For the diehard gadget lover the digital camera is really last year's gimmick. Everyone was talking about them, they bought them or not and now they've gone. Except of course they haven't. The question is, whether owning one can benefit a business, and how to measure any return on investment after buying one.
Probably the first thing to make clear about digital cameras is that if a company's photographic needs are small and you have a reasonable scanner, spending money on extra equipment is unlikely to be helpful. They cost twice as much as traditional cameras and the quality can be uneven, particularly with the cheaper devices.
Digital cameras pay for themselves in two ways. First, there is the immediacy: you can see whatever you've just snapped on a small screen on the back; and second, you won't have to pay to get your shots developed.
Given that a good camera (meaning "not of a professional standard but pretty useful") will cost upwards of £300, you clearly need to take a lot of pictures before development costs become important.
So if your business is picture-intensive - you may be an estate agent, for example - and you want to buy a digital device the next questions will be about quality, storage and ease of use. It is in the last category that some of the sub £200 models fall down. Yes, pointing and clicking is simple enough and the picture quality is OK, but you are effectively tied to using the software that came with the camera. Forget about editing using Photosuite or your favourite picture editor.
Storage is another element the cheaper cameras often lack; they carry enough for 20 odd pictures at a time, but to take more you need to download to a computer and clear the camera's memory. Cameras that purport to take brief video clips and sound annotations can fall foul of the memory trap; yes they take the video, certainly you can record voice on to them, but don't expect to take in more than two or three clips before having to download and clear again. More expensive cameras are likely to have standard memory cards so it will be possible to carry spares around.
Obviously picture quality counts for much in selecting a camera. The jargon to watch for is the number of pixels; the more there are the sharper the picture. However, sharper isn't always better. If you are likely to be making a lot of images available on a website, more detail will translate to a larger file; this will take longer to download and may annoy customers. If a thumbnail of a house for an estate agent's site is all that's required, it can be counterproductive to opt for more. Alternatively, for brochures the picture resolution needs to be the best available.
A final caveat relates to the operator rather than the camera. If your snapper is likely to end up with as many pictures of his or her thumb as of the desired subject, changing the tool is unlikely to improve technique, so don't spend a fortune. As long as a buyer takes this into account, and assuming the business has established a need and assessed how to measure the return on the purchase price, a digital camera should be a solid investment.
