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Digital photography: What do I need?

Digital photography offers several advances over regular chemical based film, but along with it come some special limitations:

• Battery life, particularly for flash photography can be quite short. This is easily resolved with a spare battery.
• Poor low light performance. This requires special attention to being close enough to take the photo and a steady hand or tripod
• Poor motion photography. While a tripod can help there is no easy solution to this problem.

So with all the problems of digital photography why invest?

• Convenience: You can go directly from picture taking to e-mailing, posting on the web, or your favorite social networking site without scanning or chemical film development.
• Cost: Film, and developing it is expensive. Even if your intention is to build a traditional photo album building a collection of good photos requires discarding the bad, and with digital this is a low or no cost option.
• Size: Digital cameras are portable, but the even greater gain is in not carrying rolls of negatives. Hundreds of high quality photos can easily fit into the smallest of memory cards.

So what do you need?
There are several specs (specifications) that each camera has. Their importance varies by the task:

• Image stabilization: Vital for any photography not on a tripod.
• Tripod mounting: Some of the newest cameras are two small to mount on a tripod.
• Optical zoom: Many cameras will taut their digital zoom, but this is nothing more than image cropping that can be accomplished on your PC. True optical zoom lets you take pictures from a distance at full quality. They become far more suceptable to hand shake though, so if this is your default method of picture taking consider getting a tripod and suitable camera.
• Resolution: Typically measured in megapixels. See below for what size prints you can make from these. If its strictly for computer use anything 2MP or higher will fill your entire screen.

If you want to develop onto traditional film here are the minimum resolutions to get a picture that isn't grainy or blurry:

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