AfterTek

A few years ago, an entry-level digital camera SLR with a lens cost around $1,000, which is beyond the budget of most consumers. Today, that price has dropped considerably. Nikon recently released the D40, a $600 compact digital SLR with a lens. Analyst Ross Rubin, of NPD believes that we’ll see a $500 SLR within the next year.

The lower prices have opened up the digital SLR market. According to NPD, sales of digital SLRs were up 48 percent from January to August of 2006, compared with the same period the previous year. Also in that same time period, sales of compact digital cameras were up 21 percent.

To make SLRs more attractive to buyers, camera manufacturers are adding features typically found in point-and-shoot cameras including expanded help screens and program modes for portraits, sports shots, and night shots to their entry-level SLRs. Nikon’s D50, for example, offers a Child mode for photographing children. Olympus, Panasonic, and Leica offer SLRs that show a live preview of your scene.

Meanwhile, among point-and-shoots, the megapixel race is still going strong. But the benefit of having all those pixels is increasingly questionable. “Unless you spend a lot of time cropping your photos and making poster-size prints, there’s really no reason to have a 10-megapixel camera,” says Ben Long, author of Complete Digital Photography (2004; Charles River Media) and a frequent Macworld contributor.

The images such cameras capture take up gobs of hard-drive space, are harder to print, and require more processing power to edit. Worse, the 10-megapixel sensors found in many current compact cameras produce images that are noisier than those produced by their lower-megapixel counterparts.

That’s why the race may be nearing an end. “Consumers are starting to realize that having more pixels isn’t the most important criterion [in buying a camera],” Rubin says. Instead of just continually upping pixel counts, manufacturers are making their cameras smarter.

For example, Canon and Nikon both now offer in-camera software that can detect faces in a scene and optimize the focus and exposure appropriately. Nikon and Hewlett-Packard offer camera modes that can automatically detect and eliminate red-eye. And almost every camera manufacturer now offers compact cameras with image stabilization to reduce the incidence of blurred photos. Such technologies let you correct or even avoid common image problems without resorting to an image editor.