Foreign Perspectives

The prices of digital cameras have had a gentle drop over the last couple of years mainly because they have added features and resolution as otherwise the price drop would have been quite dramatic.

If you just want a general purpose camera then you can get excellent ones around £100 or so these days. Even £30 gets quite a reasonable camera if you choose carefully.

However, the problem that all of these cameras have is that they are relatively slow in taking a photo. At the £30 level you press the button and it can be half a second or more before the image is fully recorded so photos taken with these cameras will generally look a little wavy unless you hold them very still. You definitely can’t photograph moving objects with them.

Move up to £100 and that half second delay drops significantly. There is a delay whilst the camera stores the image but the image is completely captured in one go so you don’t get the wavy lines. No problem with moving objects anymore. Spending more generally gets more megapixels which will let you print larger images.

However, if you try taking a photo of something like a car race you still have problems because of the delay in the camera capturing the image. There won’t be any wavy lines but chances are the car won’t be in the frame completely. If this type of photography is what you like to do then you will probably need to move towards one of the SLR digital cameras which start around £300 or so. There’s quite an overlap in the price range of top end compact digital cameras and SLRs and the two have similar capabilities but the speed of image capture is considerably different and, of course, the SLR cameras let you change the lens.

Typically around the £100 to £200 mark spent on a compact digital camera will get one that will suit most people. If you’re into sports photography you’ll need to take that up to £300 for a digital SLR.