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These days, digital cameras are available in a wide range of sizes and styles, and they boast a ton of handy features. Whether you're shopping for your first digital camera, or your fifth, you may have a hard time deciding which functions will really make a difference for you, and which are just nice perks that won't get used day-to-day. In this article, we'll walk you through the features that matter most, and cover a few other factors that you may want to consider as well. You can read straight through, or use this list to jump to key topics:
Megapixels
Instead of film, a digital camera has an imaging sensor consisting of millions of pixels. To record an image, each pixel builds up a tiny charge of electricity in response to the light it "sees." A megapixel is the term used for a million pixels — and the more megapixels an imaging sensor has, the higher the camera's potential resolution.
Now, once upon a time, megapixels were the big differentiator in cameras — because if you didn't have enough megapixels, you couldn't get a high enough resolution for good photo prints. Fortunately, most new cameras today offer 6 megapixels or more — ample resolution for small and larger print sizes, including 8" x 10" photos.
| Type of image | Minimum resolution needed | Number of megapixels needed |
|---|---|---|
| Web image | 640 x 480 | 1-megapixel cameras* & up |
| 4" x 6" print | 2048 x 1536 | 3-megapixel cameras* & up |
| 8" x 10" | 3072 x 2048 | 6-megapixel cameras & up |
| 16" x 20" | 3264 x 2448 | 8-megapixel cameras & up |
So if most cameras can deliver the print sizes you need, how do you decide between, say, a camera with 8 megapixels and a camera with 10 megapixels? You may not need to. The difference in resolution between their photos can be difficult to detect, unless you're a pro who looks for the tiniest details, or you plan to make really enormous prints.
With that in mind, you may want to instead consider your photography habits and decide what other camera features are particularly important to you. Do you want extra zoom capability to capture close-ups of your child across the baseball field or wildlife in a distant tree? Are you mainly interested in automatic functions, or do you want to experiment with camera settings on your own? Are you looking for an ultra-slim model that you can easily carry everywhere? We'll discuss all these features later in this article.
Sensor size
It may come as a surprise, but you can sometimes get better photos from, say, a 6-megapixel imaging sensor than an 8-megapixel sensor. When does this happen? When the 6-megapixel sensor is physically larger than the 8-megapixel sensor. That's because a bigger sensor can gather more information about the scene in front of it.
You see, the bigger the chip, the bigger each light-receiving section, or pixel, is, and the more data the sensor can save about what it "saw." That additional information makes for photos with better "dynamic range" — that is, more realistic highlights and more detailed shadows.
This doesn't mean that you should give up on all other features in favor of a larger sensor size. For one thing, most people won't notice a major difference in dynamic range with small size increases from one sensor to another. And many cameras use supplementary technology to optimize dynamic range, giving you greater contrast and detail in shadowy and bright areas of your photos. As with larger megapixel counts, sensor size is mainly important to demanding hobbyist photographers, who will be making larger prints and shooting uncompressed photos. It's important to remember that lens quality and many other factors also affect your photos. Understanding the role sensor size plays can sometimes help you understand price differences among different cameras. You can decide whether the extra cost is worth it to you.
