On Mondays, the Business Report examines Technology.
People used to say that "A picture was worth a thousand words." In the digital age, that works up to several million pixels. Digital cameras are getting smaller, better, and cheaper, as we learned from David Pogue. He's a technology writer for the New York Times.
David: You can get a little pocketable digital camera that takes really good pictures, not suitable for giant prints, but suitable for four-by-sixes for 150 dollars.
Reporter: Now you just made an interesting distinction there between whether it's suitable for giant prints or suitable for something smaller. That's one of the challenges for digital photography, right?
D: Exactly. With zoom cameras, you take a piece of film, you make any size enlargement you want, you never think about it. But on a digital camera, the number of color dots it memorizes when you press the shutter determines how big an enlargement you can make without being able to see the individual dots. That's the so-called megapixels of a camera.
R: And depending on the camera you have, you may have control of that even within the camera you can put on different settings.
D: Exactly, if you have an eight-megapixel camera, you can always dial it back to four or two, and you might say, well, why would you ever wanna do that. And this is my own pep, if already my veins are standing out from my faces, I talk about this. Consumers tend to think "Well, megapixels means bigger prints, so I'll just buy the camera with the most megapixels I can." More megapixels also means each picture you snap is a bigger file, which means it takes longer to take another picture after the first one. It takes longer to transfer those pictures to your computer, longer to edit them, longer to e-mail them, and so on. So megapixels is good up to a point. I happen to think for most consumers about four is the sweet spot.
R: There are now some digital cameras that will take a little video. There are of course, video cameras that will take a still photo. Is there any camera or video camera for that matter which can do both well?
D: No, every consumer has this question "Why do I have to buy two gadgets and pack two things on my trips?" The details of why you can't do that are pretty technical. It turns out that both the lens and the circuitry inside the gadget are different for these two different purposes. So there are very few that can do both well. The one interesting thing I've seen comes from Samsung. And it is sorta the weirdest-looking gadget.It actually has two lens barrels stacked, one for videos and one for still pictures, and it actually works.
R: They basically just took the two things and duct-taped them together.
D: (laugh) They had a little more elegance than that, but yes, that's the idea.
R: You mentioned one mistake that some consumers may make which is just buying too many megapixels more than they would really want and in fact they will get in the way. Are there other pitfalls people should avoid when they are deciding how to equip themselves?
D: Well it's worth pointing out just a couple of tradeoffs, and tradeoff number one is, you can't have both size and style, and great photos. So the cameras these days are unbelievablly good-looking. They have ones that are literally the size of a credit card and less than half an inch thick. We are talking you could put six of them in your shirt pocket, and the pictures they take are pretty good, but you are not going to get really spectacular magazine-worthy pictures, until you get into bigger and heavier. And number two is that megapixel issue. You can't have everything in a camera both price and a high megapixel rating. There are companies, if you can believe it, that sell five-megapixel cameras for two hundred dollars. But the pictures are terrible, and you say "Why? It has five megapixels!" And the answer is there's so much more to a good digital picture, especially the lens quality and the circuitry inside. So there is a lot of factors and the best way to shop is really to look online at these camera comparison web sites, like steves-digicams.com where these guys actually test the cameras and put up sample photos.
David Pogue, technology columnist for the New York Times. Thanks very much.
Thanks Steve.
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