[Farmgirl22]

I have decided that I'm tired of our video camera/digital camera thing. The thing is so tempermental it's difficult to use, the photo quality sucks, the film quality is excellent (if you are at JUST the right distance since the zoom is stuck), but I'm ready to just find something smaller and just for pictures for the most part. My sister in law has a little HP camera that does a couple of minutes of filming, something like that wouldn't be bad, but I'm more interested in superb picture quality.

Anyone know of anything that works well??

Thanks in advance!!

[etaf]

but I'm more interested in superb picture quality.

as you can imagine this is very subjective .... Superb for me would be canon "L" lenses at £1000 a pop

how much do you want to spend

[Farmgirl22]

Originally Posted by etaf

how much do you want to spend

Well...definitely not $2000!! I was thinking more along the lines of around $150-200 range at the most. I want good pictures, but I don't need one that does my housework for me (and at $2000, it had darn well better!!! and babysit the kid too!!!).

[etaf]

i dont know the US prices off the top of my head,

but my partner has a Canon IXUS ( I think its the SD range in US - i'll lookup ) and its with her all the time she loves it.....
its about 5MB and we print at A4 often with good quality

I also have a dye-sub printer and thats prints 6x4 7x5 and 8x6 and we use this printer all the time and have no complaints.

[etaf]

yea i was right SD
heres the review
http://www.steves-digicams.com/2005_reviews/sd400.html

by the way I think this is an excellent site for reviews.

[bp936]

I have 2 Kodak cameras, 2 Fujis, and one HP. They are older ones but they all make good pictures, depending on the light conditions, the fastest is the Fuji 3.2, the Fuji 5.1 is excellent for filming, I put a 1 GB memory card in and actually it can take 20 min pictures, that is too long to watch, when I just film the grandkids. I never took any pictures longer than this with a video camera either. \the Kodak 3.1 an 4.1 are very quick in flash recovery, need the least amount of battery power to take tons of pictures. The HP takes the best pictures outside, day and night but needs a lot of batteries to recharge.
I find all pictures printed out,the quality depends a lot on what printer you use. If I have them printed in a store, they are actually better than regular film. If I print them on photopaper, for other then regular sizes, collages or fun arrangements, it prints out excellent on my cheap Epson printer and the cheapest Cannon. I made a mistake once and bought no-name ink, that is the only time pictures came out terrible. So it depends a lot of what you want as the endresult.On normal paper quality is ok but not excellent.
Today's cameras have even more megapixels, but I find no need to buy any of them yet. An 8X11 size print comes out still perfect. Anything larger I wouldn't really print myself, remember inks can cost a lot for printing color pix.

If you take pictures with a camera with 6 or 7 Megapixels, it takes up a lot of space on the harddrive, most programs reduce filesize anyway if you want to burn them for CD or DVD viewing, and despite that they show very well on the TV. Hope this helps

[cuttlefish]

Mate, go with Olympus!
A top brand, everything just keeps on working and their PC/USB link never fails!
Simple to use in full AUTO and I can't speak highly enough of their products!
Don't get sold the "Digital Zoom" feature by the dealer, go for the normal zoom up to 10!

[etaf]

just to re-emphasis the comment by "cuttlefish" anything you can do with a digital zoom you can do on a PC with free software- so totally ignore anything about digital zoom - you need to focus on optical for quality

[wilson44512]

i have a kodak z710 and a nikon L3. they both take great pictures. i like the z710 better because of the 10X zoom. that i use with a tripod. for better pics. heres a pic of ducks in my backyard. with zoom. i resized it to 640x480 for the forum.

[Farmgirl22]

Originally Posted by wilson44512

i have a kodak z710 and a nikon L3. they both take great pictures. i like the z710 better because of the 10X zoom. that i use with a tripod. for better pics. heres a pic of ducks in my backyard. with zoom. i resized it to 640x480 for the forum.

So those pics are taken with the z710 right? Pretty good quality, how much does one of those babies cost?

[wilson44512]

rite now there running about $230

[frj11]

Originally Posted by Farmgirl22

So those pics are taken with the z710 right? Pretty good quality, how much does one of those babies cost?

I just purchased a reconditioned one from www.geeks.com for $156 last week(9/27/2007).

[rbrager]

I have a JVC GR-D200US that takes excellent video and pretty good stills at apx 2 MP. I also use a 10.1 MP Norcent (www.norcent.com) point and shoot still camera that takes very good videos (@ 640x480 or 320x240). I paid $400 for the JVC and $20 for the Norcent. The point is that you don't need Thousands to get a great digital camera/camcorder. I would sign up for Tiger Direct email offers and wait (thats where I bought the Norcent. I got the JVC at HH Greg so watch you local news paper. The Norcent uses a SD card up to 2 GB. The size of the video is limited to the size of the card.

[vicks]

I recently purchased an Olympus reconditioned camera on ebay, from the Olympus store.. So far am VERY HAPPY with it... and the price was much cheaper than in a store.
might give it a gander.
vicks.

[ferrija1]

Originally Posted by Farmgirl22

So those pics are taken with the z710 right? Pretty good quality, how much does one of those babies cost?

I have one too and I like it, though it's really bad in low-light and sometimes takes up to a second to focus, but otherwise, it's great.

I got mine for about $180 from Dell.