Buying A Digital Camera for Layout Photography

[mondotrains]

Hey Ken,
My wife finally convinced me a couple of years ago to buy a digital camera. Per "Consumer Reports" back then, Olympus made the best cameras so that's what we bought. It is 3.2 megapixels and I have taken many photos of local buildings, blown them up to 8" by 10" using the Kiosk at Wal-Mart, and used them for backdrops on my layout (our local Wal-Mart fortunately uses matte paper for the local printing rather than glossy). The clarity is great. Of course, prices have come way down since we bought ours for $600.00. You can get a 5 megapixel for less than that now. You may want to check "Consumer Reports" to see if they've done an update on digital cameras.
You may also want to determine whether it's worth spending the extra bucks for more than 3.2 megapixels.

Hope this helps.
Mondo

[ndbprr]

I intend to hold out for 5.o megapixel and the equivalent of an SLR. My logic is I also want to use it for prototype photos and may want to blow up an area fairly large to examine details. Having had a videocamera that someone stole with a 20x telephoto lens and digital telephoto to 400x my current 10x telephoto isn't as good in that regard. I think the telephoto capabilities are equally important as the megapixel and the ability to override the auto features.

[Anonymous]

After all these years I'm finally ready to buy a digital camera. I plan to do a lot of indoors layout photography, so I'll want something that can be setup to allow good depth-of-field (with a little help from a pair of 3000-watt photo floods of course!).

Regular digicam buying guides suggest that a 3.2 megapixel camera will give me pretty decent-looking 8"x12" shots. But I think I'll need more features than that.

Will I need aperture-priority and shutter-priority capability? More than 3x optical zoom?

Thanx in advance...