Don't know which digital camera?

[Birchy]

Hi everyone - Is there anyone out there who knows of a digital camera which has more than 6 mega pixels and a good optical zoom for a budget of around £200?

I want to use it for the usual things such as family and holiday photo's but I also want to use it for taking pictures of wildlife e.g. wild birds. So the camera needs to be stylish and compact as I don't want to look out of place in company.

The camera I have my eye on is the Ricoh Caplio R7 which is 8.3 million mega pixels and 7.1 optical zoom. It looks quite smart as well with good reviews but there's that many camera's to choose from am a bit confused about which one to buy. Please help me!

[rainmaker]

Just bought a 2nd hand Canon 300D. Not instamatic type, it's an SLR - £183 off ebay.

Also, the Nikon D70 goes for similar,and also has 6.3mp.

Maybe better (in the long run) than an insta type?

[rscott74]

Birchy you say "stylish and compact as I don't want to look out of place in company". The end result is more important than looks surely?
My advice is before you buy give it a try - for looks, operation and output.

[glsammy]

Sticking to your budget of £200, have a look at the Panasonic range. They know how to make good cameras, with good zoom range.
I've just received an email offering the Panasonic TZ3 for £175, including next day delivery.
Its details: 7.2million pixels, 10X Optical Zoom Lens. Image stabilizer, 3" LCD, uses SD & SD-HC cards.
Sounds good to me!

[Maccattack]

try one of the panasonic compacts with a zeiss lens , or as they say a second hand slr ( much more flexible long term ) the D70 is very good .Pah beaten to it see above
Malcolm

[glsammy]

Originally Posted by Maccattack

try one of the panasonic compacts with a zeiss lens , or as they say a second hand slr ( much more flexible long term ) the D70 is very good .Pah beaten to it see above
Malcolm

Great minds and all that!

[naturelover]

i have a konica digital,quit satisfied with that.

[Paul mabbott]

Can say no more except that there was a good Fuji on sale at my local Sainsburys last week for £175 - 7.5Mp ...... "stylish"? Have no idea ... not my scene! But a good camera probably as most of the Fujis are.

[Birchy]

Thanks glsammy I will look into that Panasonic camera, sounds like a good deal. Thanks for all your replys

[eccles]

You mention that you want to shoot wildlife such as wild birds. This requirement may drive you towards one of the superzooms or, as already suggested, a second hand DSLR. With the normal telephoto range of most compacts you won't be able to get close enough. Before upgrading to a DSLR I had a Canon S3 which had a telephoto range up to 432mm (35mm equivalent) and I still couldn't get close enough to small birds. I Added a 1.5x tele attachment, which meant an equivalent of 648mm telephoto, and that was good enough for quite nice pictures once they were cropped a bit.
Similarly with the DSLR I found I needed a 400mm telephoto which with a 1.5x cropped sensor put me up in the same range of around 600mm effective.
BTW, don't pay too much attention to the number of megapixels. The actual sensor size is far more important than the number of photosites it has.
Take a look at DPReview (forget the url name but google will find it) for lots of camera reviews.

[Muggsy]

here I go again, butting in, sorry but so many interesting points get raised in almost every thread, interesting to me anyway.

I have a 75-300 zoom, rather than upgrade to a 500, all of which seem a bit out of my price range right now, especially as I'm just starting out, can I add a tele attachement ? if so, which one ? and will doing so help ? or be an advantage.
eos 400d and canon lense.

I'll be off on holiday soon, you can rest then

Muggsy

[paulthomas]

Unless you're going for a DSLR, look for something with less than 6MP. More megapixels does not give you a better photo; quite the reverse in fact as dynamic range and low-light performance are very seriously degraded.

[Leono]

I have been looking into getting a better digital camera than my present compact. Dixons advertise on the net that they are selling the Fuji S8000fd for £188 plus postage. This is an 18 x optical Zoom giving a maximum focal length of approximately 500mm. It also has anti shake. No Raw. I took an sd card to a camera shop today and they allowed me to take a telephoto shot with the camera. The sharpness of the photo is terrific. The image has slight colour fringing on bright edges. It is not, of course a compact camera in appearance, nor is it an SLR (no interchangeable lens) and the view finder is not optical. It is half way between the two. I am very tempted to purchase this camera.


