Digital camera features: What you need, what you don't

Consumer Reports News: June 22, 2009 06:08 AM

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Summer photography can bring out the best and worst in a point-and-shoot camera.

For example, imagine you're at the beach on a bright, sunny day and want to take a shot of your friends or family. But when you try to compose the picture, the LCD is washed out by the bright sunlight. And if your camera is a fairly recent model, it probably has no optical viewfinder, which would have let you view the subjects you want to photograph.

If this has ever happened to you, you were the victim of a camera industry trend of reducing the number of models with a viewfinder. And you're hardly alone: In our recent subscriber survey, 68 percent of point-and-shoot owners said they found it hard to view images on their LCD in bright light.

In that same survey, 72 percent of those who had a point-and-shoot with an optical viewfinder found it useful. And about half of point-and-shoot owners said it was very important that their next model have one. Those findings raise make me question the wisdom of eliminating this vital feature from so many new cameras. To finds out which new point-and-shots still feature a viewfinder, check our latest camera Ratings (available to subscribers).

Meanwhile, our survey found, some features that camera makers highly promote underwhelmed our subscribers. For example, geographic tagging (digitally stamping a photo with the location at which it was taken), smile detection, panoramic mode (combining multiple images together) and blink detection were judged not especially useful by many whose cameras had them.

(For details on other, important digital camera features, check out our Digital Camera Buying Guide.)

And what about you? You've probably got some features on your camera that you love, and some you could do without. Let us know. —Terry Sullivan