How To Avoid Making A Bad Digital Camera Purchase

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18 June 2009

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One surprising change, is that the 450D can use SD and SDHC memory cards. Typically these cards were only used with smaller point and shoot cameras. Canon is obviously recognizing and marketing to the large segment of point and shoot digital compact camera users looking to move up to a SLR.

Not to let any of this scare you off, as I believe buying any cameras online is a great way to go. Especially with all the digital cameras for sale you can find on the internet. And generally speaking the majority of online transactions go off without a hitch.

Well, many reasons actually. They generally have to do with trust, warranties, and appreciation for the shinier things in life. While those may be some perfectly good reasons, does that mean the people who do buy used digital cameras know something the rest of us don’t?

In the spirit of saving batteries, and keeping your costs down, make sure your camera has an optical viewfinder. That way, you don’t have to use the LCD screen all the time. Many LCD screens don’t work well outside in bright sunlight anyway. A lot of digital cameras these days (especially the least expensive) exclude the viewfinder.This opympus slr camaras and this complete checklist for camera buying should help.

I have a couple old digital cameras (like my Canon PowerShot s40) sitting at home that I paid top dollar for a few years ago. Today they still work brilliantly, and can be had on eBay for a disturbingly low fraction of what I paid for mine.

Another thing to consider, is LCD screen size. A lot of digital cameras have 2.5 or 3 inch LCD screens. Nice for viewing, but also guaranteed to chew through batteries like crazy. If you look around a bit, you should be able to find some models with a 2 inch screen.

Don’t pay for extras you won’t use. This may seem like an obvious enough axiom, but a difficult one to put into practice, when camera manufacturers rev up their marketing engines to convince you of your need for the latest and greatest whatever.

You’ll have to look it up online, or ask an honest salesperson. Basically, the larger the better. Cameras that try to squeeze too many megapixels onto a small image sensor, generally end up degrading the image quality with too much image noise. In other words, if I was looking at a 10 megapixel camera vs a 8 megapixel camera and both had the same image sensor size, I’d pick the 8megapixel camera in a heart beat. Your bound to get much less image noise in your pictures, especially at the higher ISO settings.