So after a recent holiday in Los Angeles and Las Vegas I finally convinced my better half to invest in a compact digital camera. Up until now she has been happy to use disposable cameras which in my opinion have had their day. Her disappointment upon discovering that a number of the photos had not come out as hoped further convinced her that it was finally time to go digital. Now I myself have had a digital compact for some time but it had been a while since I invested any serious time looking at the latest and greatest features offered - and boy was I impressed.

Firstly and probably one of the first things a number of you look for when considering a digital camera is the all important megapixel number. I was amazed to find cameras such as the Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-W200 boasting a very impressive 12.1MP or the Canon Digital Ixus 960, again capable of 12.1Mp. At this point however I would like to give a warning about being too focused on that magic megapixel number. A general mistake a lot of people make is that the better the megapixel number the better the image is going to be. Now in principle this is of course correct but given that a number of you will only be interested in uploading these to a website such as Flickr or printing them at 6×4 format the difference beween a 12.1MP camera and a 7MP camera will be extremely hard to tell. Of course if you are planning on printing much larger format photos then you may want to pay a little closer attention to the megapixel offering.

So apart from megapixels what other features do some of these compact cameras offer. Well when I started to look under the hood I was amazed at some of the features starting to appear such as 10x optical zoom on the Panasonic DMC-TZ3EB, or the exposure controls on the Sony Cyber Shot DCS-T200 such as adjustable ISO, white balance and multiple light metering options - something that up until recently was only available on more expensive Digitial SLR cameras.

And of course the really nice thing to report is that you can get all of these features in a very nice looking camera for under £200, fantastic !

Oh and don’t forget you will probably want to get yourself a case for you camera along with a memory card, again with falling prices something you can pickup very cheap. Oh and finally there are a number of websites out there such as Photobox which offer a simple to use service for printing your digital images so you can present them in an album or frame as you would with your normal photos from a non-digital camera.

Posted on November 8th, 2007 by nigel