A clearer picture of the digital camera scene

This may be the Year of the Digital Camera, when what was a high-tech gizmo only a year or two ago is morphing into an ordinary consumer item. By January 2006 more than half of all American households will own at least one digital camera, predicts the Photo Marketing Association (PMA). At the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, manufacturers displayed a dizzying array of sleek models with nearly every feature a photographer could want - and many more.

In fact, the term digital camera itself is too generic to mean much. Do you want a camera that's also a mobile phone? Do you want the flexibility of interchangeable lenses? To shoot video and audio? To be able to take large, even poster-size, prints? To shoot underwater? Each of these requires some special features and some special homework before buying.

But for the majority of picture takers, looking for a shirt-pocket camera to capture family snapshots, here are some things to consider:

Megapixel mania has cooled. Like automakers who cram as much horsepower as they can under the hoods of their cars, digital cameramakers have been bragging about how many megapixels their models offers. A megapixel contains roughly 1 million pixels, or picture elements, tiny squares of light that make up the digital image. To a certain extent, the more you have, the better the resolution of the picture.

Megapixels have been "a way of delineating this silver camera from that silver camera" in an industry with a lot of similar-looking products, says Chris Chute, a senior analyst for digital imaging at IDC, a market research firm in Framingham, Mass.

But if you printed out a typical 4-by-6-inch print from a 3-megapixel camera and from a 7-megapixel camera, "you'd get pretty much the same picture," he says. In general, only when photos are blown up to very large sizes will more megapixels make a visible difference.

"A 5-megapixel camera is more than sufficient," adds Gary Pageau, a spokesman for the Photo Marketing Association (PMA) in Jackson, Mich. Beyond that, "you're talking about [cameras for] the hobbyists, the advanced amateurs who need the extra resolution to do more sophisticated things with their pictures." These include digitally "zooming in" and printing just a small portion of the picture.

Besides megapixels, say industry insiders and analysts, consumers today want:

• The best price. Average selling prices will fall from $340 in 2004 to $295 by the end of 2005 and to $200 by 2009, predicts IDC.

• The right "look and feel," a subjective judgment in which the "sizzle" sells the camera.

• Brand names they recognize, such as Kodak, Canon, or Sony, says Mr. Chute. Those three companies are the top-selling brands so far this year, according to IDC, together accounting for nearly 3 in 5 digital cameras sold in the United States.

Other questions to ask or features some buyers may want to consider:

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