A password-derivation function has two requirements:

1. Obscure the password in a one-way fashion.

2. Be fast enough for humans, but very slow in computer time.

Hash functions can be used to produce an obscured copy of data, but they are also by design very fast.

If you wish to protect passwords, don't use a naked hash algorithm. Choosing a different hash algorithm doesn't fix the problem.

Instead, use a password-derivation function. These are designed both to obscure and to take significant time. Bcrypt, Scrypt and PBKDF2 are the standards.

And of these three, scrypt is by far the best choice because it's the hardest one to speed up with specialized hardware.

Right. Colin Percival did a clever thing and made it memory-hard, not just computationally hard.