Comments on: Which Digital Camera?

By: canonef50

canonef50 — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 16:40:09 +0000

This is a great post! And this will be a great help to anyone of us.More power! 🙂

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 14:50:33 +0000

A photo blogger ( http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/00-new-today.htm ) recommends the somewhat older Canon S95 and as a second choice, the newer S100.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 21:46:18 +0000

I think I’ve decided that the Canon is perfect for Amanda while the Lumix is perfect for me. I wasn’t getting myself one, but just so you know.

By: Daniel J. Andrews

Daniel J. Andrews — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 20:57:22 +0000

What you will use the camera for would probably determine which one you want. For me, my backup camera has to fit into a shirt pocket, has to have a fairly good zoom (mostly I take bird and other wildlife pics), and a not too bad macro (I can supplement it with my magnifying lens I carry with me). That’d narrow down the choices above to the Nikon or Panasonic. If I was just snapping day to day pics (kids, scenery, idiot drivers so I can hunt them down later) any of the choices above would suffice.

The older Nikon Coolpix had too long a delay when pushing the button. Maybe they’ve corrected that now.

My personal choice (disregarding zoom) would be the Canon–when my girlfriend, now my wife, had one of the early models it outperformed my Nikon CoolPix which cost three times as much. Sharper picture, almost immediate response with the shutter button, more intuitive menu that I could figure out without resorting to the instruction book.

The quality of that pocket Canon and its ease of use convinced me to make my next bigger camera a Canon (which I like). The only reason my pocket one isn’t a Canon is because I couldn’t find a Canon with adequate zoom (hence the “use” caveat above).

By: Stephen Johnson

Stephen Johnson — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 17:44:15 +0000

I’ve had an older model Canon point & shoot since 2006, and I’ve had very good luck with it. My wife just (September) bought a 310, and we like it very much.

I suspect all the cameras listed will do the job for you perfectly well, but if you have other Canon (or other brand) devices, you might want to consider staying in a brand for all of them, just form a consistency-of-interface-and-design standpoint.

Cheers,

By: Daniel McCoy

Daniel McCoy — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 07:11:50 +0000

Zoom is one of the main reasons to own a camera that isn’t part of a phone.
Start up time is the other important feature, the fancy camera is worthless if the moment has passed by the time the gadget is ready to snap.
Other than that, they’re all pretty good these days.

dpreview.com is a nice place to compare features:

http://tinyurl.com/73y3uy3

Though, I could swear they used to list the start up time in there. I’m not seeing it now though.

By: Laura

Laura — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 05:48:54 +0000

I just bought the Canon Powershot Elph 300 HS after obsessing over this to the point where I felt like I could have been on Jeopardy. The speed is much better than any other Canon I owned before. I was tending away from them because of lag. I almost went for a Lumix, which is bulkier. Lumix gets all the hype these days and some people insist that they are the best. Haven’t used the Canon enough yet, but I like it a lot more. Using it largely on Program. I am told low light is great.

By: Fred

Fred — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 04:01:17 +0000

I’ve had a powershot and while it was good, there were some flaws. While mine was an older model, the biggest issue for me was speed. This was most obvious when attempting to photograph dogs or children, or anything in motion. This may be an issue with all point and shoots. While its larger the Olympus PEN is very nice.

By: GrayGaffer

GrayGaffer — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 01:54:57 +0000

Price point is the issue. $200 seems to be the center point for decent feature sets, and one is quickly up to $400 or more to do any better.

I’ve been through several different makes over the years looking for an always-with-me camera for shooting wildlife during my ferry commute. Canon, Sony, Lumix, … The older Canons were my favorites since they had optical view finders, manual focus, and AA batteries, but alas no more.

The biggest issue has been finding one with very short focus time, and I finally did – the Fujifilm Finepix F500 EXR. Also has the zoom I need at 15x, and a 3″ LCD.

Other features are pretty much standard these days – panoramas in the camera (this one goes to 11 with 360 deg in any direction), 1080p HD with HDMI out, high speed movies at 320 fps at 320×112, and face recognition (again, this goes that extra step with not only human but also separate settings for 8 specific humans, also cats and dogs, and waits for the pet to face the camera). Some fairly intelligent advanced features too, like multiple image averaging to lower low level noise instead of single image filtering. This one also follows the Pentax example with a sensor shift motion compensator instead of trying to do that via software manipulation of the pixels on their way off the sensor.

So far I’m happy with it, but at the same time so far I have not had many good shooting opportunities. If it breaks or I get something outstanding I’ll report back.

By: Ana

Ana — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 00:58:19 +0000

If this Lumix performs anything like my LX5, you and Amanda will not be disappointed. Stephen Downes makes an good point about the superior white balance (I have seen both the Canon and the Nikon get this wrong – esp. in low light conditions), and the Leica glass cannot be beat!