Buying a Digital Camera!!

I need to buy a digital. I need some advice, what should I look for when I am buying a digital camera. I need to buy a digital camera as an accessory and as a need for some of projects regarding pictures and sample of materials. The size of camera I am looking needs to be a bit smaller than the moderate digital cameras

Here is some advice I took from the professionals. They told me to look at the properties of the digital camera. Everything you need to know when considering a new camera purchase, from the kind of user you are to current technologies to consider.
They told to me look at the properties of the digital camera.
I went on a website to help me, http://www.cnet.com.au/digitalcameras/cameras/0,239036184,240000945-3,00.htm
Here I looked at the properties of some of the cameras. I looked at;
How many megapixels do I need? What kind of lens do I need? What are storage options? What kind of battery is the best? What else can my digital camera do? Etc.


For any images you plan to print or retouch, we recommend you stick to 4-megapixel resolution and higher; Web- and e-mail-only photos should be fine at resolutions below that. For prints 8x10 or larger, look for digicams with 5-megapixel resolution or higher.

It depends upon what you're doing with the picture and how you're doing it.
If you're going to display or print pictures at smaller-than-actual-pixel size, resolution doesn't matter much -- opt for the camera with the best colour.
The images below were shot with a 4-megapixel and a 6-megapixel camera, respectively, and scaled down to smaller-than-actual size. Aside from slight color differences, they should look pretty similar.


If you're going to crop in close or print large, higher resolution lets you crop in closer and get better prints.
Let's say you want to blow up a detail shot or print a picture; that's where extra resolution comes in handy, for both printing and Web display. The 4-megapixel shot (left) is a bit blurry, but the 5-megapixel (middle) and 6-megapixel (right) shots come pretty close to each other. Which could you live with?

Digital cameras store pictures on some kind of removable media, though certain cameras ship with only internal memory and leave extra memory purchases to the consumer. Flash-memory cards -- which come in various shapes, sizes, and capacities -- are the most popular type of storage media. The number of pictures you can store on a memory card depends upon the compression settings you choose when saving the files, as well as on how an individual camera compresses. Higher compression allows you to fit more pictures on a card, although image quality will suffer somewhat.