Its my daughters birthday in a week and she wants a good professional camera so she can take photos good quality ones. But i am a noob at cameras. I don't understand what mp are and what Optical Zoom is. i could really use some help. Can you explain what everything means please! Thanks for the help.
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Professional cameras go for about $4,000- and up. What's the top dollar you want to spend?
Point and shoot cameras can run from $50- to about $500-
DSLR entry level kit cameras start about $500-
There are point and shoot cameras that have an image stabilizer (for shaky hands), optical zoom can run from 3X to over 24X for the super zooms. Usually the more zoom, the more money. Most super zooms have a viewfinder. Rather than hold camera away from you and looking through LCD screen, while at same time keeping camera steady, with a viewfinder you can press against your cheek for steadiness. Remember the more zoom requires lots of stillness or you get blurry photo.
Almost all super zooms have aperture shutter priority, and even some compacts. If you want to learn photography this feature is a starting point.
Almost all point and shoots don't do well in dim light without flash.
A starting point is borrowing a book from library or buying one on The Basics of Photography. Also a book on the different types of cameras out there and what the're used for.
Stat away from Kodak, Hitachi, GE, Sanyo, Holga and Vivitar. Choose a name brand.
To add to what Ryan says, there are quite a few different aspects to photography and depending on the camera you can have a lot of flexibility or be restricted.
People throw the term "professional camera" around without appreciating the implications. As said, they are expensive, mainly because they are designed to withstand the abuse that many other cheaper cameras will give up with, so they're metal rather than plastic and weather sealed as well as having higher specifications in terms of photos per second, for example.
There are plenty of good cameras that will do what your daughter wants to do. First you'll have to decide whether she wants a point and shoot, a bridge camera or a DSLR which is more like a pro camera in terms of function.
Point and shoot (compact cameras) and bridge cameras are the ones with optical zoom (as described in the advertising). This is basically that the lens can zoom in or out and the 5x or 10x or 20x zoom says by how 5 times to 20 times which is basically how much something is magnified. These cameras have fixed lenses, they can't be changed. These are the cheaper cameras.
DSLRs are the more expensive ones that let you change the lenses. They are a higher quality and take better pictures, mainly because the sensor is bigger and they have better lenses.
How old is your daughter and what is she planning to do with the camera? Photography can be an expensive hobby if you go with a DSLR and, depending on your daughter, such a camera may be a lot more than she needs if she's just taking snapshots to put on facebook, or whatever.
The quality of a photograph depends a lot on the skill of the photographer. A photographer can take bad photos with any camera if they don't know what they're doing, so buying a good and expensive camera won't necessarily lead to good pictures. In that respect the point and shoot/bridge cameras may be better because they do a lot more for you.
We could probably suggest 50 cameras over the whole range from $100 to $5000 depending on so many factors. It is, ultimately, going to depend on whether this is going to be a serious hobby or for snapshots.
A few possibilities linked. The Fuji finepix is a bridge camera, the lumis is a point and shoot, the Nikon and Canon are DSLRs and the Nikon J1 is a mirrorless camera that's like a DSLR in that it has interchangeable lenses (though only a few at the moment)
These just scratch the there are many many others.
You say a professional one, so I assume you mean a DSLR with a full framed sensor, after all thats what I'd consider a professional camera. Price range on a full framed DSLR is I'd say would start at around $2,000 for the Nikon D700, maybe you'd get a basic lens thrown in for that price.
A DSLR is not a professional system, there are an array of consumer level DSLR's strictly aimed at hobbyist photographers etc. Only the very high end DSLR's are what I'd consider pro, but there are plenty of awesome DSLR's for around $1000 on the market.
Personally I shoot with a Nikon D90 (this is known as a pro-sumer camera) Its not quite full featured enough to be a high end pro camera, but its not lacking so many features it would considered mid range. It sits about 3 quarter way through the Nikon product line i'd say. Defiantly more than adequate for my photography shoots.
Megapixel really makes no difference either, after about 10 megapixel it really doesn't matter at all unless your wanting to crop your image and zoom in more These 21 mega pixel DSLR's etc are kinda pointless, especially since the manufacturers don't enlarge the image sensor, rather they just add more pixels to it.
Hope this helps.