Digital Cameras Buying Guide

Don't be mystified by jargon or fooled by hype. Our comprehensive Buying Guides help you choose the right products.

What you need to know, from the kind of user you are to current technologies:

WHAT ARE MY STORAGE OPTIONS?

Digital cameras store pictures on some kind of removable media, though certain cameras ship with only internal memory and leave extra memory purchases to the consumer. Flash-memory cards -- which come in various shapes, sizes, and capacities -- are the most popular type of storage media. The number of pictures you can store on a memory card depends upon the compression settings you choose when saving the files, as well as on how an individual camera compresses. Higher compression allows you to fit more pictures on a card, although image quality will suffer somewhat.

Before you buy a camera, carefully consider the type of media that it takes, as you may own (or plan to buy) an MP3 player, PDA or other device that takes the same kind of card. You can save a few pounds by thinking ahead.

CompactFlash Types I and II

42.8 by 36.4 by 3.3/5.0mm

Pros: Comes in very large capacities; fast; widely supported; competitively priced

Cons: Larger than many of the new formats

Supporting manufacturers: Canon, Kodak, Konica Minolta, Nikon, and Pentax

Hitachi Microdrive

42.8 by 36.4 by 5.0mm

Pros: Large capacities; fast

Cons: Expensive; CompactFlash capacities are quickly catching up

Supporting manufacturers: Various, usually for pro and semipro cameras

Mini CD-R and CD-RW

80mm diameter

Pros: Readable by CD and DVD drives found on most current PCs; inexpensive; reasonably large capacities

Cons: Using 80mm discs and drive makes cameras relatively large and bulky

Supporting manufacturers: Sony

Secure Digital/MultiMediaCard (SD/MMC)

32 by 24 by 2.1mm

Pros: Very popular across consumer electronics devices; small; fast; wide range of capacities; competitively priced; small size permits compact devices

Cons: Not compatible with old MMC slots

Supporting manufacturers include: Canon, Casio, Contax, HP, Kodak, Konica Minolta, Kyocera, Leica, Panasonic, Pentax, Toshiba

Memory Stick

50 by 21.5 by 2.8mm

Pros: Compatible with all Sony consumer electronics devices; growing popularity

Cons: Limited to a maximum capacity of 128MB (256MB in the doubled-up Memory Stick with Memory Select Function); not widely supported by camera manufacturers other than Sony

Supporting manufacturers: Konica Minolta, Sony

Memory Stick Duo and Pro Duo

31 by 20 by 1.6mm

Pros: Tiny format means tinier devices

Cons: Possibly too small; requires bundled adaptor for use in Memory Stick slots; not supported by camera manufacturers other than Sony

Supporting manufacturers: Sony

Memory Stick Pro

50 by 21.5 by 2.8mm

Pros: Large capacities

Cons: Not compatible with most devices from circa 2002 and earlier; unsupported by camera manufacturers other than Sony

Supporting manufacturers: Sony

xD-Picture Card

25 by 20 by 1.7mm

Pros: Smallest format means smaller devices

Cons: New and still proprietary format; possibly too small; haven't yet ramped up to the capacities of SD, CompactFlash or Memory Stick

Supporting manufacturers: Fujifilm, Olympus