It is time to buy a digital camera but you just don’t know what to buy…
This article is meant to point you in the right direction and will touch a few difference between different types of camera’s like point and shoot vs DSLR.
Are you a person that is not that much into photography and just want a small camera to take an occasional photo or two? That being the case I would suggest you go for a point and shoot camera.
What is a point and shoot camera? A point and shoot camera is a compact camera with most features on automatic.
One difference between a Digital single lens reflect (DSLR) camera and a point and shoot is that a DSLR have only one lens which projects the light (image)
onto a mirror and into the viewfinder where a PAS camera have an additional lens meaning the image you see on the viewfinder or LCD screen is not the one projected on the camera CCD.
With a DSLR you can adjust many more settings , change lenses (add a super zoom lens for example) or a macro lens for extreme close-ups, add additional flash to bounch light of ceilings etc. You can Take photo’s in RAW (uncompressed, unedited version in short) and overall a DSLR photo quality is far better than a point of shoot with 100′s of settings that can be changed for better photo quality.
A DSLR is however much more bulky and cost a lot more than a point and shoot camera. So if you don’t consider yourself a photographer but want to take an occasional vacation or family photo go for a point or shoot. If you want to take really awesome photo’s and make use of advanced photo techniques (star trails for example) go for a DSLR camera.
Brands – choose whatever brand you like that suits your budget. I don’t want to bad mouth any brands here so I am just going to say Canon and Nikon are the market leaders. Look for things like mega pixels (12 mp for example will give you good quality and allow for big photo prints). Optical zoom is also important never look at or use digital zoom as it reduces photo quality to give you digital zoom where optical zoom keeps best quality)
In other words a 3x optical zoom and 5 x digital zoom camera is better than a 2x optical zoom and 9x digital zoom camera.
Good luck with your photo’s!!!
This article was written by Marius Fourie Owner of http://www.mfphoto.co.za
