Click here to see the index of Craig's columns.

DIGITAL OR FILM CAMERA? WHICH SHOULD YOU BUY?

QUESTION:

I'm ready to buy a new camera but can't decide whether to buy a traditional film model or one of those new digital versions. I would appreciate some suggestions on which to chose and what to look for in a digital model.

ANSWER:

Up until recently, your quandary had a simple solution. If your objective was to have brilliantly clear and sharp images, then you went with film. The quality of images on film were vastly superior to any pictures taken by digital cameras. But technology marches on and with the appearance of 4 and 5 megapixel camera models, the answer to your question has became somewhat blurred. The image quality of these higher resolution cameras are beginning to rival those on 35 mm film. And now that these digital models are falling into the under $1000 category, it appears your choice is really coming into focus.

Aside from image quality, the other important consideration can be summed up into all those other options to be found in a camera such as interchangeable lenses, SLR, external flash, zoom, etc. What ever features are important to you as a photographer using film should be just as important to you as a photographer using digital. The under $1000 4 and 5 megapixel models still don't have everything but they are getting closer. And besides, most of those missing features are ones sought out mostly by professionals and not the everyday shutter bug.

Combine the high resolution, price and features along with the additional abilities to be found in a digital camera and the digital camera is the clear winner. Here's what you should look for in your digital camera:

If you plan to make prints no larger than 3 x 5 inches, then a 3.3 megapixel model will do just fine. Producing quality larger prints will require the 4 and 5 megapixel models.

The camera should use removable flash memory such as Compact Flash, SmartMedia or Memory Stick so that if you run out of storage, you can simply pop in another card until you have offloaded the images to a computer. However, the need to offload or change cards is becoming less. That's because the cost of flash memory has dramatically fallen and the memory size in a single card has increased. You can literally store hundreds of good quality photos in just one card.

The digital camera should have both an optical viewfinder as well as a color LCD display so you can immediately preview your pictures in case you took one with someone's eyes closed. Some models even let you crop, edit, organize, display multiple and zoom into images viewed on the screen.

And finally, it should have a built-in flash for those darker moments.

Digital cameras let you store images on your hard drive, burn them onto a CD, send them in an email, print them on a color printer, edit and touch them up with photo-manipulative software and so much more. It may not be too much longer when we'll only see film cameras in a museum of popular 20th century artifacts.