FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions & Answers

An SLR is a camera with a reflex optical viewfinder (OVF). This means that when looking through the viewfinder, you see light entering the lens and reflected to your eye, as opposed to what the camera's sensor is recording. A DSLR is a Digital SLR. The Digital SLR basic page explains the important differences between a DSLR camera and regular digital cameras.

A viewfinder is a device or mechanism used to see the subject being photographed. There are many types of viewfinders and each has a set of advantages and limitations: OVFs and EVFs are the two most common types. Viewfinders contribute greatly to the experience of using a camera and so choosing a camera with an appropriate and comfortable viewfinder is essential. For an in-depth look, see our viewfinders article.

EVF stands for Electronic View Finder. It is an eye-level miniature LCD which servers as a viewfinder. Its main advantages are that you can see the entire picture and that you can see an approximation to the camera's final exposure. For an in-depth look, see our viewfinders article.

OVF stands for Opical View Finder. This term is used to described the viewfinder of SLR cameras. In such cameras, light coming into the lens is directed to the OVF until the picture is taken. The main advantages of this are focus is easily recognisable and the subject is seen directly through the lens without delay. For an in-depth look, see our viewfinders article.

Simply because there is nothing digital zoom can do that you can't easily do with a computer. Digital zoom is like cropping a picture, except it always crops evenly around the center and chooses between fixed sizes. Software allows you to crop any part an image and crop it to whichever size you want. This is much more flexible. Also, software can filter your image while cropping to reduce the degradation of image quality when resizing the cropped image.

On most fairly recent DSLRs, you can enable something called Live-View to preview photos before being taken. This did not always exist and older implementations of Live-View were even more limited than current ones.

To use the rear LCD as a viewfinder, DSLRs have to keep the sensor exposed to light. This is normally done by lifting the reflex mirror. Nearly each such model has different limitations. At the time of writing, no DSLR provided a Live-View equivalent to the preview shown on fixed-lens cameras. The most common limitations are: extremely long focus-delay, lack of exposure-preview and poor image coverage.

There are a few types of digital cameras but some have many names. Point-and-Shoot cameras are the simplest ones. Prosumer cameras are models with a fixed-lens and advanced controls. DSLRs are relatively large cameras that feature interchangeable lenses and are known for top image quality. SLDs also feature interchangeable lenses but do away with the optical reflex viewfinder to be more compact. Cameras with long zooms are called Ultra-Zooms, while small ones with large zooms are called Travel-Zooms. See Demystifying Digital Camera Types for more detailed information.

Compression, if the two options reduce images by the same amount. The reasons for this are explained inImage Size vs Quality.

In terms of resolution, digital cameras can offer comparable or better resolution than most camcorders. However, there are other factors which digital cameras don't do nearly as well. Camcorders are specialized at recording movies and generally will perform this task much better than digital cameras. Camcorders' biggest advantage is that they can record much longer movies with better sound. For more information, see Digital Camera Movies.

The short answer is that it does not. Digital images have a resolution but that is not the same thing as a size. Most likely you are being confused by your software which is showing the images as huge. Read Image Size and Resolution to find out how it works and how to change the apparent size of your images.

There are many situations which require an SLR. Indoor action photography is probably the best example. The flexibility of interchangeable lens is great but not every one needs it, so it depends on your needs. Using a DSLR is also quite different than using a prosumer digital camera as described in The Digital SLR Difference.

It depends on your camera because it has a speed-limit too. Above that speed-limit, faster cards won't make any difference. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to determine what that limit is.

No. The speed measurement on the card may is rarely accurate and usually represents memory reading under ideal conditions. Most importantly, a camera's performance is influenced by the write-speed of the card which can be very different from its read-speed. The performance of several memory cards can be found in our Memory Performance feature.

The most important things to consider are weight, batteries and memory. It is essential to bring enough gear for your needs without being overloaded. Depending on travel conditions, having enough power and memory to keep shooting can require advance planning. See the Travel Tips article for more details.

