This point gets mentioned in every discussion of digital cameras. And it puzzles me. It might be relevant if buying a memory card were something you do regularly. But I have used a single large-capacity card with both of the Sony cameras I’ve owned, and never had any reason to buy more than one.
In both cases these cards were indeed more expensive than the “generic kind” - by an average of around $7. Somehow, the need to amortize $7 over thousands of photos didn’t seem like a big issue - especially when the cameras gave (and continue to give) consistently excellent results and were feature-for-feature meaningfully less expensive than the alternatives.
I suppose YMMV, but I think you do well to compare features and total cost, rather than focusing on one rarely purchased accessory.
Fuji F-30 or F-31, or if you don’t need all the features look at the F-10/20. Nothing else on the market today packs high ISO capacity in a small camera. Nothing really comes close, actually. High ISO (and pretty much only this) will deliver what you want. IS is a great feature, but it doesn’t work when your subject is moving. You need clean, noiseless high ISO performance and this is where the Fuji chips shine.
A good DSLR will do better then the Fuji F-30. But you will pay much more, have more complexity, and it’s much bigger. It will, however, out perform the Fuji. Whether you will notice the difference or care is not clear.
I guess that’s true, but in terms of universality, SD wins, hands down. In my case, for instance, I have a PDA-phone that takes SD, so if I had a camera that used SD, I could go right from the camera to the PDA and wing-bang-boom, email a picture a minute after taking it, should I desire. Or at the very least I could look at it on a larger screen (yeah, a three inch screen isn’t a lot better than a once inch screen, but it’s still gives enough detail to know if the picture came out ok.) Obviously, that’s not going to be a common thing for a lot of people, but it’s still worth noting. Obviously, if all you need to do is take a picture, put it on your PC, then I guess it won’t matter, as long as you can either put the card in a universal memory card reader, or attach the phone with a USB cable itself and not have to install software to do so. I have a card that uses xD, which apparently is the one format my “universal” card read doesn’t accept, but luckily the camera just shows up as a regular drive when using the USB cable. Any camera that makes you install software to use it is almost always bad, IMO.
And I guess I shopped at the wrong place, cause my 256 MB xD card was more than the 512 MB SD card. :mad:
That seems about right. I did a quick check at the place I buy flash memory and you could get 2G SD cards for abour $21 and 2G xD cards for $45. But, since most folks will be fine with a single 2G card, we’re talking $25 over the life of the camera. Not something I think is a huge problem, but YMMV.
Last year I bought a Fuji F20 because I kept hearing such comments about the Fujifilm cameras. I was disappointed in its performance and user interface. In my experience, a Canon with image stabilization takes better low-light photos than a Fuji. And the Fuji’s user interface felt awkward. I returned it and bought a Canon SD800 IS (admittedly a more expensive camera) and am very happy with it. The SD series uses propriatory batteries, but the A710 has similar specs and runs on AA batteries.
Nevertheless, for that single card, the cost and available capacity can be quite different. I paid more for my 1GB XD card (when I had the F20) than for my current 2GB SD card. Also, card readers for SD are cheaper and more readily available than propriatory formats - my Dell laptop and Canon printer even have built-in SD slots.
Another fan of the Canon Powershot “A” series here. Both batteries (AA) and memory cards (SD) are general standards and the cameras can be set to full-auto or given a wide range of manual virtual aperture/shutter/ISO adjustments.
Got a Canon A540 for Christmas. The set of alkaline batteries that came with it barely made it through the initial camera set-up and the first 30 pictures. I worried that this camera would be an energy hog, but the second set of alkalines has gone over 200 shots with most being indoor flash pictures.
I have a pair of NiMh AA’s ,as well, left over from my replacing the crap rechargeables that came with solar lawn lights and will charge take those with me next vacation.
Canon offers an AC adaptor with 18’ of cord that would be great for birthday parties and such. Combined with a lighter-plug inverter, you could do shots within 18’ of the car without using the AA’s, as well. I’m thinking of buying a used one on eBay since I see them from time to time for 1/2 the cost of new.
I’ve been too busy of late to play with any of the special modes, but I can tell you that the auto-mode shots I’ve got look great.