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If you are a novice to photography, the equipment may seem very confusing, especially the camera. It was difficult enough working out the terminology before the digital revolution, but now it is practically impossible. Digital cameras are dedicated microcomputers and just as difficult for the uninitiated to comprehend.

Even a medium grade $300 digital camera will almost certainly have 40-50 adjustable controls and every one of those might have four or five settings. Most of those controls the amateur will almost certainly never appreciate and never change from default, but the camera will still take decent photographs. However, it will take even better ones if you do make use of them.

Here follows an explanation of some of the more frequent terms that you will come across if you go to purchase a digital camera.

Megapixels is the rating used to express the resolution of the picture that a digital camera can take. A pixel is a dot of colour and a picture is created from dots of colour, therefore, the more pixels in a picture, the higher the resolution of that picture and resolution creates sharpness. So the higher the number of megapixels the better.

Cheap digital cameras might have a resolution of 4 megapixels (4,000,000) whereas an costly one might have 36 megapixels. If you just look at your photos in small format, say, a couple of inches by a few inches, on your camera or computer screen, the difference may not be apparent, but if you go to a larger size or have your photos printed on paper, you will see the difference.

The disadvantage of a higher resolution is that it takes more storage space. Obviously it takes two times as much space to store 8 megapixels as it does to store 4, so the higher the resolution the more memory your camera and computer will require. This is not a big difficulty unless you plan on taking thousands of photographs.

Zoom is the camera's ability to get a closer shot of the topic without really going nearer to it. Digital cameras often have two types of zoom: digital zoom and optical zoom. Digital zoom just refers to magnifying the pixels, so an image that has been treated with high digital zoom will look grainy, unless you have lots of pixels in the picture.

However, computer image handling software has more ability to apply digital zoom than any camera, so the camera's digital zoom is largely irrelevant, since you will almost certainly edit your best photos on the computer anyway. While purchasing a digital camera, pay more attention to the amount of optical zoom.

Optical zoom refers to a moving lens, just like you would adjust a pair of binoculars, a telescope or a magnifying glass. Optical zoom is very useful because the quality of the image is not impaired by this zoom. The higher the better for optical zoom, however, be suspicious of total zoom, which is optical and digital zoom added together - you need to know how much of each.