Buying a digital camera is a really difficult task nowadays. When the companies just used to fight to produce models with more megapixels than their competitor then you knew what to look for, and the camera with the best looks and the most megapixels was usually the one people bought. But now that we have reached the point where the number of megapixels in even the cheapest cameras is more than enough for most people, then companies are now starting to load them up with unique features instead.
The main problem with adding lots of features though is that it is then hard to compare two cameras.When it was all about megapixels then you could look and if one had 6 and one had 9 megapixels then you knew that as long as everything else was the same that the one with 9 megapixels was better. Now if one can recognize faces better, and one has really good stabilization, how do you know which one is better for you? I think the answer is to look up reviews on them. You can find reviews on pretty much anything nowadays, even for which pink camera you should pick.
So do a search online and try to find some reviews you think you can trust (not all reviews online are genuine) and that will give you a good idea of how useful those features are. Good websites like cnet.com will sometimes get sent a camera to review, and then they will put it through its paces and test out the features to see if they live up to the hype. Once you have chosen a few different cameras that you really like and have good reviews, then head out to a shop where you can actually try them out. This is an important step, because while the reviewer might think everything is good and it gets really high marks, then when you try it out you might not get on with the fiddly buttons or hate the complex menus etc.
