Flip-out screens are useful for doing tricky shots.

The focus motor moves the lens in order to autofocus. For system cameras, having a focus motor in the camera's body allows you to use a wide range of lenses, including lenses which do not have their own focus motor. For compact cameras, a focus motor is usually built-in.

An electronic viewfinder (or EVF) is a small display showing the image. Benefits of these over optical viewfinders include: they show more of the image, they can be more compact, focusing is easier with digital zoom, and they can also sometimes have extra info on the display, eg. a live histogram.

When recording movies they stay focussed and sharp.

A BSI (backside illuminated) sensor is a camera image sensor which captures better quality images in poor lighting conditions, and offers better overall sharpness and image quality.

A remote control allows you to control the device remotely. The remote control can be included or optional.

A raw image file contains minimally processed data from the image sensor. Raw files are so named because they are not yet processed and therefore are not ready to be printed or edited with a bitmap graphics editor.

A hot shoe can be used to attach an external flash, as well as light meters, viewfinders, rangefinders and other attachments.

When the camera shutter is open for a long time, more light is absorbed by the sensor. You can use this slow shutter speed to produce vivid night time photography, or capture the trajectory of moving objects such as motorway traffic.

A shorter minimum focal length allows you to get more of the scene in the photo, and offers a wider angle of view than longer focal lengths.

Lenses with built-in focus motor focus faster and more quietly than lenses without a focus motor which rely on the camera's body focus motor.

The battery is removable and can be replaced by the user if broken.

It allows you to take multiple photos capturing different parts of the scene, and then joins them together into a single photo.

The bigger the screen size is, the better the user experience.

A phase detection autofocus is much faster than a contrast detection autofocus and allows sharper images.

It can be charged and operated with a standard USB cable connected to your computer, or with a USB power supply.

An optical viewfinder (or OVF) allows the photographer to compose a shot while seeing exactly what the lens sees. There is no time lag and they require no power - as opposed to electronic viewfinders which can drain battery life. They are also better in low light situations.

More microphones result in better sound quality and enable the device to filter out background noise.

With a wider aperture the sensor can capture more light, helping to avoid blur by enabling a faster shutter speed. It also provides a shallow depth of field, allowing you to blur the background to focus attention on the subject.