what digital camera?

adr0ck

Can someone please give me a bit of advice on what digital camera to buy.......i've had my eye on a canon a85 from pixmania for £172.....however have read a review that its very slow at taking pictures.....and the video footage is not all that good......so then i thought about an olympus mju400 but i cant find if it records volume......basically i'm after best camera for money (like everyone) to suit following spec:

at least 4 mega pixel
video
sound recording
not to shabby on quality of pics or video
not too slow at taking pics

anyone got any advice

what are the vivitar camers like i keep seeing on autionworld etc...are they very cheap for a reason??

N9eav

What ever reviews you read their are always good and bad points according to everyones opinions.
I personally favoured the Fuji finepix, great camera with large zoom capacity.
That's just me
try this site for views

http://www.cameras.co.uk/

Hintza

Hi

Why pay that kind of money? Mind you seems a good price after having a quick look around.

Why not try the canon refurbished site on e-bay. Just bought a digital camcorder for £150 great deal. Pain in the !!!!!! there payments system though. The are not doing the A85 but I have seen the A80. Remember they add VAT but p+p is a reasonable £5.13.

Or go the the Fuji refurbished site:

http://www.fujifilm.co.uk/technical/refurb/shop.php

Superb deals if you fancy a really good camera (bit bulky) the fuji S602 (better than the newer S5000) is available for £199.

Anyway here are my favourite digital camera links in no order:

http://www.dpreview.com/

http://www.digitalcamera-hq.com/

http://www.imaging-resource.com/

http://www.megapixel.net/html/issueindex.php?lang=en

http://www.steves-digicams.com/ (.....I like this one)

http://www.dcresource.com/



My conclusions were the A80 (at that time was the one if you were wanting a pocket size one.

However the Casios looked great as well.

take a second look at the Panasonics (great lens)

The Minoltas are good value (maybe a little plasticky but you get a lot for your money.

I had an HP945 nice camera (until I dropped it onto carpet...it died)

Have fun choosing...when I bought mine (refurb Fuji S602) I did a spread sheet and and took all the review scores added my own preferences and came up with a short list.

SAD or what!!!!

Hintza

By the way I know some people have had problems with Pixmania.....but I found them superb. Ordered and arrived next day from France....stunning service

EvilMonkey

I second Hintza's recommendation of https://www.steves-digicams.com Its a very thorough review site.

On your specific question about the mju, as far as I can tell it only records video without sound.

Steve rates it quite high though. See the lnk below for the conclusion on this camera.

http://www.steves-digicams.com/2003_reviews/stylus400_pg5.html

I've read a couple of decent reviews on the A85, so it can be a bit of a case of the reviewers bias...

If you look at https://www.dpreview.com they've a big forum section where you can address any specific questions to people who've actually got the cam you're interested in.

On the speed front, this might need some clarification, broadly speaking you can break "speed" into startup time (from when you press the on button to when its ready to go), shutter lag (from when you press the shutter button to when it takes the picture) and frames per second (how many pictures it can take in a second). This last one also needs some measure of sustainability (IE 4 frames at 2 FPS then 1FPS after that).

Of all these shutter lag is the one to keep an eye on as historically digicams are pretty bad at it.

On the video front, I'm not sure any of the dedicated digi cams has "good" video, I'd only really rate it for clips on the PC. I think they're starting to come through with hybrid cams now, but I'd say its a while off yet to a true camcorder / still camera mix.

Hope this helps