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RSS feedsTraditionally, the most desirable gadgets on the market get moreto your PC. We put 19 models through their paces to judge which are the shooting stars. complicated and less expensive with each year that passes. Digital cameras are no exception. Today's models are far more sophisticated than they were even a year ago, and prices have fallen so much that you can find them on every high street.
Having said this, taking the digital approach is still more expensive than employing traditional methods. You can buy a decent 35mm compact camera for under #100, and spending a bit more gets you a zoom lens, sophisticated autofocus and probably several flash modes.
Spending twice that on a digital camera only gets you a basic model, but because it stores its images electronically, you can transfer your photos onto your PC quickly and easily. Once there, you can edit them, distort them, save them and print them out as big as your printer will allow.
So digital cameras provide a quick and easy way to get images into your PC, whether it's for work, rest or play. But just what do you need to consider if you're going to spend your hard-earned pennies on one?
Image quality
Aside from how much you have to spend, your first thought when buying a digital camera should be image quality. It's all very well having the sleekest device known to man, but if it makes shots of the Eiffel Tower look like a 1960s tower block it's not much use.
Digital cameras store pictures as a series of dots - pixels - which merge into one another when you look at them from a distance. This creates an illusion that the image is made up of continuous tones, just like a photograph.
The smaller the dots, the better the illusion. The more pixels you have, the smaller you can display each one and the higher the resolution of your final picture. So, the more pixels the better.
If you want to print your photos, you'll probably be using an inkjet printer with a resolution somewhere between 300 and 1440 dots per inch (dpi). Because this is a higher resolution than a typical monitor, a picture that looks fine on screen may appear blocky when printed. This effect is worse with low-resolution photos, as enlarging them makes each pixel bigger. According to Kodak, if you want to create 5in x 7in printouts that compare well with photos, you need an original image made up of at least a million pixels.
While Kodak has a vested interest in promoting this point of view - it makes some of the cheapest 'megapixel' cameras on the market - our tests show a marked difference in the quality of prints between the lowest and highest resolutions. The Kodak and Agfa megapixel cameras take superb pictures, but you shouldn't simply be seduced by high resolutions.
Colours must be faithful too, and here the Opti MDX8000 is disappointing.
Its pictures belie its 1000x800 pixel resolution - they're not sharp and the colours are dreadful. In general though, quality of colour tends to go with high resolution.
However, depending on what you want to do with your pictures, you may not need a megapixel camera. A resolution of just 640x480 pixels is fine if you primarily want to see images on-screen, perhaps as part of a Web page.
Features
It sounds ridiculous, but two of the most basic features on conventional cameras are often missing from the digital variety. The CCDs (see box How doesa digital camera work) are sensitive even to low light levels, so some manufacturers don't include a flash. Unfortunately, this can make indoor pictures look very grey, and extra light is always useful to help pick out the detail in shadows.
You should also always look for a viewfinder. Because they store images electronically, it's easy for digital cameras to show them on a built-in LCD screen as well. It's convenient to use this for framing your pictures, but if you have to do this for every shot you'll find that you get through batteries like nobody's business. LCDs demand power, and it's not uncommon for a set of four alkaline AA batteries to last less than two hours. A proper viewfinder saves a lot of battery life, but it's not an option with cameras that - like the Agfa EPhoto 1280 and the Casio QV700 - have a swivelling lens.
The more expensive cameras tend to have a zoom too. With the Sony, Agfa and Kodak zoom models, this is a proper zoom lens - it's blissfully silent on the Sony Mavica. The Epson PhotoPC 600, on the other hand, has a digital zoom. This is a bit of a cheat as it enlarges a part of the image rather than actually getting in closer, and you'll notice the difference if you enlarge the picture further.
Other effects include time and date stamps on your pictures, electronic titling, and the ability to mix black and white and colour images. The Sony even lets you take sepia-tinted pictures.
Ease of use
In practice, despite their range of features, most digital cameras are no harder to use than a normal compact.
One exception is the RDC-300Z, Ricoh's newest release. When you switch it on the flash defaults to Off - the Auto setting would be more appropriate - and it's slightly awkward in the hand as well.
