Choosing A Camera: Part II - The Bad News

[To see the other posts in this series, click on the creatively-titled "choosing a camera" label at the bottom of this post]

So, what do you want to do with your camera?

And why did I start off by saying it's bad news?

Well, here's the thing. There are two things that small cameras (digicams) are good for:
1. Keeping with you
2. Taking pictures rather unobtrusively

So if you what you want to do is to take pictures wherever, whenever, with as little hassle as possible and be kind of discreet while doing it, your problems are solved. For everyone else, please keep reading.

The bad news for the rest of us is that that's a very, very short list and, as far as I can tell, it's more or less exhaustive. Which may mean that you need a DSLR, with the expense and complication that that entails.

After having time with both, here's what I can tell you: given the same skill of the person who's holding it, the DSLR just makes better pictures, more reliably, with less work, every time. This may not matter to you - it mattered a lot to me. For most people, a smaller, inexpensive, less complicated camera seems like the way to go. And, for you, it may be. Try my checklist and see how you fare:

You may want a digicam if:

• You lose stuff a lot and aren't insured (you can substitute "lose" with "immerse", "broil", "drop", "accidentally bury" or "run over", as needed)
• You won't carry anything with you that's any bigger than it has to be
• You figure your phone actually takes pretty good pictures
• You mostly just want to email your pictures or put them on facebook
• You spend a lot of time in Barcelona or other places where, eventually, everything you are carrying will be stolen
• A picture is a picture... who cares?

You'll need a DSLR if:

• If you look at other people's pictures and think "why don't mine look like that?!?"
• You want to put your pictures up without people knowing right away that you took them yourself
• You have tech-lust
• You want to take pictures of birds, planes, or other things that are far, far away
  
• You have someone to carry stuff for you (commonly referred to as a "husband")
• Take beauty seriously, and get a little pissed off when it's messed with
  

If you're somewhere in the middle, then you may be able to get away with a superzoom.


So, there are a couple of significant points that need to be explained here, for this to really make sense:

First, why does a DSLR make better pictures than a digicam? There are a couple of reasons:

1. Better "glass" - you get what you pay for, and most lenses alone for a DSLR cost quite a bit more than most compact cameras. The lenses let more light in, are manufactured to much higher standards, and are more complex... as a result, everything that goes through them looks better on the other side
2. Bigger (and better) sensors - the number of megapixels is not really a great indicator of how a camera will perform. My 6MP Nikon will take far, far better pictures than any compact 10-12 megapixel camera you can buy. Why? The number of megapixels describes how much information the camera stores to record the light coming in, but think of it like type on a page: as you get more, you can get a more detailed "story"... to a point. But eventually, the type gets so squeezed together on the page that it overlaps, and instead of giving you a more detailed view, gets a bit jumbled. Well, as you increase the number of megapixels but keep a small sensor size, you lose detail and also gain a lot of noise.

That leads us to the other tricky point: how can a camera with all those settings, with lenses you have to attach, make it less work to take pictures? Well, it doesn't. But it makes it less work to take great pictures, and here's why:

Some of what makes a great picture great is the subject. Some of it is the composition. Some of it is how the light is focused (the lenses) and recorded (the sensor). But a lot of it is in what you do after the picture is taken. Are the colors flat? Does it look dull and washed out? Maybe the black bits have little specs in them and don't look really black. All of this needs to be fixed in post-processing, in a tool like Photoshop.

Well, some of the pictures from my camera look great straight out out of the camera. But with a digicam, odds are good you're going to have to tweak more, to buy some more software to take out the noise (the little light bits where it's just supposed to be dark)... it takes more work to get it to anything approaching the same level of quality, and even with that, it won't ever get to you where a good lens and basic DSLR body will. So the DSLR may be a bit more work (once) to set up, but the "convenient" digicam will suck minutes off of your life with every picture that needs to be manipulated more to get it to be the way you want.


So - to sum it up, if you're not too fussy about how your images turn out, if you use them in fairly low-demand ways (small snapshot prints, email), if you want something cheap because you'll probably wreck/lose it, or if you just need something very, very compact or discreet, then a digicam (or maybe superzoom) is the way to go.

Otherwise, you may as well start looking for a second job.

Next, we'll look at how to choose a compact camera, if that's the family that will meet your needs.