos, this is a nice feature. Certainly not a substitute for a dedicated camcorder, but still a good option to have.

One of the optional new skills you get to learn with a digital camera, is photo editing. You can add horns to evil Aunt Bessie, or scars and tattoos to creepy Uncle Chester. Whatever your imagination dreams up. Of course more practical tasks would be removing red eye and adjusting color / sharpness / lighting flaws. Photo editing is kind of a second chance for photographers that can't quite get the picture right with just a shutter click.

Batteries are the bane of the digital camera world. Or the gadget world in general. Big LCDs and flashes chew through batteries like Godzilla through a Japanese army tank. Do yourself and the planet a favor by getting rechargeable batteries and a recharger. The cheap ones from Walmart work just as good as the expensive ones from a boutique camera shop.