They are both the same. They are lenses which are optically zoomed by hand. This is nearly always done by rotating a ring around the lens barrel. Mechanical zoom lenses are very efficient because they move immediately, they have no zoom-steps and they do not require a zoom motor (meaning they don't use battery power). These lenses can be controlled with complete precision as fast as you can turn your hand.

A small camera with high-zoom cannot have an optical viewfinder. The reason is that a TTL viewfinder like an SLR takes space due to the pentaprism, pentamirror or porro-finder. Any one of these would not make the camera small. Since an optical tunnel viewfinder is a second tiny zoom-lens, it is difficult for such lens to have a long or wide zoom. Not only that, these lenses have to follow the camera lens as closely as possible. The larger the zoom range, the more difficult it would be. Even wide-angle compact cameras do not have optical viewfinders for the same reason.

There are several really good ones, but the best one for you depends on your needs. That is what our Camera Guide's choosing section is about. Each year we publish a list of most outstanding digital cameras so far in each category.

We were actually surprised how many times people ask this question, that supposes there is such a thing. Brands mean a lot and very little in the world of digital cameras. While all brands have good and poor models, some brands produce a greater percentage of great cameras. Canon really stands out accross all camera types, but not all their models are worth it. Nikon's reputation is based on the excellence of their high-end cameras, but their smaller cameras are generally weak. Several Fuji cameras lead their class in terms of image quality and optics. Sony, Olympus and Pentax have very mixed line ups. The champion of ergonomics and usability used to be Konica-Minolta which is no longer in the camera business, but it is now Pentax which frequently excels in this area. Olympus produces most weather-proof cameras, but Pentax and Nikon have some too.

Generally, no. To keep prices low, camera makers bundle very cheap optics with their cameras. These optics limit the results you will get from your DSLR camera. Kit-lenses are meant to get you to start using your camera right away but they are far from being all-purpose lenses. We cannot say those lenses are entirely useless, but you must do some research to see how well it fits your needs. Our Lens Buying Guide is made for that.

Ideally, buy each of your filters once and use step up rings. It will save you lots of money.

There is only one important catch with this approach and that is you cannot use lens hoods anymore except with the lenses that match your filter size.

The second minor catch is you cannot use your filters on certain lenses that have built-in lens hoods. This tends to be the case of more specialized optics.

The larger the sensor, the easiest it is to make a large viewfinder. That is why the largest viewfinders all belong to full-frame cameras even though the quoted magnification can be smaller. Here is the table of all DSLR viewfinders sorted by effective size From there, it is easy to see which cameras have a larger viewfinder among different crop factors.

YES it is completely safe, there is nothing to worry about.

Thinking about the brand is important among DSLRs. The reason is all about the lenses, each brand gives you access to a different lineup so what you must absolutely do is check what current lenses exist in each brand. To see all the current lenses in one place go to the Lens Models page and click on each brand that interests you one at a time.

There are also key features you may want to look depending on specific requirements:

• Full-frame upgrade path, in case you're planning to get more much more serious or deal with extremely low-light photography.
• Weather-sealing, in case you plan shooting in the rain, snow (freezing temperatures), jungle (high-humidity) or sandstorms.
• Built-in stabilization, for a potential cost-saving on the price of lenses.
• Mirrorless downgrade path, in case you want to move to a lighter system and keep your lenses fully functional.

Yes, the sun can damage a camera-sensor.

If the sun is too strong compared to the sensor's sensitivity, a useful exposure in unlikely anyway. If you want to photograph the sun, you can use an very dark neutral-density filter, something like an ND400 that reduces the strength of the sun by a factor of 400. This makes the sun dark enough to not over-expose it and much less likely to damage your sensor.

There are two reasons why an ISO is not made part of the 'normal' range:

• It is considered a non-trivial drop in quality and you do not want users complaining about its performance. There may be more changes than simply more noise, colors can be affected as well.
• The camera meters and exposes for the said ISO, but the results do not strictly comply with the ISO standard. When that happens, you will notice that the ISO is NOT stored in the EXIF of the image. Most likely this is due to a drop in dynamic-range at the expanded setting.

