Camera Advice

[Mac]

I'm in the market for a new digicam - I mainly do Automotive photography with a bit of lanscapes for variety.

Need it to be pretty good at taking images of moving items, hi-res images and takes SD cards..

Also must not eat batteries (anyone looking at buying a camera, don't buy Samsung! Unless you shacked up with someone from Duracell)

At least 3megapixels as well. And video capture would be nice (though not essential)

Got a budget of around £250 to £300...

[dino]

The latest Nikon Coolpix is awesome so i've heard!!!!

I have an older one model 3100 and it takes amazing pics although im looking to upgrade to digi SLR

[david burton]

I've been very happy with my old minolta - had it a couple of years and it's only about 80 quid now

so perhaps look at the minolta range of there XT series (or whatever it is now!)

they are good on batteries (get rechargable ones) and they are AA so easy to buy a rechargable set. takes SD cards too, and has movie with sound (speaker in the camera too!)

because the zoom is a prism based one, it's very compact

I've been happy with mine, so thought I'd give my 2p

see www.stevesdigicams.com for a good place to start

edit: minolta dimage x20 is what I have - but they do better ones now! nikon coolpix and canon ones are the other 2 that are very good.

[wul3er]

Theres a Simialar post regarding camera's somewere from not too long ago. Might be worth while reading that as there was some good opinions posted.

Me personally would recomend Fuji

[Si_GTi]

Aye, that was me that asked for advice a few weeks back. Still haven't bought one though, I asked a few people at work if a camera or a new TV was more important, and the TV won so I bought a 24" widescreen Philips

You can find my old thread here

[PhilGTi]

The Samsung A6 Digimax is a awesome camera, more then good enough for me and i do photography at uni in with my webdesign etc. They are cheap as chips too!

http://www.7dayshop.com/catalog/product ... 802&r=KELK

It has 6 mega pixels, very good night mode, and video with sound... what more could you want .

Phill.

[Tahrey1043]

Also must not eat batteries (anyone looking at buying a camera, don't buy Samsung! Unless you shacked up with someone from Duracell)

amen brother! though i've found Uniross 2100mAh NiMH rechargables seem to do a better job than any alkaline i've fed it so far - and reusable to boot. Score!
(still they barely last long enough to fill the card in maximum quality mode with minimal flash)

i must say i'm pleased with the camera though (an A5 - same as the A6 but slightly smaller CCD). start-up response is a bit lacking in video mode (lose the start of things when there's little warning) and it can sometimes be fernickety with autofocus in tricky situations (nowhere near so bad as, say, an olympus though) but otherwise its rock solid. You almost forget what you're doing with it and stuff becomes automatic, which is surely the sign of a good setup.

uses SD cards, a 512mb one is just right for a two day trip with many mostly HQ shots and a little bit of video, and it has about 12mb internal memory as a reserve for sticking some lower rez ones in if you fill it up! (have to remove the card though)

low light performance is super sweet and you can go from full-auto mode in a few steps of added functionality up to "full manual" mode where you can alter everything - shutter speed, aperture, ISO (noise vs dynamic range, in this case), white balance, exposure compensation etc - except for the focus (some clever "auto" set cheating required if it won't behave)... makes for some fun if you work out what you're doing. ISO 400 with a 15 second exposure and a steady place to rest it makes night almost into blue (or orange) tinted day and you can do long-exposure tricks like making yourself a lightsabre from waving your lit-up mobile up and down..

video quality's alright too, though it's not proper MPG, just ratty old motion-JPG - naff compression artifacts and bulky filesizes ahoy. It can supposedly do 640x480 at 30fps, but ive found 320x240 is its limit at that speed, 640 only really working properly at 15fps (still looks alright!). Sound recording ability is a nice plus, but it's incredibly basic in either voice-note, picture comment, or video mode... mono, 8khz, 4-bit adpcm (urgh) with a rubbish microphone. beats silence with the soggy end of it's own legs tho

[Mac]

cheers for all your help boyos, I'll check those sites now!