Digital cameras

[Allen Crisp]

What sort of features should I look out for when looking to buy (like the picture resolution, storage capacity)? Anyone care to recommend a model from personal experience?

[lisaj]

Resolution (I'm assuming from your question that you're not a professional or prosumer) of around 4.0 megapixels should suffice. Greater than this is useful, but only if you're actually going to be printing bigger than A4, or you really know what you're doing. Optical Zoom is of paramount importance if you want flexibility, and aim for as high as you can get. Make sure you don't get digital zoom since it's not 'real zoom', and generally poorly executed. Battery life: get as good as you can, then buy a spare battery. Digital cameras (except digital SLRs) eat battery like there's no tomorrow. Finally, memory is generally expandable but certain types are either less expansive (SmartMedia for example), or slower (CompactFlash) - Speed is unlikely to bother you, but a 1Gb card on a 4.0MP camera will hold 600 odd photos: useful if you don't want to be carting loads of memory cards around. However, it's fairly useless if your camera only supports a max. size of 128Mb... more questions, just ask again...

[lisaj]

Oh, and visit www.dpreview.com