Digital Cameras

[supersoniceagle]

hey guys, I'm looking to buy a digital camera and I really don't know anything about them. I'm basically getting it as I'm going overseas soon.

I'm looking to spend about $250-$300. I saw an Olympus one on special for $270. It was 5 megapixels. Is that good? Any other features I should be looking for?

 

[B-dos]

5 megapixels is plenty. More than enough for regular sized photos. You would really only want 5 mp if you are going to be printing your photos on about A3 size i think.

In my opinion people worry too much and buy a camera based on megapixels alone when in fact zoom and other features (also battery life) should be considered much more important.

 

[Simo]

Also when looking for zoom there are 2 types 'optical' and 'digital'.

Digital zoom is a gimmick and you will see some huge numbers like 100x 200x digital zoom.....if you ever zoom in that far on digital zoom all you will see is blocks (open a photo in photoshop and zoom in 100 times and see if you can make out anything to understand what im talking about).

OPTICAL zoom is the only zoom that matters. Most cameras in that price range have 3x optical zoom which makes for small cameras but only good for very small zooming (in the same room in my opinion)

My olympus has a 10x zoom and that is fantastic.

Remeber dont let a salesman sell you on a giant digital zoom, its a waste.

 

[Dread]

IMO, shutter lag is one of the biggest things to look into when going for a cheap digital. You want something that doesn't take 3 seconds to focus, then shoot.

 

[JoeD]

A good website for comparing the differemt features of various models is

www.dpreview.com

it is almost too comprehensive

 

[Steven Gerrard]

Olympus are great. Anything with less than 6x optical zoom is a waste though. 3x in minimal.

 

[m0j0]

I bought an Olympus E-300 Digital SLR last year. I was always an advocate of film cameras for quality photos until I got this. Haven't touched my Nikon F50 since. That said, a D-SLR is a bit above your price bracket.
Ignore digital zoom - it's a complete waste of time. Don't worry about the video capability either as it's usually never capable of producing anything worth keeping. As Dread mentioned, shutter lag is one of your biggest concerns. Try out a few models and check how long it actually takes to take a photo. My first digital camera was a 2Mp Canon Powershot with no optical zoom. It would often take ages from when I pressed the button to when it would actually take the photo. I missed heaps of shots because of it.

 

[supersoniceagle]

Thanks guys, I'll probably pick one up this weekend.

One more question, I assume I need to buy some sort of memory card/stick for my camera? How much am I looking at for those?

 

[Simo]

My mum bought a 512mb card for her kodak camera and it cost her about $70 bucks from Big W.

But see if you can get a deal with your camera and you should be able to get a decent discount.

 

[Samwise]

I bought a new camera and memory card a couple of weeks ago. Got an 1gig XD Olympus card for $130. Camera was an Olympus 7.1megapixel which I got for $440.

 

[m0j0]

Thanks guys, I'll probably pick one up this weekend.

One more question, I assume I need to buy some sort of memory card/stick for my camera? How much am I looking at for those?

For my camera, I bought a Sandisk 1GB Ultra II Compact Flash from Harris Technology for just over $100. I went for the Ultra II due to the high transfer rate (9MB/s sustained write) which was kinda important when the images are around 5MB each (only takes about half a second to write the image to the card). Most decent compact digitals these days use the SD cards but the range in these is almost identical to Compact Flash cards only slightly more expensive.
You could probably safely opt for the slower transfer rate cards if you're not going to do rapid photography (not normally a feature on compact digitals anyway). You can get a 512MB Sandisk secure digital card for $52 at Harris Technology.