Camera Specs for New Owners

Canon ELPH 300-HS, 1/3Sec, f/5, 82mm (35mm equivalent), ISO 1600, No Flash

Most of my friends thought of buying a new camera after they are blessed with a baby. The usecases for a camera are much different for an average person compared to a photography enthusiast. An average person's need for a camera would include:

• To capture the sweet moments with their kids: indoor and outdoor.
• To take photos of social events: birthday parties, wedding, etc.
• To digitize the memory of a vacation/trip

The above usecases can be converted into the following requirements. Note that number of these requirements can arise simultaneously in any of the above usecases.

• Shooting in low-light conditions: it can be because you are shooting indoor or because you are shooting into the evening.
• Wide-angle shots: this is when you want to take a picture of a group of people in a small room or when you want to capture a whole mountain range.
• Shooting from far: this is for the situations where you can't or don't want to approach your subject. e.g. your kids playing in a park, tieing-the-knot shot, etc.
• Freezing the movements: this is when you want to capture your kid's first walk or first bicyle ride. You don't want to come up with blurry pictures.

Now, when you buy a new camera, you have to look for specifications that can satisfy the above requirements. I am not going to explain the technical terms here; that your task.

• To handle low light conditions, don't rely on flash. Using on-camera flash almost always results in unflattering photos. Rather, you better use high ISO and large aperature (low F-number.) Therefore, look for a camera that provides the lowest F-numbers (high apertures) and good quality shots at high (as high as 3200) ISO values.
• Wide-angle shots require wide-angle lens. Look at the focal-length specification of a camera. The specification of "optical zoom 5x" is useless, but look for the exact spec that says "focal length: 24–120mm". For wide angle shots, you will need the lower end of this focal length range as low as possible. 28mm or lower in 35mm equivalent value is preferable.
• When shooting from far, you need the opposite of a wide-angle lens; i.e. a tele-photo lens. For this, you would want the upper end of the focal length range as high as possible. Still, unless you are into birds photography or stalking somebody, 200mm is generally more than enough.
• All the cameras provide high shutter speeds and thus are capable to freeze any action. It is just about whether a camera let you choose a high shutter speed when you want it.
• As mentioned above, a camera can be capable of many things, but unless it lets you choose the settings, those capabilities are useless. Therefore, you have to look for some extend of manual control on the camera (shutter priority, aperature priority, exposure compensation, etc.)
• One important thing to consider when buying a compact camera is how responsive it is. Compact cameras will take a non-negligble amount of time to start up and there will be a delay between the instance you press the shutter and the instance the camera takes the shot (called shutter lag.) Even though these delays are less than a second, any value more than 0.1sec will make you miss a lot of shots and can become highly irritating.
• You can also look for optical image stabilization. This reduces the effect of shaking hand, which gets amplified when you use a tele-photo lens.

There are some camera specs an average person doesn't have to worry about. For example, don't worry about camera's megapixels. Unless you are printing posters from your photos, you don't need anything more 6MP. Same with touch screen; you would rather opt for dedicated physical knobs for various camera settings.

Fianlly, as I mentioned in my previous post, you can't get everything. If you go for a tele-photo lens, the maximum aperature you can use will reduce; if you use high ISO, the quality of your shot will reduce; and so on. So again, it is ultimately you who has to make the decision on which specs of a camera is more important to you.