digital camera advice?

[Krystal]

We've been playing with the idea of getting a digital camera.  But there's something I don't understand...

where's the film???  yeah, I know I'm an idiot.  What if I want actual *pictures*.  Things I can send home to my computerless parents.  Can that happen???  How do you work a camera without film anyway?  Can you take countless pictures???

And, lastly, anyone have any brands/types to suggest?  ((within a reasonable price range...whatever that may be for these things))

[rcarey1]

The number of pictures you can take depends on the amount of memory the camera has and the resolution of the picture you take.

If you've got a good ink-jet printer, you can make pretty good prints yourself. Or you can always take a disc to one of the local photo shops. Most of them are set up now to make prints from digital images.

All my cameras are Canons. But they can be a little pricey. Your best bet might be to find a local camera shop that sells used equipment. Lots of people are getting rid of their first digital cameras now for the newer ones.

Rick--

[Marybelle]

Also, if you have a digital camera, you can get a free membership to Snapfish.com, and they'll make actual prints of any pictures you take with a digital camera.  It's pretty cool, really.  

[Suebee]

I print all mine on glossy photo paper on my home printer. The quality is pretty good.

I have a Toshiba PDR-M4 (discontinued), and it uses SmartMedia cards to store the images. I have a 32 MB card in there right now, and on the quality setting I am using right now (medium-high), I can get 65 pictures. On the very lowest setting I can get 494 pictures, but they will suck because the quality is set way too low. On the highest setting I can get 32 pictures.

I rarely fill the card before uploading the images to my computer, except when we go on vacations and there's no computer to upload them to.

My advice for purchasing a digital camera:

1. Get at least 2.1 megapixels for quality photos. Prices are dropping, so if you can afford a higher megapixel count, go for it!

2. Be sure it's compatible with your computer. I have a Mac, so I needed something Mac-compatible. A lot of the cameras use USB, so if your computer DOESN'T have a USB connection (maybe an older computer), be careful.

If I think of more, I'll add them...

[rogermerriman]

Digital cameras have a sensor rather than film.
some of the advantages of digital cameras is you can delete shots you don`t like so making more space on the cameras memory.
Don`t get too hung up on the specs of the camera, try the camera out, do you like the size? Does it fit well in your hand? And how easy is it to use?

If your computer is running windows xp or mac X then connecting up is cinch, with mac X once you connect the camera to the mac a app will open up which will save your photos on the macs hard drive. XP is easy as well, it will treat the camera as a tiny hard drive and you can just copy the pics across to your pc's hard drive.

you can take the the camera (or just the memory card) to a camera shop and most be able give you prints from that.