You may have heard a lot of talk about Digital Imaging lately. While digital still cameras and digital camcorders are certainly not new, recent advances in resolution, storage, output, and affordability mean the choices available to the consumer have never been better.

At American, we believe that digital imaging can change how you use photographs and video in your daily life. We realize that most cameras and camcorders are purchased to enable people to share special moments in their lives with family, friends, and loved ones. With digital, that process just got a whole lot easier.

You can simply shoot the still photos or video you want. In many cases this is even easier than with non-digital equipment, since the large LCD screens of digital cameras and camcorders make getting the perfect shot or scene a breeze. And, digital allows you to instantly view your work, so you'll know if your shots turned out or if you should erase them and try again.

After you have captured the images you want, you can transfer them directly to your computer. This can be done directly using your USB cable or firewire cable, or via removable storage media such as Secure Digital, Compact Flash, Memory Stick, XD Photo Card, or small CD-R discs.

Once you have the files on your computer, you're ready to begin sharing them with the world. Digital pictures and short digital movies make great email attachments! You can also publish these files on your own website or integrate them into multi-media presentations.

If you prefer to share your photos as prints, that's no problem for digital! American features many affordable photo-quality printers that will allow you to turn out great looking prints from your digital photos. There are also excellent options for ordering traditional prints from your digital photos online. Online vendors offer fast turnaround times and convenient delivery in the mail. Most traditional film processing outlets have now made the conversion to digital print processing.

With digital Imaging, your options for storing your photos and videos are almost limitless. Many people choose to archive their images directly on their computer. With recent price drops in external hard drives and storage devices, this option has become as affordable as it is convenient. Removable storage media, such as, CD-R, CD-RW, and DVD-RW discs also make an excellent storage media.

Advances in resolution and image processing have improved the quality of digital photos to be truly comparable to 35mm film photography, while new features and printing options mean that digital photography is more convenient than ever.

Today's digital cameras take pictures at 3.0 to over 10 Mega Pixels of resolution. A Mega Pixel is 1 million total pixels in a file. For example, a 1.3 Mega Pixel camera produces a file with 1,310,720 total pixels, that fills an area on your screen 1280 pixels wide and 1024 pixels high.

The higher your pixel count the higher overall resolution of your picture. Greater resolution on your original picture gives your more and better printing options, giving you the ability to make larger prints or to crop and adjust your photos.

As files gain more pixels, they also become larger, necessitating larger storage media. Most popular removable digital camera media, including Secure Digital, are 1GB to 4GB in memory size. This capacity will let you shoot all day without ever having to worry about running out of memory.

Today's digital cameras offer many new features, such as limited video and audio capabilities and pro-quality optional lenses. Combined with new output options, including portable printers which interface directly to the camera (no computer needed), digital cameras can serve a wide variety of needs and fit well into almost any lifestyle.

Consumers are quickly discovering that digital camcorders have many important advantages over analog camcorders, including better picture and sound quality, smaller, more convenient size, a fast and easy computer interface, and the ability to easily edit and copy videos on your computer without any quality loss.

Digital video maximizes picture and sound quality. This translates into videos that are incredibly rich and vibrant, with less shake and more accurate color reproduction.

Most of the time, you won't want to share everything you shoot. Digital video makes it quick and easy to transfer your raw footage directly to a PC or editing deck to cut, add effects, and produce high quality videos to share with your family and friends. And because with digital there is no data loss during digital editing or copying, every video you produce can be a first generation copy with no quality loss.

With the addition of compressed MPEG format video and digital still photo capabilities, digital camcorders offer you many options for sharing your files. MPEG movies, which are compressed enough to easily fit in an email or be posted on a website and be viewable in any web browser, can be downloaded from your digital camcorder to your computer, where they are ready to use. Digital still pictures are a great feature for people who don't need ultra high resolution still photos! This makes it possible to replace a video camera and still camera with one convenient unit - your camcorder.