Go digital!
By Renzi Juarez
Nowadays, if there’s anything more precious than gold,
it is time. In the early nineties, the business byword was
quality. For the new millennium, people outdo each other in
terms of speed.
Prices of goods and fees of services rendered are almost
standardized due to tight competition in the market. With
only a minimal difference between price and quality, consumer
decisions have become mostly reliant now on how fast a service
can be rendered to satisfy one’s needs.
One of the most essential tools in getting things done for
business these days is a digital camera. From the smallest
entrepreneurial endeavor to the biggest factory, a digital
camera saves you a lot of time and money just to get your
message across another party.
For example, some business transactions require sending
a photo of a product sample to a certain buyer. If this happened
ten years ago, a seller would have to buy a roll of film,
take a picture of the product, and then waste all the rest
of the shots for unwanted pictures just so that the whole
roll can be taken out of the camera for photo developing.
It’s such a waste of time, effort and money.
Today, a seller can just take a photo of a certain product
using a digital camera, then automatically download this into
a computer. The photo can then be printed right away and shown
to the buyer. Or if the buyer is across another island, the
photo can just be sent as an attachment via email, all of
this done in less than thirty minutes.
 Choosing
the right digital camera to fit your needs is simple. Assuming
that price is not a question, the only thing to remember is:
a higher megapixel (MP) means a better photo quality and a
costlier the price.
In the market, there are digital cameras with 1MP or 2MP
that may be good options for a really tight budget, way below
$500, for example. The photo quality may be grainy but if
your intention is just to send a picture to your loved-ones
back in the Philippines through email, then this will serve
its purpose.
But if you’re a bit conscious about photo quality
and would like to save or send close-to-real pictures, there
are 4.0MP and 5.0MP digicams that result to better digital
photos. The price range for these cameras would fall somewhere
$500 up. Better quality translates to photography that is
worth compiling in your computer for CD writing.
Don’t forget to check the memory cards that are compatible
with the digital camera that you’re buying. Nikon &
Canon are compatible with Compact Flash memory cards. Sony
is compatible with Memory Stick media or memory cards. You
can check which brands have more expensive memory cards and
opt to buy the digital camera with cheaper memory cards.
Sony’s Memory Stick is somewhat more expensive compared
to the CF (Compact Flash) of Canon & Nikon. However, if
you have a Sony Clie handheld organizer, you save a lot if
you also buy a Sony Cybershot digital camera since Sony’s
Memory Stick can be used both for the Sony digital camera
and the handheld organizer.
But while Sony boasts about its versatility in bundled personal
entertainment, Canon is also known for having better digital
photo quality, bundled by portable digital photo printers.
While Nikon has its Nikonus underwater digital camera priced
more than $500, Olympus also has its line of weather-proof
digital cameras at less than $500.
There’s a whole line of brands to choose from but
to sum it all up, all of them produce easily downloadable
pictures that you can send to your family or your customers
in a jiffy. A digital camera saves you time and money. You
can temporarily save your pictures in the memory card and
then transfer them to the computer hard disk. The storage
space of a 64MB memory card allows you to more than one hundred
photo shoots at any given time, and is reusable.
Whatever brand you decide to get, the bottomline is, it
really pays to go digital these days. Time flies. Ride like
the wind.
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