Please help a camera snob find something for sister - got a £100 budget

I need to buy a digital camera tomorrow for my sister. I have convinced her that megapixels is meaingless (well at least 12 megapixels on a compact) and have managed to get her to up her budget from £60 to £100 but I am still finding it very hard to find one.

Here are what she needs

• Must have a built in rechargable battery, saves messing about with AAs
• Must be a proper a good brand but Panasonic/Canon/Nikon/Sony/Pentax etc
• 7 megapixels upwards
• 3 x optical zoom or more
• Screen size not important
• Must be black

Now as you can see I have some unusual requirements, I want the camera to have a good review too and it must look sleek (she is a girl).

It must also be a point on shoot.

I've looked and looked and so far the best is the Panasonic FZ3? seems to be the perfect solution but can't find any in stock. I have always liked Fujis for budget cameras in the past but the current ones seem to get good reviews.

Can anybody please help me in a good direct? I am planning of getting it from Manchester city centre tomorrow which really means apart from a few expensive indies my choice is Jacobs, Wildings, Jessops, Argos, Currys and Boots.

Thanks.

 

It is looking like the Sony Cyber-Shot S950 is the best contender atm but the cheapest price I can find it for is £110 and they take the stupidly expensive memory cards. I really want one with an SD slot, as a protect vote more than anything.

PS I have a Panasonic Lumix FZ7 which is a semi type camera so all these look basic to me .

 

If it was me I'd stumped up the extra 10 and....job done..

Was the hundred so critical?

Whatever cards it uses will come down in price.

 

I'd think twice about the battery,if it takes AA's you can get them anywhere when the dam thing goes flat in the middle of no were,and the 2500 mAH jobbys last for a couple of days,some can even be charged in the camera.I recently picked up a nikon coolpics L18 for $100 (yes dollars) and have been very impressed,Much better than the samsung it replaced.To get an idea of the piccy quality have a look at www.themadhippy.com the pictures unto page 23 were taken on the nikon the rest on the samsung

 

The pixel c ount is joke surely?

My coolpix 5700 uses 5 megapxls.....which OTT really.

You only really need 3 mp....unleess you are going to put the pic on the side of a building.

A colleague at work has just bought a d60 which has 12 mp,,,,,daft.

Its the lump of glass in front of your nose that counts.

 

Sister kept insisting she wanted lithium so AA's were out. I get 400 pics of my FZ7 so I am sure my sis will be ok.

We ended up going for the Pasasonic Lumix FS6. 8 megapixel, 4 x optical and the thing is tiny and light weight it does everything she wants. No manual controls for appature of shutter speed but she dosn't care about that. Was £130 though.

 

http://www.jessops.com/online.store...ix J20 Digital Camera - Black-75944/Show.html

 

Megapixels....

It's not a waste to have more, to a point.
If only printing small then sure, cramming all them pixels onto a tiny sensor will be pointless and likely lead to more noise.

However, there are both pro's and con's.

I've approx 11MP and appreciate it them on the few i've blown pic's up to larger sizes.
The main use to me is it gives me the change to shoot wide and crop in certain situations.

 

thats the point

 

Cropping was also the point

 

true......

good thought

but if you are shooting using 11+mega ps you are using up a lot of drive space.

Thats not to say thats wrong......capacities are getting bigger and bigger, so I guess big files don't hurt now.

It would on this old sony note pad I've got here with a 5 gig hard drive

 

This is the camera I have, it is 6 megapixels but it has good lens and a decent sensor (noise is an issue so I only use ISO 80)



I don't get the point on these ten megapixel cameras with tiny lens and sensors as David said it will just reduce noise. Surely pixels will end up overlapping on the sensor due to the tiny CCD or CMOS?

Having said that I might be tempted by an 8 mega pixel SLR at the end of the year.

 

It is a matter of priorities I feel.

I went against buying a digital SLR and bought a compact, simply because I'm more likely to be 'willing' to cart it about.

It's for this reason I have more photo's on my mobile phone than on my compact, and practically zero over the last few years from my (rather lovely) film driven SLR I have packed away.

'The best camera is the one you have with you'

 

True enough.

I use a now rather battered 5700 coolpix....way too complicated for what it is....but compact enough.

I always fancied a d70s but they are too BIG!!! ( besides I have no spare money....)

The d60 I think is a lot more compact....and I could really fancy a d80.

btw my camera has survived two drops onto a canal tow path.....says something for their build strength. (the lens cap is a little the worse for where though )

 

The sister now has the camera she wants but is still stuck with a snob for a brother, how do we fix that?

 

I said something very snobby in Comet today. I was buying some cheap in the ear headphones for my sister (she earns 3x as much as me but dosn't drive so I do a bit of errends for her) and bought some cheap and nasty Philips ones for £10. The sales persons said are you sure you don't want to upgrade. I said they are not for bit if they were this shop dosn't sell any headphones I would dream of owning! I said I might consider some Senny 650s though

That said when it comes to cars I am not at all snobby I like quality not image.

 

Ahh, the megapixel debate...

You can't overlap them. As the number goes up they just get smaller and smaller and smaller.

Be quick, they're all headed north of that. That said, I gave my partner an EOS 1000D for his birthday and was extremely impressed with the output from that (10mpix).

There are several arguments for and against higher resolution.

#1 For: Cropping



Cropping helped here. Birds in flight are always tricky, and you never have a long enough lens - in this case a canon EF300 F4L IS.

#2 For: Sharpness



This image is not cropped at all, but it is downsized. This gives better per-pixel sharpness without applying sharpening filters. The same is true in print, where you can maintain 300dpi to a larger print, or downsample for smaller print sizes.

#3 Against: Noise

All else being equal (eg sensor technology and process, image processing engine, etc), the more pixels in a given area (ie same size sensor) then the more noise there will be.

HOWEVER, to a small extent this can be mitigated by downsampling - it tends to reject noise. Chrominance noise can be effectively post-processed, and luminance noise has a film-grain like look once chroma noise is processed out, and generally not objectionable as a trade-off for higher ISO.

Of course, the answer is to have your cake and eat it too - big pixels and lots of them. That means a bigger sensor. Of course, that carries other benefits, such as lower demands for lens sharpness (bigger circle of confusion), bigger viewfinder, wide-angle lenses being wide-angle lenses, etc...

Hence why I shoot with a canon 5D now. Despite 12MP, the noise performance is extremely good. Here's an example (ISO1600, 1/80th):



However, there is a limit on where you don't get a good return, and Canon seem to have found it on their crop-factor cameras, where the 15MP EOS 50D does not offer a compelling image quality advantage (to my mind) over the 10MP 40D.

 

Cropping is an issue with my panasonic as its only 6 megapixels but because I have 12x zoom lens with optical stablisation I tend to shoot things without much need for cropping.

I would much rather have the zoon lens but then I take a lot of pictures of buildings so the zoom lens are essential.

 

Zoom is not essential for buildings surely!
They are not about to run away when you get close to them.

Most of the pics I have taken on builings were with a 10 - 22 lens, no where near zoom

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