OT : Digital Camera Question

[5champs]

I am in the process of buying a digital camera. I want a good one. I don't know what brand is best or if it matters. What does megapixals and optical zoom etc. mean? There are so many different types. Is there a good place online I could go or is Best Buy my best bet. Can someone give me any info to help me understand the all the differences. Thx

 

[elgerber]

I am in the process of buying a digital camera. I want a good one. I don't know what brand is best or if it matters. What does megapixals and optical zoom etc. mean? There are so many different types. Is there a good place online I could go or is Best Buy my best bet. Can someone give me any info to help me understand the all the differences. Thx

I suggest looking around at this website, there is a ton of info, very helfpul! I would not suggest Best Buy for research, as most of their sales people are fairly clueless (at least the ones I have dealt with are and my neighbors had the same problem while buying a new camera last weekend).

http://www.dpreview.com/

 

[hlovesj]

We just recently bought one. The most important feature for me was the optical zoom. It allows you take pictures and get close ups from further away. Mine has 10X optical and 3 or 4 x digital zoom.

What I did was go into a local camera store and ask questions and had them recommend a camera to me. The one I got was a Konica Minolta. The camera store (as well as Best Buy) carried it for $399.99.

I searched around on the web and found the same camera at "best price audio and video dot com" for $274 with no tax or shipping charge. Minolta was also offering a $50 rebate on that camera at the time so I got it for $224.

I took the extra money I saved and bought a 1G memory card and still saved money over the original $399 at Best Buy.

 

[seashoreCM]

I would go for at least 4 megapixels and at least 3x optical zoom.

To me digital zoom is worthless. Digital zoom is nothing more than a convenience to make the picture larger for printing when your computer does not have other software to do that after the picture is downloaded into the computer.

If you are not into manual exposure settings, try to get a camera with a "night exposure" setting. You will not get good results for fireworks or Spectro Magic or Osborne Lights when you rely on normal autoexposure.

Be sure your computer has the interface your camera needs for downloading. Many cameras nowadays use USB II but not all computers have USB II.

Disney hints:
http://members.aol.com/ajaynejr/disney.htm

The more pixels, the more picture detail per photograph can be recorded.

Optical zoom on a digital camera is like magnifying the picture over the surface of the film in a film camera at the moment of snapping the picture. Finer picture detail from the portion of the picture captured can be recorded.

Digital zoom on a digital camera is like taking the already exposed film from a film camera and magnifying a portion of it. Grain and other limits to picture detail are magnified along with the subject matter.

 

[shelly3girls]

We have a Canon Elph (the 5 megapixel but it also comes in a 7 megapixel). We absolutely love it. It is so small I can keep it in my purse or my husbands front pocket and barely notice it there. We checked out epinions.com and cnet.com for reviews before we decided. Epinions was also a great resource for finding it for the cheapest price. The website compares many stores.