by KSQ

Created on: July 14, 2008

Every family trip or holiday I would give my young children disposable cameras. The results were often surprising. It was always fun to see what those little minds thought as picture worthy. Now my son and daughter are tweens and I decided that we could move away from the safety of a disposable camera and get them into digital. As a photography hobbyist, I thought choosing cameras for them would be easy. Yowza, was I wrong! There has been an explosion of features, brands and prices. I was making myself crazy looking at all the options and I was making the process much harder than it had to be. I decided to stop and ask myself the question that I should have asked from the start. What type of pictures will the kids take most? Once you answer this question, it will help you to start to narrow the choices.

My kids are very different in what they like to photograph. My daughter likes photos of family, friends and our pets. My son likes to take artistic shots and close-ups at the zoo or of wildlife. Keeping this in mind, I started the process.

I looked at brands first. For the most part, if you stick with a major manufacturer, the quality and reliability will be there. Can you get a good camera that costs less from a non-major brand? Most likely, but I had to start narrowing the selections and I chose to weed out brands first. Canon and Nikon are reliable brands. Kodak is made for ease of use. Olympus is always a great value. These were the brands I focused on. That isn't to say that Sony and Fuji and many others aren't great but I went with the brands I personally have experienced.

dSLR vs point and shoot: I already knew that I wanted to stick to point and shoot' styles for these guys. A dSLR is over kill for them right now and I felt point and shoot' would be best.

Zoom: Since my son likes photographing things close up, I reviewed the models with the longest optical zoom. Digital zoom is cool but the picture quality often suffers and many times I've felt it was a waste. If zoom is a priority, definitely focus on the models that offer the longest optical zoom.

Megapixels: Many people focus on megapixels. I did not make this a consideration in my search. The reality is that megapixels only make a difference if you are making posters out of the pictures. Honestly, I've blown up a photo from a 4mp camera to 11 x 14 with great results. Don't spend the money on the extra pixels. If the camera comes with 10mp or more and it has all the features you want, that's great but

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