My mom and I are both looking to buy a digital camera. I’m looking for an inexpensive one so that I can try it out without too much of a financial investment. In town, the most inexpensive I could find was a Vivitar 3615 (no memory card) for around $160. I thought I’d run by and see if anyone has advice on this camera or other inexpensive digital cameras.
We’d be primarily using it for simple snapshots (mostly outdoor) and occasionally for use to sell stuff on eBay. I travel, and don’t always have access to power outlets – how is the battery life on inexpensive digital cameras? Also, are they simple enough for my not-so-tech-savvy Mom to use (I’m happy to instruct, but it can’t be massively more complicated than a regular camera). How much should a memory card hold, and can you bring more along to change in the field? (If so, how many should I get to compare to a regular camera and a roll or two of film?)
Any advice to us newbies is very much appreciated!
Look at the Sony Cybershot DSC-P31. I don’t own it yet, but I plan to buy one on Monday. It is a 2mpixel camera that has very good reviews. It has the capacity to record short movies, but this is more of a gimmick than a usefull feature as the movies are small and have no sound. It costs $220 with free shipping from sony.com, and comes with everything you’ll need, including a USB cable to connect it to your computer, video cable to connect it to a TV, a batter charger, recharchable batteries, and an 8MB Sony Memory Stick. This is an advantage over most cameras, which tend to REQUIRE that you purchase some accessories that can double the price you pay, just to use the camera. Owners report that this camera can automatically adjust itself to give good pictures, although it does offer some settings to tweak if you know what you’re doing. I’ve seen some pictures taken with this thing by a “point-and-shoot” person, and they look positively excellent.
For around $50, you can buy a starter kit with a carrying case, faster battery recharger, and an extra set of batteries. This isn’t strictly necessary, however it might be a wise investment, especially the faster charger. When you register the camera with Sony, you get a $20 e-coupon good for your next purchase at sony.com. You could use this to cut down the price of the starter kit to $30. Or, you could just buy 3 extra pairs of batteries for about $7 after the coupon, and use the included recharger. You can find some more info on the battery life in the owner reviews I link to below. According to some batter comparisons I’ve seen, Sony rechargables have some of the best capacity.
The included 8MB memory stick can hold about 10 pictures at the largest size and quality settings. Supposedly CompUSA is offering 64MB cards, which would hold around 80 pictures at the largest size and quality settings, for $20 after a mail-in rebate.
I do not have much experience with digital cameras, but I offer the following advice. Do not get the cheapest thing you can find. I did that with a digital camera (a while back), and it’s a total piece of junk, I get zero useful pictures out of it. I got what I paid for.
Make sure to get something of decent quality, if you happen to like digital photography, you won’t have to buy a whole new camera to get good pictures. Expandability is important, don’t completely limit your future options with your initial purchase.
The Sony is a nice camera, but I’m not thrilled with the memory sticks. They are significantly more expensive than CompactFlash or SmartMedia memory. In the long run, that’s probably not a huge issue.
You will need to buy several accessories with your camera, so make sure you keep this expense in mind. I’d buy a camera that uses AA batteries and then buy a set (or two) of NiMH rechargable batteries and a charger. I’ve had good luck with the Maha recharger at http://www.thomasdistributing.com/ Don’t bother with regular Alkyline batteries, they die extremely quickly in digital cameras. You’ll also need to buy a bigger memory card than the one that comes with the camera. So, there’s probably nearly $100 of extras. The number of pictures you get per card depends on the image size of the CCD, the resolution you’ve chosen, and the compression algorithm of the camera.
I’ve had a few Olympus cameras that I’ve liked. I’ve also used some Canons and Nikons, all very good. No experiece directly with the Sonys but I imagine their quality is quite good as well.
If you are mainly using the camer for online images and printing 4x6 and 5x7 snapshots, 2 MP will be sufficient. If you wish to print 8x10s, 3 MP makes for a much higher quality print. Memory cards in general are cheap, I usually carry several and swap when needed.
Visit http://www.dpreview.com and http://www.dcresource.com for some indepth reviews and descriptions of all the available models on the market. For lower priced models, the Fuji and Olympus lines seem to offer the best price/performance, IMO.
Hmmm, I’d have disagree with you there. I have a 4 MP camera, and 5x7’s are quite lovely but the quality at 8x10 isn’t as good as I’d like. I agree a 3MP would make a fine 4x5 and most 5x7’s. Obviously, this is subjective, and I’m admittedly damned picky on print quality.
Hey, here’s an idea to judge how many MPs you need: on dpreview and steve’s digicams are many sample images taken from the cameras themselves, posted online un-enhanced. Just download some at the resolution and from the camera you’re interested in, and use either a photo printer or a print service such as Shutterfly, and judge the quality for yourself. Then you can see the difference, on paper, between a 2MP, 3MP, whatever camera.
I just bought my first digital camera about 5 weeks ago a Kodak Easyshare CX4230 for around 200.00. It is a two megapixel camera with excellent photo quality. I’ve shot probably 200 photos and downloaded them on the same lithium batteries it came with except for a short tryout of alkaline.
I’ve blown up the results to 8x10 in photoshop and am still completely satisfied with the results.
The only problem that I’ve had was corrected in a couple calls to tech support and turned out to be a conflict with their software and my scanner which somehow cleared itself up.
I put a lot of value in quality tech support and found Kodak to be acceptable.
I love, LOVE, LOVE our Sony DSC-P31. The videos can be long enough to capture a funny dog dance or odd moment, and you can capture them and edit them on the camera. It’s really user friendly and pretty much idiot proof. The shutter speed is incredibly fast, faster than my 35mm Canon “real time” feature, and the quality is great, even for the small e-mail sized pics.
My only beef is that the Pixela software totally screwed my scanner program and Adobe PhotoDeluxe and I still haven’t got around to figuring it out.
And the camera’s totally paying for itself in replacing the Polaroid film we used to have to buy.
I must say, this is the cool thing for me regarding digital photography. I’ve shot about seven thousand pictures (really) in the last 12 months using my Sony DSC-S85+Tiffen lenses. My total cost in processing: Zero. Nada. Zip.
I do spend money printing/framing etc my prints, but overall this is negligable compared to what I would have spent with an analog camera.
So, spend more purchasing your digital camera if you’re really going to use it a lot; you’ll get most or all of the purchase price back in money saved on processing.
I have a 5+ MP camera (DiMAGE7i) and haven’t found anything it doesn’t do well. I’m not real nuts about .mov files but if I wanted a movie camera I would have bought one. I have compared it with a Nikon Coolpix 5000 and found it to be much more user friendly. The Nikon is murder to set up and slow. The 7X zoom is nice too.
Red
