I’m looking at buying a digital camera.
I figured I’d ask what people thought about different brands, memory requirements, mega pixels, etc.
What is good, what to stay away from, etc.
My cap is around $400. Best bang for the buck is key. And I don’t need anything super fancy with lots of toys I’ll never use.
Thanks, Andrew

 

i'm a big fan of canon, so i'd suggest the powershot s230 (2x zoom lens, 4x digital zoom i think) and s400 (3x, 4x (i think)). they're 3.2 and 4.0mp respectively. they have lots of features in terms of taking pictures, and lots of manual controls for nightshots, focus, etc.
but as an all around package, i think that the minolta dimage xt is better. it has more multimedia features, i.e. you can use it as a webcam with netmeeting and other webconferencing software, and you can record up to 3 hours of digital audio i believe. oh and you can record unlimited minutes of video as long as you have a big enough memory card (canon is 3 minutes max). it just probably wont perform as well as the canon in the dark or something. but that's with slow shutter which would require you a tripod anyway and i dunno if you'd do that.
anyway... here are some sites, if you haven't looked yet, that have camera reviews (i wanted to get one real bad when i was in japan so i researched a lot :P)
www.dpreview.com
www.imaging-resource.com
www.steves-digicams.com
www.dcresource.com
hope this helps somewhat.

 

read this thread for some good info that people typed in about camera opinions... it should address the original question (and I do not have to type it again )

http://www.protegeclub.com/forum/sho...threadid=28570

 

Somebody asked the same question about a month ago and most people suggested Canon. If you do a search I'm sure you can find the thread and it will give you more info. EDIT: See the link in the above post. He posted it while I was typing.

To me, you don't really need more than 3.2MP. 3.2 will make a good 8x10 print and it also works great for your desktop wall paper. Other than that all I do with my pictures is upload them to the internet.

Also, ignore digital zoom. Its worthless and manufacturers only put it on the cameras so people who don't know what they are looking at think camera A is better than Camera B because it has more digital zoom.

I just bought a Canon Powershot A70 on Tuesday. So far it is great. I haven't taken too many pictures since it has been raining all week. I would suggest a Canon Powershot A70 or a Powershot S400 if you want 4MP. The Canon powershot S230 is very similar to the A70. The only difference is the A70 is a little larger but it also has 3x optical zoom while the S230 only has 2x. The A70 also cheaper and takes AA batteries so if you are out somewhere and your batteries die you can go to any store and buy a set of regular AAs and continue taking pics. With the S230 you can't because it uses a proprietary battery that will have to be recharged.

 

On my camera the digital zoom works "fairly" well. I would say approximately 50% of the shots turn out looking great and the other 50% the zoom algorithm makes all nice and blurry. It is handy to have a high digital zoom as a companion to a good optical zoom, sometimes you just can't get close enough. Mine works very well outdoors on pictures with steady light.

 

thanks everyone

 

see here is where I totally do not get it... you could have taken the same shot at 0x digital zoom and full optical zoom... then you can go home and, using a photo editor, you can choose exactly how the digital zoom is going to turn out, even a very basic (i.e. free) graphics editor can do a good job at cropping down a picture so that you only have the elements that you want... that is all digital zoom is, cropping the sides off the picture.


Of course no matter of post processing magic can make up for what might have been a blurry picture from the get go... I hate how I can take a picture and see it on the camera display and think "hey, that one came out great" only to get home and be very dissapointed.

 

You are over-simplifying a digital zoom. A digital zoom is very algorithmic attempts at guessing what should really be there. It does not simply crop the picture. A good graphics editing program could probably do the same thing, but the ones I use only have a stupid zoom and the picture is terrible when you try and zoom in. If it was simply cropping then there would be no limit to how large of a digital zoom you could achieve.

 

You're right I was over simplifying my statement... for that I apologize.

However, I still stand by the premise that digital zoom is not worth it. Yes, the camera can do some pretty nifty interpolation of the data before it saves it to the images on the media, but it has been my experience (using three digital cameras so far) that the PC can do just as good a job (and usually better). If the camera comes with it for free, then great (I opt to not use it)... if that is a feature that they can charge more for then I would not waste my money on it.

If you can not afford an expensive photo editor (I hapen to have access to Adobe Photoshop) you can do pretty darn good with most of the software that the camera itself comes with. The only camera I have seen so far to not have an image editor was my original HP Photosmart (640x480 images). Both the software that came with my Canon and my Minolta, as well as the one that came with my buddy's Nikon, have the capability to crop and resize with rather good interpolation. It may not be as simple as a single select and zoom operation, but with a little patience you can get very good results.

I still believe that the digital zoom is for folks that need an immediate point and click (and if you fit that category, then that is great). Now that I have gotten into taking a lot more pictures than I used to, there is a rare instance when I do not open one in an editor to crop it down or alter the color just a bit so that when I have them printed they turn out exactly how I wanted them (this also applies to the fact that most digital cameras have a 4x3 aspect ratio and most prints do not , so I crop the image to the aspect ratio of the print as well).

I would strongly recommend to anyone getting a decent digital camera that they budget a little more for a decent photo editor (Paint Shop Pro and Adobe's Photoshop Elements can both be had for a little under $100 USD) as it will greatly enhance the picture taking experience.

The one other recommendation I can make is that you should take your pictures with the lest amount of compression that you feel comfortable taking them at. Use the CCD for all the info it can provide and manipulate the data later. Yes, this means you get less pics on the given piece of media... but the ones you do get will be better. Now, I do not mean to say that you should choose a raw format or TIF all the time (those would be huge, in my case 16MB each!) but if you can turn the compression for the JPG images down to as little as possible. In the case of my Minolta this is a ~3MB image size and that works out really well with a decent flash card. If in a pinch I will choose one more level of compression (~1.2MB image size) but I would rather not do that as it makes the touch up later less desirable. Every time you open/modify/save an JPG image you loose a little more data.