Every couple months or even more frequently a new series of digital cameras enters the market, and not well informed buyer is forced to make a tough decision when looking between the big range of models. With the buying options that we will stress out in this article, we hope you will select one for its objective features instead of relying only on sales pitch from manufacturers.

Most stores both online and brick-and-mortar, emphasize on advertising megapixels as the main factor. This is only a selling technique and is not always true.

The picture taken by a digital camera consist of a lot of spots named pixels. The more pixels make up that photo, the more details it can present; in other words, the more megapixels a digital camera delivers, the more you can zoom into the picture or print in a bigger size, before it will get blurry and unclear.

Imagine for example a 10×10 inch mosaic and imagine filling it up with 2×2, 1×1 and 0.1×0.1 inch pieces and the more pieces you use the greater the picture will be.

Since the price of the digital camera rises with the amount of megapixels, you should first analyze for what you will use the digital camera. If you will mainly use it to make shots for your blog or will you not likely print pictures larger than a 5×7 there is no ground why you should go for something higher than a 4.0 megapixel camera. Save your money for other things rather than investing in megapixels you will never use.

But the main advantage you would get if you decide on spending more for a higher resolution camera is cropping: a 9×12 picture taken at 5.0 megapixels can be easily resized to 8×10 and 5×7.

Most if not all new digital cameras have a zoom feature. This option can be particularly useful when taking a shot of something that is too far away and you have no possibility to get close to the subject, or you want to take a portrait without taking a lot of the distracting surrounding.

Optical zoom option is the real magnifying characteristic, the camera magnifies the picture with an assembly of lenses before the image gets to the image sensor. On the other hand the digital zoom enlarges the photo that is already saved in the camera.

Make certain you understood the camera’s technical specifications well. The total zoom is measured by multiplying the digital and optical zoom numbers. Be positive that the optical zoom is the one you need and don’t count on digital zoom at all because you can get this identical effect with any picture processing software package.