Your Guide to Digital Cameras
Some people have asked us to go right back to basics and explain what all the different features are that are available on today’s modern digital compacts. So we put together a simple guide describing the key terms that are used.
These are the little dots that make up your picture. If you want to print at A4 to A3 then 12 megapixels should be fine. Too many though and you risk distorting the picture with noise (that means loads of grainy dots). See our other article for more detail – What are megapixels?
Screen size
This is commonly quoted in inches. 2.5 to 3 inches will give you enough real estate around the back to be able to zoom in and have a good old look at what is going on. The screens are normally LCDs and some of the newer cameras offer touchscreen technology. It’s always a good idea to get some plastic film protector as this is the first place to collect bad scratches.
Digital zoom
This is not the same as optical zoom. All this does is enlarge the image, you’re not getting any closer to the actual thing you’re snapping and lose megapixels in the final image.
Optical zoom
This relies on the cameras optical system to get closer in to the action so you get to keep those megapixels for a higher quality image. This is definitely better than digital zoom.
Scene Recognition
This feature is quite impressive these days. Shooting sports for instance, normally requires a fast shutter speed to freeze the action. Landscapes, however, prefer a narrow aperture for better depth of field. Don’t worry too much about these terms yet as scene recognition sorts all this out for you.
Face detection
Many cameras will detect when you are taking pictures of people and will focus in on their faces automatically rather than be distracted by distant objects in the picture frame.
Wide angle lens
This is great for shooting in closed in space as the whole point of a wide angle is to get a really wide field of view. Great for taking pictures in cities, it can also be used creatively for landscapes to get good close up foreground details.
HD
These cameras can reproduce 720 lines on the screen. That’s High Definition, that is. The next step is …
Full HD 1080p
Surprisingly these can reproduce 1080 lines on the screen. The p stands for ‘progressive’ and refers to the way the screen is scanned.
So there you have it. We’ll go into a little more detail on some of these terms in another article.
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