What features make a good digital camera?

[StephMK]

Sorry, another digital question. The other one made me starting thinking about the one we have. It was given to us as a gift so I never got to choose features, etc.

I see that some cameras aren't as well liked - ours is an HP Photosmart 612 - and I have no idea what might be better on another camera. It won't hurt my feelings to hear the negatives on HP or this camera - need to know! I either want to buy some additional lens for ours or think about upgrading if there are significant differences.

What features do you look for when you purchase a camera? What are the good things to have that you look for & what do you avoid?

 

[Disney_1derland]

and man oh man, the differences I NEVER knew I was missing! My number one biggest "must have"- Optical Zoom!!! With digital Zoom only you lose picture quality by using it. Shutter delay, the shorter the better.

My newest camera is a panasonic DMC-LC43 and I really love it. I actually have two of them due to a mixup when we ordered this one and I'm thinking about selling the other one on ebay. Have no idea what they actually cost since we got them as a 'reward' through dh's work. It's a 4 megapixel, amazing picture quality! It takes a bit of getting used to because it has lots of settings and abilities. Took me about a week to get acustomed to it.

I also like the ability to take 'rapid fire' pictures where it takes a bunch in a very fast sequence. This way when I'm photographing moving children I'm almost guaranteed to get one decent picture in a burst. Oh, and my new favorite.....the ability to take 'movies' with my tiny little digital camera. The LC43 is better than most, most cameras out there can only take about 15 seconds at a time but this one can take movies for as much space as your memory card will hold. It's fun to be able to put up mini-movies of the kids on the internet for our far away family to see.

Okay, I'll stop now! These are the things I think are important in a digital, I'll be interested to see what others say as well.

 

[CheapMom]

Not exactly a feature of the camera but...
I would make sure it comes with a good software program. Even the best camera can be a pain if it is hard to load, edit, transfer pictures