Uncle Charlie also took hundreds of photographs, most of which today are still mounted on black paper in large photo albums. If he were alive today, I have no doubt that he would have been one of the first on his block to own a digital camera. Since he is no longer with us, that family tradition has fallen to me. I have recently purchased my own digital camera, and that is the subject of this article.

I have never been much of a shutterbug, perhaps because I lacked the patience of taking photos and then waiting for them to be developed. But when I took up genealogy as a hobby, I realized that I would need to make records of such things as tombstones, ancestral homes, and relatives. Fortunately, disposable cameras had become very popular in the last few years, and so I made good use of them, but they still suffered from having to wait for film development. There was the expense of purchasing them, and worst of all, the horror of discovering that the one picture you really needed didn't turn out very well, if at all. There had to be a better way.

Digital cameras solve many of the problems attributed to traditional cameras. In the past year, they have come down in price to the point where you can purchase a name-brand digital camera for less than $200. Of course, you can spend far more for one, depending on how many features you want. Rather than dwell on the typical camera features already known to those who have purchased and used traditional cameras, I'll simply talk about a few features unique to digitals.

One of the primary differences between different models of digital cameras is the maximum resolution of an image. As either the quality or the size of the image increases, the amount of storage necessary for the image increases. The smallest piece of a digital image is a "pixel," and my recently purchased $200 camera can take pictures that are 1280 pixels by 960 pixels. Multiply these numbers together, and you end up with a bit over one million pixels (one megapixel). More expensive cameras can create digital images of two-megapixel or three-megapixel size. The quality of the image is more noticeable when you print the image on photo-quality paper than when you display it on a computer monitor (such as on a Web page). For instance, a one-megapixel image will look quite sharp if printed as a 5x7-inch print, but you'll need two or three-megapixels to get an image that is good enough to print an eleven by fourteen-inch picture.

Of course, the more pixels needed to store each image, the fewer images your camera can store. Most digital cameras use a small removable memory storage device (such as Compact Flash or SmartMedia) ranging in storage capacity from 4 megabytes to 64 megabytes. If you are traveling and plan to take a lot of pictures (say, in a large cemetery or at a large family reunion), you will either want to take along extra storage devices, or a notebook computer to which you can transfer the pictures you've already taken. Some cameras allow you to copy the images from the camera to your notebook or desktop computer using a USB cable (a very fast way to do it).

Because digital cameras don't use film, you're spared the expense of purchasing and developing film, although if you plan to print your digital images, you will have to consider the cost of photo-quality paper (and the ink from your printer). If your plans are primarily to store and display your pictures on your home computer or on the Web, the only ongoing cost of a digital camera is likely to be batteries. In the long run, investing in an AC adapter may be a good idea!

Drew Smith is an instructor with the School of Library and Information Science at the University of South Florida in Tampa. He is also a regular contributor to the quarterly journal Genealogical Computing, where he writes the "Cybrarian" column. He can be reached at drewsmith@aol.com.