Digital 101
If you aren’t up for learning a whole new technological interface, digital cameras function very much like your standard film camera. You frame your subject and the camera automatically focuses, decides if it needs a flash, and takes the picture. Most of these new digital cameras also feel to the hand just like film cameras. Viewfinders, buttons, lenses are just where you would expect them to be. They are actually quite easy to use, so have no fear. Just pick one, pay for it and start taking great pictures! Well almost. First you have to decide which camera to purchase. If you think desktop computers are changing rapidly, digital cameras are changing at warp speed. Every few months camera manufacturers dump their old technology and bring out new and improved models. If you were to try to keep up with the changes happening in the industry it could be a full time job. At last count there were over 15 major manufacturers, all vying to produce the latest and greatest camera.

Bare Bones
In order to get the most out of your new camera, you need to know at least some of the technical stuff. So grab a cup of Joe and settle down for Digital Cameras 101.

As mentioned above, digital cameras are computers and are just as different from film cameras as word processors are from typewriters. Although the final product might look the same, how it got there is way different.

Digital cameras don’t use film to capture the light from an image, they use a little something called a Charged Coupled Device (CCD). This has more to do with a TV screen than a piece of film. Think of it as a postage stamp sized grid of tiny semi-conductors each of which records a dot’s worth of picture information. These dots are commonly called pixels. CCDs come in different sizes which relate directly to the quality of the final product and with their cost. The more pixels that make up the postage stamp sized grid, the more information a camera can store, the larger the picture and the more the camera costs. However the amount of pixels on the CCD keeps going up. And the corresponding prices just keep going down, just like any other computer product. Cameras are commonly grouped according to their pixel size: under 1 Meg, and 1, 2, 3 or 4 Meg cameras.

But why spend the money on a camera that can store 3,000,000 (a 3 Meg camera) pixels over one that uses only 307,000 pixels (also know as a 640 x 480 camera)? Well, it has all to do with size and quality.

The number of pixels per inch that are in a given picture determines how sharp the resultant picture is perceived. But after a certain point, it does not matter how many pixels make up a 5" x 6" picture because the human eye can’t tell the difference.

So what more pixels really get you is the ability to produce a bigger picture. More pixels equal bigger prints, period. All the rest is talk. Here are photographic quality prints you can expect from different CCDs:

Camera Pixel Capacity of the CCD	Size of photographic quality print
	Great	Very Presentable
307,000 pixels (640x480)	3" x 4"	5" x 7"
1.3 megapixels (1280x1024)	5" x 7"	8" x 10"
3 megapixels (2000x1500)	8" x 10"	11" x 14"

So, if you want to be able to produce a great 3" x 4" print, you can get an older or low end camera, and with a decent printer and you will be delighted with the results. Just don’t to expect to get as good a quality when you print that same picture at 8" x 10." For that you need to invest in one of the high end cameras.

You should also keep in mind that since most computer screens are configured to show around 800 x 600 pixels, a low end camera will work just fine as far as viewing pictures on a computer screen. The high megapixel cameras are needed only when your goal is to print your photographs on paper.

The bottom line about pixels: a 1-2 megapixel camera will get you great prints up to 8" x 10"s and give you all the sharpness you will need for viewing on your computer.