Purchasing a Digital Camera

You must first decide if you will carry the camera with you all the time; if this is your goal then you obviously must go with a compact; if you’re buying a camera that you will take out when you are specifically engaged in a photographic project you can choose a larger model.

When shopping for a good digital camera, the one specification that you can ignore is the number of pixels, which has almost nothing to do with image quality. A 3 MP camera will produce acceptable prints up to 8×10″ in size. The interesting question is not the number of pixels, but their quality.

Is your photo in focus? Have you captured the high contrast and vividness of a scene? Are the edges of objects rendered sharply? It is important to note that if these qualities are important to you then physically larger and more expensive cameras generally do a better job at satisfying these harder-to-quantify objectives than small and cheap cameras.