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June 19, 2006 What was predicted and inevitable has come to pass – film cameras are going the way of the Dodo. Kodak doesn't make film anymore, the digital age of photography has arrived. You can walk into most any drug store or super-store and make high quality prints for a fraction of the cost of developing film. In my area, there is a store that will give you pictures as low as 19 cents per photo. They charge you a little more if you want them within an hour, and yet a little more if you want them immediately. To get them within minutes, you must spend a mind boggling 34 cents per picture. Mind bogglingly cheap, in other words. What you get are pictures that are the same standard shape and have the same feel as developed film – not required, but important as frames and photo-albums and such are designed with these types of prints in mind. Be careful purchasing home printers with the intent of photo-printing. Many normal printers require extra expensive cartridges and special paper to achieve the same quality. While printers these days can run as low as $40 at Wal-Mart, good photo paper can be as much as dollar per sheet and ink as much as $40 per cartridge. Generally, the more expensive the printer is up front, the cheaper it will be to run. Always inquire about the cost per sheet – if this value is lower than 40 cents per print, the convenience may be worth the money, depending on how many pictures one prints. There are photo-printers which are cost compatible with store-prints, but they often won't work with ordinary paper sizes, so you must factor in the cost of having two printers. In any case, it's actually easier to choose a digital camera. There are three basic items which are important, the rest are frosting: megapixels, optical zoom and storage. The number of megapixels determines, more than anything else, the quality of the photos. I have an old model with 2.1 MP which still makes very nice quality prints even compared with today's standards. However, with technology advancing as it does, avoid any camera with less than 3MP. Stay clear of toys which take pictures at 640x480 resolutions and such – some advertise that they require no storage cards and can take hundreds of pictures. They can indeed take hundreds of very low quality pictures. Those resolutions were considered high quality in the days when PCs ran at 33Mhz. If that doesn't mean anything to you then ignore it and use this rule: if a camera doesn't describe its quality in terms of megapixels, steer clear. Put another way, a webcam can often take better pictures. Simply put, the more megapixels, the more detail you can capture. Optical zoom is critical. Often, you will find cameras seemingly cheaper then their peers while having more megapixels. Take a closer look – one common reason is that they lack optical zoom features. Optical zoom involves glass lenses and motors. When you zoom in on a mountain, for example, you may see a mountain goat if you use an optical zoom and zoom in close enough. When you use a digital zoom, software makes the mountain appear bigger – this is no different than importing your photo into Photoshop and enlarging it. In other words, optical zoom gives you true enlargement with new data. You can digital zoom that mountain to your heart's content, you will never see that goat. Ignore the digital zoom spec of any camera and never ever use this feature. Photoshop will almost always enlarge a picture better than the camera software. If you want to see digital zoom in action, download a picture of a mountain, and then enlarge it. Manufacturers will often trump a high digital zoom factor as a selling point – ignore it. Next to megapixels, optical zoom is the feature which raises the cost of the camera the most. Stay clear of any camera which has lower than 3X optical zoom. If you don't, you will find yourself backing up and squeezing into corners to fit everyone into the frame at Christmas and other silliness. Finally, we come to storage. Many cameras include some internal storage – usually not much more than to save a few pictures at high quality. You will almost always want to take your pictures at the camera's highest quality setting – if not, why bother with a good camera? One can safely ignore the internal storage – memory cards are where virtually all pictures are stored and memory cards are what you will remove to hand to the clerk at the store or insert into the photo-kiosks. There are many competing memory card standards, but two are prominent. Pick cameras which use one of these two types: CompactFlash (CF) and SecureDigital (SD). Each has advantages and disadvantages but the costs are, at the moment, virtually identical so price isn't an issue. Note that some new formats are merely variations on older formats – these are also OK – a miniSD card will fit into any standard SD slot with an adapter, which is often included, for example. SD cards are smaller and lighter than CF cards – they truly are tiny, it amazes me to no end that they now have these cards in 2 gigabyte and up flavors! These are also widely used in PDAs due to their small and light form, so your SD card will get wide usage. CF is an older format and is often preferred in really-high end cameras, though by no means exclusively. CF cards are bigger and heavier, but they are still incredibly small – about as big as a matchbox and much thinner. My PDA can also take CF cards, but I must use a powered adapter with its own battery which the PDA plugs into. Some newer PDAs can take both cards. The advantage of CF is that the cards are pin for pin compatible with PC-card slots, the slots which laptops use for expansion. A simple, non-electronic extension adapter allows you to insert your CF card into a laptop directly, without using a USB cable or reader. Speed is the big advantage here – your pictures will transfer much faster, at or exceeding hard drive speeds. As a matter of fact, circuitry on the CF card makes it appear to the laptop as a hard drive device. That adapter for my PDA is a also full expansion slot, capable of taking WiFi and other adapters much like a laptop. The reverse is not true, however - not all CF slots in devices function as general purpose expansion bays. Micro hard drives, which are not actually flash ram devices but genuine hard drives complete with platters and motors and moving parts, also use the CF form-factor, meaning you could insert a tiny 12 gigabyte drive into your PDA or camera! This is why the higher end cameras prefer CF - this medium currently allows for the most flexible storage options. In general, if you already have a household device which uses CF or if you have a laptop, consider CF. If not, lean towards SD. The price and storage (apart from the micro hard drives) are identical, but SD cards are smaller meaning your camera may be a bit lighter and less bulky. If the camera doesn't use memory card storage or if it uses one of the more exotic formats, steer clear. The other formats are currently more expensive and work in fewer devices. Once you have a camera with a good MP value (at least 3) and good optical zoom (at least 3X) and a good storage medium (CF or SD), you can be assured high quality pictures which you can work with anywhere; now you may compare frosting-features. These include the ability to record video snippets and sometimes record audio with the picture or video, anti-shake mechanisms and software, TV interfaces, etc. My old camera came with a video cable allowing me to hook the camera directly up the TV and view the photos or run a slide show – a nice frosting feature. Don't be fooled by cameras with many frosting-features, but low MP or optical zoom values – it is pictures you want to take. A really good stereo system will not turn a Ford Pinto into Cadillac, after all. If you are a professional photographer, you may be interested in typical camera specs, aperture sizes and so forth, but for shooting your kids, family events and vacations, you can't go wrong with this basic information. A nice digital camera will automatically adjust itself and take very good pictures. In the hands of an expert, even the cheapest 35mm camera will still top all but the most expensive digital cameras, but for the rest of us, taking pictures has never been easier. ------------ About the author Frederick Smith: I enjoy writing about the positive virtues of humanism - humanists are the good guys. I now have a blog that I will start to increasingly maintain and update. Here is the link: fredsuberview.blogspot.com/ About my personal background and life: I was born, I got some education, worked, ate, and had some kids. It seems I like to write � something that was unknown to me until relatively recently...How's that for detail? ;) Hate mail is welcome unless you are from the Army Of God. Please! It's not that I mind seeing pictures of aborted fetuses in my inbox, but once you've seen one you've pretty much seen them all... Email: dahlek65@gmail.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. 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