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There are countless digital compact cameras out there, many of which look much the same and offer much the same functionality. So which one is right for you? That depends on what you plan to use it for and, of course, your budget. There are the most visible criteria, like the number of "megapixels", zoom range and what type of memory cards they use. Apart from these factors you need to think about, there are also more subtle distinguishing features that can greatly affect your choice. In this article I will cover as many as I can think of.

Expectations

Before you rush out to the stores and spend a lot of money on it, you must decide what you want to get out of a digital camera. Buying a digital and expecting your photos to come out like they do in the magazine advertisements is like taking a roll of film to your minilab and believing your pictures will be as good as the ones on display, taken by professionals on professional equipment and certainly not developed at the 2 minute photo service in your local drugstore.

Digital has come of age and can certainly compete with 35mm film, especially in the compact camera market. But without knowledge of how to use a camera, and Photoshop, you will not achieve better or more consistent results. One major plus is the LCD screen on the back of the camera, letting you see you have taken a horrible picture and giving you an opportunity to try again, all without the costs of extra film and developing. But to get that extra quality, you will need to know and understand about resolution, white balance, levels/curves, cropping, unsharp mask and many other things. They are not that hard to get to grips with enough to make your digital photos look much better, but you will need to invest some time in learning them. I plan to explain all these things in future articles, but for now, there are many books out there to help you out.

All that said, if you are happy with the quality of your 35mm compact and developing and printing at the local minilab but want a digital because you won't have to worry about the expense of film anymore, share your pictures with others across the globe and only print those you really want prints of, there is also no need to shy away from buying a digital camera.

Cameras know as Single Lens Reflex (SLR), with interchangeable lenses and used by professionals and discerning consumers alike, have been available in digital variants for a couple of years now and with their prices coming down fast, many consumers are tempted by them. It is not in the scope of this article to explain all their details but you should know what you are getting into before splashing out $3000 on a camera, memory cards and lenses. Many people have been disappointed by the (in April 2003) new Canon EOS 10D, the first digital SLR to come close to a (rich) consumer's price range, simply because it is too complex. It is designed as a professional tool and more than likely, if you use it as a point and shoot automatic, your results will be less than those of a camera designed for that purpose. In general, unless you have been using an SLR for years as advanced amateur or professional, if you need to read this article to learn about digital photography, you are not ready for a digital SLR. You have been warned.

There is a lot of things you can say about digital cameras, but nobody can say that they are not a lot of fun. Just being able to snap away without worrying about costs of film and see instant results is the greatest thing since the invention of photography. But please do all your friends and family a favour: just because you shoot more pictures, doesn't mean they want to see all of them so pick out the best and only show those!

Megapixels 

On most website as well as a shop's shelves, cameras are lined up by their "megapixel" count. Megapixel simply means "million picture elements", or dots that make up the image. While 35mm cameras have an aspect ratio of 3:2 (hence the 6x4" or 10x15cm prints) digital cameras generally follow computer screen aspect ratio 4:3. The number of pixels is simply the number of horizontal pixels multiplied by the vertical pixels, 1600*1200=1,920,000 pixels, which any marketing department will happily round off to 2 megapixels.

How many do you need, then? That depends on your use. If you only ever plan to put your pictures on a web page, the image from a 1.3 megapixels is about 5 times bigger than you need, if you want a decent quality 11x8" or 28x20cm print, a 4 megapixel camera is your friend. Below is a table showing the megapixels you need for which print size and which screen resolution this gives. Print sizes are given in 300 and 150PPI, or Pixels per Inch. 300 is generally regarded as the optimal resolution, but bigger prints tend to be viewed from further away and you can therefore usually get away with a lower PPI count.

At the end of the day remember the higher the megapixel the better image quality you will get from your camera. This will also ensure you can print bigger versions of the photo.

But this isn't all there is to it, manufacturers do not put their best quality CCD or CMOS censors (the light sensitive component behind the lens that records the image) and best lenses in their lower resolution cameras, so it is quite possible, even when your picture is scaled down to only 600x450 for web page use, you can tell the difference between a 4 and 1.3 megapixel camera. In most cases, however, if you buy a 2 MP camera and make 6x4 prints from it, you will generally have a quality similar to, if not surpassing, a 35mm point and shoot. And you can email these images or post them to a website.