Happy shooting

[Leono]

ps. I think it is about 8mp

[Birchy]

HI THERE,

thanx for your suggestions but after a little research myself I've decided on the Lumix TZ3 Panasonic. There's nothing in it's league for the price and for what I'm using it for. The only thing I can think of which might be a disadvantage would be that it's not got a view finder to look throw.

Birchy

[coasty]

Originally Posted by Birchy

HI THERE,

thanx for your suggestions but after a little research myself I've decided on the Lumix TZ3 Panasonic. There's nothing in it's league for the price and for what I'm using it for. The only thing I can think of which might be a disadvantage would be that it's not got a view finder to look throw.

Birchy

I have just got myself a Lumix,,,and i am chuffed to little meatballs with it

[zan]

I'd recommend the lumix as well. My dad carries one with him all the time, and for wildlife-type shots the 10x optical zoom is a big help (don't confuse it with digital zoom though, which is just rubbish). No compact will be better than an SLR if you really want to take decent wildlife shots, but the lumix is a good compromise. oh, and it's got image stabilisation which you'll probably find useful too.

Zan

[eccles]

Originally Posted by Muggsy

here I go again, butting in, sorry but so many interesting points get raised in almost every thread, interesting to me anyway.

I have a 75-300 zoom, rather than upgrade to a 500, all of which seem a bit out of my price range right now, especially as I'm just starting out, can I add a tele attachement ? if so, which one ? and will doing so help ? or be an advantage.
eos 400d and canon lense.

I'll be off on holiday soon, you can rest then

Muggsy

If you'd said you had a 300mm prime lens then a 1.4x or 2x converter would have been a good addition. However, zoom lenses, particularly at the cheaper end, just don't have the resolution or aperture size to carry a teleconverter. You will gain very little if any detail, will lose one or two stops in brightness and possibly lose autofocus as well.

In the days of film the lowered resolution didn't matter so much as you were aiming at colour prints that came straight from a commercial photolab. You would try to do all your framing in the camera as cropping a colour picture in the darkroom yourself was difficult and expensive. But with digital you can crop on the PC, and unless your main lens has greater resolution than your sensor then digitally cropping and upsizing with Photoshop or similar would give you just as good a result as with a teleconverter.

I appreciate that big Canon zooms or primes are expensive, so if these are beyond your budget, I would recommend you save up and go for a Sigma 135-400, 175-500 or 50-500 or maybe the Tamron 200-500. Each of these will give you better reach than your 75-300 with real increases in image detail.

[Maccattack]

Prices are coming down since this thread started , Nikon D40 is going for £240 "only 6MP" but very good optics .
MMac

[stoptheclock]

in my honest opinion (and partly advice from a friend) unless you going to blow the pics up to a silly size you'll find around 5-6MP more than enough for great quality shots

[Gav]

after using and owning a few different cameras, I would suggest a second hand SLR for wildlife, either the canon or nikon range are very decent, I personally have a canon but that was just due to price and what was on the market when i was purchasing the camera.

for the small compact/stylish market you can't go past the Olympus range, I've got a Olympus 770SW it's sadly a tad over the 200 mark. it's waterproof down to about 10meters and very good in all weather.

dabs.com have the new Olympus 790SW for 168.79, I have no experience of this camera but as with the 770 it's water proof and shock proof.

I put mine through the works including snorkelling and standing out in the Scottish weather, it's also accidentally been dropped in a pint of beer!

hope that helps a little

just noticed you'd settled on the Lumix TZ3 Panasonic. hopefully this bit I added maybe useful for others

Gav

[Birchy]

Hi Gav,

Didn't want an SLR really because I was intending to use it for hol's and family snaps as well. Just wanted something stylish and use it occassionally for wildlife. I haven't managed to use it properly for wildlife yet but have got some really decent general snaps so far.

TZ3 is the best or one of the best of it's kind without buying an SLR.

Tony