Gotta beat my Canon S400 which lags horribly with shutter speed and has a horrible zoom…
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Gotta beat my Canon S400 which lags horribly with shutter speed and has a horrible zoom…
Um… Yeah…
strap that bad boy to a tripod and and pop on a telephoto lenz… and you got yourself one badass setup… however, I would still go with a 35 mm camera with 800 speed film over any digital camera… much better quality and you can get photos on CD @ walmart…
I still use a cannon T^ from 1990 that my mom gave me back in highschool… it gets awesome quality, but you have to know where you want to take the pic… It has a manual zoom so you can’t take pics on the fly… and it takes a couple mins to switch out telephoto lenses…
p.s. make sure to go to a store and test out the digital “shutter speed” … (lagg between button push and picture)… my digital camera has a sucky speed… takes a second and a half before the snap.
Your better off spending a little more and getting a digital rebel xt - even a used one. Shutter lag will kill you with most non-slr cameras.
All depends on how serious you are.
If you provide your budget, it’s easier to make recomendations.
If you want to get the rebel, canon has a triple rebate program right now where you can stack up rebates with more you spend…I’ve seen people buy lenses from the rebate and ebaying them for full price for a savings of $600+…can’t beat that.
I agree that shutter lag might be your worst enemy w/digital p&s. But that’s a good camera for what it is. not for sports/action IMHO.
Rio
Ahmm- not bad, I have a similar ( 10x optical zoom ) Fuji see http://www.steves-digicams.com/2004_reviews/fuji_s5100.html and a buddy of mine got one of the Sony’s see http://www.steves-digicams.com/2005_reviews/sony_h1.html . Both of us like 'em.
The Sony has some advantages over the Fuji for some things, notably the claimed image stabilising built in. It comes with NIMH AA rechargeables and a charger ( you will want at least two more rechargable batteries ).
And it will definitely blow away the A400, though you might want to save the latter, put it in a water housing and use it for water shots.
A couple things:
First, the non-SLR high end digitals like these are not film cameras, they can’t touch the quality of, say, my 30 year old Olympus OM1 with even mediocre lenses.
Nor are they as nice in a lot of respects as the SLR digitals like the Canons ( see http://www.steves-digicams.com/2004_reviews/20d.html ). Picture quality with those is noticably better, like the step in quality between that Sony and your current A400.
Now, if money isn’t a consideration…by all means go with a digital SLR. If what you’re doing with it will be pro-grade work, for publication or for pay.
If you are doing semi-serious snapshots, then it’s a tough call. The Sony will also do short video clips, limited by the size of the memory card you put in it, which is a nice touch.
If you want to take shots of your buddies surfing and bikini shots of your girlfriend, well, the Sony will do all that nicely. You won’t have to mortgage the house for the whole lens family either. You will find that using the digital viewfinder rather than the semi-dufus screen on the back of the thing results in much better pictures. A low-end tripod or monopod will make the telephoto shots better too, image stabilising or not.
And if you want to get ‘serious’ later, well, then you can look around for a good, used Canon and lenses for it. But that’s a whole 'nother story.
hope that’s of use
doc…