Digital cameras can do things film cameras cannot, displaying images on a screen immediately after they are recorded, storing thousands of images on a single small memory device, recording video with sound and deleting images to free storage space. Digital cameras are incorporated into many devices ranging from pdas and mobile phones called camera phones to vehicles. They have high power requirements and over time have become increasingly smaller in size, which has resulted in an ongoing need to develop a battery small enough to fit in the camera and yet able to power it for a reasonable length of time.

Camera

Compact cameras are actually designed to be small and portable. The smallest are described as subcompacts or ultra compacts. Compact cameras are usually designed to be easy to use, sacrificing advanced features and picture quality for compactness and simplicity. Images can usually only be stored using lossy compression jpeg. Compacts often have macro capability but if they have zoom capability the range is usually less than for bridge and dslr cameras. They have a greater depth of field, allowing objects within a large range of distances from the camera to be in sharp focus.

Most cameras on the market today have sufficient resolution for your needs. Bridge or slr like cameras are higher end digital cameras that physically resemble dslrs and share with them some advanced features but share with compacts the framing of the photo using live preview and small sensor sizes. Bridge cameras often have super zoom lenses which provide a very wide zoom range which is attained at the cost of some distortions including barrel and pincushion distortion to a degree which varies with lens quality.

These cameras are sometimes marketed as and confused with digital slr cameras since the appearance is similar. Bridge cameras lack the mirror and reflex system of dslrs, have so far been fitted with fixed non interchangeable lenses although in some cases accessory wide angle or telephoto converters can be attached to the lens and can usually take movies with sound and the scene is composed by viewing either the liquid crystal display or the electronic view finder. Many of these cameras can store images in lossless raw format as an option to jpeg compression.

Nevertheless, most manufacturers of digital cameras do not provide drivers and software to allow their cameras to work with linux or other free software. Still, many cameras use the standard usb storage protocol and are thus easily usable. Digital cameras have high power requirements and over time have become increasingly smaller in size, which has resulted in an ongoing need to develop a battery small enough to fit in the camera and yet able to power it for a reasonable length of time.

Lens

The zoom lens reflex cameras sometimes referred to as zlrs, megazooms, ultrazooms, or bridge cameras are designed to be an intermediate step between compact digital cameras and dSlrs. They are larger than compacts but offer more versatile manual controls and lens systems including greater zoom capability. Unlike the typical digital slr, they do not have interchangeable lenses but filters and adapters can be used on many megazoom cameras. Optical sharpness is attained by physical movement within either the camera body or the lens element which compensates for handheld shaking.

Conclusion

Sort your favorite digital cameras by brand or by megapixel, compare cameras and buy one for a cheap price via online retailers. Photographers who want to go beyond basic point and shoot digital cameras should look for more robust features, such as manual exposure modes, several different metering mode choices and the ability to use accessories such as adapters, lenses or extra flashes.