Of course we know the answer -- because they feel that is all they can trust. The bigger the number the better the gadget, right? A 125 cm TV has to be better than a 100 cm telly, doesn't it? Regardless of the size of the viewing room or the quality of the picture, bigger must be better.

And if the bigger one costs less than the smaller one then it's not only better, you've got a bargain. Shoppers don't even stop to ask themselves why bigger should be cheaper than smaller when common sense would make you wonder if there is something else going on here.

Back when hi-fi systems were the gadget de jour average shoppers put more trust in the number of watts per channel than in what their ears told them, so the big number phenomenon is not new.

Let's take the case of cameras. The camera makers' research tells them that the average customer wants pixels, the more the better. They don't know what pixels are and they are ignorant of the physics of digital photography, but never mind that, 14 megapixels has to be better than ten any day.

A few years ago, when 8 megapixels was considered to be bordering on the absurd, Canon announced that they were pulling out of the pixel race. From now on the emphasis would be on the quality of the image rather than the number of light receptors on the sensor. Within months they were back in the race.

However, late last year a remarkable thing happened. Canon launched the successor to the G10, their top compact camera. We were pleasantly surprised that the new G11 sported 4 million fewer pixels than the camera it replaced. The G10 had 14 megapixels, the G11 has 10. Why would they do this? The answer is "the Panasonic LX3".

One year earlier Panasonic launched their top compact with a ten megapixel sensor and a very short range Leica zoom lens. It immediately won the admiration of camera reviewers around the world. Its natural competitor was the Canon G10 which was declared to be inferior to the LX3, solely because of the image quality difference.

Canon reacted by hurrying the G11 (and its sister, the S90) onto the market with fewer pixels and the move paid off. Canon is back at the top of the compact camera heap.

Here's the paradox. Both Panasonic and Canon make lesser, cheaper cameras with more pixels. Canon squeezes 14 million receptors onto an area about the size of a pinky nail in some of its cheaper cameras. No doubt many shoppers find it hard to comprehend why more should cost less, because they assume that if less is more then more must be a great deal more than more.

Next week we will answer some FAQs about sensors and pixels to assist the confused shopper in dealing with the seduction of numbers.

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Imaging's shelves groan under the weight of massive photographic books, but that hasn't stopped us adding a couple more since Christmas.

Books of photos by great photographers are an ambiguous inspiration. On the one hand they show what can be done and, in most cases, it is easy enough to work out how it has been done. On the other hand they are a temptation to be mere mimics of the masters. We fall for that temptation every time!

Photo Wisdom – master photographers on their art, compiled and edited by Lewis Blackwell (Hachette Australia www.hachette.com.au) is a massive collection of photographs and interviews with photographers in which they talk about their training, philosophy, inspiration and equipment.

Not surprisingly several of the photographers talk about the challenge of making something unique in a medium where billions of photos are being taken every day with the ubiquitous digital camera.

Jill Greenberg, who takes stunning portraits of animals and humans, says: "You have to work very hard, try to develop and hone your own vision, find something that is personal to you. With all the photographs that are being made daily, it may seem impossible to make something that stands out, but you have to do it."

Many of the photographers in the book still work with film. Joel Meyerowitz gives an interesting rationale. "With digital it is a negative asset that you can immediately see what you have got...When you only have film in the camera and you start to shoot something, a small event is transpiring in front of you. Well, you move closer and keep pushing...only focusing on the event. But with digital I have noticed so consistently that photographers take a picture and then look at the back to see what they've got, while the event is still going on."

Nude Photography–the art and the craft by Belgian photographer Pascal Baetens (Dorling Kindersley www.dk.com) delivers what the title promises -- a comprehensive guide to photographing the human body.

Baetens' introductory essay on the history of photographing nudes is a good guide to sorting out the various categories from the coyly allegorical works of the 19th century up to the explicitly erotic photography of Playboy and its ilk. In between there are categories of pictorial, surrealist, scientific, fashion and feminist.

Our preference is for the portrait category where the nudity is a secondary feature of a photograph that captures the personality of the subject. The August 1991 Vanity Fair cover photo of a naked and pregnant Demi Moore (by Annie Leibovitz) is a good example of portrait nudity.

The most helpful section of the book is the "Photographers' Gallery" where splendid examples of the art are illustrated with one particular picture, followed by a detailed photo essay on how the picture was made. This is accompanied by a selection of each photographer's works. Australian photographic partners Lyn Balzer and Tony Perkins are featured in this section.

Altogether two valuable additions to the photo book library.

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Last week Samsung at last unveiled the long-awaited NX-10. The company has shoe-horned most of the internal workings of a digital single lens reflex into a compact(ish) body, going down the path pioneered by Panasonic in replacing the reflex viewfinder with an electronic affair.

We had a chance to handle a pre-production model before Christmas, but release of information was embargoed until last week. As the general concept and shape of the camera was already well known the point of the embargo was moot.

