Which camera should I buy??That's not an easy question to answer, but one that I am asked frequently. It depends on many things including your budget first of all, and how you plan to use the camera. Many factors come into play such as how much zoom do you need? Do you plan to take extreme closeups? Is shot-to-shot speed important to you? Is image quality more important to you than camera size and other factors? By reading reviews you can check all the features of most mid-priced cameras and some basic models at these sites: dpreview.com, steves-digicams.com, dcresource.com, imaging-resource.com and megapixel.net Here are some recommendations broken down by price range and resolution, based on ratings from reviewers listed above, Consumer Reports, personal experience and advanced photographer friends' recommendations. Keep in mind these are list prices or “street prices”, the price you would pay in a retail store like Sears, Circuit City, and Office Depot. You can get great deals online and save $50 – 200 off these prices! Good places to buy cameras online Best cameras under $200 Kodak EasyShare CX6330 (best, 3 mp) Best cameras for under $400 HP
Photosmart R707 (new 5 MP camera with lots of good features,
easy to use and cheap!) Best cameras $400-600 Best cameras $600-$1000 Some of the better cameras rated by resolution and zoom: 3 Megapixel: 4 Megapixel 5+ Megapixel Best Super Zoom Cameras Best Digital SLR cameras ($1000 up) Considerations: Buying Cameras Online There are excellent buys available at online stores and I have purchased 4 cameras online saving a total of about $600 off what I would have paid at a local store. Keep in mind that if you find a really cheap price on a particular camera at one or two stores, then it probably is "too good to be true" and you should be wary of such prices/stores. For example if a certain camera sells in a range of say $325 to $375 at various retailers and one place has it for $279, then beware! When you try to buy from such places, you might encounter the following: 1. They call you or force you to call them so they can try to sell
you over-priced accessories like memory cards, batteries, cases,
extra lenses and filters that selll much cheaper elsewhere. MY ADVICE: Check ratings of the merchants on pricegrabber.com, dealtime.com and especially resellerratings.com, before you buy. Stick with stores that have good ratings. When buying online, NEVER let the seller talk you into buying accessories from them, such as memory cards, extra batteries, cases, etc., without checking elsewhere first as their prices are usually very high. That’s how they make up for selling cameras cheap. Case in point, a friend got a very nice camera for a good price at one of those places and let them talk him into paying over $200 for a 256 mb compact flash card. He was shocked when I told him they were less than $70 at buy.com and newegg.com, the best places to shop for memory cards. What is an autofocus illuminator? In dimly lit scenes, such as indoors with normal incandescent lighting or outdoors at dusk or dawn, the camera may have trouble focusing.This can result in the camera not taking the picture or "hunting for focus" for an extended period of time, causing you to miss the shot. Some cameras are worse than others. Auto Focus illuminators, also referred to as AF assist lamps, are now being included on many camera models in the mid and upper price ranges. They shoot a focused beam of light onto the subject in the center area of the frame so that the camera can see better and focus properly in a very short time period. If you mostly shoot outdoors, you probably won't need one, but if you do a lot of indoor candids, it's a good thing to have. What is diopter correction? An adjustment on the viewfinder of a camera that allows you to adjust the viewfinder to your vision and eliminates the need to wear glasses when looking through it. The knob, wheel, or slider is found next to the viewfinder. It is usually found on larger cameras. I find this feature very useful. Will a high resolution camera make better prints than a lower resolution camera? For 4 x 6 or smaller prints it won't make much difference whether you have a 2 megapixel camera or a higher resloution camera. The main advantage to having 4+ megapixels is that you can make sharp, detailed 8 x 10 prints and you can crop your images and still get a good 4 x 6 or 5 x 7 print. When making 8 x 10 prints you can tell a difference. With my 2 mp camera I did not print larger than 7 x 9, and that was stretching pixels. |