Depth-of-field is the set of distances from the camera for which things appear in focus. Depth-of-field is influenced by several factors. The hyper focal distance is the distance where depth-of-field is maximized. The Depth-of-field and the Hyper focal Distance article explains these concepts simply and precisely. There is even a hyper focal distance calculator.

Exposure-Compensation (EC) is a control that makes the camera take brighter or darker pictures, depending on its setting. It influences the camera's automatic exposure system without using manual (M) mode. For more details see Exposure Compensation.

There is a huge difference: You cannot change your mind if you set your camera to B&W.

Another difference is that there are multiple ways of converting to B&W, some people do not simply use luminance and will favor certain colors during the conversion. In the film days, it was possible to use a colored filter with B&W film to reduce the resulting look. Some cameras let you control this in-camera but you have a limited number of options (0-12).

Then again, if you have complete confidence it's what you want and don't want to waste your time on a computer, it is up to you.

This is a personal question and it will vary tremendously. Some situations like fast-moving actions often get a higher hit-to-miss ratio, so there is no universal answer.

Remember that Delete is your friend. It is good to delete anything that is not technically perfect with extremely few exceptions and then delete anything that has no point of interest or is too similar to another shot. This will make it easier to find nice pictures and create high-quality galleries.

The most common reaction to this advice is that storage is cheap and, while true, the cost of managing storage is not.

To get started, set up a few shots from a tripod and shoot them in both JPEG and RAW. Most DSLRs can do that simultaneously but not all smaller RAW-capable cameras. Then load some RAW files into any conversion software and see if you can produce an image which you prefer to the in-camera JPEG. Play with the conversion controls: sharpness, saturation, contrast, curve, etc. Don't go with the default conversion unless you want to waste your time because that will almost alwaysSome advanced programs will let you define your own conversion though which is usually called a preset. produce the same JPEG as the camera.

REMEBER: The RAW advantage is about what you can do with the image. Most mediums cannot even show all the nuances in a JPEG, so it is more about having control on the final image than about showing one with more color tones.

After a few rounds, you'll be able to judge if it is for you or not. There will be a cost in terms of space, speed and workflow. For those who do not use a DSLR, there is often an extremely long delay between shots when shooting RAW. Then, you have to realize that if you don't take the time to make the output better than what the camera does, you're not getting much out of RAW. If you do, realize that you could have been shooting more instead. Ask yourself what you prefer and what is worth it.

RAW files are not images yet. They are usually missing color-components on each pixels, so to see a RAW file it must be converted into an image.

Different software apply different conversions to show you RAW files as if they were images. That is why RAW files can appear different in Picasa and Lightroom. The software is pretty much free to do what it wants at that point.

Some RAW files actually have a JPEG embedded for preview purposes. In this case it is easy for the software to show you something. This depends on your camera. Sometimes it is a thumbnail, other times it is a full-size image. When you have only the small preview, you will sometimes see your images change in some software which loads the small JPEG as a preview and then uses the RAW data to render.

If you ONLY shoot RAW and thought not to care about image parameters (WB, Color, Saturation, Tone, Hue, Contrast, etc... depending on your camera), then you should know that if your files have an embedded JPEG, they use those parameters anyways. These parameters are also often used as a default RAW conversion when displaying RAW files and importing them. Depending on those settings, then the preview for your RAW files can look drastically different that what you had in mind.

UV filters are clear filters sold under the excuse that they protect the lens. They actually do but they also degrade image quality, increasing chances of lens flare. This is mostly visible when light sources are visible in the picture or just outside the edges of the frame.

As such it is only recommended to use a UV filter when a lens is in eminent danger such as in the presence of salt-water or flying sand. In this case, the degradation in quality should be accepted as the cost to save the lens.

Never on a digital camera. It would be a silly thing to do. A Skylight filter adds pink to compensate for overly blue sunlight at high altitude. White-Balance is designed to compensate for this and, on most digital cameras, it will simply compensate for the filter too!

