good digital camera?

[zingo1327]

My 12 years old digital camera is showing it's age.Can you recommend a good reasonable priced 16mp digital camera, mainly for clear A3 size portraits. I was talking to a guy and he said 16mp and something about RAW.

[VHG]

>>>and he said 16mp and something about RAW.

Dont get hung up on megapixels. A 16mp camera with a poor lens will take worse pictures than an 8mp camera with a good lens.

And most cameras take pictures and save them a jpegs, but good cameras can save them in RAW format (or JPEG AND RAW).

Jpegs are basically a compressed format where some processing has gone on in the camera to make the file smaller.

RAW is a full pixel by pixel saving of the image with no post processing done. Professional photographers often save their pictures in RAW.

However RAW files are HUGE, and it can take a long time for a camera to save a RAW file (due to the size).

[zingo1327]

thanks for that.When you say "huge" how many photos could I save on what is classed as fair sized thingmy card.
As you may gather I'm not au fait with technology terms.

[VHG]

I dont use RAW, but this wikipedia article says they can be 2 to 6 times larger than jpegs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_image_format

Also note that each camera company has its own version of RAW so taking pictures in RAW can cause extra problems.

To be honest, unless you are going to take professional portraits then you may want to forget about raw.

But if you ARE going to take professional portraits then you may be better with a "good" camera like an SLR or a larger format camera.

But now you are geting out my league so I will leave for others to answer.

[Answerprancer]

I ONLY use raw because going out and taking pics on a digital camera then post-processing is the equivalent of taking old analogue film into a darkroom and completing the job IMO.
JPEG is ok for quick results where you 'got it right' in the camera, but if you want to be able to correct white balance, under/over exposure etc, then you have to go raw.
To answer your question, if I were you, I'd go for something like the Canon EOS 550D. The 550D is a very popular "entry level" DSLR and has 18MP, you can get one S/H for around £400. The lens is the important bit though, if you want to make good portraits, you will have to lash out on a decent lens like Canon's 50mm 1.4, or the cheapy nasty (but optically fairly good) 50mm 1.8, if budget was an issue.
I back up what VHG says about getting hung up on megapixels except when you need to enlarge a print.

[Answerprancer]

...I forgot to say, when I have finished diddling around with my raw images, I usually save them as JPEG.

[Answerprancer]

...btw "raw" is not an acronym, it literally means raw (as in unprocessed).