25 things you must know before buying digital camera

Interesting article on things to check before buying a digital camera.

Top three things that I liked the most:

Don’t Get Caught Up in Mega-pixels – just because the camera is higher Mega-pixel, doesn’t mean its better. 4/5 Mega-pixels is more than enough for every day use unless you want to take very large (poster size) prints.

Ignore Digital Zoom and check the Optical Zoom.

Be Careful When Buying Package Deals – Its often cheaper to buy the memory separately from another reseller and camera from a camera shop.

Also cameras don’t bundle any useful memory, so you always need to add the cost of memory. If the camera takes AA batteries, then you need to add the cost of rechargeable AA + charger.

Things to add to this list:

If you need more than 6X optical Zoom, make sure that the camera has Image Stabilisation.

If you select a camera which takes AA batteries, then you can use rechargeable batteries and when you run out of them, you can always buy regular AA batteries and use them, although you may not get lots of shots there. But the non-AA cameras which have Lithium Ion batteries typically have longer battery life, so that may be a consideration.

Some cameras such as Sony use proprietary memory. This means that every memory that you buy is more expensive and only works with Sony products. If you camera/ mobile phone/other devices use standard memory such as SD Memory, you can interchange the memory. This is big plus. When I am traveling and run out of memory on my Camera, I plug out the memory from my mobile phone and stick it in.