I am going to preface this by saying I know absolutely nothing about cameras. The wife knows I frequent this site, and enjoy looking and learning from all the pictures posted. She wants to buy me a digital camera for Christmas, so I can post some of my work as well. From what I have been reading in this forum, it seems I should be looking for at least a 2+ MP camera. But this macro mode people talk about – well I don’t understand it. How do I know if a camera has it? Will it state that on the specs somewhere? Is there some number I should be looking for?

Also, since I get to choose the camera, is there one out there for $400 or less that I should be looking at, in your opinion? Any help would be appreciated. As I said, I know nothing about the subject, so don’t be afraid to talk down to me. TIA.

Mike

Mj,
when I started with digital photograpy I bought an Olympus 1400L (I think in the US it was marketed ad D600L or something like) with 1.4 megs resolution. Believe it or not I could print on paper excellent photos up to an A5 format (that's roughly 1/2 of a letter sheet) and my wife still uses it with great results. It did not come with a macro function (that's something that allows you to focus at very short distances from 20 or 30 cm onwards - sorry to be "decimal" it should be something like 13 to 16 inches) but it had the possibility to use "additional lenses" to do the job (these are sets of extra lenses usually coming in 4x, 2x, 1x enlargement factor and very cheap to buy). The choice of a camera is, in my view, very depending of what do you have to do with it; if it's just for web related scalmodels "presentation" I think that a 2MP is more than enough. Another handy feature, specially if you work with artificial light, is that the camera has got a white ballancing function too, to correct the undesired effect of the dominant tones of artificial light. Coming to your question about how can I know if it has this or that function, just go to the shop and ask them. Often these function, if present, are also written on the box. On the net it's easy to look for products and even for comparisons in the same price range...
Ciao

My wife bought me a sony dspc-32 3.2 megapixel camera. Why it doesn't have a macro mode, you can get great, focused pictures at a distance of only 5"-6" from the subject. When you can do that using the max setting of 3.2 mp you can get a very nice photo. Here's a sample:

Thank you Bryan and Fabio. I appreciate the input, and hope to be joining all the photo contributers soon. Thanks again.

Mike