Eye-Catching Features
Even in the crowded digital camera market, some features stand out. The observations that follow aren’t reviews or recommendations, but samplings of bright ideas—usually not exclusive to the manufacturers mentioned—to notice as you shop.
The Right Light: Dynamic range—the ability to handle high-contrast scenes like a half-sunlit, half-shadowed corner—is one of digital’s disadvantages compared to film, but vendors are on the case. Many digicams have something like HP’s Adaptive Lighting, which balances light and dark by preserving gentle contrasts while compressing harsh ones, or the Fujifilm FinePix Z1’s Natural Light mode, which disables flash, boosts ISO, and lengthens shutter time for low-light situations.
Just the Best: Exposure bracketing is a feature that quickly snaps a series of photos, one or two steps below and above the default exposure; you keep your favorite and delete the others. The Best Shot Selector system on some Nikon models takes up to 10 pictures while you hold down the shutter button, then instantly analyzes them and saves only the sharpest to the memory card.
Spot Color: Canon PowerShot cameras’ My Colors feature lets you customize color as you shoot—adding extra punch to reds, greens, or blues; making skin tones a notch lighter or darker; or even substituting one color for another or highlighting a single color in an otherwise black-and-white image. For serious prepress work, high-end cameras such as Sony’s Cyber-shot DSC-R1 let you select a preferred color space, such as Adobe RGB versus standard sRGB.
From Camera to Computer
Nearly all digicams let you upload their memory-card contents to a Mac or PC via a USB cable (preferably USB 2.0 versus the slower version 1.1); some also allow a Firewire (aka IEEE 1394) cable transfer.
A few new models use WiFi technology to link camera and computer without
a cord. The 8-megapixel Nikon Coolpix P1 and 5-megapixel P2 send images to your computer—while reviewing or even while shooting—via an 802.11b/g wireless link. Kodak’s 4-megapixel EasyShare-One can not only zap pictures to a computer, but post them to an online album or e-mail them to friends.
Most photo printers also work without a computer: One industry-standardized USB port called PictBridge offers direct camera-to-printer connections, as do a number of vendors’ WiFi and Bluetooth wireless adapters. Also, an increasing percentage of both printers and computers are equipped with flash-card slots for reading digicams’ memory cards. If yours isn’t, you can buy a compact card reader—a box of slots that plugs into a computer’s USB port.
Once you’ve stored thousands of images on your PC, how are you supposed to find the one you want? Get yourself some image-management software, such as Adobe’s Photoshop Album, Apple’s iPhoto, or HP’s Image Zone. These programs make it easy to browse through photo files by date, replace cryptic image names such as P24011008 with descriptive names, and assign and search for keywords or subjects.
Files and Formats
Virtually every digital camera saves images in the JPEG file format, often offering
high-, medium-, and low-quality settings (with respectively low, medium, and high levels of compression) that let you balance eye-pleasing clarity against memory-hogging file size. Higher-end models can also save images in the TIFF format that some designers prefer, though it makes for much larger files.
Perfectionists can choose a high-end camera with the option of saving images in RAW format. These hefty files contain every bit of the data that hit the sensor when you press the shutter, skipping the next step of creating a JPEG. RAW files allow you to fine-tune white balance, exposure, and other properties—but for most of us they can slow workflow while getting results not much better than the camera’s own. Many professional shooters, however, will work in no other format.
Finally: They’re not ready for prime time, but most digital cameras can also capture video, recording short, low-resolution clips that you can transfer to PC and place in web pages. Some cameras can’t record videos longer than 15 seconds; others keep rolling for as long as capacity and battery allow. How quickly video files fill up your memory depends on screen size, capture rate, format, and duration:
Small 320 x 240-pixel films at 15 frames per second are fine for online; 640 x 480 flicks at 30 fps can approach TV quality. Check whether a camera saves video in a format you can work with—typically Apple’s QuickTime, MPEG-2 or MPEG-4, or (least popular) Motion JPEG.