With the others, to take a picture you just point and shoot, framing your picture either in the viewfinder or on screen. Applying effects, changing flash modes and the like can be a different story, though.
Here, a good LCD screen is valuable to display text, rather than just icons. The Kodak DC200 and 210 are particularly clear, while the Nikon Coolpix 300 goes one better with its touch screen which makes navigating through its menus a very simple matter. We weren't so keen on the Agfa EPhoto 1280 - you'll have to master the intricacies of its Info button, a thumbwheel, two more buttons and a dial, together with learning several icons.
As well as setting options, the other main use of the screen will be to review your pictures. It's one of the great advantages of digital cameras that you can take half a dozen snaps of the same subject, then pick the best and delete the others to free up space. A screen is vital if you're to make these judgements.
Connectivity
Even if you delete some pictures as you go, you'll need to store others on the camera before you can transfer them to your PC. There's a tremendous difference in how many photos you can take - the Nikon Coolpix 300 can store 132 low-resolution pictures, while, if you choose not to compress the Kodak DC120's highest-resolution shots, it will hold just two. How exactly they're stored isn't terribly important, with some cameras having an internal memory and others using removable memory cards, either exclusively or to supplement their own memory. However, this can affect how easy it is to transfer pictures to your computer.
With most cameras, you need to install software on your PC, before you connect the camera using a serial cable. In most cases it's then simple to download pictures into the transfer application, then save and edit them in a graphics package. Although we found the downloading process in Casio's QVlink more complex than most.
The simplest method is if you can use the camera as an extra disk drive, allowing you to drag and drop pictures to your hard disk. All three Kodaks are supplied with a PC Mounter utility allowing you to do just this on any PC.
If you've got a notebook - or your desktop has PC Card slots - you can be even more flexible. The Nikon Coolpix 100 fits straight into a PC Card slot so you can take pictures off instantly, and it's possible to get PC Card adaptors (supplied by Panasonic and Opti) for Compact Flash memory cards. Floppy disk adaptors are also on sale.
As soon as your pictures are on your computer, you can edit them - as long as you've got the software. Basic tools are provided by the packages supplied with every camera reviewed here, but these can be limiting. Software such as Adobe PhotoDeluxe is more sophisticated and is bundled with some of the more expensive cameras. You can also buy it separately.
This is the first time we've seen high-resolution megapixel cameras falling below the #500 mark. If image quality is important to you, our first choice would be the Kodak DC200. It produces super pictures and is ridiculously easy to use, while its #449 price tag makes it even more desirable.
Kodak's other two offerings are nearly as attractive as the DC200, with the same excellent image quality.
The DC120 is aimed at the professional market, with its ability to store high-quality uncompressed images and its 3x zoom, but at the same price the DC210 is slightly easier to use. Both are good cameras, and which is best for you will depend on your needs, but the feature-packed DC120 gets our award.
We'd also recommend the Agfa Ephoto 307. Much cheaper than its big brother, the EPhoto 1280, it takes some of the best 640x480 photos we've seen.
It's also dead simple to use, and would make a great introduction to digital photography if you want to try it on a smaller budget.
The EPhoto 1280 is right up there in terms of image quality, but it can be tricky to use and its #762 price tag means it's only for those with money to burn.
HOW DOES A DIGITAL CAMERA WORK?
In principle, a digital camera works like a cross between an ordinary camera and a scanner. When you look at your subject - or point your camera towards it - light is reflected from it back towards you. This passes through the lens and is focussed on the image plane.
The image plane is where you find the film in a normal camera, and your picture is instantly recorded by light-sensitive emulsion. Of course, there's no film in a digital camera - instead, the light hits a light-sensitive electronic panel called a charge coupled device, or CCD.
The CCD is made up of a number of pixels - generally these amount to between 300,000 and over a million - which each register the colour and intensity of the light hitting them, just as they would in a scanner.
The camera then takes this information and saves it, either to memory or onto a memory card, a process that can take a couple of seconds.
See also:
Digital photography should be easier. Kodak is trying to make it as painless as possible. 27 Feb 2002
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