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Taking good pictures with a compact camera can be frustrating, especially for spoiled SLR users. But sometimes it makes sense to grab a lightweight point-and-shoot, be it digital or film, even if it means making a trade-off in performance.
While the latest digital models offer more sophisticated exposure controls, wider apertures, and features than their film-based cousins (see “Why spend $700+ on a digital camera?”), there are actually more things you can do to wreck your pictures. Here are the most common digital camera pitfalls and how to avoid them.
1. DIGITAL ZOOM DOOM
Read the brochures for some digital cameras, and you’ll see digital zoom described in terms such as, “Extends the maximum 3X optical zoom, making up to approximately 12X zoom possible.”
Does this sound like an advanced technology that allows you to get closer than ever to your subject without compromising image quality? It’s not!
The truth is, as soon as you venture into the digital zoom range on any camera, image quality nosedives. (On the other hand, digital zoom in playback mode lets you magnify your images to check for focus and other details, a very useful feature.)
Here’s how digital zoom works: Once you reach the limit of your optical zoom, the camera starts cropping the image (just like you can do later on a computer). Then, when you press the shutter, the camera resizes the cropped area to the pixel resolution you’ve set on the camera.
Resizing the image is also called interpolation, a process of duplicating pixels to prevent jagged edges and other low-res artifacts. The camera may also sharpen the image a bit, but neither of these steps improves image resolution.
So if you take a picture with a 5MP camera using 10X digital zoom (4X optical x 2.5X digital), you’ll get the same image quality as you would with a 1MP camera using a 10X optical zoom. As a result, the “zoomed” image that appears sharp in the camera’s tiny 1.8-inch LCD will be fuzzy and out of focus in prints or when enlarged on a computer monitor.
My advice? Turn off the camera’s digital zoom and get closer to your subject so you can crop using the optical zoom. If the subject is too far away, shoot at the highest resolution and maximum optical focal length. Later, crop in the computer using imaging software, resize it (if necessary to boost it to 200 ppi for printing), and apply some unsharp masking to give it the illusion of high definition in a print.
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