A Teenage Rite Measured in Megapixels By Michelle Slatalla February 19, 2004 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/19/technology/circuits/19shop.html As my daughter Ella approached her 13th birthday this month, I concluded I would probably survive. After all, I am a veteran of the teenage years. And in addition to my personal fieldwork project (Ella's older sister), I have compared notes with enough other teen-challenged parents to write an A-to-Z manual on managing adolescent catastrophes ranging from Apathy to Zits. So when Ella came into the kitchen the other night and asked her father and me to sit down, I said: "Sure, honey. Tell us anything." "Mom," she asked, "for my birthday, could I have a digital camera?" "A what?" I asked, in the sort of shocked tone other parents might reserve for offspring who request a pierced belly button. "You know, to take pictures of my friends, and make little movies and put them on my Web page and -" "It'll be O.K., honey," my husband interjected. "I'll explain everything to your mother." I know nothing about buying electronic gadgets. But now, as I mentally thumbed through the long list of teenage crises on which I have an opinion - drugs (bad), sex (bad), under-age driving (bad) - I realized that on the topic of technology I had absolutely no guidance to offer my own daughter other than digital (bad). Nobody promised that being a parent would be easy. So I took a deep breath and decided to buy a digital camera online for Ella. I approached the problem as I would any other child-rearing quandary. In the same spirit in which I once rushed off to read expert advice about how to get an infant to sleep through the night, I now turned to online gadget guides for suggestions. My first question now was one of megapixels. The more tiny dots (or pixels) in each image, the better the resolution of the picture. So how many megapixels does a teenager need? First, I visited the digital camera reviews at www.zdnet.com and the Digital Living guide at www.cnet.com. I learned there which digital cameras are most popular, which are most expensive and how they all compare, feature by feature. I confronted zillions of tiny images of cameras with features like rotating lenses, high-speed capture ability and T.F.T. active matrix L.C.D. displays. Then at the Digital Photography Review (www.dpreview.com), I became acquainted with such concepts as white balance override and aperture priority. Finally, at the online tip sheet site www.gizmodo.com, I read rumors of wonderful new cameras that will go on sale any second and render obsolete all the old cameras. The result? I was as confused as if it were 2 a.m. and I was walking the floor with a crying baby who, the books claimed, would soon learn to soothe herself to sleep. Luckily, I stumbled next upon www.consummerreports.org's digital camera guide (Consumer Reports is a subscription site that costs from $19 to $26 a year), which put the megapixel issue in perspective for nontechnical shoppers. Based on the site's recommendations, I decided to consider cameras with resolutions from two megapixels ("their forte is snapshots") to four megapixels ("additional resolution for manipulating images"). That narrowed my search to roughly a gazillion cameras. The problem was shopping for teenagers, a special-interest group of consumers that has certain undeniable needs. For instance, the smaller and lighter the camera, the easier it is to carry it around in a book-heavy backpack. I knew I wanted a small compact, but how small? I didn't know until I saw one. Logging off and going to a bricks-and-mortar store proved a valuable next step. In the store, I handled different models. I saw that one manufacturer's ultracompact model was another company's elephant. I identified models with buttons that were irritatingly small. I weighed two four-megapixel ultracompacts in my hands and discovered that one was much heavier than the other. I emerged from the store with a leading candidate: the Sony Cybershot DSC-U40. In its favor was the fact that it was tiny and adorable (four inches long, 4.7 ounces), easy to use and inexpensive. According to www.bizrate.com 's comparison shopping site (which calculates total costs including tax and shipping to a specific ZIP code), I could buy it for $197.08. I phoned my husband to tell him the good news. He took it badly. "That camera has no audio capabilities for the little movies she wants to make," he said. "It runs on Memory Stick, which means memory is expensive, and in my opinion, she deserves more than two megapixels. What if she gets into printing 8-by-10's?" "Oh," I said. At this stage of the buying process, I faced my biggest challenge yet: co-parenting. I married an early adopter. My husband countered a suggested model of his own: the popular Canon PowerShot S400 (four megapixels, with 3x optical zoom). "That's too heavy for her to carry around," I said, as I frantically checked Bizrate.com's prices for more ammunition. "And it would cost $338.95." We debated for a day or two. Then, with less than a week to go until her birthday, we decided to resolve our parental differences amicably - by putting Ella on the spot. With only two business days lying between us and her birthday, we figured we would have to forgo the cheapest price in favor of upgraded shipping and reliability. We agreed: we would have to order a camera from Amazon.com by the end of the day. A few hours later with Ella in the car with us, my husband asked her the usual pointed questions: What do you see yourself doing with the camera? Where do you see yourself and the camera in five years? What kinds of cameras do your friends have? Are these friends whose parents we like? And by the way, did you finish your Spanish homework yet? Ella took it in stride. Since we asked, she said, she did have a particular camera in mind - the Pentax Optio S4 - but she hadn't wanted to say anything because she felt it was too expensive. She'd handled the Pentax and liked its good points. She ticked them off: the camera was tiny enough to fit inside the smallest pocket on her backpack; its four-megapixel resolution was good enough to make sharp birthday-card-size prints (Ella makes a lot of oversize birthday cards); and she could use it to make one-minute movies with sound. Over Ella's head, my husband and I gave each other pointed looks. The Pentax model was a good compromise, feature-laden enough to please my husband and small and cute enough to win my approval. But I paid a high price for speedy delivery; Amazon's post-rebate price was $329.94 versus the $268 I would have paid at buydig.com. (A phone call to Buydig confirmed that the camera would not arrive by Ella's birthday even if I paid for overnight delivery.) We should have just asked her in the first place. After all, she did sleep through the night at four weeks. E-mail: Slatalla@nytimes.com