Digital cameras can be confusing to the new user; this need not be so if the terminology is explained. For example, what on earth are pixels? It is just a term conflating the words "Picture" and "ELement." Digital pictures are made up of tiny squares. These are like small tiles of a mosaic. This means that whilst a picture looks sharp and clear to us it is actually made up of millions of miniscule squares.

When buying a digital camera you may see a pixel count. For example a camera may be described as being 3MP; this refers to the number of individual pixels (our tiles) that make up the picture. This number usually varies between 1 million, which is written as 1 Megapixel to around 14 million written as 14 Megapixels for the best digital cameras. A million pixels is usually written as MP so a 3MP digital camera has 3 million pixels. So what? Well if we think about it a picture made up of 14 million small tiles is going to be much sharper and capable of enlarging without losing definition than one with only 1 million. In practice this is important if you want to make large prints. If you want prints up to about 5"x7" then a low MP camera is fine, but if you intend to make larger 8"x10" pictures you would be better off with a more expensive 4 or 5 MP camera.

Another point of confusion is the difference between digital zoom and optical zoom and what this means to the amateur. Simply put: an optical zoom is like a zoom lens on an ordinary film camera and the lens changes magnification as it is twisted or zoomed – this means that the picture quality stays the same throughout. A digital zoom, on the other hand cuts the image to a smaller total size and enlarges the bit that is left to fill the frame. The result of this is that quality is lost and the image may be fuzzier. This means that a 10x optical zoom will be much clearer than a 10x digital zoom. This does affect price and you will find that the best digital cameras have higher optical zooms and are thus more versatile.

Finally what does JPEG mean? Well one of the advantages of a digital camera is that you can send pictures to friends and family over the internet. Compared to ordinary text e-mails, files containing pictures are huge. With some providers limiting the size of shared files and speed of transfer slow down considerably, a solution to the problem is needed. One way to solve the problem is to compress the file and you can do this without a noticeable loss in quality. JPEG (Joint Photo Experts Group) is a programme which is designed to work on photographic images. It compresses the information with only a little loss of quality. Obviously the more one compress an image, the more information or tiles (to continue our analogy) are lost. In practice you can compress by a factor of ten and still send an image of high quality. You can compress much more than this but quality suffers and you begin to see the "tiles" coming through.