You can make digital images from scratch with digital cameras, which work more like camcorders and store images on a memory card smaller than a credit card.

Digital photos have a variety of uses: They can be incorporated into word-processing files, displayed on a Web page, attached to e-mail, or printed on a color ink-jet printer.

The timeline for a previous digital-camera project (below, right) spans eight months--from contacting manufacturers about their product lines to publishing the report. As with all products we test, we want to include the newest models that will be available on the market in time for testing.

One of the most important judgments we make of digital cameras is that of print quality. Panelists inspect sets of 5x7-inch prints, in several rounds, judging them for clarity and color accuracy, then assigning them a quality score. After the panelists make their judgments, we display all the prints on a wall (below left), so they can be examined as a whole and we can see how they differ.