A camera can use a variable amount, which is better than what a Skylight filter can do. On cameras with an external WB sensor, results may look very strange as it may not fully compensate. With flash, things get even more bizarre since WB is often automatically adjusted for the flash but a Skylight filter causes problems by changing incoming light,

Yes and No. That is the only true answer.

A lens has to be adapted to your vision and subject. Even though some lenses are often associated with some types of photography (landscape, portraits, architecture, etc), photographers rarely limit themselves to one type of lens for a type of subject. Moving back and shooting with a longer lens is not equivalent as it changes the relationship between of things at different depths.

In some locations you end up very close to the scenic vistas (beaches, nature trails) and there are interesting foreground details which deserve emphasis (flowers, seashells, moss, etc) in which case a wide-angle be easier to compose with. In other locations, the interesting things are far and without a long lens is becomes difficult to make an interesting shot.

Regardless of what angle-of-view your lens is, you have to be able to fill the frame with interesting things. Just because something is harder with some lens does not mean you should not shoot with it. Unusual angles and perspectives can be very interesting.

Color-temperature is a way to describe the color of light along a spectrum that goes from warm colors (measured as having a lower temperature) to cool colors (measures as having a higher temperature).

Color-temperature is measured in Kelvin degrees and corresponds to the temperature at which a certain metal must be heated to emit light of that color. That is why lower temperatures (say 3000K) give off warm (yellow-orange) light and that high temperatures (9000K) give off color (bluish) light.

White-balance is the process of canceling the effect color-temperature in a photograph. This is because our brain corrects what our eyes see to let us see white as white, although it may be tinted by the color-temperature of light.

If the color-temperature of light is known, then its effect can be mostly canceled. Automatic white-balance guesses at that temperature (see this question). Preset white-balance use mostly fixed known temperatures (6500K for daylight, 9500k for cloudy, 3000k for tungsten, etc - actual values vary between cameras).

For custom white-balance the camera uses a sample that is known to be white and deduces the color-temperature of light from that. Some cameras actually report the measured color-temperatures when using custom white-balance.

Note that for light sources that are mixed or simply way off from typical lighting conditions (sodium vapor lights, some fluorescents) it is not possible to cancel the effect because some parts of the visible spectrum are missing.

Since colors affect the mood of a photograph and how we perceive images, so does color-temperature. It is known that warmer color-temperatures are generally perceived as more pleasant and some photographers purposefully set the white-balance wrong to convey a certain mood. Cool temperatures are associated with night and mystery. Neither is better, it must simply fit the photo and how you intend viewers to perceive it.

First, a filter does not help compared to not using one, since it adds a flat reflection surface. However, some filters add more flare than others. A filter that is multi-coated or - even better - super multi-coated adds less reflections and therefore less flare.

To reduce flare if the sun is not shining directly into your lens, try a lens hood first. If it does not enough, then you need additional shading. Anything that does not obstruct the subject will do (hand, hat, a friend, etc).

Keep in mind that if you use a full-frame lens on a cropped-sensor camera, the hood supplied with your lens cannot be adequate. This is also the case for a almost all zoom lenses at any focal other than its widest point.

This is often a source of confusion which most people get backwards, so understanding this is delicate:

When a light entering a lens is not in focus, a point on the subject is focused into a circle on the image plane (sensor/film). This circle IS the circle of confusion. The more out of focus a point is, the larger the circle of confusion becomes. This depends on focus distance, subject distance and aperture. It does not depend on the capture device resolution or viewing conditions.

The circle of confusion used in DOF calculations is the maximum allowable circle of confusion which is considered in acceptable focus. This is dictated by the medium size and viewing distance because of the way human vision resolves details.

Historically, most DOF tables use a standard COC which corresponds to unaided viewing of an 8"x10" at 14" away for someone with 20/20 vision, although other numbers are used sometimes.

