How to choose a good camera for beginners

Are you overwhelmed by the multitude of information regarding features, functions and all the technical jargon that's being thrown at you to make you buy a camera and finally after buying it, you find that the digital camera doesn't perform as well as it claims?

Fret not! This is where this guide I've pieced together will be helpful. Other than choosing a beginner's compact digital camera, also known as "point and shoots", based on looks, you can now make a more informed choice to buy a compact digital camera that performs better than the others!

So what do these terms really mean? Do you really need it? Let's go through them individually or click on the topic that interests you most to jump to it directly. If you come across a feature that's not in the list, let me know about it. I'll gladly do the legwork for you.

Face detection / Smile detection

As the name suggests detects a person's face or smile. The use is quite different however, face detection scans the image for "faces" which means even a wall poster or doll face works. This is good when you're travelling and asks a stranger to take a photo for you. You face is almost guaranteed to be in focus in the photograph. No more irritating "background sharp person blur" complains. However, this does not guarantee that you'll be smiling in the picture. This is where smile detection comes in, the photo will only be taken when you smile.

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Scene modes

This is an automated feature that allows you to select what you want to shoot. Example of useful scene modes: fireworks, sports, landscape, portrait, night, black/white,etc.. this provides the user with automated presets of the camera for the scene. However, some brands boasts a high number of shooting modes as a feature. Many of which are repetitions with slight adjustments. Too many of such presets serve only to confuse the user more than helping them. In most camera users that I've come across, they hardly use anything more than just 3 to 4 preset scene modes. Most commonly being the night, sports, portrait and black/white.

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Image Stabiliser

This has got to be everybody's favourite. There are 2 main types of image stabilisers. Optical and digital. Optical stabilisers work by moving a component in the camera, either a piece of lens or the sensor to compensate for the movement caused by your hands or the environment. Digital stabilisers work by the camera's software to predict where the object in the image is going and digitally redraws the object back to the centre. Other types of image stabilisers work by setting the camera to 'shoot faster' by either using a largest available aperture coupled with the fastest shutter speed and highest ISO usable for the current shot.

Reputable review sites do not consider digital image stabilisers and you shouldn't as well. However, ask yourself if you really need image stabilisers. Most people who own cameras with this feature turn it on all the time but find that it hardly works as good as promised and nothing beats the good old tripod when it comes to night scenes or good and proper holding techniques. This does nothing but drains battery life unnecessarily. I'm not trying to say it doesn't work at all. It does work only if you know how it works. If you use it outside it's limits (which most people do) it is as good as useless.

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Wide angle

Wide angle as the name suggests allows you to shoot wide angles. What it means it that within a confined space, your shot can cover a bigger area in your photo.

Imagine taking a group photo over dinner. You get your friends huddle together opposite the table and you find that you cannot get everyone to fit into the photo but you have no way to move behind because of space constraints. Enter wide angle. When choosing a camera with wide angle feature look for one that says "28mm" or lesser. We shall leave out the technicals of what 28mm means but usually the 28mm will come with an companying note that says "on 35mm equivalent" or similar. "35mm" referred here is the size of film back in the days where cameras capture images with film. So it became the standard measure for consumers.

28mm is known as the equivalent focal length on 35mm film. "Normal" compact cameras have focal lengths starting from 36mm (equivalent on 35mm film).

Confusing? Don't be, just remember you want to look for a camera with wide angle which means 28mm or lesser on 35mm equivalent or some might say 'film equivalent' it's basically the same. If there's no information on it, it is most likely to be 36mm (on 35mm equivalent).

Tip: If you see something like 8-24mm you're most probably looking at the camera's actual focal length, which is of little interest to most of us, what you want to know is the "35mm equivalent" focal length.

So don't be fooled if a salesman tries to tell you, "Yes, this is a wide angle, you see? 8mm-24mm"

Currently (at time of writing) Panasonic is leading the market with 25mm wide angle. It's pretty wide if you ask me.

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3x zoom, 5x zoom, etc.. (3x optical or 2x digital, etc..)

Zoom.. everyone needs some zoom, let's face it. We're lazy to walk in and out or sometimes it's not possible. You should try as much as possible to look for cameras that offers optical zoom, this involve the camera lens actually moving in and out to make the image bigger or smaller. Digital zoom on the other hand is like using a software to cut out the centre portion of the image and chucks the rest away.

A picture is made up of pixels or tiny dots, in digital zoom the camera uses software to cut out the image in the centre and the dots gets magnified. Just try this out, open any picture with your computer and zoom in, keep zooming in and you'll see the picture quality getting worse. This is because a tiny dot is now magnified and you're looking at a big dot instead of a small dot. Bottom line is, go for cameras that offer optical zoom and treat digital zoom as a bonus and not a must to have, in fact it is good to turn it off unless you know what you're going to get at the end of the day.

