Digital Camera Recomendation

DharmaBum

So my girlfriend want's to get into Digital Photography as a hobby. Her birthday is comming up soon, so I wanted to get her a nice digi cam to get her started in her hobby.

My current digicam is about 2-3 years old, and since pictures arn't really my thing I was wondering if some people could recomend me a few good cameras for a starter who wants to take up the hobby. (Note she is not a complete beginner, she knows how to use a camera and all that jazz I just wanna get her a nice-ish camera)

TrippyDK

A price range would definitely help us out.

DharmaBum

Oh sorry. My mistake. I would say anywhere from $200-400.

TM2 Rampage

My family just got this a couple months ago:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000NK8EWI/km-20/ref=nosim
It's pretty good, but uhhh... I've read a CNet review and it said that it doesn't have as many manual type of options for professional-types. It has a bunch of settings that affect how the color of the overall picture will turn out... like, yellow, blue-ish, etc. depending on lighting conditions. These settings are listed as things like "automatic," "tungsten lighting," "indoors," "outdoors," etc. ... It's to my understanding that there are other digital cameras that let you manually adjust this thing and not have to choose among presets.


It's our 2nd digital camera... our first one was in the 100 dollar range and was frankly kind of a piece of crap (low battery life, clunky, blurry pictures, made you adjust the date and time every time the batteries were taken out or whenever you took the memory card out)...

ryuprecht

I assume you are looking for a point and shoot?

A few months ago I bought a Canon Powershot SD900. It's 10MP and the manual settings are pretty easy to use. Picture quality is great for a P&S. I've done low-light, nighttime, scenery, closeups...all came out good.

Six

i recently got a Canon Powershot SD1000 and have been really happy with it. I just wanted a small P&S I culd easily take anywhere and that used SD cards.

It works great.

jpeg

I just recently bought a Canon Powershot A550 and it is magnificent for the price (got it for 150 USD off newegg with a free 1gb memory card).

embrik

I was all set to recommend Canon when I saw the thread title, but it looks like I was beaten four times. FWIW, I have the SD800 IS, and I love it. So, I'll be the fifth recommender of Canon in this thread alone.

redimpulse

I recently purchased a Samsung NV11. It's quite good as far as point and shoot cameras go, although there can be noise when shooting at ISO 100. The macro (super or auto) mode is very good and the 5x optical/5x digital zoom with ASR image stabilization is also another excellent feature.

Pheezer

redimpulse wrote: »

I recently purchased a Samsung NV11. It's quite good as far as point and shoot cameras go, although there can be noise when shooting at ISO 100.

There's no justification for any current digital camera to generate noise at ISO 100. None.

Without a price range, I can only recommend the Canon Powershot A line. Whichever one you can afford. They all have a wealth of automatic and manual shooting modes and settings, allowing you to start out knowing quite little and learn just about everything you'd need to know about cameras to graduate to an SLR. They're also great cameras that provide better features than almost any competitor at the price point, such as the only decent ISO 800 you'll find for less than $500 USD.

I think the bottom end models in that line start pretty reasonably priced, too. They also take SD cards, meaning that memory is dirt cheap, and 2xAA batteries, meaning that while yes, you do need to pick up an expensive NiMH charger & batteries kit (like $20-$40), you've got the ability to swap batteries easily in the field, which isn't usually an option for Li-Ion based cameras that aren't DSLRs.

redimpulse

Well I can't confirm the noise, that just what I've read on some reviews.

And I'll also submit that I know nothing about cameras at all. I don't know what ISO X is - alls I know is that the camera does from ISO 100 to ISO 1600.

Pheezer

ISO is light sensitivity. It's the same in film and digital, except in digital you get noise and film you get grain and grain doesn't always look bad but noise always does.

High ISO means high light sensitivity means higher likelihood of noise. Very few point and shoot cameras even go up to ISO 800 without getting a lot of noise in the picture. You're usually safe one ISO setting below the camera's maximum setting, except that a lot of ISO 400 P&S digital cameras are decent at ISO 400. ISO 1600 is pretty much unusable on even decent quality DSLR bodies, and that's where you're spending over $1000 for the body alone.

Getting a camera that handles ISO 800 reasonably makes it easier to get decent photos in low light, particularly in the evening.

Mephistopheles

If she is wanting to get into photography as a hobby, and not just wanting a camera so she can take pictures, you really do not want to get her a point and shoot. That means that you are going to need to spend more than $200. I would recommend looking into what is called the "prosumer" market for something like an ultrazoom camera. In that category, Canon and Panasonic are pretty much kings. The Canon S3 and Panasonic Lumix FZ series are both very highly regarded. Some places you might want to look for actual camera reviews are http://www.dpreview.com and http://www.steves-digicams.com. I got into photography with one of those and then, this year, moved up to DSLR. To be honest, if you are going to take photography as a serious hobby, it is going to be expensive, and you will have to be using DSLRs.

blincoln

Nikon just recently released the D80, so the previous model (D70) of DSLR can be had for pretty cheap ($300-$400 for the body on eBay). I went that route for a number of reasons, and got some decent old manual-only lenses for it too ($30-$60 each).

Canon's Rebel series can be had for reasonable prices too.

For someone who is interested in photography beyond taking pictures of friends and vacation photos, I would highly recommend a DSLR. Being able to change lenses and manually control the aperture and exposure opens up a lot of possibilities.

GrimReaper

I think recommending a DSLR is a bit over the top, unless you're really serious for it as a hobby and willing to fork out the money then go for it. But his best option for a present is one of the better Canon Powershots or a prosumer type cameras however that may stretch the money a bit.

For my hobby I went Canon Powershot A75 -> Canon Powershot Pro1 -> Canon EOS 400D (spent about £500 on lenses, so far).

blincoln

I guess the thing that makes me recommend a DSLR is that using one really opened my eyes to the possibilities you get when you have that level of control over the image-taking process. It's hard for me to think of using a point-and-shoot in the same way now - it's less photography in my mind and more like documenting evidence.
I haven't used a newer P&S digital camera, so maybe some of them have enough of that control that it would be less of an issue, but IMO if someone is going to spend $300+ on one of those, why not go all the way and get a used DSLR body for basically the same price? Maybe the OP could even work out something with his girlfriend's family where they chip in together to get the body and a lens or two.