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Which digital camera to buy…?

I’m looking for a camera which takes high quality photos, but isn’t too bulky

The first thing to look at with a digital camera is the resolution. This is given in one of two ways: either as XxY pixels or as a megapixel count, the latter being the most common.
Thus:
1216 x 912 = 1 megapixel. This is the very low end and will be found on cheap cameras. Picture quality is okay for small snapshots, but you will lose quality if you blow them up more than four by five inches.
1600×1200 is 2 megapixels. As good a quality as film on four by five inches, but loses quality in blowing up.
2240×1680 is 4 megapixels, and gives a fairly decent quality on 16 by 20 inch pictures.
4064×2704 is 11.1 megapixels and is top of the line. 14 by 9 inch prints will be of extremely good quality.
If you do the maths you’ll see that the pixel squaring and description don’t add up- this is because part of the circuitry is used for the other functions of the Charged Coupled Device.
This latter is the actual image sensor and is usually abbreviated to CCD. You may see a cheap camera that uses a CMOS sensor instead of a CCD. CMOS (complimentary metal oxide semiconductor) is an old technology which is inferior to the CCD and the practical upshot is that the image it takes will not be as good regardless of the pixel count.
All image sensors are colour blind. The CCD (or CMOS) only records the intensity of light and not the colour. Fortunately colour is an electromagnetic function and so the intensity can be translated, this is done by three main methods:

1. The Bayer Filter, which makes a mosaic of intensity and writes this to a file (usually jpeg). The advantage of this is that it’s cheaper and more compact.
2 the spinning disc filter. Generally better hue than a Bayer, but needs a lot of space inside the camera and being made of moving parts more prone to breakdown. The camera has to be held steady, so it’s not good for hand-held cameras.
3. The beam splitter. Undoubtedly the most faithful recording of colour, but expensive and bulky. Used in professional quality equipment topping the thousand pound mark.
Next is the lens. Usually there’ll be a choice of one of four:
Fixed-focus/fixed-zoom -which you’ll find on inexpensive film cameras. These are great if you just want to do snapshot work, but limited for anything else.
Optical zoom lenses with automatic focus – usually offer wide and telephoto, sometimes you can alter the focus. Good for long and short distances.
Digital-zoom lenses – which take the image at the centre and interpolate a larger picture. It can be a bit fuzzy.
Replaceable lens -such as was found on the professional cameras of yore- usually 35mm.
Lastly is the storage. Some Digital cameras come with an internal memory but it won’t be very big. Most take one kind of card, some take a multiplicity of cards. The card is detachable from the camera and is given in megabytes.
Basically the higher the megabytes on the card the more pictures it will store. Most cameras give you a choice of picture quality- the higher quality picture you take the less fits on the card and vice versa.
Cards have a type, commonly you may find XD, Compact Flash, SD and some proprietary cards, especially Sony. The most common standard is becoming SD and I’d choose a camera that supports that. You can download directly to a computer from a camera via a USB port, or you can take the card out and take it down Tesco who’ll do you a set of prints and/or put them on a CD quite cheaply.
Hope that helps.

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