How to buy a digital camera #1: About $100 or less
If you're widely known as a photography nut, you probably get a lot of people asking you about whether this camera they want to buy is good or not. The market has become glutted, particularly in the point-and-shoot category, and while it makes our choices better (and cheaper) as consumers, the array of options is bewildering. I haven't tried most of the point-and-shoots on the market -- pretty much no one has, even excellent camera testers like Phil Askey at DPReview.com. There's just too many, and they often differ in the slightest of ways.

So I could easily give a "top 10 list of best cameras" or the like, but these would have a healthy dose of artifice. What I can tell you is what some of the arcane terms of digital photography mean, and what you should be looking for in each price category, as well as a few cameras that have impressed me along the way. Every day this week I will tackle a new category, from the humble values to the biggest and most expensive.

The Cheapies



The good news is that there are more good options in the cheap seats than ever, as hyper-competition have made point-and-shoots hit rock-bottom prices. If you shoot even a few hundred pictures a year, any of these cameras will be effectively cheaper than a free film camera. The bad news is that if you make a poor choice in this category, you're likely to end up with a camera that will be an endless source of frustration. The bad ones are really bad.

Do I really need a stand-alone camera?
If you're buying for yourself, this is a pretty important question. The best cameras in this category will take perfectly adequate pictures in good conditions, but will face a lot of constraints in poor lighting, photographing fast action, and so on. This year, some cameraphones are entering the same performance range -- not ALL cameraphones, most are still garbage, but a few new ones take nice, sharp shots in good lighting, have passable flashes, and even optical zoom. With these, the "carry it anywhere" advantage of a point-and-shoot is taken to its logical extreme. Of course, these phones tend to be clunkier than their camera-as-an-afterthought counterparts, so if you still want a separate digital camera …

Does it have optical zoom?
One of the surest signs that a manufacturer is trying to push a junk camera on you are the words "digital zoom." Zooming means actually changing your optics to increase magnification, so digital zooming isn't zooming at all -- it's cropping and enlarging, the same way you could do in an image-editing program after the fact. A "5x digital zoom" is taking 1/25th of your camera frame and blowing it up to fill it, which is why it looks like digital vomit.

If a camera has just digital zoom, it has no zoom at all. This is the most common misconception I've seen in this market segment, and for good reason -- the less reputable manufacturers are deliberately trying to cheat you. You can have a good camera with no zoom -- Ricoh makes one in a higher-end market -- but it's not marketing as though it had one. In this market, a 3x zoom is a good sign.

It's the little things
Very few of the cameras in this market are going to have spectacular image sensors, and will get pretty noisy in low light. A few might have passable images at ISO 400, but the variance here isn't going to be huge. What can be huge are the little things that contribute to how usable a camera is.

Battery life is tremendously important -- some of these models, particularly the older ones -- can barely keep a charge. You can't take a photo if your camera won't turn on. Read reviews of the product on forums like Amazon or epinions.com for a good user take on this (I wouldn't buy something in this market I couldn't find user reviews on)

Is the menu confusing? Are the buttons on it usable? Can you change settings on it easily or (in this market) at all? Does it have a manual exposure mode or do you have to rely on the camera's (sometimes stupid) meter? These are things you can best test at a camera store that will let you hold and test out the camera yourself -- what is confusing to one person is perfect for the other, so a personal test is important.

Is the flash good? Can it light a room? Does it meter with the flash well, or do people in its path end up looking like ghosts? This can be tested either in person or from online reviews or, better yet, both.

What are some good cameras in this market?
At the upper end of price and performance are Canon Powershot models like the A530. These are a bit above $100, so not truly dirt-cheap, but they tend to have good color and battery life. While Canon, despite the marketing, isn't at the top of every market, unlike almost every other maker their cameras are pretty good in every price segment. Buy newer models, though -- a lot of their older models have awful battery life, as tempting as eBay is.

Lower still, models like the Fuji A400 produce pretty good pictures while being truly dirt cheap, although you will really start to see the sacrifices -- slow response time, poor LCDs, etc. Casio and Sony also produce some decent models in this segment. Probably the kings of the cheapies, though, are the Kodak EasyShares -- while the cameras themselves aren't spectacular, they make it very easy to go from the camera to finished product, whether it's a print or organized on the computer for e-mail and Web use. Considering most people buying in this market aren't going to spend much time using expensive software to tweak their photos, simplicity is a big bonus.

So, are there any cheap models you've known and loved?