I am asked often about folks wanting to make the move to digital photography

DigiCams

Web www.thepeters.org

Reasons why I love my digital camera:

	I can take 100+ pictures without spending a dime until I print or long-term store them.
	CD-ROMs are 10 cents or less each (on sale) and they hold 500 high quality pictures.
	I can take a picture and immediately know if it is a good one.
	I can hold the camera above a crowd and take a picture by looking at the lcd.
	I can play with advanced auto exposure settings and see the immediate results - A great way to hone those photography skills.
	I can print photos for a reasonable price by uploading them over the internet to DotPhoto.com and have them sent to grandparents for very reasonable printing and shipping and handling fees. I never have to go to a photography store. A reader sent me an email telling me that he is happy with digital printing provided by Sam's club. They charge $0.20 a print and allow uploading like dotphoto. There is a Sam's being built here in a few months, so I may have to give that a try.

Some negatives about digital photography:

	Picture set-up time is long. It is very difficult to take good action shots of sporting events.
	If you take 3 or more rolls of film (100+ pictures) and you don't travel with a laptop, then you will have to constantly weed through your pictures to keep only the best ones, or you will have to spend more money for extra memory.
	If you are used to an SLR camera and a variety of lenses, comparable digital cameras are a bit more out of range moneywise.
	My particular camera has a rechargable battery and I need to buy a spare, because I'm out of luck when it runs out of juice.

Things to think about:

You need a CD-ROM Burner. If you get a 3 Megapixel camera, then each picture takes up roughly 1.3 Megabytes of storage (about 1 diskette) (raw uncompressed size is 9 Megabytes). So you have to think about where you want to keep the pictures long term, because you certainly don't want all your pictures lost in a hard drive crash.

You probably need a USB port & Win98, WinME, or Win2000 (not sure about Macs - check the camera box). Most Cameras come with a USB cable, so you need to make sure that your computer has one. There are other methods available for transfer, but most are either slower or more expensive.

You need some software to organize your pictures. I like Thumbsplus. I create high level directories with the year and then subdirectories with the two digit month before the name so that they sort properly: \2001\01 New Years ; \2001\02 Saint Patricks Day ; etc.

If you want to print photo quality, then you will need a photo quality printer. Keep in mind that printed pictures are expensive (photo paper paper $$ + lots of ink) and fade more quickly than real photo paper. But it is great to whip out a few 8x10s of a special event to quickly share with others. To save paper, you may also want to use a program like QImage to maximize the number of pictures you can put on a page before printing.

Upload and get true photographic paper pictures that will last longer than if you print them. If you have a high speed connection to the internet, then you have the capability to easily upload your pictures to an online photo service and have them mailed to you. A few places: Dotphoto, Ofoto, Shutterfly. We subscribe to the Dotphoto $5/month plan which gets us 25 or so free prints per month which accumulate if not used. The main benefit for the subscription is low print prices for 5x7 and 8x10s.

Buy at least a 2 megapixel (MP) camera. I use a 3 MP, which is sufficient for an 8x10 print.

Ignore any claims about "digital zoom"; Optical zoom is what counts. You probably want a 3X optical zoom unless you have a great desire to have a very compact digital camera. You can accomplish digital zooming by cropping pictures with software later.

External Flash? Built-in flashes go about 10 feet and cause redeye. External flashes go 30 or more feet and allow you to bounce the flash off the ceiling for filling the room with light.

Other things to consider are accessories like add-on lenses, extra batteries, extra memory, whether standard batteries can be used as backup, etc.

My camera is a Sony DSC-S75. Sony now has a 4 MP camera (DSC-S80?) version of mine. I like the Sonys and haven't really used the others enough to tell you which one is best at any given time (since new ones come out every week).

Please email me if you think I need to add or change some information on this page.

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