Beyond Megapixels: Picking a Compact Digital Camera
Short "shutter lag." Of course, if your camera takes too long to react when you push the button, most candid shots will be lost. And if it takes eons to write the image to the flash card, you won't have any second chances. Because of that, professional photographers also try to find cameras that have very short "shutter lag" and large image buffers. That way, they can take pictures even as the camera is writing the previous shots to the flash card.
Handy size. Don't be seduced by size, Galbraith warns. Tiny cameras' portability may be enticing, but "they tend not to be much fun to use," he says. The controls are often too small to operate easily, and "the diminutive body makes them difficult to hold steady."
Shooting it RAW. Look for a digital camera that allows you to shoot images in an uncompressed format. Most compact cameras save images as compressed jpegs. But some will also let users save the images as RAW files, often referred to as a "digital negative." Although this means the card used to save the images will fill faster and the camera may take longer to write the images to the card, the RAW file will result in a higher-quality image.
RAW files also allow for much greater latitude if the exposure or color is off and must be corrected in Photoshop or other post-processing software. This is particularly true for compacts, which must work much harder to produce the same image quality as their larger brethren.
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