Features

Every digital camera has a variety of quality settings that allow you to trade picture quality against file size in order to squeeze more images on to your memory card. Although

this was useful in the days when memory cards were small and expensive, today's high capacities and low prices mean there's no need to compromise the quality of your photos by making the file sizes smaller.

It's important to understand your camera's quality settings, as most of them are set up to record images in a medium-quality mode as standard. Unless you change the settings, therefore, your camera may not be delivering the best possible quality.

The most important setting is the image resolution. This simply refers to the number of pixels in your image. The more you have, the greater the detail recorded.

All digital cameras allow you to reduce their operating resolution, but there's no point unless you're about to run out of memory or you know you're never going to print your photos; if they're only going to appear on a web page, for example. Recording at your camera's maximum resolution gives you the greatest flexibility for printing or cropping later. And why pay for lots of megapixels if you're not going to use them?

Once you've taken your photo, most cameras will record the image as a JPEG file. This compresses the data to save space, and you can control the degree of compression. The higher the compression, the more pictures you'll squeeze on your card, but again at the cost of quality. If the compression is set too high, you'll permanently lose fine detail, edges will look fuzzy and you may even notice the blocky or banding effect you get with some digital television channels.

Most digital cameras have three different JPEG compression settings, often labelled 'Good', 'Better' and 'Best'. We think it's more realistic to call them 'Terrible', 'OK at a push' and 'Fine'. So again, unless you're never going to print your photos or are about to run out of memory, always put your camera on its best-quality JPEG setting.

Pricier digital cameras offer an alternative file mode called RAW. This records the RAW data from the camera before it has had a chance to convert it into a JPEG. This means you need to convert it later using software on your PC, but it gives you complete control over a number of settings, including the compression.

The requirement to process RAW files with your computer - not to mention the fact that they typically measure around four times more than a good JPEG - means they're generally used only by professionals or enthusiasts, and even then rarely for every single image. The easiest and most practical way of maximising your camera's quality is to have it record JPEGs at the highest resolution and least compression.

	1 Make sure you use the highest resolution and lowest compression for the best quality photos.