I got mine at dBuys.com, fwiw.
If you go to the B&H Photo website, they have it listed at $499. They also have a link that says “Email Me a Better Price” and when you use this, they email you a price of $469.
I’m not generally in the habit of giving companies free advertising, but i bought my high-end digital camera from B&H, and i would recommend them without hesitation to anyone looking for a digital camera, or any photographic equipment, for that matter.
They deal almost exclusively in proper US imports and not “grey market” cameras (and when they do sell non-US products, they are very clear about it). When you order online, you do not then get a high-pressure sales call trying to convince you buy unecessary accesories, unlike many online electronics retailers. I placed my order five days before Christmas, and asked them to ship the camera to California, where i was spending the holiday. It arrived three days after i placed the order.
If you want to find out more about B&H, you can check out their customer satisfaction comments on the Reseller Ratings website. Also, almost everyone on the DP Review forums (which seem to be having technical difficulties today) recommends B&H as the best online store for photographic equipment.
I should also add:
Before you buy ANY electronic item online from a retailer your haven’t used before, always check out their customer satisfaction rating at one or more online ratings services, e.g.
oceans_11: I purchased my DSC-S85 at Best Buy. clicky[url=www.bestbuy.com]
One more vote for the S230
I bought it for my wife for Christmas, figuring I’d keep using my G1. As it turns out, the camera is so sweet that I haven’t touched the G1 since. It’s the size of a pack of cigarettes and it takes good 3mp shots that print nicely 8x10. It uses CF media (not my microdrive though – only type I), but the 256mb card I bought her is enough for me.
Hijack: The B&H store in Manhattan is awesome. Lots of camera stuff…everywhere.
Olympus C700UZ owner here. I love it. It may be over your price range (it was when I bought it a couple years ago, I don’t know how much, if at all, it dropped in price), but it’s an excellent camera.
I can’t recommend the Olympus Camedias enough. They take fantastic pictures. I got the 700UZ because I wanted a hefty zoom (mine has a 10X optical + a digital one on top of that).
Re: SmartMedia and Olympus
The Camedia C4000 is a worthy candidate, as it’s been steadily dropping in price, and the feature set is nice. Again, my concern is with the SmartMedia format. Though I’ve personally never used the format, and I’m sure they work fine, they’ve always reminded me of the of the old 5 1/4" floppy disks. They seem very fragile. And then I’m also hearing that support for this format is waning. SmartMedia users: am I wrong?
I had a bit more budget to work with, and I decided to go with the Sony DSC-F717. Wasn’t really happy that all I can get is 128 MB memory sticks, but I ordered two of them and with the 32 meg which comes with it hopefully we’ll be able to take a fair number of pics each outing. I really wanted 5 megapixels and a good lens and the Sony was the best fit. I may get in trouble with my wife because I bought a camera that isn’t as point-and-shoot as some of the digital cameras on the market, but I’m looking for the highest quality we can possibly afford that way we can have digital pictures on CD-R archives that will be good pictures even when the kids grow up and screen/printer resolution makes pictures that look great on today’s technology look grainy and pixellated. When desktop printers finally print picture-quality, I want my original data to be good enough quality that we can make hard copies if we want without them looking grainy. Thanks to our tax return, I think this camera will do fine by us for several years. 
Thanks to all who gave advice, even though I wasn’t the one asking. That Digital Photography Review website is AMAZING!
Enjoy,
Steven
I’m sure it will, and i think that some of your worries about it will prove not even to be a problem.
I have a Minolta Dimage 7Hi, and the Sony 717 was one of the cameras i consdiered before making my purchase. The great thing about the Sony, according to the reviews i read, is that, of the top end digital “prosumer” cameras, it is the one that gives the best results when used as a point-and-shoot camera, without all the messing around in photoshop etc. Results that are just as good can be obtained from the Minolta and from the Nikon 5700, but images from these ccameras will likely need more in-computer processing to obtain optimum results. One of the few reasons that i rejected the Sony is because i like to take landscapes, and the 38mm wide angle wasn’t anywhere near wide enough for me. The Minolta’s 28mm lens is great for this.
Another reason was the Sony memory stick issue, which you are obviously well aware of. But, according to Sony there will be much larger memory sticks on the market very soon, so it shouldn’t present a long-term problem. The main reason to prefer the more common Compact Flash and Microdrive memory cards, IMO, is that they are made by more manufactureres so you have a bigger choice on quality and price.