For each model, we look up as many reviews as possible. We take each conclusion and translate it into a percentage scale. The translation is based on the review site's rating system and some subjective editing to remove factors that have little relevance. For example, if a site removed points for a camera not having a feature and does not remove points for another camera of the same class not having the same feature, an adjustment is made when translating to the common scale. Then the ratings are averaged together. This way we can add one 'Above Average' with one 'Excellent' with one '8.6' and one 'Dave's pick' and come up with an average rating. Finally, the ratings are translated into a 4-point scale relative to each camera class or size. The rating scale is, from best to worst: Excellent, Good, Average and Poor. Keep in mind that since the ratings are relative to the camera class, a good DSLR will most likely produce better picture than an Excellent ultra-compact camera.

There are many excellent digital cameras which have been discontinued but are still available from many sources such as clearance stores and auctions. These cameras can provide very interesting price points for their performance. Otherwise, it may have just been discontinued and we did not have time to react. Also some companies discontinue models in different regions of the globe at different times. For example, a model no longer available in America may still be available in Asia.

Most likely we did not get around to it. They may be other factors which do not make it worth while for this camera to be reviewed here. We are aiming to educate people mostly new to digital photography and we will generally not rate products not aimed at this market.

Not until it takes better pictures! We don't cover this class of device at this time. Same thing goes for you video camera, your laptop, you MP3 player and your pen-camera.

You're probably not as picky as most people but you probably would be happier with a camera which we rated better. The good news is that today's 'Poor' cameras are much better than most cameras of a few years ago. It makes it harder to go completely wrong. Since our ratings are averaged from other ratings, we're less wrong than other sites!

You're probably more picky than most people or perhaps you have special needs. The good news is that since our ratings are averaged from other ratings, we're less wrong than other sites!

This is our term to described cameras that are nearly identical. In most cases sister cameras all use the same lens and sensor. Sister models have the same features and are expected to have the same performance and characteristics as each other. Camera buyers should pay attention to this if they can't find the camera they want for the price they are willing to pay. It is common for digital camera manufacturers to release very similar models over time. Differences already seen include different size LCDs, different branding, button layout and power source.

This is our term for a digital camera designed to replace another camera model of the same manufacturer. These cameras are generally similar but some things have significantly changed. Frequently replacement models improve on major features such as resolution and optical zoom. It is quite common for features to degrade or to be removed. Many manufacturers use this strategy to reduce costs or increase differentiation between product lines. Degradation already seen include diminished battery life, removal of some manual controls and change to a more expensive memory type.

It is somewhat arbitrary, but we use thickness. Ultra-compact cameras are 1" thick or less. Compact cameras are between 1.1" and 2" thick. Medium cameras are between 2.1" and 3" thick. Large cameras are deeper than 3".

The assessment section is where neocamera describes its recommendation (or not) for the given camera. We also try to point out there alternates depending on specific needs. Special features of a camera can also be high-lighted there.

Simple, because most other cameras are better. Our scale has only four steps but we do try to fill it out. Some sites have a point scale from 1 to 10 but never give less than a 7. When we translate this into our point scale, a score of 7 maps to a Poor.

Because our abilities to read minds is limited by distance. To let us know you question, you can email support@neocamera.com. If your question is frequently asked it will eventually appear here, but first we'll try to answer by email as soon as possible.

It is not that they are missing, they just were not assigned. Some features like having a flash Hot-Shoe are automatically verifiable and so our back-end puts the icon automatically. We also decided to require a sufficiently reasonable implementation for certain features. For example, continuous drives less than 1 FPS are ignored and so the continuous-drive icon does not appear.

Yes, we know. Well, in most cases. Some manufacturers do not provide all the information that we expose. The number of aperture blades for example seems to be a carefully guarded secrets sometimes.

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After we review Y! Seriously, unexpected things can happen and even if we are working on a review right now, there is no way to know when it will be published. If we have not received it yet, it is even more uncertain. So, as Abraham Lincoln said, Its better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.

See answer to previous question. Well, we would like to, but we have a distinct lack of monitors.