Cameras

So ya wanna go out and buy the camera and get started on your newly found obsession. You head to the camera department and suddenly there's hundreds of camera's and options. Where do you even start? Well I don't know either, so I asked my wife over lunch today. The first two options she talked about were megapixels and zoom. Mega what? Basically the mega pixels decide how clear your picture will be and also how large a picture you can print without losing quality. With low megapixels say around 5 you can print out a decent 3x5 pic, but any bigger you start seeing little squares in the picture. So we go to a 10mp you can print bigger pictures and still have quality. Course more megapixel, more money.
Now when you look at the zoom it will say something like 2X optical zoom or 10X optical zoom. Basically its just like binoculars, the higher the number the closer you can zoom in on the subject. Optical means the lens actually zooms in and out of the camera and thats a good thing. Now some camera's do come with a digital zoom, which more or less means its magnifying the picture, this isn't as good as optical because its taking the picture and blowing it up instead of getting closer. This means that when it comes time to print the pic it will have already been blown up once and have less quality, especially noticable if you try to make the picture even bigger.
Wow! Who knew all that could make a difference, I'm used to just point and click, then wait for the polaroid to develop.

Steve