I needed a new camera. Nothing fancy, just a simple point a shoot to capture…whatever. I had already decided my price range (sub $150) and battery type (no AA’s for me). Now all I needed was to find one. Easier said than done. Like I said in my previous post, all I pretty much had to go off was the internet, so I rolled up my sleeves and did some pretty intense research which led me to a couple of online resources that came in pretty handy.
First thing’s first. Choosing a camera is difficult. There are so many options – zoom, speed, LCD size, megapixels, viewfinder, video capability, video type, sound playback…the list goes on. This is not a post to narrow all of that down for you. This is a post to show you how to use the internet to aid you in selecting the camera that’s right for you.
1. What do you want in a camera?
If you want some information on all the options available to you and help in determining how important they are to you, I would highly suggest CNET’s Digital Camera Buying Guide. Chock full of information, they break down all the options and link the general camera features to the type of user, making it fairly easy for you to decide just what group you fall into. They also have a Digital SLR camera buying guide for the more advanced camera users.
2. Which cameras have the features you’re looking for?
Once you decide the kind of user you are and the features you want, the next thing is to find all the cameras that meet that criteria. Once again CNET has this covered. Their digital camera finder makes it easy by allowing you to select the most basic options while their digital camera review section allows you to narrow down the options by feature, brand or camera type.
3. Camera comparisons
When you have finally narrowed it down to a couple of choices, the next thing to do is to compare your options. Quite a few sites have this feature with some being better than others. Snapsort.com keeps it really simple by giving a feature by feature comparison while sites like Imaging Resource have image by image comparisons on the same or similar test subjects.
4. In depth Reviews
These basically give a review of the camera’s overall performance, feel and features. Sites like digitalcameraHQ, Camera Labs and Imaging Resource do an awesome job.
5. User reviews
To me this is one of the most important parts of choosing a camera and can pretty much be a deal breaker. If the choice comes down to two cameras and one has a ton of bad reviews, which will you feel most comfortable buying? TestFreaks.com pretty much aggregates reviews from all over the internet, they even categorizes them into “expert” and “user” reviews. Amazon and Youtube are also pretty good places to find some user reviews, even though I’m pretty sure TestFreaks has them included in their listings.
6. Pictures
Finally, after all of the research above, maybe you want to see actual pictures not just test images but real everyday photos from real users. Flickr and Picasa are good sources for this. Flickr has a camera finder feature while Picasa’s search function using allows you to just type in the name of the camera and voila all the camera images at your fingertips.
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Most of the websites mentioned above, have the same or similar features. Some with better options and more details but a wealth of information nonetheless. I pretty much used them all in my camera selection process. The verdict is still out however, as I have yet to even turn on my camera. In my next post I’ll let you know my top 3 and which one I selected.
