Researching for a New Camera

For my previous post, Vijay referred to an excellent post from his own blog, on tips for buying a new camera. As he mentioned there, "what camera should I buy?" is the most frequent question I also get from my friends. It is the hardest question as well because it is very similar to the question "whom should I marry?" How the heck I would know that?!

What I am saying is choosing a camera is a personal choice; nobody else can make it for you. Are you looking for a beautiful, less expensive girl, I mean camera, or sophisticated, expensive one, only you can know. So what it boils down to is that you doing your own research. And this is where everybody backs off from me ("if I can do that why the heck would I come to you for advice!?") I hear you and I know that camera research is intimidating, but can't help it; you have to do it. More the money you are willing to spend on your new camera, more the time you have to spend on doing research. So instead of I telling you what to buy, I am going to give you some tips on how to do camera research.

• First, believe in you. If you can research for buying a car or making a wedding cake, then you can do this as well.
• Short-list some cameras according to your price range and browse through their specifications and features. Your brain will adapt itself to recognize the most frequent terms even though you don't really understand them.
• In addition to the selected price range, you should also have a pretty good idea about what your new camera is for. Now read as many reviews as possible from different sources: while you can find professional reviews at sites like dpreview, online-sellers like Amazon.com carry reviews from average users like you and me.
• Now start noticing things: if the purpose of a new camera is "xyz" and a review says something like "this camera's nice 'pqr' feature makes it excellent for 'xyz'", start digging a bit deeper on the feature 'pqr'. Basically, get the answeres for two questions: what is it? and why is it important? I for one will be delighted to answer these questions. The "?" icons in DPReview's spec sheets are particularly helpful in this regard.
• Consider pushing up or down your price range and redo your research.
• Keep in mind that, there will be always a trade-off between something when you want to buy anything. The ultimate purpose of this research is to understand the trade-off you are eventually going to make.

There are number of good side-effects you get from doing this market research:

• When you ultimately buy a camera, you would know most of its controls which will enable you to use the camera most efficiently.
• You have now mastered the photographic glossary; now it would be easy to master the art of photography as well.
• When reading reviews, you would've gone through a lot of example photos. Get inspired by them; learning by example is the most efficient way of learning.

So basically, rather than asking others which camera you should buy, get their help to understand the area and make the decision yourself. The amount of confidence you get from this process is priceless.