You have a 2-3 year old point-n-shoot digital camera with a whirlwind of functions (that you rarely use), it takes perfectly decent photos, but you think it’s time to upgrade. To what? If you’re like me, you’re tired of taking “touristy” photos and want to see if you can kick it up a notch. Should you go for another higher tech point-n-shoot or should you try your hand at a Single Lens Reflex (SLR) camera?
I love the convenience of my little point-n-shoot digicam. I bought it about four years ago and at the time it was one of the smallest on the market. I don’t even think twice about throwing it in my pocket for a shopping trip (to record product choices), on a night out (to capture that special birthday moment) or on even on a long vacation. And it has most of the features of a larger, more professional camera. I love it. But why did I want more?
I read many photography reviews before I finally settled on the particular intro-SLR that I bought. Still not sure I understood what I was reading. They all contained a valuable dearth of data, statistics, photo quality parametrics, and feature analysis. As usual when purchasing new electronics, the information was overwhelming and the opinions, advantages, and biases all difficult to separate. So, after really running my new SLR through the ropes for a while now, here’s a breakdown of what I think is *really* important… from an amateur’s point of view:
First of all, my photo requirements are simple:
Occasional hard-copy photo printing for grandma or a vacation album
Frequent internet upload and display on a photo website
Storage on a huge hard-drive to show to the kids someday
Here are the top eight most important things:
- Button push-to-Shutter click responsiveness – when you push that shutter button how fast does the camera snap out a photo. Often the case with the smaller point-n-shoots WYSIWYG is not the case – you push the button and have to wait a few seconds while the camera focuses, then blanks the screen, then snaps the photo – in which time the subject has gone on to do something else.
- Rapid-fire – an extension of the previous but this feature is typically helpful for moving subjects and things in action – gets rid of that blur and lets you take multiple photos one after the other in order to capture just the right moment of action.
- Power-up time – being able to snap a photo at the right opportunity is critical. Waiting for the camera to turn on is a waste.
- Ease and speed of setting changes – if you can’t change the settings quickly, you can’t get the ideal configuration for the scene you’re trying to compose. Changing these settings and understanding them should be intuitive – shouldn’t take more than two button pushes.
- Focus time – you can play with this by shooting subject through glass or by choosing a close-up subject with background distractions – when the camera chooses to focus on the wrong thing or takes too much time to do so, you lose the shot.
- Lens focal length (wide angle/zoom) – one of the most unique features of the SLR is the flexibility to change out the lens for a different perspective on things. Forget about crazy zooms – the wide angle lens will change the way you take pictures.
- Weight/size – the bigger it gets, the less you want to carry it on that trip
- Function comprehension and manipulation – keep the “menu digging” necessary to change functions down to a minimum. Many point-n-shoots have many of the same functions as the SLRs but fewer people know what to do or how to find them. Why? They’re a pain to get to. Should be easy to find in a hurry to capture that chance of a shot.
The following things, on the other hand, aren’t worth getting all tied up over:
How many functions and what they are – the major brands all have the same basic functionality
Megapixels – until the internet gets faster and the hard-drives bigger, you’ll be scaling down your photos anyway. The day 3 megapixel came out almost 10 years ago, the quality was good enough for 8×10 printing anyway – gimme a break are you going to print much larger than that anyway?!
Bundled software – you can get much better stuff otherwise
Some expert’s opinion of the picture quality intricacies
Zoom – either buy another lens or settle for the 3X zoom that’s pretty standard on the point-n-shoots. You can always crop the photo and enlarge a section for “simulated” zoom.
Conclusion
Not sure really sure why I wrote this but its one amateur’s opinion. Remember it’s the photographer that really makes the camera what it is… unless of course the camera sucks. 