Memory Cards

There is an ever increasing number of memory card formats available and in all honesty, for general use they don't differ that much. You may want to keep in mind that more than one person in your household has a camera or memory card equipped MP3 player and settle on one format, but other than that you should be more interested in how much the cards are to buy, and even there the price difference is decreasing fast.

SmartMedia: Ironically, the technically dumbest card is called "smart". Maybe the smart refers to its price tag; it used to be the cheapest and you will find this format on the cheapest cameras. But because of the popularity of other formats, the price advantage seems to be gone, in some places CompactFlash cards are now priced lower than SM. That is not to say it is bad, for the small images created by 1.3 and 2MP cameras, its transfer speed is adequate and there is no reason to shy away from them.

CompactFlash: One of, if not the, oldest standards around, they come in type I and type II versions. The type II cards are thicker and all microdrives are type II. Not all cameras can take both type I and Type II drives so if you intend to use a microdrive make sure your camera is compatible. CF cards the defacto standard in professional cameras because they are fast. You need this speed to transfer from the camera's internal memory to the card. You can buy them in different speeds (2x, 4x, 10x, 25x and such) and their price increases with their speed. For snapshooting, the cheap standard speeds will be fast enough, only professionals letting their cameras rip at 4 frames per second in the highest quality at the Oscars' red carpet will need a 25x speed one. Note that card speeds do not directly relate to their performance in a camera. The time required to take and store an image depends as much (probably more) on the camera than on the speed of the CF card. On high end DSLRs the fastest cards may allow images to be written 50% faster than on a slower card, but in a typical comsumer digicam you may not really see any difference. Last year Lexar introduced a WA (Write Acceleration) feature on their high end professional CF cards, which allows up to 20% faster operation when used with certain WA enabled camera bodies. The WA process requires that both the camera and the card have WA enabled firmware, so using a WA card in a non-WA body will not result in improved performance.

MicroDrive: This is an actual harddrive with moving parts the size of a CompactFlash card! While from time to time questions have been raised about their power consumption, heat generation and reliability, the bottom line seems to be that though these issues may exist,  in real life use they don't seem to cause many problems. At one time microdrives were much less expensive than equaivalent sized solid state memory but with the price of solid state memory coming down, their price-per-megabyte advantage is getting quickly wiped out, even the at the biggest size currently available (1Gb), they are only 10-20% cheaper than CompactFlash. You should also be aware that there are compatibility issues; even though they should work in any CF type II compatible camera, in reality, they don't, so check with your camera's manufacturer if they are supported.  

Memorystick:This is Sony's proprietary format. It is reliable, fast and not that much more expensive than competing standards. The only problem is that you will need new memory cards if you decide to sell your Sony camera and go with another brand; while third party manufacturers now make Memorysticks, no others make cameras that take them.

MultiMedia and SecureDigital: These cards are closely related. They are the smallest cards and both use the same case, but the SD card has more connection pins. The SecureDigital card differs from the MMC in that it offers (or tries to, anyway) digital rights management inside the card. This is a good reason to never buy any devices that use them, especially MP3 players. You can use a MultiMedia card in a device that is equipped with a SecureDigital card slot. However, you can not do the opposite; SD cards will not work in an MMC only device.

xD Picture Cards:Developed by Fuji and Olympus, xD stands for "eXtreme Digital", how original. Like MMC/SD, these cards are tiny but will support up to 8Gb of memory, though currently 256Mb is the maximum available size. Olympus says adapters will be available to use xD cards in CompactFlash equipment but I fail to see the point of that as CF cards are currently much cheaper than xD.

To answer the question of what size memory card you need, I have created the table below. These are estimates because it depends on many factors, most notably the difference in JPEG compression in different models and the content of the scene. (ie: a nice landscape is easier to compress and results in smaller files than a shot taken with flash at night.)

More information similar to what is shown above can be found at: http://www.photo.net/equipment/digital/choosing2/