Digital Cameras

Hey yall.

Looking for some advice on affordable digital cameras.
Basically, I'm after something with nice image taking, preferably 6-8mp, with nice features and easy to use etc.

Battery life is important, as well as being in the $500 range.
If anyone has any suggestions or first hand experience with a good model, let me know!

Cheers in advance.

Portable/small/lightweight?

Canon A serise cameras have a good rep

arent they all? unless you want an SLR, but i doubt that. they are just hard work :P

I'll tell you right now.

Canon or Nikon... and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. You'll just be disappointed. The sensors in the other brands are crap. Especially Kodak. Blah!!

Panasonic Lumix are great.

That's true, the Lumix are a good little camera. ISO performance isn't as good as the Canon and Nikon brethren in the same range, but the Lumix range tend to use Leica glass, which is superior generally.

That said, the G10 which is Canons new top of the line P&S compact, has incredible image performance especially in high contrast areas and edge fringing. That's the G10, but I dare say, give it a few weeks/months, and we'll see that sort of performance carry down too.

Note, it's out of the 500 range... probably closer to 800, but there are plenty of options from all brands too.

Full stop, image quality is Canon followed by Nikon (very very close, but Canon still edge out in the compact P&S stakes) Panasonic coming in behind only by Noise performance, and the rest trailing behind by large enough margines to rule them out.

apart from it looking gay the SX110 from canon seems alright I am gonna order one and give it a shot ^_^ I have no photography experience tho ^_^;

Awesome, thanks for the advice.

Digital Camera Resource Page Review: Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ5

mate here at work bought one of these and it's fan ****ing tastic.

and it's about $500

Yeah another oneup for the Lumix. It's shape is just right too. I don't have one but have had regular access to one until it flew overseas.

Unfortunately Canon owns my soul and I'm going to give a +1 for the Canon IXUS series... Amazing image quality and some of the best low light performance in the P&S range. Some of the photos that I've seen come out of an IXUS makes me wonder sometimes why I bought a DSLR when clearly you can get lovely images out of the IXUS for a lot less money.

Canon make quite simply the best compact digital cameras in my opinion, hands down.

The new Panasonic range is indeed outstanding, though.

Quote from leonami;356279:
Unfortunately Canon owns my soul and I'm going to give a +1 for the Canon IXUS series...
i will back this up. owned one for 2 yrs and i love it. its got a huge 2" screen and its so easy to point and click. cheaper memory cards, decent battery life, everything you need.

best thing is the price ~300 bucks.

Quote from Knight Of Nih;356311:
its got a huge 2"

if you think 2" is huge i feel sorry for your missus.

Just unwrapped my TZ11 8.1mp
****ing fantastic little camera.

As did I with my Nikon D60, awesome camera so far, just need to experiment with some settings for dark/concert photo's.

D60 is in a bit of a different league to the compact digital cameras of this discussion. It's much bigger, much more expensive, and much better. Most people consider it better than the D80 at the pro-sumer level.

It is pretty good with night environments too from what I've read. For quick and easy night shots your best bet is to crank the ISO up to its highest setting (3200), and keep the mode-dial set on no-flash. You just need to frame your shots with as many light sources as possible to ensure the shutter speed remains quick enough to avoid the blur. The shots will be grainy, but once you've down-sized the images for web and print use (as you wont need the full 10.2mp) they'll look much better. For an idea of what I mean, check out the ISO 1600 and ISO 3200 shots from these D60 photos: d60 iso test with black background - ClubSNAP Photography Forums

If the shutter is still too slow, change the mode-dial to S (shutter priority) and setup the shutter speed to stay at a something suitable for the environment you're in, but you'll need to continually make small changes depending on the amount of light in each shot's frame. In shutter priority mode you could even try a few shots with ISO on auto as results might be better in certain environments.

You could go to manual mode and improve on those cut-corner methods, but that's what I find most convenient when I'm taking lots of snaps and don't have the time (or desire) to setup the perfect shot.

In an ideal world for a casual photographer you would get some coloured cellophane to put over the flash, suiting your the colour of your ambiance (eg. blue for most night clubs), and colour correct in Photoshop later if required. This means the flash doesn't actually ruin photos by making your focus-points bright white instead of staying true. You'll take generally much better quality photos with the extra light from the flash. I'd use the rear flash mode though... as small as the in-built flashes are, they still often over-bright objects that are your the foreground.

Have been playing with the settings and functions a bit today.
Got a bit interested in the night-exposure modes it ships with, so I had a test tonight.
I'm in Broken Hill at the moment, which has alot of historical colonial buildings.

Keep in mind Im by no means a professional and tbh, quite unknowledgable when it comes to camera settings.

For a small handheld though, I'm impressed with its quality.
(Images are resized obviously).

[Media]http://i36.tinypic.com/11abckk.jpg[/media]

[Media]http://i38.tinypic.com/j7gkqr.jpg[/media]

[Media]http://i36.tinypic.com/epnq51.jpg[/media]

[Media]http://i37.tinypic.com/21adai8.jpg[/media]

[Media]http://i34.tinypic.com/29giwiv.jpg[/media]

Something very wrong with that camera.

The first picture shows no meat in the frying pan.

Quote from Harbinger;357542:
Something very wrong with that camera.

The first picture shows no meat in the frying pan.

Maybe he's not 'meat'ering properly...

:P

That joke is way too camera-nerd for most people here. :P