Beyond Megapixels: Picking a Compact Digital Camera
It's never been easier to find a well-built and relatively inexpensive compact digital camera. Nor has it ever been harder to pick the right one. Blame it on the megapixel.
Advertisements almost always center on how many megapixels a camera company has managed to shove onto the tiny sensor that captures the images we later print or ricochet around the Web to family and friends. But while that number was a somewhat important gauge of image quality at larger print sizes a few years ago, the megapixel arms race has now gotten severely out of hand.
Although it still pays to buy more megapixels in a single lens reflex camera, "more than ever before, the increase in the number of pixels in compact digital cameras is about marketing more than image quality, and the current crop of 10-megapixel cameras clearly demonstrate that," says Rob Galbraith, a photographer and digital consultant. "It's likely that a camera with 7 to 8 megapixels will deliver cleaner, clearer pictures at the moment."
This is because compact cameras use much smaller image sensors than digital SLRs to catch the light that comes through the lens. The problem is that manufacturers have excelled at squeezing ever more pixels (the thousands of tiny dots of "grain" that make up the image) onto these sensors. But they generally haven't done this by increasing the size of the sensor used in the camera. So they've done little to help increase the camera's ability to capture and read the light. The result is that buying a camera with more pixels these days often means just paying more for a "noisier" image that captures less detail than a similar counterpart with fewer megapixels.
Since a camera producing an image of 5 or 6 megapixels is more than enough for most applications, there's generally no reason to make the trade-off. But if a consumer wants to buy a camera with more megapixels, looking at how the camera captures and interprets the image becomes even more important. Says Gary Knight, an award-winning documentary photographer: "It is not the megapixels— it is the way they are rendered and the quality of the lens" that matter most these days.
So, what should consumers focus on?
A good, wide-angle lens. Nearly all professional photographers, like Knight, put the quality of the lens high on the list. Many say they're always on the lookout for compact cameras that use high-quality wide-angle lenses.
Thomas Dallal, a former professional photojournalist who now practices law, noted that he shopped around for a pocket camera a few months ago and settled on a Canon Powershot SD800 mainly because it was "the only good image-quality portable with a 28mm-equivalent f2.8 lens on the wide end."
Wide angle can be important for most consumers because it is the only way to generally get everyone in the picture at a family function. "Lots of typical 'mom photos' are at holidays with plenty of people in the room," explains Chip East, a photographer who mainly shoots for Reuters. "If the lens isn't wide enough, you end up cropping crazy Uncle Larry out of the frame and apologizing for it when you see him next Christmas."
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.