My wife and I are looking to buy a new digital camera. Our current one is not broken, but it often takes blurry photos. It’s a Sony Cybershot DSC-S650.
Anyway, we’re looking for one that isn’t crazy expensive, so recommend whatever you would like to.
We’re pretty much looking for the following things:
Can take a good, normal photo.
Can record simple videos.
It’d be great if it had some kind of “motion” photo feature, where it can capture a sporting event in action without it being horribly blurred.
I guess megapixels don’t matter that much to us. Our current one is 7.2 megapixels, but my previous one was 3.2 or so and it did just fine.
I hate to be the guy giving the generic answer… but here it is.
I’m a Nikon fan myself, however the reality is, when looking for a point and click you can’t go wrong with any of the big names. They all have the basic functionality you’re looking for, you just need to compare them yourself and see what features you like on the individual model.
Actually, Nikons don’t have a great reputation in the P&S world.
Taking a good normal photos is a fairly meaningless statement. In good sunlight, any camera on the market today will do fine. Indoors or in poor light, most inexpensive P&S cameras won’t really take great shots. They have to raise the ISO so high due to low light and the resulting images will be either noisy or have blur due to slow shutter speed. You’ll have to use a flash, which may make the image washed out, or won’t have enough power to reach if the subject is too far away.
What is your price range? A Canon A1100 will run you about $170 (plus you’ll need to buy a memory card and NiMH rechargeable batteries). The Canon A480 will set you back closer to $110. The Panasonic FS7 would also be on my list.
As a die-hard 35mm fan, I finally broke down and bought a digital. I have a Canon A590IS. It has many features I don’t know how to use, and probably never will. It lets me upload decent pictures of my pen projects without a whole lot of fuss.
Prices have gone down quite a bit, and unless you are a profi-photographer (which you don’t claim to be) you should be able to find something quite decent for about $100-150.
One word of warning!
Digital cameras come with various settings, and most people immediately set it to the highest quality of photo - why not, it is digital and you can delete what doesn’t come out well? Who cares?
I will tell you why not - because every time you download those photos onto your computer - dozens at a time, perhaps more - it is eating up space on your hard drive like you won’t believe! I set my camera to the highest quality and took tons of pictures at holidays, in the summer, on short road trips, etc. - not thinking about it as I downloaded them all to my laptop. Imagine my surprise when looking at my hard drive, I noticed it was filling up fast!
I had about 15 gigs of recent photos (mostly crap) wasting space! Those photos were huge - about the size of a poster on a wall.
Disk space is very cheap. I shoot hundreds of shots a day, sometimes thousands, always at maximum resolution. There’s very little reason not to, and if you get a really nice shot you’ll want it at maximum resolution.
Having said that, you can safely ignore MP when looking at camera quality, as the two aren’t related in any way. More MP just means more, not better.
I did a stint selling cameras a couple years back and found that Canon tended to be the best overall in the P&S market. I’ve owned Canon and friends have owned Canon, and I’ve owned Nikon and friends have owned Nikon - Canon’s the best. Although I will say most cheap cameras of any brand will be more likely to be slower on the uptake, slower to recharge flash, lag between shutter and photo, etc. Be prepared for the possibility of that. Cheaper cameras in Canon’s line are also usually powered by AA, which has advantages and disadvantages.
Getting those “sports” shots is gonna all depend on your lighting and luck with cameras like these. Outside on a nice day, not too far away, it’ll be possible to get good shots. Inside, forget about it probably but you may get lucky.
I asked this question a year ago, and, upon advice of the teeming millions, got a Canon A470, which I’m delighted with. I got it from Amazon and paid a tad over $100 (don’t recall the final amount – $100-$125 total) for the camera, bigger memory card, and case.
(I also followed the ensuing advice to get Eneloop rechargable batteries for it – digital cameras go through batteries like Kleenex.)
Related question. I have a Canon A70 from like 2003. If it didn’t randomly die all the time, I’d still be happy with it. Great combination of low price/features at the time - it worked fine as a point and shoot, but you could still play around with exposure, shutter time, white balance, etc. if you were so inclined.
