Somedays, I wish I had a real camera. Today was one of those mornings. What a perfect dawn – Sun fighting off the clouds and darkness, reflecting my own inner self. I had to settle for a camera phone photo – not bad, but not great either. (Of course you know what it means – a whole lot of blogging today 🙂
By the way, any suggestions for a good, yet inexpensive digital camera? Less than $250, since I actually don’t take too many photographs.
Canon A 560 or A 570.
Can’t go wrong with it.
Not the slimmest but a good balance of form and function.
Here’s my camera,
it’s not a bad deal, check it out
Nice shot! I picked up a Canon PowerShot A710IS about a year ago, and have been very happy with the image quality. For under $200 (just checked amazon), it’s a nice cross between lots of features and reasonable price, in my opinion. The image stabilization is great too – photos come out much clearer with this camera than our previous Kodak. Plus, it’s small enough to pocket if you wear cargo-style pants, and doesn’t take much space in a carry-on or other bag if you don’t.
Have fun!
Between your camera and my monitor it looks like israel
Canon SD1000, or any of the SD series…
Link:
@rick It does look kinda familiar and not too Californian 😉
@Om I love the Canon Ixus series. Great results in a very small camera. I’m sure you can get one under 250$.
Go with a FujiFilm FinePix S6000fd – many features of an SLR (like mechanical zoom) without the actual “SLR” part. This series (5000, 5200, etc) are quite popular on flickr too. I find it great to go between full manual settings, 1/2 manual 1/2 automatic, and full point-and-shoot.
Nice, i guess i am not the only one who couldn’t sleep in on a sunday. oh well, it seems like canon is getting the big thumbs up so far.
I would vote for Canon as well. I have a SD700IS. IS = Image Stabilization — I strongly recommend it. You can check the “deal” websites like gottadeal.com for good deals on it. I picked mine up at Circuit City when they were having a sale.
Another vote for Cannon. SD750 is floating around $200 this holiday season. Amazon has it for $209. Slickest and best rated camera in the reviews I’ve seen for the price. Definitely recommend it over the SD1000.
For a point-and-shoot in this price range, I’d consider the Fujifilm F50fd (I have F45fd myself). The reasoning: Fujifilm’s compacts are fairly constant with the level of color & luminance noise on a bit higher ISO settings, like the ones you might have needed this morning. Many other brands are better at low ISO (like 80 or 100), but poorer at 400-800. The Canons listed above with IS are also a good bet, allowing you to shoot sceneries with lower ISO to fight the same problem.
Also, get a 2GB microSD card with the full-SD adapter, so you can shoot with the real pocket camera, swap the cards and upload the pics with your N95 or other device accepting microSDs. I do that when traveling light without the laptop.
DennisQ,
What are some of the features you like about SD 750.
Another Canon PowerShot recommendation – the SD870 IS. You can grab one for about $299, 8 megapixels, nice images and screen, good form factor, good flash for low-light portrait shots as well.
Om, Go check out different cameras personally at a store. ensure that you have a WI-FI & BLUE TOOTH interface built in.
I use a Canon Powershot A520 – it’s a getting a little old in the digital camera world, but it works quite well. I’d check out some of its younger siblings as Amit said. The 2 things that really sold me on the A520 are that I can have either complete manual control or completely automatic point & shoot, and that it takes AA batteries, so if you’re on a long trip and run out of power you don’t have to charge anything – just pop in to the closest corner store.
dpreview.com was a great help to me when I bought my camera, and if you want to see some photos taken by it almost everything on my flickr page. Almost everything there was taken with the A520 – except for a very few images obviously taken with a camera phone.
The only things I would change are a faster recycle time when using the flash, better exposure metering with the flash, and better low-light performance. However, I rarely use the flash, and I believe the newer generation of cameras have better performance at higher ISO settings.
One thing I forgot to say: I’m not so sure wi-fi’s really all that worth it in a camera now that the Eye-fi card has been invented, (although I’ve never used it).
Unfortunately the quality of this photo is just terrible. Have you used your 1st gen iPhone to take this pic?.. :/
Your Forbes and I like this Canon SX-100 IS.
