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This is a great time to get that digicam
Talk about progress! When we put together last year's Digital Camera Buyer's Guide, the big news was a handful of 5-megapixel consumer digital cameras, and the first $1500 interchangeable-lens digital SLR. Now, we have five 8-megapixel consumer digicams—a 60% increase in resolution, at the same prices as those 5-megapixel models last year—plus a pair of under-$1000 6-megapixel interchangeable-lens digital SLRs. It's a very good time to "go digital," indeed.
 Shooting with digital cameras offers a number of advantages over shooting with film. For one thing, you don't have to buy film—or pay for processing. This can save you a bunch of bucks if you do lots of shooting. Digital also provides instant gratification—you can see your image right after you shoot it. In fact, with consumer digicams, you can see it before you shoot it, displayed on the camera's LCD monitor. Besides staving off impatience, this gives you the valuable opportunity to check the exposure and focus while you're still right there, so you can adjust and reshoot on the spot if necessary. You can even erase a bad image on the spot.
Another digital-camera advantage is that your photos are digitized automatically as you shoot, so they're ready to use in your computer. And photo database software makes it easy to keep track of your burgeoning digital photo collection, so you can retrieve photos and data about them very quickly. And you can archive a bunch of images on an easy-to-store under-$1 CD.
There is a downside, of course. None of the "affordable" digicams can match 35mm film in image quality. Because many require that you scroll through menus on the LCD monitor to make camera settings, digicams are often more difficult to learn and use than film cameras. Digicams that
provide the same range of versatility as an entry-level AF 35mm SLR cost several times as much. And while you don't have to buy film, you do have to buy memory cards to hold your images as you shoot (and those aren't cheap, although they are reusable), and some form of storage for your "keepers" after you shoot (CD and DVD burners are the hot answer to this today).
 Film is still going strong, but digital imaging is taking over a bigger part of the photo market every day. Very popular with point-and-shooters and "non-photographers" who just want to record family moments, and with pro photojournalists, digital is also big with studio product photographers, and gaining lots of fans among photo enthusiasts and "serious" amateur photographers. Today, there are lots of choices, whatever your digicam needs.
At the end of this article, you'll find charts presenting a representative sampling of what's available today in consumer digicams, plus capsule descriptions of all the interchangeable-lens digital SLRs currently in production. But first, here are some things to consider when buying a digital camera.
Pixels
Digital images are composed of tiny "square dots" called picture elements, or "pixels." The more pixels an image has, the better its resolution—the more detail it will have, and the bigger you can "blow it up."
A megapixel is a million pixels. A one-megapixel digital camera, at its maximum quality setting, produces images composed of approximately 1,000,000 individual "square dots" (actually, most "megapixel" cameras provided images measuring 1152x864 pixels, which works out to 995,328 pixels, or .995 megapixel). A 3-megapixel camera produces images composed of around three million pixels (actually, most give you a bonus: 2048x1536 pixels, or 3.14 megapixels), a 5-megapixel camera, images of around five megapixels (2560x1920 pixels, or 4.9 megapixels), and so on. Most digital cameras utilize some of the image sensor's pixels for non-image stuff, so compare the actual horizontal-by-vertical pixel resolutions to get an idea of two cameras' relative resolutions.
 What do these pixel counts mean from a practical standpoint? Well, a common rule of thumb for publishing images is that you need 300 dpi (dots per inch) at the printed size for top image quality. Divide the digicam's pixel image dimensions by 300, and that's how big you can run it in a magazine like this one, in inches: a 2048x1536-pixel (3-megapixel) image can thus be run up to 6.8x5.1 inches, a 2560x1920-pixel (5-megapixel) image up to 8.5x6.4 inches, and so on. In reality, you generally can make a good 8x10-inch print from a two-megapixel image, a good 11x14-inch print from a three-megapixel image, and a good 11x17-inch print from a four-megapixel image on a photo-quality inkjet printer. As with 35mm film images, how big you can blow them up really depends on your personal standards—what one viewer considers fine, another might find unacceptable. It's a very good idea to view some prints made from a specific digicam's images before buying, if you intend to print your images.
Just for reference, the general consensus is that it takes at least an eight-megapixel image to approach 35mm film quality.
Several companies have just introduced eight-megapixel "prosumer" digicams. Ironically, this means that there are now more over-6.5-megapixel consumer digicams (five) than over-6.5-megapixel pro digital SLRs (three) in production today. (If you have the five-digit budget and don't mind limiting yourself to stationary subjects and a camera that needs to be tethered to a computer, digital scanning backs for medium- and large-format cameras are available with much higher, "better than film" resolutions. But these exotic tools are beyond the scope of this guide.) By the way, 640x480 pixels (0.3 megapixel) is fine for e-mailing and Website use—in fact, high-resolution files are not good for e-mailing and Web use, due to their large file size.
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