I read reviews a few years ago that the successors to the A-60/70/80 series (IIRC the A-5xx series) was poor. Some of the new models in the Canon A-line look similar, but do they have the same great combination of functionality and price for a low end camera that still allows some tinkering
Btw, I’ve read that there’s something of an arms race with the megapixel numbers on digital cameras. Every company wants to say “That camera has 11mp? HAHA WELL SUCK IT WE’VE GOT 13” - but the lens quality hasn’t improved - so essentially you’re getting a very high res CCD taking a detailed, grainy picture of a low end lens. Is that still the case?
I wouldn’t let that scare you away from high-megapixel cameras.
It’s true that if you use the same lens and try to increase the pixel count, you have to make each pixel smaller. Which means each pixel receives less light, and therefore you have lower (worse) signal-to-noise ratio. However, you can improve the signal-to-noise ratio by simply resampling the image to a lower resolution. So you’re not really losing anything by having a higher megapixel sensor.
(Strictly speaking, the signal-to-noise ratio of a lower resolution sensor is slightly better than a resampled image from a higher resolution sensor, because some component of the noise is independent of pixel size. But the difference is small, probably negligible.)
I disagree. There’s significantly more noise the in smaller P&S sensors that have been pushed to 15MP. It has also eliminated the low light advantage that Fuji had with their SuperCCD sensor when they tried to put too many MP on that chip. Unless I was going with a DSLR with a larger sensor, I’d stick to 12MP or below if possible. I also think 99% of camera users would never need or want more than 10 MP for their images.
The lenses can be good or bad, but the sensor size on most cameras is still tiny. IMO, that is where the problem lies, not the lenses. Lenses and pixel size aren’t really related directly; that only applies to the sensors.
The Canon A570, A590, and A720 were some of the best cameras produced in recent years. They were inexpensive, had good lenses, full manual controls, and excellent image qualty. Alas, Canon has gutted the A-series and the two models currently produced (A1100 and A2100) don’t have manual controls; they are strictly P&S. To get manual controls you need to move up to the G10, SX200, or SX10, which are nice cameras but cost considerably more.
Take a look at the Fuji F30/F31 and the follow on F50. MP went from 6MP to 12MP and image quality, especially noise at high ISO, suffered greatly. The F30/31 was one of the best cameras in the past 5 years for high ISO shooting, and Fuji essentially killed that advantage by adding too many MP to the sensor.
Yes, things have gotten better since then, somewhat. The 12 MP cameras today have better image quality than when they were first introduced, and it looks like the MP race is dying down. Only a few cameras are pushing past 12MP, most have settled on 10-12 MP. But the push for more MP instead of better MP hasn’t really improved cameras, IMO.
I don’t know if Ricoh is even available in the US or if they would be likely to pop up on your radar, but if they do… just keep moving. The guy at the camera shop talked me out of buying the (more expensive) Canon that I had my heart set on, and into the Ricoh. With the savings on the price difference, and having confidence in the guy’s opinion (he’s a million years old and has been the town’s photography expert as long as I can remember), I bought the thing on the spur of the moment. It’s junk, and I hate it.
It takes very, very noisy photos.
The Auto light setting results in blue toned photos. It’s ok if you change the light setting to “Incandescent”, but every time the camera turns off, the light settings revert back to Auto. This includes when it turns itself off after 60 seconds of not being used.
After several months, the camera stopped transferring images when connected to the computer and now I need to take the memory card out and use a reader to get my images off.
The camera doesn’t tell you the memory card is full. In fact, the display seems to indicate that there are still plenty of shots left. After the button is pressed it tells you it can’t save the photo because there isn’t enough memory, and then it audibly clicks and (if set) flashes. This has not only caused me to miss a number of photo opportunities, but the click/flash has alerted the subjects and ruined the moment so I couldn’t even quickly delete a couple of unwanted pics and try again.
All these are apparently known issues with Ricoh cameras, and the two other people I know who own one both have the same problems, even though theirs are different models to mine.
I haven’t looked at test results in detail, but these seem to show the difference isn’t that big. Provided you rebin the F50’s image down to 6MP when comparing with a 6MP camera.
http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/fuji/finepix_f50fd-review/
At lower ISO settings you get artifacts from noise reduction. At higher ISO settings you get more noise than the F30. It’s not a bad camera, and in many ways it was still the best on the market, but if Fuji had kept the number of MP to 8 or maybe 10, I think it would have been even better.
