|
OH. Two common digital camera traps.
The Megapixel trap: Don't buy a camera based on megapixel. Pick a megapixel level that is right for you and get something equal or better. Many first time digital camera shoppers look for a value (like horsepower) to compare cameras and megapixels is it. Megampixels is image size, not how nice your pictures will look. My canon 3.2 will kick a casio 5.0 in quality. Keep in mind depending on what size picture you print, a 3.5 won't make a difference with a 5 megapixel. What a larger megapixel will let you do is print larger pictures. It will also let you crop a portion of your picture to develop. As the image is bigger, it lets you take out some of the edges and still stay nice.
A big F U to the digital zoom trap: This is the worst trap of them all. I'll just tell you about my sony video camera I have. It has 20x optical zoom and 200x digital zoom. 20x looks great. I can 200x in on neighbors 2 blocks away but I get a blob of color depending on wht color the house is. What digital zoom is, even tho it sounds cool, is using a computer to grab a portion of your picture and blowing it up. Much like you would do in Photoshop to blow up a picture (which decreases quality). Heres the kicker... there is no condition where you would use optical zoom. Can't get close enough? Take a picture with optical zoomed in and crop it later. At least you have a nice image that isn't screwed up. Photoshop can handle blowing up a picture better than a little chip in your camera.
|