Dispatch from the grandparents:
Last Sunday, your mother and The Kid were in the study. She pointed to the telephone and said “telephone” and he said “telephone.” She pointed to the computer and said “computer” and he said “computer.” She pointed to the camera and said “camera” and he said “no touch.”
Speaking of cameras, I’m looking to buy another digital camera to replace my Canon PowerShot A70. I know very little about camera mechanics. Virtually every picture I take is on the auto-everything setting. I compensate for my poor talent by taking 100 pictures at a time and then picking out a handful of them and showing them to everyone else. (I took 2000 pictures last year and put 174 of them on the family DVD.) Occasionally I try iPhoto’s “auto-enhance” but it usually makes things worse. I have no desire to get better at this, and thus no desire for a camera that requires me to get better at this.
I’m looking at the Canon PowerShot A620, which seems to be about the same price as I paid for my A70 several years ago, but with several years worth of improvements. It can take much larger pictures, which of course will accelerate my storage problems, but would be useful for printing the occasional large print at the local camera shop.
Any suggestions for a consumer-level auto-everything digital camera? What are people buying these days?
Olympus Stylus 720 SW
http://www.olympusamerica.com/cpg_section/product.asp?product=1225
Water proof and shock proof.
Comment by Will — Friday, May 19, 2006 @ 1:39 pm
Mark, I’m in more or less the same position as you with regard to cameras. If you’re already reliant on the shotgun-effect of the essentially free ‘one more shot’, then I think you’d really enjoy a Cannon SD-series camera. It’s small enough to literally carry everywhere, meaning that you’ll always be able to take pictures if you feel like it.
I have an SD400 (5 megapixels), and can print beautiful 8×10 photos. Flickr tells me I can print even larger, but I’ve never had the need. I’d suggest taking a look at dpreview’s take on that camera (http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canonsd400/). It should be fairly cheap, given that it’s a year or two old at this point.
Comment by Mike West — Friday, May 19, 2006 @ 1:58 pm
The Canon PowerShot A620 is what my fiance and I bought and I absolutely adore the camera (excpet for the fact that the thing acts like a device instead of a USB drive, I find that kind of annoying). Takes gorgeous pictures, takes small movies with sound (which is a feature I’ve found to be only useful for embarassing the fiance when he decides to sing “I’m a little teapot” in his pajamas…) Has excellent battery life… We bought the camera in February and we’ve taken a ton of pictures and haven’t had to change the batteries yet… I was originally skeptical about buying a camera without a charger because I’d had bad experiences with having no batteries at inconvient times with other cameras, but things have worked out great with this one. I highly recommend the A620.
Comment by nikkiana — Friday, May 19, 2006 @ 2:39 pm
I can sell you my A75. I’m quite sure you’ll be impressed with the upgrades.
Comment by Darryl — Friday, May 19, 2006 @ 2:45 pm
I bought my wife a camera last year, Sony DSC-P200 which she loves, and I like better than my older Canon S500.
Some meta-comments: I was going to buy my wife’s camera at Best Buy, until they told me there was a restocking fee (15% ?) to return it. Claiming people buy a camera for vacation and return it when they’re done. Wolf’s Camera had the same camera, same price, two week full price return policy. Guess where I bought it.
Having cameras that can fit in my pocket easily, and cameras that don’t, I’ve made this a major factor in picking these. I suspect I won’t ever buy a camera that doesn’t easily fit in my pocket.
Take the reviews here with a grain of salt, but they provide LOTS of information for cameras they actually review:
- http://www.steves-digicams.com/
- http://www.imaging-resource.com/
Comment by Patrick Mueller — Friday, May 19, 2006 @ 2:51 pm
I love my Sony dsc-s600; was the best balance of megapixel-size-cost that I could find when I was camera-shopping in February. 6 mp; meets the pocket test, most of the time; and was $200. (Patrick, I ended up buying mine at Best Buy because I’d procrastinated too long to get it anywhere else.)
I’ll second Steve’s Digicams as a good source of details, although I found it a bit overwhelming!
Comment by Elaine Nelson — Friday, May 19, 2006 @ 3:45 pm
> I love my Sony dsc-s600
Does it come with a free rootkit when you plug it in?
Comment by Mark — Friday, May 19, 2006 @ 3:49 pm
Dear Mark,
I haven’t worked this hard in years.
Sincerely,
The Lazy Web
Comment by Pete Lacey — Friday, May 19, 2006 @ 5:26 pm
I bought a Canon Digital Rebel 300D some time ago. When I got it, I too was thoroughly uneducated in the ways of camera stuffs. Conveniently, the camera had all those handy auto-settings. A year later, I never use them. Try playing with the manual settings a bit, you may find you like them. It’s not like you’re wasting film by messing around.
Comment by Bob Aman — Friday, May 19, 2006 @ 10:19 pm
Get a decent SLR like the Nikon D70 or a Canon Digital Rebel and read ‘A Short Course in Photography’ by Barbara London and Jim Stone.
Comment by Thijs van der Vossen — Saturday, May 20, 2006 @ 2:48 am
I have an A610, which I’m guessing is only about two percent inferior to the A620. It’s a great camera. Not the most compact camera you can buy, but it feels sturdy, takes great photos, and the batteries last forever.
Comment by Charles Miller — Saturday, May 20, 2006 @ 6:22 am
The Casio Exlim Z750 (Steve’s Digicam Review) has served me very well as a point and shoot. I also own a Canon SD500, which takes fantastic pictures, but only if you have a second to mess with the settings (a blessing and a curse). Enhance button in iPhoto is totally borked. The other editing controls are useful though.
If you have a consumer reports account you can look at things like startup time, quality of pictures, etc. Look for something that lacks manual controls I would say because that way it has to be good at point and shoot.
Good luck! Be aware that whatever you buy will be obsolete as soon as you’re out the door, but then it’s that way with everything.
Comment by Steven Canfield — Saturday, May 20, 2006 @ 10:03 am
I just replaced my little 4 megapixel point-and-shoot 3x digital zoom Canon SD10 with a new 3x optical zoom 5 megapixel point-and-shoot Canon SD450. They are remarkably affordable, take great pictures without messing with settings, and are tiny enough to carry in a front pocket at all times. I can’t recommend this camera enough.
Comment by Evan Rose — Saturday, May 20, 2006 @ 11:29 am
I will second the Casio EX-Z750 (though there’s now an 8-megapixel version out that has a brighter screen). I bought one based on this review and this one. I’ve owned a Canon PowerShot S200 and a Fuji SD-5000, each of which I thought was good. This one blows all of those away.
I think pocket digital cameras are the best ones for a proud father because the best pictures are the ones you can take because you’ve got a camera handy. Sure, those SLRs and bigger models are nifty but we found ourselves missing a lot of great opportunities because the Fuji was too big to lug around. Other father features are a super-fast shutter, an EXCELLENT Children auto-setting that I’ve used to take pictures of my daughters swinging (I could never get those shots properly on either of the other cameras), and a battery life that is simply incredible.
Comment by Bill Brown — Saturday, May 20, 2006 @ 9:42 pm
Oh and here’s an example set of photographs with this camera: Prospector Park
Comment by Bill Brown — Saturday, May 20, 2006 @ 9:45 pm
Another vote here for the Cannon SD400. I have an older model, and it’s chugging along like a champ. My brother got the newest revision, which is similar, except for smaller size, bigger screen, more megapixels.
Mine has survived several drops… some in sand.
Comment by Mark Jaquith — Monday, May 22, 2006 @ 5:13 am