Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Buying A Camera And Understanding Zoom

At one time photography was a hobby limited to those with bottomless pockets and a keen understanding of the mathematics of light, focal distances and other confusing terms and phrases. Pioneers such as George Eastman (of Kodak fame) introduced many inventions that brought photography to the masses bringing down the costs and simplifying the processes. With the appearance of the instant camera we saw the removal of the need to wait for long periods of time before we saw the results of our snaps. Today the film camera has been replaced by the digital camera and it is no longer necessary to even print our photo's but have these advances made photography easier to understand?

If you have been investigating buying a digital camera you will be aware of the multitude of camera manufacturers out there today. Well known camera producers, such as Nikon and Canon now compete against companies usually associated with other electronic items and a huge number of small companies producing digital cameras a knock down prices. Which company do you choose and is that digital camera bargain such a deal after all or are you paying far too much for old technology repackaged?

Buying a digital camera can be confusing and there are a few things you should become familiar with before proceeding. The word megapixel will be recognized by many but not so many may recognize the word interpolation. If a camera uses interpolation another camera with the same amount of megapixels without interpolation will be superior. Interpolation is a digital method of increasing the megapixel size of a photo so that a 5mp photo will be the same as one taken using, say, an 8mp camera.

Another term which can confuse some is zoom. Basically there are two types of zoom, digital and optical and understanding them will help you pick up a digital camera bargain.

You will often see an impressive figure for digital zoom quoted on digital camera packaging but in actual fact you would be better off ignoring it. The reason for this is that digital zoom takes your photo and cuts it down in size (to the area you have zoomed into) and then simply enlarges this part. Of course the more you zoom in the more the photo degrades.

On the other hand, optical zoom, is something of importance. Optical zoom does not have an effect on the quality of your photo. Therefore you can zoom in and your image will still be as good quality as before. The greater the optical zoom the better the camera. However not all optical zoom is equal as the quality of the lens can vary between cameras.

The quality of the lens is one of the most important factors to consider when buying a digital cameral. Those tiny cameras for a $100 are not going to produce photo's of the same quality of those taken with a camera where the lens alone can cost several thousand dollars. Generally the higher the price of the lens the better the quality of the resulting image.

Knowing how you will be using your camera is incredibly important when deciding what to buy. If you will be taking your camera everywhere with you taking snaps wherever you can, mainly of friends and the likes, then a simple compact digital camera will be the best buy for you. In such cases the buying of an expensive DSLR with a lens with huge optical zoom would simply be a waste of money.

The world of the DSLR camera is huge, far too complicated to cover here in one article. Many people are buying them for home use now but they are usually only used by professional photographers.

I take many photos and actually use a Canon PowerShot A480 and a DSLR with a selection of lenses. The A480 has an optical zoom of 3.3x which is great for most situations. Before you make a final decision on which camera to purchase take the time to read reviews and compare specs. It took me a couple of weeks for me to decide on the A480 and since I bought it I have seen it top of many comparisons.


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Get all the information and photos:: http://coringa.info/technology-and-gadgets/buying-a-camera-and-understanding-zoom

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