Choosing A Camera - The Basics

Well, anonymous asked a question about this in a comment a while back, and I think it deserves a post (or a few posts, likely) on its own. I've had a lot of friends ask over the last couple of years, and so it will help to get it here where anyone who wants it (and, unfortunately the poor guy researching Nickel in the periodic table who doesn't) can see it.

Here's the thing I don't like about blogs, though. If you're reading this today, or tomorrow, or before whenever it is that I will get the next installment up (which is hopefully not, as Ni pointed out, a week), it will all make sense. You'll read it, and then be ready for part II when it comes along.

For those of you who are finding it later... I'm sorry. Sorry that you have just read the post (or two, or three, or fifteen - I won't really know until I'm there, even though you've already been) that I'm going to write later, since they appear above this one in the page. It's all been fairly convoluted, I'm sure. You started with lenses before you even knew you wanted an SLR, or something like that. But it's not my fault... I have my emails with the new ones showing up at the bottom, and, if I could, I'd do my blog the same way.

But I can't. So, here we go.


So, maybe you're camera-less. Maybe you're shooting film. Maybe it's time for an upgrade, or maybe it's time to get serious. What do you do?

Well, you need to decide what you're going to buy. And what you're going to buy depends, really on three things:

• When, where, and how do you want to take pictures? And what of?
• What do you want to do with them once you have them?
• How much do you want to spend?

Before we get into those in the following posts, just to make sure we're all kind of talking the same language, here are some of the terms I'll be using, and how I mean them:

digicam (above - some old ones) - a very compact, portable camera, the kind you can easily put in your pocket, usually 6-10 megapixels, 3x zoom



superzoom (above) - a camera that's a little less compact... the lens sticks out in the front, and it looks like the old-fashioned kind. It's called a superzoom because it has a long zoom ratio (usually more than 10x), but can't have different lenses attached




DSLR (above) - short for Digital Single Lens Reflex. These are usually not very compact, won't be fitting in your pocket, and feature lenses that can be changed. These range from 6 to 25 or so megapixels. Also known, to people who carry them, as a "big" camera, or "real" camera. Snobs.


Next: When, where, and how do you want to take pictures? And what of?