Types of Digital Cameras

Once you decide upon buying a digital camera for yourself and go shopping you will come across various types of cameras ranging from a few hundreds to thousands of dollars. Here I will give you a brief idea of the different digital cameras available in the market so that you can have a prior idea as to what each camera type is capable of and decide upon the best digital camera type for your needs.

1. Ultra Compact Digital Cameras

Ultra Compact Digital Cameras are the smallest digital cameras available, so small that they can be easily slipped into a shirt pocket. They are lightweight, easy to use and are capable of taking quality images with the least of manual adjustments. Most cameras of this type have lesser number of effective pixels and fewer features than compact cameras, like viewfinder and other typical manual controls. Cameras like Nikon Coolpix S3000 and Panasonic Lumix FP3 fall in this category. They are moderate to high priced.

2. Compact Digital Cameras

Compact digital cameras or Point and Shoot cameras, as they are also known, are compact, lightweight and have semi-automatic and manual controls. As their name suggests, they are ideal for point-and-shoot photography having fully automatic and scene modes. They normally produce very high quality images and are low to moderate priced according to their features. Canon PowerShot S95 and Nikon Coolpix L22 are typical cameras of this category.

Some latest compact digital cameras like the Fujifilm FinePix Real 3D W3 comes with the ability of taking 3D images as well.

3. Advanced Digital Cameras

They are also called Prosumer digital cameras and are targeted towards photographers having skills between professional and consumer. They feature advanced high quality lens and manually controlled features for greater creative control, much like DSLR cameras, but lack interchangeable lenses. They are moderate to high priced and cameras such as Nikon CoolPix P7000 and Sony Alpha A900 come under this category.

4. Digital Single Lens Reflex Cameras

Digital Single Lens Reflex or DSLR cameras are the best digital cameras available in the market today. They have high quality optics, capture very high resolution images, and have large optical zooming capability. They also accept interchangeable lenses and other sophisticated accessories.

DSLR cameras have got full range of manual control but can also function automatically. They are very high priced and are ideal for the professional photographers.

5. Micro Four Thirds Cameras

Micro Four Third digital cameras were first introduced by Panasonic in 2008 and are very similar to single lens reflex type digital cameras but lack reflex mirrors and optical viewfinders. They are smaller and more compact than DSLR cameras but have large sensors and accommodate interchangeable lenses like DSLRs. They are moderate to high priced. Cameras such as Olympus PEN E-P1 and Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1 fall under this category.

6. Interchangeable Lens Unit Camera System

Ricoh first introduced the interchangeable lens unit camera in 2009. These cameras are unique in the sense that they consist of a body and separate camera units. Each unit contains its own lens, image sensor and image processor. They lens units simply slide into the camera body to make up the whole camera. They are pretty much towards the expensive side.

These are the 6 main types of digital cameras available in the market. So before your start shopping for your new camera, decide on your needs and requirements and then choose your best digital camera type

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