Thinking of getting a camera - need advice!

[Yohji]

I'm thinking of getting a camera for my birthday, and probably looking to spend around £260ish.. give or take depending..

Now, I know there are a lot of camera's around, and I've had a quick look at these two:

Fuji S5600 Value pack

http://www.purelygadgets.co.uk/prodi...slist=5~21~144

Fuji FinePix F11 value pack

http://www.purelygadgets.co.uk/prodi...slist=5~21~144

What do you guys think of these?

I'm not really clued up on photography, other than knowing how to point and click with my little sony camera, so any advice into which camera would be best for that kind of price range would be really helpful. Thanks

[joshwa]

The Fuji F30 should be out in about a month (maybe 2?) and is the upgrade to the F11... offering better battery life (580 shots) and ISO upto 3200... could be worth waiting for if you wanted the smaller of the 2 cameras above...

re the S5600 - it's a good camera, but the Canon S2 IS, S3 IS, Panasonic FZ5, FZ7 and Sony H1 (H2 etc) are known to be better thanks to built in optical image stabilisation... the FZ5 and FZ7 are among the best ultra zooms available...

ps - the F10, (which is the F11 without manual controls) is only £150 at amazon UK.

[da_ging]

i dont think any of those "value packs" are actually good value either, well certainly not the 5600 one anyway

and as for the super zooms you defo want 1 with image stabilisation, the s2 is a good camera and just about in your budget

[Yohji]

I'm quite tempted to wait for the F30.

How much difference would there be between the F30's 6.3mp and the S5600's 5.1?

[shiato storm]

i'd wait for the f30, its better than the f11 in terms of quality and its low light ability is probably going to be one of the best around for the type of camera it is.
as for mpix. from 5 to 6 there's not a great deal of difference to be quite honest with you, that said 6 is the current middle of the range now and anything lower would seem slightly lacking. it is at the end of the day resolution, and the higher it is the better quality you will achieve at larger print sizes. there's a massive churning machine that is the speculation of how many pixels you need for such and such a print but I wouldn't worry too much about that, I've got an 8mpix camera and I took a crop out of the middle - quite a fair chunk too - and got an excellent print at 10x8. i guess the dimensions of that would have been somewhere around 2 to 3 mpix maybe. there are 12mpix and even 16mpix cameras but they're not always that necessary.
Don't worry too much about it, go with the merits of the camera and not too much on the mpixels.

as for the 5600 i'd wait to see what happens, a super-zoom like that could really do with some sort of image stabilization...like tha canon S2 IS or something.
have a look over at www.dpreview.com for stuff, very useful over there.

[Yohji]

I think I'm most likely to go for something like the F30, as it looks great spec wise, and size wise as well.

How does the F30 compare to the Sony P200?

[shiato storm]

not sure, I've got the P200 and all I can say is its a great little camera, unfortuantely Sony stopped making it recently. I think the latest sonys are ok but again not sure if they've hit the shops yet.
perhaps have a look at the little nikons, they look ok, think they're the P3/P4 ones. but be aware you'llbe paying for the name when it comes to nikon/canon...

[Yohji]

The P200 seems to be on that Purely Gadgets site for £262 with a 512mb card.

Hmm.. This is gonna be a tough choice

[joshwa]

Check out Amazon.co.uk - the P200 is around £172, and 512mb cards are around £16 !

[Yohji]

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/...595346-7032650

Found this one as well, which seems like a lot better deal with a £30 1gb card, compared to the other site.

[shiato storm]

p200 for anything more than £200-190 is a rip-off. I got mine this time last year for 230, and that was new out! with that in mind you should be looking more towards the £170 mark as posted above. I'd give this purely gadgets site a miss for cameras.

[Yohji]

I've been having a look at some reviews for quite a few, and really like the look of the Panasonic FZ5...

Only thing I'm not to sure about is the ISO sensitivity, which goes up to 400? As some models have had higher, what differences does this make?

(More questions... )

[da_ging]

just to stick another camera in the mix , my parents just got the nikon coolpix P3 8 megapixel with wireless and Vr and it's a pretty good camera better than i was expecting and can be had for £260 from jessops online or you can get the non wireless version the P4 for £240

about the iso anything above iso400 unless its a fuji f10/f11/f30 will be crap and useless unless im mistaken

[GDVS]

My mum bought an Olympus SP700 from Jessops yesterday (£199.99) and I was pleasantly surprised with it. The 3" LCD is gorgeous (no viewfinder so it needs to be) and the picture quality is rather good too.

This is (I think, never know with her) a 100% crop from a macro shot of a fly that just happened to land in front of the flower she was snapping. You can see the noise in the top right but I think it's not too bad overall, certainly at full size it looked great (regrettably the original is long gone now).



The other piccies in the same folder are all crops or resizes of shots with that camera yesterday.

[Yohji]

Thanks for all the input guys.

I think I'm gonna try and afford a Panasonic FZ7 after my birthday

EDIT: Going to Greece for two weeks in the summer, which should be good for testing it out.