As a beginner, will a digital SLR camera make you a better photographer? The textbook answer is No - for as with all tools, the skill of the tool user is of greater importance. Many of the world's most famous photographers - including Ansel Adams and Henri Bresson, used equipment that is primitive by today's standards. The most important thing about any photograph is simply what you point your camera at.

But even very basic SLR cameras offer far more flexibility and potential to  photographers than the very best digital compacts. There are many reasons why will find they take better photographs with digital SLR cameras for beginners.

Modern compact cameras are true marvels of digital technology and optics. But to be as small as possible, and to make them easy to use, compact camera designers have had to compromise.

As a result, digital compact cameras have much smaller sensors and smaller lenses than professional, not beginner SLR cameras. This means less light strikes the sensor for each photograph, and so the final image quality is lower. Even high-specification compacts with very high mega-pixel ratings must obey this law of optics.

Digital compacts also have small batteries, and small camera flashes. Often they are also slow to turn on, and slow to take a picture when you push the button.

In general, digital compact cameras work well in good light and in scenes where there is a lot of color. But anyone who wants to do more with their photography should consider SLR cameras for beginners.

The light sensor of a digital SLR camera usually has at least five times the surface area of a compact camera, and often much more. This means generally sharper images, especially in high-contrast or low light shots.

The bigger sensor means bigger lenses to gather more light - and with digital SLRs you have a wide variety of lenses to choose from, with different aspects and features.

Wide-angle lenses are great for people shots and landscapes. Telephoto zooms let you take long shots, or to compress apparent the distance between the subject and the background. Most digital SLR camera bodies are sold with a kit lens, which is usually a small zoom lens covering the range between a gentle wide-angle and a short telephoto.

Thanks to the size and design of lenses for SLR cameras, photographers can easily control the depth of field of a photograph - a popular photographic technique, but one almost impossible to do with a compact camera.

Digital SLR also handle much better than compacts. They power-up and are ready to shoot almost immediately - which can be as important for sports and nature photographers as it is for parents taking snaps of their kids. When you push the shutter button on a digital SLR, you get a photograph of the next instant - not an instant five seconds in the future.

Digital SLRs also have external buttons to control most of the major camera features, so you don't have to hunt through touch-screen menus to change options. Although the controls and options on an SLR camera can seem intimidating, most digital SLRs house sophisticated software that operates the camera in Automatic or Program modes.

In Automatic mode a digital SLR camera functions almost like a point-and-shoot compact, but generally does a better job thanks to better exposure metering and other features. Program modes let photographers choose the automatic features they want, depending on what they are shooting - such as choosing a shutter-priority mode and selecting a fast shutter speed for taking sports photographs.

Many of the latest beginner SLR cameras also include innovations that were first seen in compact cameras - such as touch screens, and flip-out screens. Modern digital SLR cameras for beginners are easier than ever to use, and beginners should quickly see signs that it is helping them to take better pictures.