What about the zoom times? Like 3 times (3X), 5 times (5X) or even 10 times (10x) zoom?

Remember the focal length we discussed about in wide angle? The amount of zoom is just the focal length multiplied by this number. So a normal camera (assuming 36mm on film equivalent) with 3X zoom means 36mm X 3 = 108mm (again, on 36mm equivalent). On wide angles, 28 X 3 = 84mm.

This means that a 3X zoom on a wide angle is not the same as a 3X zoom on a 'normal' camera. Makes sense? So how do you make sense of this data?

Simply put it 3X zoom will give you approximately 3 times larger image size (height or width-wise) from the widest angle or most zoomed out setting.

See the example of a 3X zoom camera below,

The image starts out in the middle of the screen covering about 1/3 the width or height of the screen. When the camera zooms in, it covers almost the whole of the screen. Although this is not exactly the really most scientific nor accurate way to explain, because the as zoom numbers go up it deviates from the guide (you actually get less) but it is safe to use it as an estimate what the zoom means. So a 10X zoom will make the bears in the image really up close and personal. If you looked close enough, the bears started out with the ears touching the lines but the fully zoomed in picture shows that the ears a still a little away from the edge, the image enlarged about 2.7x in reality.

To those who knows about focal lengths and what it means, the 3X, 5X or even 10X zoom means nothing, really! It is just a division of the longest focal length by the shortest. This is a consumer term coined up to let buyers have a visualisation of how much the camera can zoom instead of providing technical info like 36-108mm camera, saying a 3X zoom camera is so much easier to understand.

Tip: Go only for optical zoom and treat digital zoom as a bonus not a must have.

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High-tech image processor name

Every brand wants to differentiate itself from others, so on top of individual brands and selling point, they have started to give names to the little CPU they use inside the camera to process the photos. It is something like giving names to the tools you use at work.

For example, you can use a Mac for work, does it matter to your customers? As long as the work gets done, nobody gives a hoot about what you used to accomplish it. Apply the same for those high-tech sounding processor names, unless you know the nitty gritty of how each processor works and differ from the others, every brand will want guarantee you "good and realistic" photos. For this, you can safely ignore if the salesman tries to sell this feature to you.

Tip: Ignore the fancy names of image processors the different brands offer, you will never know what it really does.

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High ISO

ISO is a misnomer but we shall just go along with the industry or consumer standard, it is the sensitivity of the sensor. The higher the number, the more sensitive the sensor is to light. For day shooting, ISO of 50 to 200 is more than sufficient, on cloudy days maybe up to 400. Most compact cameras will have up to ISO200 at the very least. As the environment gets darker, you'll need a sensor that is able to capture light better. Meaning a sensor that has higher ISO. In dimly lit restaurants, you'll need at least ISO1600 for relatively shake-free pictures, if you have stable hands ISO800 might do the trick. However, Fujifilm has (at time of writing) led the pack with ISO12800.

However, there is no free lunch in this world. High ISO comes with "digital noise" It is those red/blue specks/patches which appear on your photos.

Here is an example of ISO200 photo.

Looks ok to me. Let's look closer, at at the green patch. Looks nice and furry too. Great!

Now let's look at an ISO1600 sample

Pretty much the same? I assure you not. Let's look closer,

See the green/red patches and dots all over? Those are called "digital noise" or "noise" in short.

The above is actually an example of a better performing camera that has really low noise. This level of noise is acceptable by majority of users and noise levels really differ from brands and models of camera. However with all the brands and models, how do we know what is good? It all boils down to the sensor type. Different sensor types have different characteristics. I will show you in the next section what the different sensor types are and how to choose them.

Here's an example of really bad and noisy picture, trust me, many cameras even up till today, some from big brands, are offering this.

However, they will put up advertisements like HIGH ISO up to 800 or 1600. Having the ability to shoot at high ISO is only half the picture. The other half (or 2 halves) depends on whether the picture output is acceptable and if the resultant photo size will be smaller. Some cameras do offer high ISO shooting at the expense of lower pixel count. We will touch on megapixel count later and see it's relevancy to you.

Whenever there's a need to choose, having high ISO whether a noisy picture, or lower resolution is better than not having it all.

Tip: A small noisy picture that gets the moment is better than none at all

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Sensor types (CCD, SuperCCD, CMOS, etc..)

