Three-megapixel cameras are all the buzz, but there's no shortage of new two-megapixel models that merit a look. We recently reviewed five of the latest offerings (see www.macworld.com/2000/07/19/reviews/cameras.html), the most noteworthy being the Canon PowerShot S100 Digital Elph. Built on Canon Inc.'s popular Elph (an APS film camera), the Digital Elph is lightweight and small enough to fit in the palm of your hand or in your shirt pocket. A small size doesn't mean a small feature set, however: you get 2x optical zoom and 4x digital zoom, a built-in flash, a bright LCD monitor, USB connectivity, and a complete set of menu functions.
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If you bought one of the first digital cameras -- the ones that created 640-by-480-pixel images -- you probably wished you could make high-quality 8-by-10-inch prints on your ink-jet printer. The latest crop of cameras, offering 3-megapixel resolution, lets you do just that. We looked at four recently released 3-megapixel cameras -- the Canon Inc. PowerShot S20, the Epson America Inc. PhotoPC 3000Z, the Nikon Corp. Coolpix 990, and the Olympus America Inc. C-3030 Zoom -- and found all of them to be capable of giving you that dream print. They all create 9MB files with 2,048-by-1,536-pixel resolution and cost around US$800 to $1,000; the differences lie primarily in the types of removable media they use and in the number of images they store.
Two-megapixel digital cameras are now commonplace and will soon be superseded by a new generation of three-megapixel cameras. But it wasn't long ago that one-megapixel cameras overwhelmed us with their image quality. Do you really need more than 1 million pixels in your digital images? If the answer is no-and you want to save some money-the last of the megapixel cameras have just come to market, in the form of the Epson America Inc. PhotoPC 650 and the Olympus America Inc. D-450 Zoom. Both cameras produce good-looking pictures, but the Olympus model stands out with higher resolution and a host of useful features, including-true to its name-a 3x optical zoom.