Article Summary
"For those shopping for a digital camera in the 2006 holiday season and into 2007, there's never been a better time. There's also never been a more confusing one. Never a better one because the prices of digital cameras have come down so much that many high quality digital cameras from major manufacturers are now priced below the traditional US$299 "pain threshold." Never a more confusing one because with so many cameras available for so little money, how do you decide which one you want and need? It's gotten to a point where the inflated list price of a lesser model is often higher than the discounted price of a much better camera. And even if buying from the same source, consumers are often faced with figuring out what, if anything, they give up or gain by paying as little as US$20 less or more for this model or that.
It used to be easier. In the olden days of megapixel scarcity you paid a premium price for cameras with a higher megapixel count than for the bargain basement models that still offered last year's pixel resolution. And even those cost quite a bit, several times more than equivalent film models. But film is virtually gone by now and almost everything in the stores is digital. Five megapixel used to be high-end a couple of years ago. Now it is low-end. Your average digital camera now has betwen five and seven megapixel, and there are a good number that go above. Yes, you can get very reasonably priced eight to ten megapixel cameras. This is where megapixel become about as academic as the clock speed of a computer's CPU chip...." ....Read Complete Article
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