Looking For Advice and Info About Digital Cameras

Hi All!

I am looking to buy a digital camera but I know very little about them. What I'm looking for is something high quaility enough to blow up pictures to hang on walls. I want to spend around $250 - $300. I appreciate any advice I may get!

Thanks!

-SciFi

SciFi,

I am sure that there are people on here that can give very specific info regarding this, but I will break it down to a few key features that you must have.

1. Do you want a compact shooter, or a Single Lens Reflex (SLR)
shooter is more basic in functionality, kinda point and click. An SLR is going to be much more professional in nature and likely have significantly more features.

2. Mega-Pixels- the more you have the bigger you can stretch it without distortion of the image.

3. Zoom- dont be deceived by digital zoom, if you have 2 cameras and both have 4x zoom, one with digital the other with optical, take the optical zoom.

Digital zoom stores the picture at its highest res. then stretches it internally

Optical is a true zoom into your target.

hope that helps.

One other important feature if you can get it all in a good price- Optical Image Stabilization, in my opinion a must have.

a good one I found on circuit city.com

http://www.circuitcity.com/ssm/Canon-PowerShot-SX100-IS-8-Megapixel-Digital-Camera-Black-SX100IS/sem/rpsm/oid/192194/catOid/-16941/rpem/ccd/productDetail.dohttp://www.circuitcity.com/ssm/Canon-PowerShot-SX100-IS-8-Megapixel-Digital-Camera-Black-SX100IS/sem/rpsm/oid/192194/catOid/-16941/rpem/ccd/productDetail.do

Thanks! That answers some questions! I'm gonna keep researching what's out there; but, that's a big help right there!

-SciFi

I bought this camera right around Christmas time:

link

Thus far I've been really pleased with it. We took it to Israel, and it took some great pictures. It has a good "panorama" feature that is kinda fun too. The 12x optical zoom is pretty cool.

The bad: it burns through batteries like crazy. You get a lithium battery with it, which lasts a while, but the regular AAs just don't last long in that thing. I guess it's the price you pay.

Honestly, other than that, I really don't have any complaints. You would probably want to test it out to see if it could blow up a picture onto the wall - I haven't tried that out.

Wish I could offer more advice than this, but I work with Illustrator and Photoshop designing things every day and I know that the bigger you want the photo to be, the more megapixels you need.

For good print quality, you want a resolution of at least 300 dpi, though 200 would probably work for a poster size, since you won't be looking at it from six inches away.

Anyway, here's a decent breakdown for that:

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/digital-camera-pixel.htm

(Scroll down until you see the category MEGAPIXELS AND MAXIMUM PRINT SIZE.)

There are some other ways you can blow up a digital photo, but not without losing some image quality. And that may OK... it really depends on what you need it for. But if you do indeed want a true, non-distorted image in a big size, you need some major megapixels.

A couple other things to think about-

a viewfinder.- I notice that newer cameras don't have them, but I found that even the brightest LCD display is useless in full sun. A viewfinder gives you at least a chance of framing the picture correctly. I ended up taping a short straw to my camera on one excursion as a substitute.

video at large resolution, and the ability to edit frames on the fly.- Action shots are almost impossible to capture with most digital cameras because of the shutter delay most of them have. It's much easier to take a short video and edit out the perfect frame, then discard the video. Some cameras allow you to do this right in the field. With the new large storage SD cards, you could even wait until you get home. I took a whole vacation's worth of photos on one SD card, and I took a lot of photos at 8.1 megapixel resolution. Memory isn't the issue it used to be, especially if you take along a multi-gig thumb drive. You can always borrow a PC machine to do the transfers.

I found that Museum (low light, no flash, OIS), Sport (OIS that focuses on the moving object), and panorama ( links several pictures in software on board) were also great fun. There are free software packages that will do panorama with a bunch of overlapping pictures if the camera you like doesn't have that feature, however.

Also, there is no such thing as too much zoom. Candid shots are easier and subjects stay more relaxed from a distance.