2009 will be remembered as the year in which the camera companies tried something new – better images from less bulk. First came Panasonic with their G1 and GH1 (the G1 with movie mode added) Micro Four Thirds pseudo-SLRs. These well made, slim twins were an immediate success, although we felt that the electronic viewfinders left something to be desired and were certainly no match for the traditional mirror and prism.

Later in the year Olympus launched the E-P1, the cute retro styled camera, again built around the Micro Four Thirds sensor the company shares with Panasonic and uses in its DSLRs. This time the only viewfinder is the LCD.

Panasonic followed with the GF1 which can be bought with an add-on EVF; not to be outdone Olympus followed with the E-P2 – essentially an E-P1 with an add-on EVF.

Then in November Ricoh launched their clever version of the compact interchangeable lens camera with the GXR. Ricoh’s solution to the fully competent camera in the compact body is to incorporate the lens and sensor into an interchangeable unit. This means they can offer either a full APS-C sized sensor, as used in most consumer DSLRs, or the smaller compact camera sensor, to be used in one body.

Samsung’s approach has been to create a compact pseudo-SLR, about the same size as Panasonic’s twins, but with the larger APS-C sensor. The advantage of this system is in potential image quality. The disadvantage, compared with the Micro Four Thirds cameras, is that the lenses must be larger.

This flurry of innovation and size reduction by the camera companies is spurred on by the belief that there is a potential customer in the shops looking for single lens reflex image quality in a compact body. This customer is deterred from buying a traditional DSLR by its bulk, its mass, its ostentation and its perceived complexity. The putative customer is moving up from a compact into something better, but not as grand and excessive as a Canon 1d MkIII.

The Samsung NX-10 could be the camera they are looking for. It can be set to auto-everything and left to its own devices, just like a compact, or the user can keep complete control. It is rugged and well made, so it is not light, and that is good – unless you want to carry it in a pocket. We are impressed by what we have seen. We will do a review of the camera soon.

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You remember the chap who liked the electric razor so much that he bought the company? Well, we are not in a position to buy up the companies whose products take our fancy, but we do sometimes find it hard to part with the gear we are testing.

This year we flattered a few products by adding them to our equipment bag.

We particularly liked the little Samsung ST550 compact camera with the dinky LCD on the front of the camera. This is the camera that Narcissus would have owned because it makes self-portraiture so easy. However, it has a couple of other virtues.

For one thing it has a wonderfully large, high resolution LCD (on the back, where it belongs). Samsung do LCDs really well, and this one, so we are told, is a spin-off from their mobile phone technology. It is big, bright and altogether beautiful in its full 16:9 widescreen format.

Add to the super screen a touch interface that is intuitive and easy to use and you have a winning combination. Every control except for zoom and review is accessed via the touch screen. This is not unique to the Samsung, it’s just that they do it better than any similar cameras. The only thing we don’t care for is the infuriating micro SD card used for image storage, which we take to be an unfortunate by-product of the phone connection.

At the other end of the camera scale we added the Canon EOS 7D to the bag this year. Canon have upped the pixel count to 18 million, which is a lot for an APS-C sized sensor, but they have done it without creating any noise or dynamic range problems. So you get extraordinary resolution – better than many lenses can deliver – without any nasty by-products.

The 7D has replaced our esteemed EOS 40D which we were able to sell without much trouble.

We couldn’t resist the Olympus Pen E-P1 when it was released. This gorgeous little camera gives DSLR results in a compact(ish) body. And it will mount our Olympus Zuiko legacy lenses from our last film camera, via an adapter. Here’s a cliché – the E-P1 puts the fun back in photography! We bought one.

With four computers in the house in different rooms we needed a printer that connects to the wireless network and we bought the Kodak ESP7 all-in-one printer/scanner/copier. The thing we like about this device is that it uses Kodak’s paper recognition technology, reading the paper type from a code printed on the back of Kodak papers. It takes the tedium out of matching up the printing parameters in Photoshop with the printer. We don’t use it for serious photographic printing, but for mundane mono and for quick postcard size colour prints it is excellent.

And still we weep for those we had to send back but for which we would gladly have bought the company.

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We have a Canon i9950 for serious photographic work. It prints up to A3+, which is 32.9X48.3 centimetres. It uses eight ink cartridges which cost about $18 each to replace.

The print quality is excellent. However, because it uses older technology inks the prints fade quickly. This means we are looking to upgrade to the Canon Pro9000MkII as soon as we have paid off Santa.

The i9950 prints onto blank CDs, but it doesn’t do anything else. Top quality photo printers are never all-in-one printer/scanner/copier/fax devices. They are built to do one thing and to do it perfectly. Canon, Epson and Hewlett Packard make the best affordable photo printers.

