Digital Trends

Digital cameras are almost as popular as Apple iPods! That may be a slight exaggeration but by the end of this year over 50 percent of U.S. households will own at least one as another 20 million will be bought in 2005, according to the Photo Marketing Association, a key industry trade group. Why are digicams so popular? There are many reasons but a few of the key ones are quality, price and convenience.

When digital cameras arrived 10 years ago, photo quality was problematic, to put it charitably. In fact, let's be honest—they were poor compared to film. Not only that, they were very expensive. It also was a pain transferring digital stills to computers in order to make prints. All of this has completely changed—to your benefit. Picture quality is now on a par with film, working with photo files is easier than ever and camera prices have fallen through the floor. And another great benefit of digital photography is the fact you no longer have to run down to the local drug store to pay $10 a roll to develop 24 prints that always seem to end up in shoeboxes.

What Digital Cameras Do

As noted, quality of the first digital cameras was poor. Let's briefly discuss what a digital camera does so you can understand the great changes that occurred over the past five years. A digicam is really a device that captures digital files (photos) and saves them to memory, similar to a computer saving a file to floppy disk or hard disk drive. In fact, the first popular digital cameras—the Sony Mavicas—actually saved files to floppies. Once you saved a shot, you took out the disk, inserted it into your PC and either printed from it or saved it to the hard drive.

In the early days of digital photography, the USB (Universal Serial Bus) connection didn't exist so people transferred files through the serial port, a very slow connection. Today every digicam has a USB 1.1 or even faster Hi-Speed USB 2.0 port so images move between your camera and PC in a flash. The way this works is very simple. After you take some shots, you connect the camera to your computer with the supplied USB cable. With just a few button clicks, images are transferred to your PC. With some digicams, the camera appears as a drive so you open your images the same way you would any other type of file. In other instances, you access files using the software supplied with your camera. It's a very simple operation and in many instances, automatic.

Another positive is the fact digicams have moved from floppy disk media to much smaller solid-state memory cards. This ongoing trend enabled manufacturers to build very compact cameras that easily fit in a pocket or purse. The most popular types of memory cards are Secure Digital (SD), Memory Stick, Compact Flash and the xD Picture Card. Choosing one type or another really shouldn't be a consideration unless you have a collection of cards from a PDA or an older camera. Several years ago choosing a card format was a hotly contested issue but now that they are more of a commodity item and much less expensive (available at Wal-Mart and Costco) it's much less of a worry.