Andre's Digital Matrix
How to Read a Spec Sheet
As you shop for a digital camera, you will come across a few unfamiliar terms. Here is what they mean.
Megapixels (MP)
Mega means million, and a pixel is the smallest unit making up a digital image.
MPs give an indication of the size of image a camera will capture. A five MP
camera will yield an image 2560 pixels wide and 1920 pixels high; a one MP
camera image will be 1024 pixels wide and 768 pixels high. Divide the dimension
in pixels by 200 to get a rough idea of how big, in inches, you can print the
image at good quality on an inkjet printer.
E.g. (1024 / 200) by (768 / 200) = 5.12" by 3.84" photo
Optical & Digital Zoom
As with film cameras, an optical zoom lens allows you to photograph more or less
of a scene without physically moving. A digital zoom is really an in-camera
enlargement of a smaller portion of an image. this can be useful in some
circumstances, but isn't as good as the result you get with a true optical zoom
lens.
Memory Card Type
A memory card stores your camera's images. several types are available, but they
aren't interchangeable, so you will need to know what kind fits your camera if
you want to buy extras or a card reader for your compute. The common types are
CF I and II (Compact Flash), SM (Smartmedia), SD/MMC (SecureDigital, or
MultiMediaCard), xD (xD PictureCard) and MemoryStick (used mostly by Sony
products).
File Format
Most digital cameras will save images in a file format called JPEG or JPG which
is a compressed format, but you may also see TIFF or BMP (uncompressed formats),
RAW or AVI, QuickTime, Motion JPEG or MPEG4 (movie formats).
Compression Level
JPEG is a compromise between image quality and file size. a mode like SuperFine
or SuperHigh Quality means best image quality but also largest file; Normal or
Standard mode creates the smallest files, but at the expense of image quality.