Let me say it this way. If I am a CMOS sensor, I live in a house and I have nine neighbors surrounding my property. If I were a consumer camera I’d have nine neighbors but all in one very small apartment building. And that’s not an unfair comparison.
One of the complaints among reviewers is that manufacturers continue to engage in a pixel race, each year adding a couple of megapixels to their sensors, crowding them even further, rather than addressing the noise factor in the chips. For this reason improvements in image quality are incremental, and the impression on the consumers is somewhat misleading.
What I’m saying is that last years model shouldn’t be scorned because it has fewer pixels, and don’t be fooled into thinking that a ten megapixel sensor in a consumer model will provide an equivalent image to that from a true SLR. Ultimately it depends on how large a photo you wish to print, as well as what type of photos you like to take.
One of the best ways to learn what a particular camera will do is to join a forum based on that brand or model of camera. When you pose a question include some information about your skill level, and whether you take photos indoors or outdoors, of people of landscape or architecture, and what size prints you’d like to make, and basically what’s most important to you in a camera. That will usually generate some meaningful responses that will help you become a better photographer, and if you’re shopping, it will help you narrow your choices.
Finally, all the camera manufacturers include a software suite that’s adequate for fine tuning and printing your photos. So it’s a good idea, if you’re just starting out, to learn those programs before you go shopping for something reportedly better. And there are better or more fully featured programs, but unless you’re planning a career in photography you probably won’t need them.
That said, there are a couple of freeware programs that you may find very useful. The first is Picasa2, a beta program from Google. It requires either Windows 2000 Professional, some version of Windows XP, or Linux. What it does is index all your photos, offer some basic controls to enhance them, and makes it easy to publish them on the web. You also get 250 MB of storage (approximately 500-600 photos) for your web albums, and you can make them public or not.
The other is a lightweight image viewer that can create slide shows, play videos or music. But IrfanView is more than that. It’s what I use for batch resizing, conversion to another format, and renaming photos. In other words, if I have just taken 50 photos and I want to rename the files September xxx then I just load the photos into IrfanView, designate a folder, let it do its thing. It happens to be very popular among amateurs and even some pros, so it’s worth your time to take a look.
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