Digital cameras are a popular item, and are of particular interest to:

• Web publishers,
• newspapers and magazines,
• businesses with catalogues,
• graphic designers,
• automobile and real estate business

-- wherever a large number of photos need to be taken, and rendered quickly into electronic format. - Go to Camera Listings at CanadaRAM.com-

CanadaRAM has Compact Flash, Secure Digital, XD PictureCard, MemoryStick, SmartMedia and other memory cards. Click here to check prices..

Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH) AA batteries and chargers available: Batteries $ 7.00 each, Charger $ 39.99 + taxes and shipping..

Considerations:

• Resolution: These days, cameras that shoot at 640 x 480 resolution are not suitable for much more than toys, and have image-quality limitations even for web output. The minimum resolution is 2 megapixels (1024 x 768 and higher. If your work is going to be used in colour print publications, especially at large size, then go for the highest possible resolution.
• Price: Your target price for a good camera should be CAN $400 to $1,200 - the current state of the art means that you have to sacrifice too much quality if you try to go under CAN $400.
• Value for money: Keep in mind before spending your money on a digital that a $ 150 auto-focus snapshot film camera will still give you better picture quality than any of these digital cameras, plus you can buy and develop more than 50 rolls of film for the difference in price. The drawback is that after developing, you will have to get this film scanned in order to use it electronically. The traditional time delay for developing and the cost of scanning attracts people to digital cameras, which give virtually instant results.
• Focus: Watch out for fixed-focus cameras - "focus free" is not the same as auto-focus. With a fixed focus lens, you will never get the sharpness and control over depth of field that you are going to want. Auto-focus mechanisms are pretty good, and cover most bases for you. The best choice is an auto-focus that can be switched to manual focus when you want to do close-ups, shoot through a window or achieve special effects. In this chart, fixed focus cameras have been penalized.
• Zoom: Another great lie is "Digital Zoom". All digital zoom means is that the camera will cut off the outside of the picture and just give you the middle pixels inflated to larger size - you DO NOT get any extra pixels of resolution, and the resulting picture will be fuzzier than it has to be. You could do as well in your photo editing software. Much more useful is an optical zoom lens, which allows you to magnify the image so that your desired shot takes advantage of all the pixels in the camera's sensor. Ignore digital zoom - optical zoom is all that counts.
• Focus vs. zoom vs. price: Here is where we have the tradeoff - there are no inexpensive cameras in this survey that offer optical zoom and auto or auto+manual focus. How do you choose if you don't have $ 1,200 to spend?
  • If you will be doing a lot of close up work, abandon the zoom and choose an auto or auto+manual focus model. Check the specs for the minimum distance in "Macro" mode.
  • If you know that all of your photos will be outdoor, longer-range shots, then choose a model with optical zoom, because fixed-focus cameras work acceptably well for distances beyond 30 feet, and the zoom will be more useful to you.
• Storage: As you shoot photos, they have to be stored in the camera. The type of storage the camera uses affects the cost and the speed at which you can take sequential shots.
  • Avoid cameras with "built-in" memory and no memory card slot
  • Different varieties of memory card are
    • Compact Flash
    • SmartMedia
    • SecureDigital / Multimedia Card
    • Fuji XD PictureCard
    • Sony MemoryStick, MemoryStick Pro and MemoryStick Duo

  The memory cards are not interchangeable. A few cameras are built to take more than one type of card, but generally you will be wedded to the type of card your camera works with.

  • Floppy disk - a few older models of Sony Mavica cameras use floppies.
  • PCMCIA (PC Card) memory and miniature hard disks - expensive, generally found only on professional cameras which need to store ultra-high resolution files.
    
• Uploading: once you've made your shots, the data has to be transferred to your computer. Although this can be done by a USB cable (if your machine is too old to have USB, but has a PCI bus, you can buy a USB adaptor card for about $40) and with either proprietary software that comes with the camera or third party software like Apple's iPhoto.
  
  More convenient is to invest $18 - $90 in a memory card reader for your computer. These connect to the USB port.
  
  Cameras can take from 5 to 20 minutes to upload the photos via a cable. This is the not-so-fun part of digital photography.
• Batteries: Cameras eat batteries for breakfast. If your camera takes AA batteries, plan on buying rechargeables, and plug the camera into the AC Adapter whenever you are uploading files to your computer (many manufacturers charge extra for either the AC adaptor, battery charger, or both). Turn off the camera's LCD viewing screen whenever you can to conserve power.
  
  The models with a regular optical viewfinder can extend battery life because you can shoot longer-range shots with the viewfinder and leave the LCD screen turned off (but like snapshot cameras, the parallax problem makes it difficult to frame close ups through the viewfinder. Here, an LCD panel is a distinct advantage because it will show you exactly what you're going to get in the frame).
  
  Price alert: Some cameras don't come with rechargeable batteries, and some make you pay extra for the AC adapter. Among battery choices, Nickel Cadmium (NiCad) batteries are average, Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH) batteries are better, Rechargeable Lithium-Ion batteries are best. Don't confuse these lithium-ion rechargeables with lithium batteries, which are expensive, single use batteries that hold several times the charge of an alkaline cell.

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