which budget digital camera

P

phatch

Joined
Oct 3, 1998
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I've looked at past threads and done some looking at stores.

The Canon A75 is popular here at BF and in actual looking I liked the Minolta Z1 as well. I like the 10x optical zoom on the Minolta and reviews have been Ok.

These aren't expensive cameras so they're going to have shortcomings. Who has used what and what's good.

Phil
 
I got an A75 for Xmas, and it's been great. The Consumer Reports rated it number two in it's group (with the #1 Olympus almost a hundred bucks more!)
with the best battery life of the cameras tested.

It operates very well as a point-and-shoot, but with typical Canon layout, you can adjust "everything" in the same manner as a good SLR.

Macro, 10X Zoom (3X optical), hard to go wrong. Get a bigger memory card (they are often available at bargain prices) and maybe some rechargeable NIMH batteries.
 
Just one comment regarding camera zoom: optical zoom is the only thing you should care about and pretty much anything beyond 3x-4x is hard to hold steady for most people (in other words, it takes a tripod to get decent pics with higher zoom for most of us). As for the "digital zoom" crap, just disregard it and turn it off. This is just a method of interpolating missing pixels to make it appear as if the picture was shot at higher resolution than it really was.

Any image editing software (such as Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro) will have better interpolation algorithm than the one built in your camera so just shoot the pics normally (with digital zoomcrap disabled) and resize them (= "digitally zoom") only when necessary with your home computer.

"Digital zoom" (and its combination with actual zoom to provide "impressive" 10x and higher zoom factors) is used to sway clueless consumers into buying something that they don't really need. I doubt you could ever make any use of 10x optical zoom either, even if it worked flawlessly.

~$300 should get you alot of digital camera :)
 
I'd get the canon. I don't think you can go wrong with a canon camera. I had the a10 a few years ago and the pictures it took were simply better quality than those from other cameras. Camera companies want to sell you on features, but the one thats hard to compare is simply overall picture quality, and canon being one of the top makers of professional digital and film cameras, knows a lot about this area.

And on another note, I was playing with a video camera in best buy yesterday that was advertising a 990x digital zoom. Its such an absurd feature, I feel insulted by companies when they try to sell me on crap like that. Also keep in mind that just saying "4x zoom" has little meaning on its own. That just means that the focal length of the maximum zoom is 4x as high as the focal length of the minimum zoom. In other words, if I made it "zoom out" farther, that would increase this zoom factor without actually letting you zoom in farther.
 
Thanks so far guys.

From my searches, the A75 is out of production. Still available in a few places. But froogle pointed me to Walmart.com which has the 4 megapixel A85 for $199.84. I might just find myself in a Walmart in the near future to see what the brick and mortar side has.

Phil
 
I have an A80 and I'd reccomend it over the 85 because of the swivel (camcorder style) LCD screen. It's a bit on the small side but the full swivel and the ability to close and cover it is excellent. It may also be out of production but you should be able to find it on Amazon still. Ebay if nothing else.

Both my girlfriend and I have one and we love them.

N2
 
I own the A95.

Great camera. Never use digital zoom. Turn it off. Digital zoom has a nasty habit of pixelating your zoomed image.

Get the A95. You won't regret it. Also, get two sets of rechargable batteries and at least a 512MB compact flash card. If you can swing getting a 1G Compact Flash card, I highly recommend doing so. This is a 5 megapixel camera and is also capable of shooting video at a 640x480 res. It takes up lots of memory.

Enjoy. I'm off to bed!
 
There's a nice, slightly used 4.1 megapixel Sony camera in the For Sale area here. I think he only wants a couple hundred for it.
 
CNET has a lot of good info also. I just bought a Konica Minolta G6, 3x optical, 6 megapixel on BUYDIG for about $225. I also have Konica Minolta Dimage w/ 10x optical that is a slr, but no interchangeable lenes. I really like both. the G6 is very quick on startup and very little shutter lag.
 
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