Why do we take pictures? To remember events, such as, the birthday of a child or grandchild, a wedding, an anniversary, or a special trip we have taken. We sometimes need to illustrate an article or book. Many of our pictures we want to be able to share with others, and to decorate our home or office.

Since George Eastman introduced the Brownie camera, we have used film to bring back memories of significant events in our lifetime. Today's modern film cameras vary from the point and shoot style to the single lens reflex camera with interchangeable lenses. For today's travellers who want pictures to remember places they have been and things they have seen, digital cameras are a very convenient alternative. Highly portable digital cameras can be placed in the pocket or knapsack so as not to miss a single photo opportunity.

Digital cameras come in many brands and quality. Most travellers opt for a camera with 2 Megapixels per print. These cameras produce excellent 4x6 prints that can be shared with others or kept as memories in a photo album.

The picture in a digital camera is captured on a device with many tiny light sensors. As the light comes through the lens, it falls on these light receptors and each one generates a small electrical impulse that can be stored on a memory computer chip. This electrical representation of the image then can be stored on the hard drive of your computer, printed on photo paper or shared over the Internet with friends and relatives.

More expensive digital cameras have higher resolution. That means more tiny light sensitive spots called pixels. Cameras with less than 1 Megapixels (million pixels) provide photos that are suitable for sharing over the Internet. To produce a 4x6-inch paper print, the camera should have more than one Megapixel resolution. If you want to make 5x7 prints, the camera needs a larger Megapixel area such as a 2 Megapixel resolution. If you need 8x10's you will need a camera with a resolution of 3.3 Megapixels or more. (Top)

This summer, I have been using a Hewlett-Packard model 812 camera with a 4.3 Megapixel resolution. This camera is capable of enlargements as big as 11x14 inches. This is a fairly high resolution but still not high enough for good quality magazine illustrations. For that, we would need a resolution of over 5 or 6 Megapixels. The higher resolution cameras cost more. For the photos in our magazine, I still use a 35mm Nikon 100 camera with excellent lenses to create the high resolution images that you see on our pages.

The average Rver who travels on his holidays can use the new digital cameras to bring back memories, and instantly see whether the picture he has just taken is good, or if it needs to be retaken to correct some photo fault. Many of the digital cameras have a slight lag from the time you press the shutter until the photo is actually captured in the cameras memory. During this time, your subject could have moved slightly, just enough to spoil the photo. If this happens you can immediately see the results on the view screen and take another picture right away. Later you can erase the photo that you did not like. Unlike pictures taken with a regular film camera, you only print photos that you like- not the whole roll. Instead of realizing that certain shots are not worth keeping after they have been developed, digital cameras allow travellers to view and delete those they don't want right on the spot.

This feedback is even faster than the instant film cameras many of us have used in the past. We had to wait a minute for the picture to develop, then most often we gave the picture away to our subject and we returned home with no pictures to share with friends, or for our scrapbook. With HP's line of portable digital cameras, which includes the H-P Photosmart 812, photo albums can easily be created and stored on the computer and photos can be printed or e-mailed at the click of a mouse. This camera also comes with a feature that allows it to connect directly to a television so instant slide shows can be shown. Also ideal for the traveller is the compact H-P PS100 photo printer, which weighs just 3 lbs and can be carried in a suitcase. This device allows users to quickly and easily print and share 4X6" snapshots directly from the camera while on vacation. (Top)

The photos are stored in your camera on some type of memory card that can be transferred to your computer or inserted in your printer. Many cameras use Compact Flash cards, Smart Media Cards, Memory Sticks, or Secure Digital memory cards. The size of memory card determines its storage capability. These cards come in various sizes from 16 Megabits to 254 Megabits. If you are using a 2 Megapixel camera, you will need a 32 Megabit card to store 24 pictures at full resolution. But if you use a compression program stored in the camera, you can restrict the resolution to a lower figure and shoot more pictures on the same storage card. The 4 Megapixel H-P 812 camera has four resolution settings, The best setting produces 5 photos on a 16Megabit card. As you reduce the resolution you get more photos on a card. The lowest resolution which is fine for sharing with friends over the internet gives 56 photos on the 16 megabit card. Other cards with greater storage capacity are available at the shop where you purchased your camera. Higher resolutions allow larger print sizes without the picture breaking up into jagged edges.

Digital cameras eat batteries, especially if you often use the digital viewer on the back of the camera often. We found the best battery life when we used the optical viewfinder to frame our photos. The best type of battery to use is the rechargeable. If you are stuck in an area without power to recharge your batteries, you can also go to the convenience store and purchase some regular AA batteries to continue shooting your pictures. The Hewlett-Packard 812 camera will take still shots, still shots with a 30-second sound clip, and one minute movies. It also has a time-delayed shutter of up to 10 seconds, to allow you to be in your own pictures.

Most digital cameras that we tested take time to write the photo file to the storage card, so if you are trying to take pictures one after the other, you might find a slight lag from the time you press the shutter until the camera actually takes the picture.

The lens in most cameras have a combination of optical zoom and digital zoom. Using the optical zoom results in the best picture quality, as it uses the full size of the light sensing material. The digital zoom only gives you a section of the whole picture, so you could end up with jagged edges when you try to enlarge the photo. The 812 camera from Hewlett-Packard had a close-up feature that allowed us to take photos of flowers from as little as six-inches away in complete focus. It also had a built-in flash that was good to pump up the illumination in low light situations for small group shots. One nice feature was the red-eye elimination - the flash would send off a small amount of light that caused people to close their eyes slightly so that the full flash a moment later would not bounce back to the camera from the retina in their eyes.(Top)

When you purchase your digital camera, don't forget to purchase an additional memory card so that you can still take more pictures without having to unload the memory card into your computer. For best printing results, a photo quality printer is the only way to go. Photos printed on an ordinary color printer lack the snap that we are used to seeing. Most of the cameras we looked at for this article also came with a program for your computer that allowed you to crop and enhance certain features in your original photo before you sent it to the printer. You could connect the 812 camera directly to the PS100 printer that produced excellent 4x6-inch prints, or put the camera on the docking base so that you could recharge your batteries while downloading prints to your computer.

The cost of shooting photos with a digital camera is zero. Transferring prints to friends and relatives over the internet also costs nothing. You don't need your own printer to obtain prints of your pictures. You can order prints over the Internet from your favorite photo store, and pick them up later. Before you print your pictures, decide whether you really want that print. It cost about 75-cents for each print that you decide to make, not like the $1 a print for the old instant film system, where it cost you money every time you pushed the shutter release- whether you wanted the finished picture or not. When you gave away all your pictures, it cost you money to have nothing left after you got home from your trip. With the digital camera, you can make any number of prints that you want, and also share them electronically over the Internet. When you get home after a trip, you will still have every picture that you wanted to save, on your computer. Rather than store all of your photos on your computer, many people use their computer to burn a CD ROM to use as a photo album, then look at the photos on their television screen, this frees up memory on the computer for more pictures.

The H-P 812 camera with a 16 Megabit memory card retailed for $599.84, The 8881A dock was $129.95, the PS100 photo printer for 4x6 prints cost $249, and extra 32 Megabit memory cards sold for $59 each. Printer paper cost us $14.95 for a package of 20 sheets and the ink cartridges were $53.99. (Retail prices supplied by Business Depot)

For the average Rver travelling around the country, the digital is a great point and shoot camera. You don't have to think about anything except click the shutter when you are satisfied that you have framed the picture the way you want it. (Top)