LCD quality varies widely: Many wash out in sunlight or become grainy in low light, or the image may change if you tilt the camera slightly. If you can, try a camera outside before you buy it. Some cameras also have an eye-level viewfinder, which is a convenient backup for framing your shots (and if you turn off the LCD when not using it, you'll save battery power). Perhaps the best way to ensure an accurate exposure is to (if the camera offers this feature). A histogram is a graph that will show you highlights that are overexposed to the point of being pure white, and shadows that are underexposed and show as pure black.

Using Wi-Fi to transmit images to a PC, a printer, or a photo-sharing site may sound enticingly free of entanglements, but we recommend that you try this feature beforehand. In our reviewers' experience, sending Wi-Fi transmissions did not work seamlessly in some cases, and as a result this feature was not worth the extra money it added to the camera's cost. You don't have to buy a Wi-Fi-enabled camera to send photos directly from your camera, however. enable any compatible camera to send photos wirelessly to your computer, to photo-sharing sites, and even directly to a mobile phone. And lets you transmit photos and video between compatible devices simply by holding them close to one another.

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