Digital Camera/models

[Phoebos]

Can you please define some minimum creteria a digital camera must have? Cost should be relatively low, reffering mostly to European market.


Thank you in advance

[Nilfennasion]

When buying a digital camera, first sort out how much you can spend. You can get a good one for about $320 in Australia. If you allow another $100-200 Australian for storage media, you should be alright. I would not recommend one that has any less than 3.2 megapixels. In fact, if you splurge and get a memory card that is 1GB or more in size, I'd say 4 megapixels should be the least you look for. After that, it is just a matter of what you want to do with it.

So what do you want to do with it, exactly?

[Squid_uk]

Amazon.co.uk have some very good one's at good prices as well!

[tango_jd]

I have an Olympus Cammedia - it's 3.2 Megapixels I think.

One point to remember - no matter what the max resolution is, will you actually save pictures at the highest resolution?

I use quite a low-ish res - Olympus call this SHQ2 I think - I get 50 pics on a 32mb card.

This is fine and prints up to 10"x8" look as good as any I have seen.

The very high quality images (my best resolution) allows up to 4 or 5 pics on a 32mb card only - and the files are huge!

I use 32mb cards since they CAN be dodgy - and I dont want to lose a whole holiday's pictures in one go should a card fail for any reason. I use 5 32mb cards which gives me 250 pictures - plenty for an average weekend away!

By the way - a digital zoom cuts-in after the optical zoom is exceeded - but it does result in a slight loss of quality.

3x zoom is usually adequate for general picture taking.

One obvious point - get a camera with a view finder AND a back screen - it saves battery power if you dont use the screen all the time.

Newer cameras seem to be switching to XD media cards - fine except my PC has holes for every type of media under the sun....EXCEPT this new format!

My camera uses ordinary AA batteries (rechargeable) rather than a proprietary "energy pack" so I can buy them cheaply, charge one lot up while away from my hotel, and swap over each night.

Friends with other camera types (Especially Sony) end up HATING the cameras with floppy disks or CD roms rather than media cards (they may not make these nowadays)

Not an expert reply - obviously! - but hope this helps

[Nilfennasion]

Never judge a digital camera on their digital zoom. I turn off digital zoom because it is an utter joke - optical only.

I cannot say I have ever had a problem with the reliability of Compact Flash, but I will leave it at that.

If your camera is 3-4 megapixels, 256-512 megs of storage will be plenty.

[lordsmurf]

dSLR or point-n-shoot ???

Things to remember:
- megapixels means nothing past 2-3MP
- shutter lag (time from pushing button to time picture ACTUALLY gets taken) .. Canon dSLR terrible
- quality of lens ... most are terrible
- kind of batteries, cost of new ones, and how quick they get drained (Olympus is terrible) .. AA/AAA best for P&S, rechargeable best for pro cameras (dSLR)
- kind of media, cost of blanks

Good DSLR = Nikon, Fuji
Good Point-n-shoot = Canon, Fuji

Also, you can use whatever media size you want. Smaller ones are older, and probably more dodgy than new ones. They have multi generations. I use a 1GB IBM MicroDrive. Most 256MB-512MB cards are fine. All of these will outlast your batteries anyway.

Also, this is not video. Moved to OFF TOPIC.

[Doramius]

Didn't we have a thread like this already a few months back?

CLICK HERE! for instructions that might help.

[Phoebos]

Thank you very much guys, your guidance is appreciated