Sarah Latour

If you are not a professional photographer, or if you are not taking up photography as a hobby, you do not have to get a really expensive digital camera if your only purpose for it is to capture the great moments in your life.  The digital camera you would need would be something that you can whip out when something nice happens at home.  It would also be something that you can easily bring along to special events and to your travels.

You can find such a digital camera to suit your needs for under $300. The five best digital cameras that you can get for under $300 are listed below.

Canon PowerShot A720 IS. Many experts in digital cameras have opined that the Canon PowerShot series is the best line available in the market today.  It is therefore not surprising that it has cornered a good portion of the market.

What makes this particular digital camera so special?  For one, it has 8.0 megapixels and its lenses have a 6x zoom. It also boasts of an increased usability that makes it easy for the person using it to control the pictures he or she is taking. 

Nikon Coolpix P50.  his digital camera poses itself to be a middle-ground camera. As it is, it is a good startup camera for anyone who wishes to learn serious photography, but it is wieldy enough to serve ordinary point-and-shoot picture-taking purposes.  This Nikon digital camera model has 8.1 megapixels, and it also has a 3.6x zoom with a wide angle.

Canon SD1100 IS. Another digital camera coming out of Canon’s production line, this model introduces a couple of new features that were not yet seen in other digital cameras, be it from Canon or from any other brand.  These features in particular are face detection and motion detection.  Both are aimed at preventing picture blurring

Sony CyberShot DSC H10. This digital camera is designed for photographers on a tight budget – great for heavy-duty shooting and yet going for a mere price of less than $300.  It has 8.1 million effective pixels and is fitted with a 10x optical zoom manufactured by Carl Zeiss. 

Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ5. This model from the Panasonic digital camera lineup is dubbed as a “Travel Zoom” camera. It has a powerful zoom lens – a 10x optical zoom – and yet the gadget itself is quite slim and handy.  It boasts of 10.7 million pixels, a high-resolution 3.0 LCD screen, and the ability to make movies with a resolution of up to 1280 x 720 pixels.  Other than that, it has 22 shooting modes and a built-in clipboard.

These are the five best digital cameras that people with $300 to spare can buy.  Take your pick.

John C. Arkin

I remember my first digital camera I bought lots of years ago. It was a Mustek and so, a piece of garbage. But back then, this was the best you could get. From the beginning of the early digital days we have come a long way though. Once in a while, some of my friends, because they know I am a photography enthusiast, are asking me what they should look for when buying a digital camera, what the most important features are and how to take quality digital pictures. This is a very hard question that you can answer and thats partly because, honestly, there are a lot of things which can go into the process of taking quality digital pictures. But, I have chosen top three deal breakers, the way I call them, so I will use this article to discuss them in detail.

Unbelievably, unless you have a really high end camera, most important to taking quality digital pictures is lighting. Did you ever took pictures using a poor or fair camera yet still with using such great conditions for lighting, your pictures came out great? Well I have. Actually, with my Mustek, I found out that by setting up good lighting conditions made the camera work like a charm. However, take this light away and your camera will produce the most color washed and grainy pictures that you could ever imagine. Lighting makes all the difference. This puts it on the top in my preference list, above even the camera itself. Hence, if you are on a tight budget and can’t buy a great camera, you should make sure that you have sufficient light.

Next is the camera itself. Basically, the better is the camera, the better is the quality for the pictures. However, there is a problem, and that is how to decide whats a great camera? You can’t go only by mega pixels as each producer has different methods by which they are represented. So a camera that has 8 mega pixels could actually not be such as good for quality as one camera produced by other manufacturer and which has only 6 mega pixels. So, read as much unbiased reviews for each camera you are thinking to buy. How could you tell which review is unbiased? Thats one where there is no link to the camera.

Finally, theres the photographers skill. Unfortunately, this you cant buy out of a box. Skill is something that I picked up with time, but, its something that you could learn and develop.

Alex Don
http://www.articlesbase.com/digital-photography-articles/tips-for-digital-photography-3-most-critical-things-for-quality-digital-pictures-722979.html