The sensor is one of the most important component in the camera and I would give it some extra attention. Most cameras come with CCD-based sensors these days. Web-cams come with CMOS because of its low power consumption and relatively cheap production. If we were to examine a digital photo really up close, you would have know that it is no more than a big array of coloured dots called 'pixels'. In conventional CCDs, light is captured in a rectangle array. Divide a rectangle sensor into millions of square/rectangle divisions and each division will represent a pixel in the photo ¹. This is true for most CCD's in the market, however, innovative companies like sigma has developed special image sensor that is really 3 pixels in 1, for the technically inclined, you can check the Foveon sensor out. Fujifilm on the other hand has a completely new way of using octagonal shaped pixels instead of square and has many light receptors in each pixel. Most of the other conventional CCDs have only 1 light receptor in each pixel. Fujifilm call this the SuperCCD. Due to the special design of the SuperCCD, they have been able to produce a sensor that has high ISO and yet low (when compared to conventional CCD) noise outputs.

If no reference has been made to the sensor as a selling point, it is most likely to be a conventional CCD. Design of CCDs by itself has not changed much even as technology advanced and you'll likely to find that the performance of cameras across different brands as the same ISO will produce similar amount of noise.

¹ This is a very simplified way of understanding how it works, in reality, there is still a layer of coloured filters on top of the sensor and 1 or more light receptoris only responsible for 1 colour on a pixel. A special algorithm combines each colour together to form 1 pixel on the image. Read more about it by searching online for bayer pattern. Do note that most but not all cameras use the bayer pattern.

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Megapixel count - Is more really better?

Have you asked yourself how many megapixels do you really need? The more megapixels your camera have the bigger your resultant file size of your digital photo. A 2 megapixel camera used to produce something like 700kB photo. 6 megapixels give about 1.5MB photos. So how did cameras get this megapixel number? It comes again from the sensor (the whole camera's quite well linked to the sensor isn't it?)

The number of 'megapixels' comes from the number of pixels the output photo contains. Imagine a picture that is 640 x 480. It means that there is 640pixels along the long side and 480 pixels along the short side. 640 x 480 = 307,200 pixels. You can call this 0.3 megapixel if you wish.

As we climb the ladder, a 3.1 megapixel camera may have a maximum output of 2048 x 1536. That's a lot of maths. So how much do we really need?

A year or 2 ago, I would recommend friends that 4megapixels is sufficient, but in today's terms I would up the ante to 6megapixels due to improved printing technology and higher demand for bigger prints. 6megapixels is really about the lowest resolution you can find in the market these days anyway. Every brand is hopping onto the meagepixel race with 10 and 12 megapixels camera. While I won't play down the importance of megapixel count in certain areas of photography, for majority of social shooters, like most of us, the extra megapixel count just takes up storage space in our memory card when we travel or hard disk space to store them. You'll end up paying for more memory cards just to shoot more photos.

Hard to get convinced that we don't need the kind of details 10megapixels provide?

Take this analogy: time is divided into days, hours, minutes, seconds and so on. In daily events, you will hardly need to tell people, it's 10:24am and 32seconds. Only in more specific events you'll say "You came in 10mins 54seconds" and in even lesser occasions do you need milliseconds, nanoseconds and so on. Think of 4 megapixels as the 'seconds' of time. It is enough to get you through most of your daily needs. Treat 6 megapixels as the 'milliseconds' you do need it a couple of times and it's good to have. You were probably doing a 100m sprint or something. Take 8megapixels as nanoseconds of time. Rarely would you need 8 megapixels and I can hardly think of anyone who needs 8 megapixels for daily use. It is even far too big to fit into your desktop as a wallpaper without having to resize it!

When do we need 8 megapixel or more? Only if you do a lot of image manipulations like cropping or printing large posters in sizes like 10meters long/wide. However, you can make super crisp 8X10's from a 6megapixel file. So I don't think daily/holiday shooters really need all that megapixels from a 10 or 12 megapixel camera.

Tip: Do not get caught up in the meagpixel race, most people don't need that kind of resolution in their life, 6 megapixels is far more than sufficient for majority of us. 6 is sufficient, anything more offers no significant advantages and only serve to take up precious space in your memory cards.

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LCD sizes

Digital cameras these days come with really big screens like 2.5 to 3.5inches compared to 1.5 and 1.8 inches just 2 years ago. For the LCD display, bigger is always better. It offers you a more comfortable view when taking the photo and also makes reviewing your photo easier. However, do note that bigger LCDs require a bigger backlight and takes up more power thereby shortening your camera's battery life. I know it's hard to fight the temptation to get a big LCD screen, so go ahead and pamper yourself with a big one.

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LCD Touchscreens *Coming soon*

Thanks!