Used Car Blowout! 1999 Ford Expedition $188/mo or $10,988;2003 Infiniti M45 Loaded $23,988 It's not snowing, but the predictions about what holiday shoppers will snap up this winter are sure accumulating.The latest look into the crystal ball comes from the Consumer Electronics Association. The trade group ranked what gadgets people want, as well as what gadgets they plan to give.

Not surprisingly, digital cameras came in high on both lists -- just as they did last year.Film, apparently, doesn't stand a chance against the memory-card-equipped digital camera, which can store hundreds of photos. Then there are the host of functions from pairing a digital camera with a PC -- such as editing photos and e-mailing them.Add to that an average selling price that's fallen to $295 from $340 in one year, and you have a hot product.But hot doesn't equal easy.There's plenty of technical mumbo-jumbo to wade through when it comes to buying a digital camera.Some of that technobabble matters; some of it doesn't. Focus on the following when you hit HH Gregg or Best Buy this season. In layman's terms, a megapixel is how a camera's resolution is measured. One megapixel equals 1 million light-sensing dots. Generally, the more dots, the better.For any photos you plan to print or edit on your computer, stick to cameras around 3 megapixels.These days, though, moving up to 4 -- or even 5 -- megapixels won't cost much more. Such cameras will produce sharp 8-by-10-inch photos and allow you to do more cropping. Many cameras come equipped with two types of zoom -- optical and digital.Optical zoom gauges a camera's ability to magnify something or someone. It is measured -- 3x or 4x, for instance -- by the maximum number of times an object can be magnified.Digital zoom tells how much a camera can magnify objects using its software instead of its lens. It lets you crop a shot before taking the photo. But the more you magnify the image, the worse the resolution will be.The bottom line: A camera with a high level of optical magnification can produce large, high-quality photos. Cameras with low-level optical zoom or only digital zoom cannot. Digital cameras store photos -- and in some cases, video -- on memory cards about the size of a razor blade.The most popular storage formats include Secure Digital, or SD, and Compact Flash, or CF. There's also Sony's proprietary Memory Stick.An advantage of buying a camera that supports SD or CF is that both formats are compatible with a host of other devices, including PDAs and cell phones. So, for instance, if you take a bunch of photos and store them on an SD card, you could remove that card from your camera, put it in your PDA and scroll through them.The Memory Stick works the same way, but it only plays nice with Sony products. Don't get hung up on a name.There are plenty of quality digital cameras that aren't emblazoned with Sony, Canon or Kodak. Check out Panasonic and Casio, for starters.

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