Six Tips For Buying a Digital Camera
We all have special moments in life we want to capture and share with our friends, relatives or colleagues. A party gone wild, your kid making his first steps or a gorgeous sunset at the seaside are scenes you will want to immortalize and remember after years. For all these occasions, owning a digital camera is a must. If you don’t already have one, here are a few tips you should keep in mind when going shopping.
1. Research beforehand. You don’t want to arrive at the shop and get bewildered by the wide range of choices they are offering. Read about cameras in advance and settle on one or two models you would like to have.
2. Decide what you will use for. How often will you use the camera? Do you plan on making high quality prints of the pictures you have taken or simply upload them in an album online and share with your friends? Are you going to take a lot of pictures at an event or only a few?
3. How much are you willing to spend? You wouldn’t want to spend $2,000 on a camera with lots of features you don’t need, or get a $49.95 one that wouldn’t rise up to your needs. Document on the available features and decide on a model that would fit your budget.
4. Maximum resolution. Rule of the thumb says that the higher the resolution, the better the image quality. For day to day photo shootings you can settle for 3 megapixels or even below, if you will only be using the images to upload them online or make low sized printouts. If you plan on taking professional quality images, you should get a 5 megapixel model.
5. Optical vs. Digital zoom. With optical zoom, you can get a closer view of the subject, whereas the image only appears larger when using digital zoom, but has a lower quality. Cameras with high optical zoom are usually more expensive, so try to choose one with high optical zoom that fits your budget constraints.
6. The extras. Last, but not least, you should consider which extra features are worth the money or suit your needs. Since most middle-end cameras only provide you with low memory space, you should always go for a 1-2GB memory card to make sure that you have enough storage. Also, if not included with the camera, you should get a data cable to download the pictures on your computer.