Compact digital cameras are built to be little and transportable and are especially appropriate for casual and "snapshot" use, thus are also called point-and-shoot camera. The tiniest, generally less than 20 mm thick, are described as subcompacts or ultra-compacts. Most, aside from ruggedized or moisture resistant models, incorporate a retractable lens assembly allowing a thin camera to have a reasonably long focal length and therefore entirely exploit an image sensor bigger than that on a camera telephone, and a mechanized lens cap to cover the lens when retracted. Compact cameras are sometimes engineered to be simple to utilize, sacrificing sophisticated features and picture quality for compactness and simplicity; images can mostly only be stored using loss compression (JPEG). Most have an inbuilt flash typically of low power, enough for close by subjects. Live preview is nearly always used to frame the photograph. They might have limited motion picture capacity.

Compacts regularly have macro capability and zoom lenses but the zoom range is mostly less than for bridge and DSLR cameras. Sometimes a contrast-detect auto-focus system, using the image info from the live preview feed off the key imager, focuses the lens. Generally these cameras incorporate a nearly-silent leaf shutter into their lenses. To enable lower costs and smaller size, these cameras often use image sensors with a diagonal of roughly six mm, corresponding to a crop factor around six. This gives them weaker low-light performance, greater depth of field, usually closer targeting capability, and smaller parts than cameras using bigger sensors. The digital compact provides a bunch of edges over its SLR cousin.

These benefits are worth considering in light of your intended use. The most evident advantage is its compact size which makes it simple to carry or to chuck in a bag, making it available for the majority of situations. In comparison, the SLR is seriously chunkier, frequently requiring a dedicated bag to carry it and all its accessories. The compact camera's shortage of a reflex mirror makes it significantly quieter than the SLR. This indicates that the compact camera is less intrusive at events like marriages. And obviously, compact cameras are terribly price competitive.