Buy digital today and (maybe) repent tomorrow

My digital camera was a smart purchase, so why did I feel cheated?

I'd scoured website reviews of the latest cameras, obtained comparative quotes, and then bargained my local supplier down to an all-time-low price. My new camera was my pride and joy.

Then, just six months later, a workmate turned up with the next model, with more features, for an even cheaper price. My congratulations were almost sincere.

And so I did not buy a DVD player. No, I wasn't going to be caught out twice. I was going to be smarter and wait until DVD recorders dropped in price. Then, a month ago, I went to check on the price of DVD recorders and found ... DVD hard-drive recorders.

Since that day my face has been set like flint as I have relentlessly pursued an answer to the question: How do you decide when to buy that new piece of electronic wizardry?

I've discovered I'm not alone in this quest. Many others are also wondering whether they should buy a digital camera now, or wait until digital cameras and video recorders merge? Or should they opt for a cameraphone? And what about DVD? How quickly will the price of hard-drive recorders fall? Or is there something else just over the horizon?

"The cameraphone comes of age", the Guardian newspaper recently announced. As the picture quality increases, and with lenses built into 80 per cent of new handsets, it is estimated that nearly 400 million cameraphones will be sold worldwide this year. Who knows what that will mean for the digital camera, which is losing the sales race five-to-one, the British newspaper said.

Not much, reckons Stuart Cameron, proprietor of Harvey Norman's Big Camera store in Auckland.

"Photography is all about light. A small lens means less light and lower quality. Unless they were to make cellphones bigger, which is the opposite of what people want, then I don't think phones will ever replace the digital camera."

What you do need to check for in a digital camera is lens quality, the size of the memory card that the images are stored on, and the quality of the CCD (charged-coupled device) - a computer chip covered with millions of tiny, light-measuring cells that convert light into electrical signals allowing the camera to capture the image.

Digital and video cameras will inevitably merge into one unit. The process has already begun with JVC recently releasing the Everio, a hard-disk camcorder that retails for about $2800 and has three CCDs and also takes five-megapixel still images. And Kodak's brand new V-series of digital cameras, between $700 and $800, promise up to 80 continuous minutes of TV-quality video.

And then there is DVD. Don't buy a DVD recorder, let alone a player, unless it's for the bach or the kids' bedroom, Harvey Norman's Cameron says. Go straight to the hard-drive recorder.

"The best thing about these is you just grab the remote and hit record. There's no spending half an hour trying to find a spare videotape or a disc, because it's recording straight on to the internal memory, the hard drive. You can even start watching the beginning of the show while it is still being recorded. Then you just delete or edit and save to disc."

Hard-drive quality and size are key considerations when you go shopping. An 80-gigabyte hard drive will store more than 40 hours ofgood-quality recording.

And prices keep dropping too.

"The same price I bought a DVD player for six years ago is what I spent on my DVD hard-drive recorder," Cameron says. Starting price for the recorders is now about $1000.

So do you buy now or is there something better over the horizon?

There's bound to be.

LG will soon offer a wireless banking-enabled, 1.3-megapixel cameraphone complete with a radio frequency scanner that reads your fingerprint before allowing access.

Car audio manufacturer Fusion has just unveiled the FAV-10P, a 25-centimetre-wide screen combination laptop, radio, DVD, CD, MP3 player and TV, for $1295.

And a new generation of opto-electronic materials using zinc oxide is being developed jointly by the University of Auckland, Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences and the University of Canterbury.