So, my mom’s thinking of getting my dad one for Christmas, and was asking me about them. Unfortunately, all the looking into I’ve been doing has been for big, fancy ones, whereas she’s looking for a simple point and shoot…something to take on vacation to take some lovely scenery shots, but nothing too crazy…something in the $300-$400 range. Any suggestions?
My advice would be to prefer a camera that’s small - that way, there’s a good chance you’ll actually carry it and use it.
Avoid Sony, just because their memory system is proprietary and annoying. We have an Canon PowerShot A70 which works great, is easy to use for point-and-shoot but has the options available to exert complete creative control over your images, and is very battery-friendly. Also takes Compact Flash cards, so we can share the same couple of cards back and forth between it and my two-year-old HP Photosmart 318.
I used to have the Canon A70 too, and liked it a lot. The ability to use AA batteries and the fantastic battery life come in handy for vacations. You can even get away with non-rechargeable batteries, freeing you from the battery charger.
Now I use a Canon S1. Also a great camera, but more bulky and intimidating than the A70.
For Christmas I got my mom the Canon SD200. I have it’s ancestor the SD110 and am quite pleased with it; the SD200 has a better zoom. It’s a “supercompact” and is easy to tuck in a pocket or tiny purse. It’s a basic point and shoot although you can use custom settings if you like, and it will shoot video as well. It warms up fast which is nice in a digicam, some of them take so long you’ve lost the shot. Pick up a 512mb SD video card for $50 and you’ll have enough memory for about 500 high-res pix.
Well, lots of PC now accept MemorySticks. For those that don’t, you need an adaptor - small, readily available, costs around $10.
All in all, not a giant hassle.
So, how does “digital zoom” work?
Digital zoom just takes the centre portion of the image and blows it up. You can do exactly the same thing with any graphics editor - crop and resize. Digital zoom should be considered completely irrelevant when looking at cameras.
Consumer Reports always has good recommendations for this kind of product, although you do have to pay to access their magazine or website.
Based on their recommendations, I recently bought the Olympus D-580 zoom. It’s a 4 Megapixal job with a 3x optical zoom (not fabulous, but good enough for a fairly compact point and shoot).
I highly recommend getting a camera that takes AA batteries, and buying a good charger (if you search, you’ll find a thread of mine that I started a couple months ago about good high-drain battery chargers).