I bought my brother a new camera. His never seemed like a premium one, but recently took a turn for the worse. My mom’s is nearly ready to kick the bucket, too.

I initially went into Best Buy and looked. And they don’t have any meaningful data on the cards. The main difference between cameras, as far as they care, is resolution.

My camera is apparently 10 megapixels. I’m not actually sure, because it’s unimportant to me. All I know is that I have it turned down to “Medium” resolution. My brother’s new camera is 9 megapixels, so I turned his down to Medium, too. Down at about 6 megapixels, with a new 2GB SD card, he can take over 1,000 shots. On the computer, the images still require zooming around the screen to see in whole. So really high resolution is essentially a bother to me. Camera makers, are you listening?

But it seems they aren’t pouring all of their resources into megapixel wars. Most (!) decent point-and-shoot digital cameras now have gyroscopic image stabilization on the lenses. I don’t know how it compares to the IS/OS on a $2,000 lens, but it’s surely better than nothing. ISO sensitivity has really expanded, too: a considerable number of mid-range point-and-shoots go to ISO1600 or further. Until recently, this was pretty much the exclusive province of much pricier cameras. More than a few have HD-range (usually 720p) video recording, and some have amazing zoom, sometimes along the lines of 35-600mm equivalent.

The things in that paragraph get me excited. They’re the neat, advanced technologies. Bumping up your megapixel count is not.