As for you comment about grainy and pixellated pictures, i really think that a lot of the concerns people have in this regard are going to prove meaningless. The pictures produced at 6x4, and even 10x8 inch size by a current 4-5mp camera and a good printer are about as good as you could ever want. The problem i found with so many camera reviews and comments is that the people writing them forget that, no matter how many lines per millimeter a camera lens can produce, or how many dots per inch a printer puts out, the human eye can only discern sharpness and resolution down to a certain level. Improvements beyond that level, while impressive, often mean very little in terms of actual practical results.
The main real concern with current printing technology, in my opinion, is archival longevity. It’s really not certain how these pictures will look in twenty or fifty years time. They may fade and yellow like 1960s pictures, or they may be great; the inks being used haven’t really been around long enough to stand the test of time. Of course, as long as you have a digitial copy on disc, this won’t be a problem, because you can always print another picture when the old one fades.
I’m glad this thread got started as I’ve been looking for some advice on this front. =)
I’ve had a Ricoh RDC-6000 camera for a year or son and I am really disappointed with it. In the right lighting I can get some okay pictures but any time the flash is needed the flash is so bright it totally washes out the picture. I’m not very camara savvy but I’ve played with the settings and haven’t been able to get it to work right.
My sister has a Kodak DX 3600 and I’m totally jealous - she can just mindlessly take pictures and they always come out great. My wife’s aunt (I don’t know what camera she has) can do the same thing. That’s what I’m looking for - a relatively inexpensive camera that can take great shots without any thought - a nice point and shoot camera.
I’ll mostly be using it for snapshots of the kids, pets, family, and stuff so it doesn’t need to be super fancy but I am a geek and would like some cool features. I’m looking to spend somewhere from $200 to $300 - any thoughts?
I have found a reconditioned Kodak DX 3600 for about $179 and was thinking of going with that. Is that a good idea?
Thanks for any feedback!
My main worry now is that my wife won’t like the ergonomics of the camera. It does look substantially different from cameras we’ve owned in the past and I’m sure it will feel different too. Everything else, battery life, memory size, etc. etc. seems to be falling into place, but the wetware may have problems with the hardware. She said she’d leave the decision up to me, but in reality she’ll be using it as much as I will. The comments I’ve seen is that once you get used to it, it’s easier on the hands.**
That’s a very nice camera too. I’ve always liked Minolta, they make very good cameras.**
We had a 38-105 35mm Samsung for years(before a 4-inch fall from the basket under a stroller caused its death). We’ve never had a camera with a wider angle than 38mm. My mother has a very nice 35mm Canon SLR with a 18mm(IIRC) lens. Her camera kit is really something to drool over. It’s probably fifteen years old now and it is still a fantastic camera. She has wide-angle, medium, and telephoto lenses for it as well as a speed flash and filters. A low-end professional kit, a step above prosumer, a half-step down from professional. She is very protective of that camera :)**
The latest news on the Memory Stick front is that there are now at least three manufacturers. Sony, Lexar, and Sandisk. Sony has invested in Lexar(also a top manufacturer of Compact Flash) and they are putting out Memory Sticks now. I keep hearing the “we’ll have bigger soon”, but I’ve seen articles with this in them dating back to around 2001, so I’m not sure. In the meantime I’ll buy several and a card reader I can leave attached to the PC so I don’t have to hook up the actual camera to download the pictures. I can take pictures(or video) in the backyard and if a stick fills up, pop in another, take the full one into the house and stick it in the reader to upload into the PC then come back and swap them out when my second stick gets full. If I’m on the road, away from the PC, hopefully the three sticks(128, 128, and 32) will be enough to hold me. They’re fairly cheap these days, I think I paid less than 60 bucks per 128 stick. I didn’t get the “pro” sticks though. It seems the only difference is some sort of guarantee that they won’t have memory faults. I’m not a professional photographer, so I’m not paying a premium for a lower fault-tolerance in my digital film. Most of the pictures I’ll be taking won’t be pulitzer prize candidates. :)**
I’ve thought about this too, and my take is that we may want to enlarge some of these, or do some cropping and re-sizing, or other digital editing. The reasoning here is the same reasoning behind picking a 42-bit digital scanner. 42 bits are enough to represent far more shades of color than the human eye is capable of distinguishing. The extra bits help store info about the image that may become important if that particular pixel needs to be expanded to four pixels, or lightened/darkened. We live in an analog world, infinite variation in wavelengths. We may not be able to distinguish between two particular wavelengths, but they ARE different. Having equipment which can capture this difference more accurately results in pictures which are more accurate when we start messing around with them. I’d like a picture intended to be displayed at 4X6 to look almost as good at 20X30. More pixels, and more bits per pixel, help make that a possibility.**
My main goal is to avoid printing pictures at all if I can. I only want to print a handful of pictures, the best ones, for a photo album. I want to store the rest on a CD and put them in a cd wallet somewhere safe. I even want the option of deleting pictures entirely if they didn’t turn out well. I kind of worry about how pictures printed today will look in the future, but I’m more worried about wasting todays resources on paper and chemicals to develop pictures of my thumb. I’d rather my kids have digital photo albums on CD or hard disk(probably both) to remember us by. If the CDs threaten to break down(yes, CD’s do break down, and maybe faster than people think. Some of the first CD’s ever printed are already unplayable due to the plastics and metal used to create them breaking down), then they can copy the raw data to another storage medium. Digital is a win-win as far as I can tell. All we have to ensure is that we get good enough quality with our captures to make them worth saving.
