Camera choice is crucial to both professionals and hobbyists alike. RELATED LINKS Take the Photography IQ Test Watch Vidoes on Taking Great Photos

If you've decided to make photography your business or hobby, you'll need to know what kind of camera is best for your needs. Should you be looking at one of the new digital cameras on the market, or would a camera that uses standard 35mm film be better? What are the pros and cons of each format?

Ronald Hobbs is creative director of Samy's Camera in Los Angeles. He's also a photographer, and offers up this quick guide that highlights the differences between 35mm and digital cameras.

• Film is for big prints. Traditional 35mm photography is still the choice for most professionals and artists who need their work to be big. If you think you might be enlarging your photographs to very big sizes, say 11x14 or 16x20, you'll want to use a 35mm camera.

• Digital—it's all about the memory. Because of the convenience, digital photography is the wave of the future. No film is needed; the images are simply recorded onto a memory card that slips inside the camera. High quality images need more memory than low quality ones, so the higher the resolution of the pictures you're taking, the fewer will fit on your camera's memory card.

• Digital prints—the more pixels the better. Lower quality images are fine if you're going to view them on your computer screen or on a website. But if you want to print them out, you're going to need higher quality, meaning more pixels. The most expensive digital cameras have five megapixels. If you want to make 4x6 prints of your photos, your camera should have a minimum of 2 megapixels.

• Digital lets you preview. One of the unique advantages that digital has over film is that it allows you to preview your pictures. With traditional photography, you don't know what you have until you develop the film, but with digital cameras, you can see the image on your camera's screen, and even delete it if you don't like it.

For more information on cameras and photography, check out the following organizations and websites:

The Amateur Photographers Association
www.photoassociation.com/index.html

Digital Photography Review
www.dpreview.com

Photolinks
www.photolinks.com/cgibin/webc.cgi/cgihome.html

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