For a more compact camera that produces good quality images and has ‘cool’ styling, I’d get the Samsung NV10.
I recently got a Canon SD1000 for 160 or so on buy.com, and you really can’t beat it for that price. It has their newer digic chip so it’s really fast and can do facial recognition, where it autofocuses on faces automatically. You can get an 8 or even 16 gig SD card pretty cheaply now, allowing for more than an hour of continuous video that looks great. I do wish it had image stabilization but you have to pay a lot more for that. It seems a lot of a camera’s performance isn’t really reflected in any of the common stats for us non-photogs, I just stick with Canon. They’re also one of the most solidly-built and reliable brands.
btw Om, do you live in Nob Hill or were you just out for a walk that early?
@bryan… i live close enough to Nob Hill. 🙂
@ dh… actually that was from Nokia n95.
on of compact Nikon’s like p4 (one without wifi – it’s useless) pretty costumizeable makes good pictures and competitively priced comparing to canon (especially if you shop ebay)
i’m surprised no one has mentioned the canon sd800 is yet!! very affordable, at 230 @ amazon now. very portable and durable too, it lives in my pocket. the real plus here is a 28mm wide angle lens that turns your photos to gold.
Seems like most of the people love canon. i think this is a good starting point and i am going to follow up with some more research and narrow down the choice to two. let me know which one would you recommend.
I used to have a fuji but lost it when i moved from new york to san francisco. it was a pretty nifty device, though at this point i want something smaller and easy to carry around and throw in my bag. regular AA/AAA batteries are a must have feature in my opinion. I don’t want to carry too many chargers around.
Recently bought a Canon PowerShot SD850 IS. Just checked the Canon website and they have the SD870 IS out. Just leave the decision making to these cameras and you’ll have a terrific picture. They’re ultra-portable yet rugged. I just throw mine into my backpack and it’s withstood a good deal of torture.
Om – I bought a Canon SD1000 (7.1 megapixel) about 3 months ago and love it. If you’re looking for an affordable camera that is small and lightweight (easily fits in your pocket) to take non-professional but great looking photos, this is the one. The point-and-shoot feature takes great pictures and there are customizable settings if you want to get more advanced. It also records great videos at 640×480 – perfect for YouTube uploads, etc. No AA/AAA batteries, but the removable battery lasts for hours and the charger is lightweight and small – smaller than the camera itself.
I purchased mine at BeachCamera.com – it’s listing now for about $175.
Ask John. He’s the one who convinced me to get a digital camera in the first place.
Followed by the second. And the third.
Cannon 800IS is great, has a wide angle lens for just under $250
I would go for Canon SD1000. Best camera for the buck. BTW canon camera chargers are real small(No Wires). You can carry the charger in your camera bag, instead of carrying spare AA batteries ?
under $250 – just use the camera on your cell phone 😛
I’ve got two suggestions, depending on what you’re looking for.
Tiny but good. The Canon SD1000. 7MP, 3x zoom in amazingly small package. About 175. Despite the name, it is much smaller than the others in the the SD series like the 750, 800 and 900. It lacks image stabilization.
Excellent all around. Bigger, but my favorite camera is the Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ3. Panasonic? I had second thoughts based on the brand. But the lens is Leica. It has a 10x zoom, small shutter lag, small intershot interval, optical image stabilization, great UI. Beautiful 3″ screen. For having a 10x zoom, it’s remarkably compact. My detailed review is here:
http://blog.agrawals.org/2007/05/19/the-perfect-camera/
I bought the Canon Powershot SD1000 last week for $149 at Circuit City. I like it. Very small and easy to use. It travels well because the charging station is tiny and plugs right into a wall socket like the Apple Airport Express. Photo quality is very good.
Om, I too vote for Canon Powershot. I’m on my third one, point-and-shoot simplicity, small, and you can set the level of granularity to decide how many pictures you take. If you take only a few pictures, set to the highest resolution, you can always crop or shrink later.
Om, just wanted to say I love the image — looks very impressionistic.