Sharp Shooters

If you're thinking of buying a digital camera, but high prices and quality concerns make you a little camera-shy, here's some good news: Now is a great time to take the plunge. Whether you plan to use a digital camera to post images to a Web site, share snapshots with friends and family, or record images of people, property, or products for your business, there's a sub-$1000 digital camera for you out there.

Though lens design, compression, and other elements affect output quality, manufacturers generally define a digital camera by its highest resolution--its total number of pixels. Normally, the greater the number of pixels, the better the picture. Last year, 2-megapixel cameras were all the rage. This year, the same money buys a 3.3-megapixel camera, which sharpens resolution to 2048 by 1536, producing 8-by-10 prints virtually indistinguishable from a 35mm film camera's output. These relatively expensive digital cameras, priced at $800 and up, also allow considerable manual control over aperture and shutter speed and come loaded with extras such as the ability to take black-and-white photographs and to record short videos with sound. Meanwhile, some 2-megapixel cameras now cost less than $500. Most units at this price, however, are point-and-shoot cameras best suited for capturing images for Web pages or e-mailing 4-by-6 or 5-by-7 prints, as well as making photographs for archiving.

The recent advent of reasonably priced digital cameras with lens threads, external flash connections, and other professional features converted New York photographer Mark Greenberg to the technology. A photojournalist for 25 years, he now uses Olympus's $999 C-3030 Zoom for about 10 percent of his work, including photographing Fortune 500 executives. The C-3030 lets him skip the steps of developing negatives and scanning them for editors who prefer digital images anyway. Two years ago he viewed consumer-level digital cameras as "a joke," but now foresees a day when about half of his work will be digital. "It has put the love of photography back in my life," he unabashedly declares.

Focusing on Digital

Which digital camera is best for you? We tested 15 models priced at under $1000 from Casio, Epson, Kodak, Minolta, Nikon, Olympus, and other well-known vendors to see what's available for consumers and small businesses. We evaluated both display (how photos looked on a monitor's screen) and print quality, and tested battery life. We also tried out each camera's features to see how easy they were to use. Our sub-$500 Best Buy--the 1.3-megapixel, $299 Olympus D-360L--packs lots of extras for its low price, including white-balance adjustment and panorama shooting. Our over-$500 Best Buy, Epson's $899 PhotoPC 3000Z, offers the best combination of battery life, picture quality, and convenient operation of any camera in this review.

For all their complexity, digital cameras are usually easy to use, thanks in large part to their built-in LCD screens. But keeping a few things in mind will further simplify your transition from film cameras to digital photography.

For one thing, digital cameras inhale batteries. Some can drain a set of four AA alkalines in half an hour. So plan on investing in two sets of rechargeable batteries and a recharger if the camera you choose doesn't include them. The most popular type of rechargeable battery is nickel metal hydride, which lasts up to four times longer than ordinary alkalines. You can pick up a pack of four at a site like batterybarn.com for as little as $16. Rechargers that work overnight cost less than $15, but a $30 model can recharge four NiMH batteries in about 2 hours. Keep an extra, fully charged set of rechargeable batteries ready for your next field trip, and take along a set of standard alkaline AA or longer-lasting lithium AA batteries for emergency backup.

Currently, most cameras under $1000 use either CompactFlash or SmartMedia memory cards to record images; the newest type of storage media, Sony's Memory Stick, is a distant third in popularity. If you plan on taking mostly high-resolution photographs (which can top 10MB a shot), you might consider buying a camera (such as Casio's QV-2300UXplus) that can accept IBM's 340MB Microdrive disk. This miniature drive is slightly thicker than a regular CompactFlash card and can hold more than 400 high-resolution shots, compared with the dozen or so that a typical digital camera can record on a 16MB card. Some users have reported losing their work when they dropped or jarred their Microdrive-equipped cameras, however, so don't neglect to download your work to a PC regularly.

What's next in digital photography? It will be some time before 4-megapixel cameras break the $1000 barrier, but you can expect to see some models next year priced at around $1500. Olympus leads the way with its new $1999, 4-megapixel Camedia E-10, which should be shipping by the time you read this. The first multifunction digital cameras are just around the corner, too: By the beginning of next year, Ricoh will sell a $1500 combination digital camera and PDA called the RDC-i700. This 3.3-megapixel camera will incorporate a 3.5-inch touch screen and a modem so you can use it to send and receive e-mails and faxes. Also next year, Polaroid plans to sell a hybrid digital/film camera called the C-211 that produces instant pictures on Polaroid film. It will retail for approximately $800.

Until then, amateur and professional photographers alike will have plenty of choices among sub-$1000 units. As digital cameras improve and as more people discover their convenience, count on these devices to continue changing the face of photography.

Carla Thornton is a contributing editor, and Lisa Cekan is a staff editor, for PC World. Testing was conducted by the PC World Test Center.