So you want to buy a digital camera, and you don’t know where to begin. Well, based on my photographic experience– 25 years with film, three with digital- I shall present to you some major pitfalls along your path. This is just my opinion of course, but as Walter Cronkite said, everyone’s entitled to my opinion.

To begin with, you’re probably overwhelmed with choices when it comes to buying a digital camera. And for good reason-there are many snakeoil salesmen out there who are eager to get you to part with your gold. As I attempt to debunk some digital fairy-tales, I will keep the pseudo-technical squitter to a minimum. We’ll get all technical on another part of this site.

EXPENSE

Digital has incredible potential, but you’re going to have to spend (as of this writing) about $700 for a camera capable of taking photographs equivalent to that of a $150 SLR (single lens reflex camera) with ISO 100 film. This doesn’t include the equipment or expense to process and print your images (which, I might inject, is not something you want to do through your computer, unless you’re an affluent masochist).

THE HYPE

As a reader of Consumer Reports magazine, it pains me to say this. With regard to their digital camera ratings I have been let down by their reports, and most others’ reports as well. Here’s the problem: No matter how many megapixels, no matter how efficient the battery life, no matter how easy the images are to download, a digital camera is only as good as its lens. And sadly, many of them have less than adequate lenses. In my experience, the image quality of many digital cameras does not live up to the glowing reviews. If this sounds like a rant, your grasp of the obvious is unparalleled. I would submit to you that after purchasing such a highly-rated camera last year, I would have been happier putting $200 in a paper bag and leaving it on a bus.

THE RECOMMENDATION

There will be no mudslinging here, but suffice it to say that in the past 3 years I have seen astounding results from approximately one digital point-and-shoot camera — the Sony DSC-V1. It just leaves everything else in the dust. The only other point-and-shoot digitals I can recommend are the Panasonics with the Leica lens. The Sony uses a Zeiss. These are the top two quality lens manufacturers in the known galaxy.

ZOOM ZOOM!

Do not be suckered by a “x 5″ or “x10″ optical zoom. Without built-in image stabilization, such a feature is useless, i.e. if you expect to use the camera without a tripod. The standard x 3 zoom seems to be the current technical limit for these cameras.

DIGITAL ZOOM

This hardly needs to be said, but I’ll say it anyway for the uninitiated: a digital zoom only magnifies the captured image. If you shoot a low-resolution image and then try to magnify it digitally, quality drops. Short and sweet, garbage in, garbage out.

TERMINOLOGY

The lingo within the menus (for any kind of automated camera) is difficult to understand if you are not already familiar with using a manual 35 mm SLR. Therefore, you need to familiarize yourself with at t least the handful of common terms. On another page of this site, we’ll learn about film camera settings for aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. For now, suffice it to say that you’ll need to understand what these parameters are in order to use them effectively on the digital camera. Aperture, shutter speed, and ISO settings on a digital camera are functionally equivalent to those on a film camera. Even though what those controls do in a digital camera is different from what they do in a film camera, the manufacturers continue to refer to the settings by their historical names. For instance, ISO refers to film speed, but of course digital cameras use no film. So what does ISO refer to?

ISO refers to light sensitivity. Formerly called ASA, these numbers used to denote film speed, most commonly from very “slow” low ISO films (100) to the “ultrafast” high ISO films (1600). Low ISOs for bright sun, high ISOs for indoors or other low-light situations. That’s almost interesting, right? Why bother? Well, if you shoot at a low ISO, you get a sharper, less grainy/noisy image. The trade-off with being able to shoot in low-light situations is that the image becomes less sharp, more grainy/noisy. Physical limitations of the technology, I’m afraid.

Shutter speed refers to the speed at which the shutter exposes the film or (CCD digital camera) sensor to light. Fast speed (1/500 sec.) captures motion, slow speed (1/30 sec.) blurs motion.

Aperture refers to the size of the lens diaphragm’s opening. A higher f-stop (f8) lets less light in to the film or sensor than a lower f-stop (f2.8). This affects the image’s depth of field, or the range of subject-to-lens distances that will be in focus. The higher the f-stop, the greater the depth of field.

So in summary, lets make one thing clear. All right, two things. The first is that if you’re only going to take snapshots, don’t buy a camera with lots of bells and whistles. If you’re mainly going to use a camera in the “auto? mode, there is a high likelihood that you’ll waste a lot of money on features you’ll never use. If you’re more than a snapshot photographer, you probably won’t be happy with a digital point-and-shoot. Why? Because of three things: light sensitivity, focus, and aperture setting. Digital point-and-shoots are notoriously bad in low-light situations. They generally don’t focus well and the aperture range is only about f4 ? f8. While you can manually adjust the aperture (f-stop), your depth of field is severely limited. Even if the camera has manual focusing, its menu-driven controls will likely make you want to introduce the camera to a wall in short order.

After being led down many digital garden paths, I’ve come to the realization that I should’ve just plunked down the grand for a digital SLR at the beginning. They say there’s no such thing as a bad experience, just experience. The upshot? If you go digital, the camera for the advanced amateur and beyond is the SLR.