Enjoy,
Steven
For those who are dying to know :), I made my decision and ordered the Fuji Finepix 3800 this weekend.
It was a megapixel less than I was actually looking at originally, but the right price ($325), and a 6X optical zoom eventually reeled me in.
Thanks for everyone’s responses, and even though I’ve made my decision, I’d love to see this thread continue; there’s lots of great info here.
The dpreview, eopinions, and resellerratings recommendations were very helpful in making my decision as to what to buy, and who to buy from.
I love my Kodak LS-443. dcresource is a great site to get information on all cameras.
When I was shopping for a camera, I was having thoughts on the Memory Stick issue - primarily in the “nobody else uses it” mode. After a while, I realized that the camera would be the only thing I had with removable memory cards of any sort, so the exact kind didn’t really matter.
And put down one more strong vote for B&H Photo. In the 5+ years I’ve been buying things from them, their business has been impeccable.
I have decided to buy a SONY mv-cd400 (the 4 megapixel mini cd burner camera), but as this is my first digital camera, I am SCARED (it’s $700.00), any stories/warnings?.
unclviny
Unclviny, check out the Main Board at the MIE, there are a lot of folks with answers to questions about Sony cameras, including the CD400.
unclviny:
If you’re going to buy in-store, then just take the usual precautions of shopping around, comparing prices, checking the merchandise, etc.
Buying online, which is what i did ($1,400 camera - my biggest ever online purchase by a long way), is a slightly more tricky proposition. Some retailers are rather shady dealers, and you have to be careful that you don’t get taken.
The first thing to do if you want to check out a particular retailer is to look at an online rating website like the following:
http://www.resellerratings.com/
Just type in the name of the company and you’ll see reviews from people who have used that company before.
As a general warning, be wary of grey market cameras. These are cameras imported by the store, or by someone else, rather than by the camera manufacturer’s US subsidiary. These cameras are often fine, but if something goes wrong they are covered by the international rather than the US warranty, which can make repairs a hassle. Many people are willing to risk buying grey market cameras to save money; you just have to weigh the cost advantage against potential problems later on.
And, while this may be a generalization, i’ll say it anyway: Stay away from most of the NYC area internet retailers. Many of them are bait-and-switch or hard-sell merchants who will try to sell you a bunch of overpriced accessories in order to maximize their profit. They advertise the camera at a very cheap price, and after you place your order online they call you will the high-pressure sales pitch. If you refuse to buy the overpriced accessories, you might suddenly find that your camera is on a two-month backorder, or is unavailable altogether. NYC shuts down businesses like this quite regularly, but the same businesses then reappear under a different name. If you want to read a very interesting article on some of these retailers, take a look at this.
Two NYC retailers with very good reputations are :
B&H (i got mine there - excellent service)
Adorama
A good thing about these stores is that they specialize in camera gear. They do have other electronic equipment, but they are both professional-level camera stores, rather than just being across-the-board electronics retailers.
Good luck with your search. If you have any specific questions, just post them and i’ll do my best to answer them.
Interesting article, mhendo.
I took your suggestions and checked out bizrate and resellerratings. I’m glad I did (thanks again). I took my time reading the reviews and complaints and ended up purchasing from digitalfotoclub.com. They seemed to have consistently good ratings on both sites. A couple of the sellers I researched had good reviews on bizrate, but horrible reviews on resellerratings- with “customer” claims that they had falsely boosted reviews on bizrate. I stayed away from those sellers.
Anyway- my transaction seem to go pretty smoothly, no phone calls or other “hard sells”, and they even gave me a UPS tracking number. The camera is scheduled to arrive Monday, so I’ll report back with my results…
unclviny:
I purchased this product about 2 months ago on Ebay for $580.00. I did not know a thing about cameras, and this camera is perfect. Forget the memory sticks, the cd’s hold much more.
And, I think I got 4 extra cd’s with it. I use it primarily to take pictuers to put on Ebay. Very, very easy to use. Super pics. Don’t hesitate! It even takes movies with sound!