The high cost of running this printer means that it would be folly to use it for everyday document printing. So for the mundane jobs we have a Canon laser printer. These little fellows are as cheap as chips, typically costing around $130 including a limited capacity toner cartridge to get you started. Full capacity replacement cartridges usually cost more than the printer. Print cost per page is miniscule. Printing is fast and we set the laser as our default printer.

But wait, there’s more. Because we have four computers in different rooms in the house we need a wireless network printer, and for that we have the Kodak EPS7. This is a multi-function printer/scanner/copier but it doesn’t print onto CDs. It is reasonably economical to operate even when it is printing in colour. It uses Kodak’s multi-colour cartridge plus one black and the ink is pigment, which means that colour prints will last more or less forever. Paper handling leaves a little to be desired – getting borderless prints is tricky. But on the whole we are happy with the Kodak.

The winning trick of the ESP7 is that it uses Kodak’s paper type recognition system. Kodak papers have a code printed on the back which the printer reads and sets the correct parameters for any paper type. Well, any Kodak paper type. It recognises plain paper and defaults to its basic settings.

Then, for when we need a postcard size print quickly and without any futzing around in Photoshop looking for the correct settings we have a little Canon Selphy dye sublimation printer. This only prints 10X15cm prints and the colours are a little dull but the prints last a long time without fading. It is ideal for the quick postcard print job. Replacement dye roller and paper come together in a pack.

USB has to be the most brilliant digital innovation of all time. How else can we connect four printers to one computer?

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Price: $175

Half great, half infuriating

The low-down: The latest incarnation of Photoshop Elements arrives almost exactly one year after the release of version 7. Some of the most significant changes are in the Organiser module, which is also the biggest disappointment. (See below) Owners of 7 will probably find little incentive to upgrade, but there are enough improvements over 6 to justify the price. Elements is a cut-down version of Photoshop that does just about everything most people will need for photo finishing. The only feature we really miss is the ability to record Actions (macros). Elements will play them but not record them.

Like: The Edit module is excellent, striking the right balance between automation and full user control. There is an overview of features at tinyurl.com/yhe2uqq with comparison charts for versions 7 and 6. Adobe Camera RAW can be set as the RAW conversion front end.

Dislike: We spent a day trying to make face recognition work. This is one of the vaunted new features and we could not get it to function. There is no instruction book and as Elements is a complex program it will be necessary to buy a third party manual. The design of the Organise module is poor. There is a Nobel prize for the first person to find the microscopic Edit/Find/View dropdown menu button.

Verdict: Photoshop Elements is the economical and viable alternative to the very expensive full Photoshop program. It’s a shame that Adobe spends so much money on creating a bewilderingly beautiful interface and not a cent on documentation. The on-line help system is no substitute for a printed manual. This means that the cost of a third party manual must be factored in to the price of the software.

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Now is the time to start planning for the Yuletide photo ops. Especially for capturing that moment when the little tacker’s face lights up when she discovers that Santa has come good on her wishes. And also the moment of rapture when she gets her first taste of the joys of materialism and conspicuous consumption.

The first rule of happy Christmas snapping is so obvious it hardly needs repeating, but just in case you’ve forgotten it is this: get down on their level. There is no missed opportunity as boring as a shot from above from which you miss the eyes completely. Get down on the floor, eyeball to eyeball.

The second rule is: do not use flash, except as a last resort. Flash from an onboard camera unit will always look flat and artificial and is almost guaranteed to produce red eye. So if you don’t want your little one looking like an extra in a vampire movie you should use available light.

However, available light is not without its problems. There is usually not much of it under the tree and what there is will be a funny colour needing some tweaking of the white balance to compensate for incandescent or fluorescent light.

We compensate for inadequate light by cranking up the ISO speed. With compact cameras there is a limit to how far we can go and ISO 400 is about it. Beyond that point the picture noise becomes intolerable and even the smoothest infant skin starts to look acne blitzed.

With a digital SLR the limits are higher. ISO 800 is good and up to ISO 1200 may be acceptable, depending on the camera.

One way to move the odds of capturing the magic moment in your favour is to set the camera to its burst mode. Most digital cameras will take rapid sequences of shots by holding the shutter release down and following the action. Compact cameras have modest burst rates of three or fewer frames per second but DSLRs can usually manage five frames per second in JPG mode. It’s well worth experimenting with the camera in burst mode before the big day to see what it can do. Just keep in mind that you probably can’t do bursts with flash and expect them to all be correctly exposed – the flash takes longer to recharge than the time between exposures.

This is not an occasion for getting people to watch the birdie. (Does anyone still say that?) What you need as a record of the festivities is a collection of people interacting with each other, not with the camera.

In this day and age of big flat screen TVs and instant gratification don’t miss the opportunity for instant playback. Most LCD TVs have a USB port into which to plug a USB memory stick. Some can play back movies from digital cameras. And most have video inputs for connecting the camera directly to the telly. ‘Tis the season for convergence!

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