We continue from the first part of our digital camera buying guide. If you have missed the previous part of this feature, be sure to catch it here before you read this one. For everyone else, let's move on to the third question.
Question 3: What should I look for in a camera?
Ah, the golden question. Every camera in the market boasts excellent image quality, flaunts its massive megapixel count and tells you how you'll be able to click like a pro with this simple point and shoot. My advice to you is ignore the marketing spiel and only look at the facts. Here are a few things you should check out when buying a digital camera.
Megapixel count
Camera manufacturers have completely exploited the term megapixel to disillusion the consumer. Most users thing that a higher megapixel camera will by default give a better quality image, which is not entirely true. The only thing that the megapixel count denotes is the maximum size the camera can shoot at and nothing more. The image quality depends on the quality of the camera's sensor and optics. A 10 megapixel camera will give you an image size of 3648 x 2736 pixels, but if the optics and the sensor are not good enough, the image would still look washed out and even worse than, say, a picture taken from a 5 megapixel camera.
Most cameras these days shoot at a minimum of 5 megapixels, which is generally considered good enough for a full A4-sized print. So my advice to you is to keep the megapixel count a bit lower in your priority list when buying a camera and keep an eye out on its other features.
Zoom levels
Firstly, completely disregard the digital zoom level of any digital camera, as all it does is deteriorate the quality of the photo by stretching the image to compensate for actual zoom. In fact, when you get a camera, turn off its digital zoom, to ensure that you don't even accidentally use it. The only kind of zoom that matters is optical zoom. Most consumer point and shoot cameras have a minimum of 3x optical zoom (34mm-102mm), and some may even go upto 4x, 6x or even 10x. Superzoom cameras as the name suggests boast a pretty good zoom level starting from 10x (38mm-380mm) to 12x (36mm-432mm). As for D-SLRs, you need to decide how much zoom you need, as you'll have to pick up a lens separately for your D-SLR camera body.
These are really some nice tips. Now after going through all the points I understand that the quality of a picture depends on the sensor and the optics. Regarding the optics I think we can very well depends on the brand name. But it seems that there are only two type of sensors in the market like CCD & CMOS. What i want to know is that whether a particular sensor will perform similarly for different camera. say a CCD for canon, nikon or pentax? 
