We all have special moments in life we want to capture and share with our friends, relatives or colleagues. A party gone wild, your kid making his first steps or a gorgeous sunset at the seaside are scenes you will want to immortalize and remember after years. For all these occasions, owning a digital camera is a must. If you don’t already have one, here are a few tips you should keep in mind when going shopping.

So first of all, how are you going to use and share the images? This is where megapixels come in. Not all cameras produce the same quality photos. If you are going to be printing large pictures, it is important to pick a camera with enough megapixels to handle such photography. Image quality basically depends on resolution. Resolution is how sharp and detailed the images will be (resolution is measured in megapixels).

A good place to start is search engines. Just key-in “discount digital cameras” on Google or Yahoo and you’re sure to find sites offering digital cameras at discount rates. If that doesn’t work, you could try bidding on cheap, used digital cameras on eBay where you just click on the camera you want by categories presented there. Wal-Mart and Kmart are two big stores that should make your search easier. Pay them a visit, too for their season discounts. Try checking weekend sale adverts or on special coupons or inserts in your daily paper especially after holiday seasons, a time when most people dispose of their electronic goods.

This may be more important to some people than megapixels, but may not be to others. Either way, the price plays a role for most people choosing a digital camera. There are cameras for as low as $50, all the way up to $4000 and up.

Maximum resolution. Rule of the thumb says that the higher the resolution, the better the image quality. For day to day photo shootings you can settle for 3 megapixels or even below, if you will only be using the images to upload them online or make low sized printouts. If you plan on taking professional quality images, you should get a 5 megapixel model.

So you’ve been taking photos all weekend during parties? Please don’t overfill your card! Pushing too much information on your camera’s memory card will corrupt the file system. As much as possible, avoid deleting or formatting pictures. Some digital cameras may write 0s from beginning to end of the card, in the process deleting data you never intended to. As well, why pull the card out while your digital camera is accessing it? a camera may not be able to recover from a poor shutdown mode so don’t try it. Be patient and let it finish before taking out the card either from your computer or camera.

The extras. Last, but not least, you should consider which extra features are worth the money or suit your needs. Since most middle-end cameras only provide you with low memory space, you should always go for a 1-2GB memory card to make sure that you have enough storage. Also, if not included with the camera, you should get a data cable to download the pictures on your computer.