Things you should look for in a digicam:
Size and portability. Some of the things are huge, larger than a 35mm. You can get a great camera that is about the size of a 35mm. Much smaller than a 35mm. you usually give up telephoto lens and pixel quantity.
Ease of operation; one camera looks like a huge lens with a small camera body added onto the side as an afterthought. Must be a bear to actually use. Recycle time is also important if you want to take pics of sports or things of that nature. Battery life also important; Li ion batteries best, but also most expensive. NiCd's are old fashioned, and lack storage capacity of NiMH.
Memory and speed of memory; here is where the hard drives shine. IBM has announced a one Gig hard drive that is smaller than a paper match packet. Current cameras have a 340 Meg hard drive.
Telephoto lens a must. Only count the optical zoom part, as the digital zoom is the same as cropping the picture; the number of pixels on the desired area is not increased.
Make sure that you get one that downloads via USB port; otherwise it takes forever to download even small pictures.
I would think that 3 to 5 Megapixels is about optimum for general use right now. I started out with 300k pixels, picture quality was definitely low. Using 3.1 Megapixels now with excellent results.
Make sure you can correct for lighting; there will undoubtedly be an auto white correct, but if you can set the camera for fluorescent light, tungsten light, or sunlight, you are much better off. Avoid cameras which make you use filters. Expect some problems with exposure using flash. Newer cameras are better about this, but in general, CCD's don't have the exposure latitude of film.
There is a feature called DPOF (Digital Print Order Format) which is useful. It basically stores the data so that printing it at a professional printer is easy. Further, DCF (Design rule for Camera File system) is similarly useful. It standardizes how the images are stored, so that one DCF camera can display images recorded and stored on a memory card (or hard drive) by another DCF camera; further, DCF printers can handle data from any DCF camera.
Here are some pics; first from my old 300k pixel Sony; a pic of my son and his niece:
Note the pic is only about 180k; it hasn't been cropped. There is a certain amount of JPEG compression unless you take pains to bypass it.
Here is a pic of some knives taken with my Casio QV-300EX:
You might not be able to tell much difference, as the compressed size of the pics is almost exactly the same. For a look at what the entire pic of the knives looks like, here is the hyperlink (I don't want people to have to download 1.5 Meg everytime they open this thread):
http://albums.photopoint.com/j/ViewPhoto?u=306668&a=2279510&p=30470026
Click on the picture after it's open to enlarge to full size.
In the big pic, you can easily read the makers of the knives, and even see the weave in my kid's t-shirt I used as a background. Note that in all the pics the colors are true; in the picture taken by the poster above, I doubt that the knives have a golden color in real life. My camera was set for tungsten light; I used my son's reading desk with two regular 60 watt incandescent lights, and one 150 watt reading lamp bulb. The result is true to life color.
Hope this helps,
The very amateur photographer, Walt
[This message has been edited by Walt Welch (edited 11-11-2000).]
