One of the important phases of shooting a good photo is focusing on the photos objects. Photos that are out of focus look bad and blurry. Sometimes shooting out of focus objects is done on purpose as an artistic effect but in most cases a sharp focused object is the photographer goal.
Most low-end pocket digital cameras do all the focus work for you. These are literally point and shoot cameras. Furthermore even if you wanted to manually focus using such cameras it would have been practically impossible since they do not include a real optical viewfinder. Using the LCD to check for focus is useless as the LCD is not good enough to truly let you know if an object is perfectly focused or not.
Digital SLR cameras on the other hand have an optical viewfinder that allows you to truly see the photo through the cameras lens. With digital SLR cameras you can see how well the objects in the photo are focused and correct the focus as needed.
Digital cameras support at least three focus modes:

You can find more information on digital photo printing and photography in general on printrates.com - a site dedicated to digital photo print service Ziv Haparnas is a technology expoert. Mr. Haparnas writes about practical technology and science issues. This article can be reprinted and used as long as the resource box including the backlink is included.