I mentioned before that I'm planning to buy a digital camera. I had one picked out, but now I'm starting to wonder if I should be more careful in my choosing. Does it matter how many megapixels it has? Is price just a matter of brand or does it reflect quality? Are there brands I should avoid for some reason? If my new computer is an HP, and the photo software I have is HP, should I get an HP camera too? This is becoming a bigger decision that I would have liked.
I really just want a stupid camera. Is there anything that fits just what I'm looking for?
-I'm not planning to submit anything to National Geographic. I just want to take pictures of my regular life.
-I don't want to email pictures the size of Canada to all my family members (Hello, family members and friends? Do you know how annoying it is to have to scroll down and over just to view pictures of your cat?), but I also don't want the picture quality to entirely suck.
-I don't want to hold the button down for 10 seconds before the camera takes the picture, and some sort of motion-correcting capabilities would be nice.
-I don't need to take thousands of pictures before I empty the memory, but it would be nice if I could take more than 50.
-I don't want to spend more money that I have to, but I also don't want something that will break by the third time I use it.
-I'd rather avoid a camera that requires a bunch of attachments to get the pictures from the camera to the computer, or anywhere else.
Any ideas?
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My thoughts - In addition to your criteria, I was also looking for something with a viewfinder. A lot of the new cameras don't have this, and maybe it doesn't matter for most, but for me, in many lighting situations, the digital screen just won't cut it. So I wanted a viewfinder. I also wanted it to take AA batteries, so that if I were on some amazing outing and my battery died, I could just get new ones, not have to worry about charging it. There are a lot of sites that rate cameras...will tell you about the speed, etc., but I got much of my information by cruising around the photo site flickr.com and if I saw some great pictures, looking to see what kind of camera they used. Once I had that information, I might look at reviews. I wound up getting a Canon PowerShot A530 - it was cheap and took good pictures and met my other criteria. Now that I have it, I am not sure if I like the photo quality as much as my old Olymus Camedia (that died), but it has potential. Good luck!
I never would have thought of flickr. Thanks for the heads up! A friend of mine has an Olympus and complained of problems. Did yours die of old age or some technical thing?
I have a fujifilm S5100 a couple years ago. Its quite similar to the current S5200 (http://tinyurl.com/2al73p).
I'm quite happy with it. Its an extended zoom which was important to me because often I'm snapping pics of the boys as they run and do. It was the highest megapixel that we could afford at the time. I also wanted a camera that ran on plain old batteries like Deanna mentioned. We bought a couple of sets of rechargeable batteries specifically for the camera which saves on battery.
This camera has a viewfinder and an LCD screen. I should also note that its not "small" its a pretty sizeable camera. But my 5 yr old can still handle it. Comes with tons of bells and whistles I don't really know how to use yet. It also came with an "auto" feature so my hubby can grab it set it to auto turn it on and point and click!
It was hard to get a real feel for them in the store so if you are interested in seeing what I've got I'd be happy to get together. Just let me know.
I've had two olympuses (olympusi? Olympi?) and one died because of a two year old - it was getting old anyway but was a real workshorse. The other one lasted a while, but stopped working way before I think it should have. I still loved the photo quality of the olympus, and I probably would have bought another one, but the ones I saw in the stores didn't meet my criteria of having a viewfinder and using regular batteries. The 2nd olympus died while on a vacation, so I had to replace it kind of on the spot. It had been acting up, and I had been researching replacements for it anyway, but when it came time to replace it, I was limited to what the stores had because of the vacation thing. It ticked me off when it died :-)
I read this whole, easy to understand camera thing a couple months ago. It's on the blog of 'Just a Mom' and made a lot of sense. She also is fun to read. She says what she thinks, for sure.
I don't know if links work, but here's the URL to the camera tutorial: http://just-a-mom-thats-more-than-enough.blogspot.com/2006/12/works-for-me-wednesday-tip_20.htm
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