mns2k, We posted together. I will be needing the 5 megs to get decent blowups but thanks for the input!

 

Hey ya know what's fuuny? Here I am on the site and this guy just came to our house from Salinas and bought my husband's old 2000 400 EXC KTM. He came into our office and my husband told me that the guy also has a 2001 S2000 in yellow. I had him come look at the site and gave him the address. Maybe we'll see a newbie from Salinas, CA soon. He said he never knew the site existed.

 

I just got the Canon Powershot SD100 3.2 megapixel and i Love it!
The nice thing about it is its very small and compact, i can fit it in my pocket. A little less than the size of my palm and has amazing picture quality. Im still reading up on it. The manual is about 150 pages and i still havent figured out how to use all its features and settings. For the price i think its a great camera. Now i can catch up on the photo taking this coming spring/summer

 

I own a Canon G5, and I am happy with it so far. There are certain well known shortcomings to the G5, such as chromatic abberrance at high contrast / wide aperture, and higher than normal noise levels in long exposures, but every model has it's own little peculiarities.

Considerations:

Canon cameras use CompactFlash cards. While not necessarily cheaper than other formats, there is perhaps a larger variety of manufacturers of CF cards. Some other formats are definitely more expensive, like the Sony memorystick. SecureDigital is smaller, if compactness is an issue.

The Canon G5 is one of the larger and heavier of the prosumer-level digital cameras. It's all relative of course. It's enormously smaller and lighter than my SLR+lens. However, other 5mp cameras can be had in significantly smaller sizes. My friend has the F300, and it seems tiny by comparison. Don't know if I would recommend that model, because it has it's own unique problems.

Canon cameras like the G5 can capture RAW mode images in a format that is smaller than the TIFF mode on many other cameras. Canon's RAW mode is a compressed, though lossless format that needs to be decompressed. The images are only about 5megs each, compared to 14megs for a 5megapixel TIFF image, so you can fit a lot more on your storage card, if RAW images are important to you. If so, I find Photoshop CS very convenient because it has a built in Canon raw converter.

The Minolta F300 runs on AA sized NiMH rechargable batteries, but I believe Minolta recommends that you do NOT use alkalines in it. The voltage is different, so make sure the manufacturer says you can use alkalines before you try sticking them in. NiMHs are usually 1.25 volts, while alkalines can output a peak of 1.5 early in their life. That's the way I recall it. Also, I found that in real use, the battery life in the Minolta F300 was much much worse than my Canon. The batteries may be cheaper, but you'll need to carry a lot more of them around with you. See this page for comparisons of battery life among some popular models:

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canong5/page10.asp
(scroll down)

 

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Kyras

 

First, I recommend against Steve's Digicams. Browse through the site with a critical eye and you'll notice that EVERY camera gets a glowing review, and ALL of them come highly recommended. As a research tool it's largely useless.

www.dpreview.com is much more critical but the focus is on higher end cameras. I like DC Resource quite a bit, too.

Right now, if you can handle the size, it's hard to go wrong with the Canon Rebel (EOS-300D). $1000 with the kit lens (not a bad 3x zoom) but it has many of the goodies of a pro DSLR and probably has a much, much longer shelf life than the digicams. It's also priced at the upper end of the prosumer digicams. Its competition was supposed to be the Sony 828 but chalk me up in the camp that thinks that the original release of the camera has some showstopper bugs that need to be worked out. That leaves a bit of a vacuum IMO - the Coolpix 5700 has quality glass, a great sensor and outstanding integrated capabilities, but it does tend to be kind of slow to operate like all Coolpixs. (My 990 is a royal pain when it starts to "think.")

The G5 is nice but I like the G3 better - same basic quality at a much lower price. Sony 717 is also a good sorted out camera that's had most of the "issues" worked out of it by now.

I really like every single one of the Canon S-series cameras, i.e. S50. Outstanding pictures, compact size, great build quality, fast shooting, good battery life... no real flaws. IMO this is the camera to get if you can't afford a Rebel or 5700 but want to spend more than, say, a Canon A-series or one of the upper level Fuji Finepix.

I think you should take a serious look at the Rebel. Or better yet, wait a month and we should know what Nikon's response will be, if any, and that might be a good choice since you already have a Nikon lens.

 

Oh, if you do settle for a Nikon 5700 (great camera) then shop around for good prices. They can vary wildly.

Dell often has the best prices - wait for one of their "15% off all digicams" sales, search for one of their $xx off $xxx purchases coupons, buy another stackable coupon or two off eBay (search for Dell+Coupon), and you can get some fantastic deals on digicams.

 

Patty

I have a Sony Cybershot DSC-S85. It is 4.1 megapixtel, 6X zoom and has a Carl Zeiss lens. I have enjoyed using it and would buy it again.

If you do decide on a camera you might want to check these sites for competitive prices:

www.pricescan.com
www.pricegrabber.com

Also B & H Photo in NYC is hard to beat (they ship anywhere via UPS)
www.bhphotovideo.com

You might want to check prices at these three and bring the price into your local store.

 

Portuguese, CBeyond, Phoenix and Ralper,

Thanks for your opinions. I will consider what each of you has posted (even though CBeyond said stuff that's beyond me). RAW or TIFF images? I'm pretty uneducated in this digital camera stuff. I know magapixels and zoom and weight. Right now I have Costco put my film pictures onto a CD so I can share them.

Thanks for your help guys.

 

If you are a serious photogrpaher, I recommed the Nikon D100, a digital SLR with interchangeable lenses. I've had Nikon SLR cameras for many years and I can use many of my lenses in the D100, plus there is a growing choice of extreme wide-angle, zoom, and telephoto lenses for the D100. Canon, Olympus, and some other manufacturers are now making similar SLRs with interchangeable lenses.

You can equip it with a 1 gig IBM micro drive, which is good for about 1,000 images on the mid-range resolution (great for 8x10 prints).

It will set you back more, however, thought the price continues to plummet.