Consumer ElectronicsFebruary 8, 2006

What type of Digital Camera

is right for me?

Types of digital cameras

Basic Point and Shoot

Advanced Point and Shoot

Prosumer

Professional- SLR

Basic Point and Shoot

Tiny, fits in a pocket or part of a cell phone, use it anytime

1-3 Megapixels $20-200 Good for snapshots, especially

outdoors and web/email Usually has little optical zoom,

may not have a flash or viewfinder

May also function as a webcam

Basic Point and Shoot

Advanced Point and Shoot better pictures but still easy to use 3-5 Megapixels and up $150-400 Good for snapshots, portraits and

small enlargements- up to about 8X10 and web/email

Typically 3X optical and additional digital zoom, and a built in flash

May capture short video clips, have Macro (close-up) and other special effects

Advanced Point and Shoot

Prosumer

prosumer (proh.SOO.mur) n. 1. A consumer who is an amateur in a particular field, but who is knowledgeable enough to require equipment that has some professional features ("professional" + "consumer").

www.wordspy.com

Prosumer More control, zoom & features, but

still lets you point and shoot 5 Megapixels and up $200-900 Good for all types of pictures and

larger enlargements Up to 12X optical zoom, built in and

hot shoe flash options May include ability to manually

control settings, image stabilization, burst mode

Less shutter lag

Prosumer

dSLR- Digital Single Lens Reflex Gives you lots of choices and control $700-5000 If you really want control, more

camera- like, can change lens, manually focus…

Zoom depends on lens, flash options. May not have an LCD, uses mirror to view through the lens

Almost no shutter lag- best type for shooting action stills

No video

digital SLR

Software

Organizing Picasa Adobe Photo Album Comcast Photoshow

Editing Picasa Photoshop Elements

Sharing

KodakGallery.com

Shutterfly.com

Flickr.com

Yahoo photos

Snapfish.com

MP3 PlayersFeatures and uses

What is MP3? Digital audio encoding and lossy

compression format Designed to greatly reduce the

amount of data required to represent audio, yet still sound like a faithful reproduction of the original uncompressed audio to most listeners

Also refers to files of sound or music recordings stored in the MP3 format on computers.

www.wikipedia.com

Types of MP3 Players

Flash memory

Hard drive Audio only Audio and pictures Video, too

Flash Memory MP3 Players Lower price No moving parts- so they don’t

skip when dancing Small capacity (typically 128 MB-

1GB) 4-20 hours of music storage Limited features (eg. iPod

Shuffle)- although newer players (eg. iPod Nano) have more

Simple to use

Flash Memory MP3 Players

Hard Drive MP3 Players

Higher price Large capacity (typically 5-40GB) Music storage up to 15,000

songs Larger, sometimes color screen Photos,Video Audiobooks, FM transmitter Organizer, games, alarms,

contacts…

Hard Drive MP3 Players

Reviews

http://reviews.CNet.com http://www.dpreview.com http://www.epinions.com http://www.bizrate.com http://www.consumerreports.org http://consumerguide.com http://www.camerareview.com/