Whats the camera of choice these days? I bought the Canon Ixus 500 last year and I'm really happy with it. My dad now wants a camera and fancied the Pentax Optio S5 or S6 (I forget which). Reviews though (from dpreview.com) didn't really make this camera look good with every review mentioning blurry photos and noise.

So if you were in the market for a camera what would you be getting?

I'd get a tiny pocket-sized Nikon, myself. The old 3mp E990 Coolpix I have is still fantastic, with great optics and macro capability. The menus and features are A1, so I'd hope to continue with that brand.

But my main camera remains the Canon 20D. They're not as nice a company as Nikon, not as featureful, and they never add capabilities with firmware updates. But the DSLR also works quite well, and I'm loaded up with Canon glass for it now. Were I starting afresh today, I'd get the Nikon D200 instead. They just seem to try harder, even though they're at Sony's mercy for chips.

Cheers

I have an Ixus 500 too. A couple of people at work have Ixus 40's and 50's. They seem really good, nice big screen and seemingly comparable performance. The only thing for me is they take SD cards instead of CF, I've got loads of CF so it would be a bit of a pain to swap. Other than that I'd probably have bought a 50 had they been about when I bought my 500.

That said the Ixus Wireless looks interesting.

Yes I saw the wireless Ixus. Looks good but overly complicated for my old dad

I'll check out the Ixus 40/50 but they may be outwith his budget.

The Ixus 55 is looking like being the one. He likes the looks of those over the Nikon ones.

cameras2u.com have it for £215 which is bang on budget.

My wife and I got an Ixus 50 (well, a Powershot SD400, which is the same thing) for her parents for Christmas. It seems to be very good at what it does, and the price right now is very good. Six months ago, we got a Nikon Coolpix 5900 (having roughly the same specs as the Powershot S400), which Nikon promptly cancelled, and none of the replacement cameras have quite the same specs at the low price point.

Meanwhile, post-Christmas, a bunch of new cameras have been announced, and more can be expected next month in the lead up to PMA. Of the current batch of announcements, the one that caught my eye is the Kodak Easyshare V570, which has a clever, dual-lens design that gives it the widest-angle view in the class. If that isn't a very big deal, then the features I'd be looking for (in order of importance) would be:

- fast / low-light autofocus
- optical image stabilization
- decent performance at high ISO
(all of the above making it easier to shoot indoors, at night, without a flash)

- full VGA video mode (i.e., 640x480, 30fps)

The full video mode is actually more valuable than you'd think. For capturing silly/cute baby interactions, in particular, the full-res video mode of our Coolpix is good enough to burn DVD videos that look almost as good as video from my older Canon ZR-10 (mini-DV video camera). The dedicated video camera has lower noise, but not really a big deal, one way or other. It's sure more convenient to carry one gizmo that does it all.

Price-wise, it seems that $250 is something of a magic number, which is followed by $400 as the next magic number. $250 gets you a variety of quality cameras, like the Powershot SD400. They're "current", but not top-of-the-line. $400 gets you top-of-the-line, which may or may not be any meaningful improvement. If you want to spend real money, that's what the D-SLRs are all about...

Canon 5D is what I pine for. I have a 10D and haven't been able to convince myself that a 20D is worth the upgrade hassle. I'm sure I'd love either (even if my wallet wouldn't). I also have a Canon S30 which takes suprisingly good pictures (in all but low light - then the autofocus bites me).

In the non-stratospheric range, it all boils down to what combination of a)budget b)size c)picture quality and d)simplicity is right for you.

My mom got a Canon S60 (5MP), while my mother in law got a SD550 (sleek little thing). I'd buy the Canon S70 (older) if I were replacing my P&S. I tend to like more control, and RAW's the only way to get it.

-Zeke

I got the Canon SD450 for 273 delivered from Dell. Had to call to get that price, but it's coming tomorrow...

- Jon

Canon removed their raw mode from the S80. This is probably a harbinger of things to come. You want raw? Buy a D-SLR. You want point-and-shoot, you're getting JPEG.

Also interesting, the Canon Powershot G6 was announced over a year ago. Canon seems overdue for announcing a replacement. An interesting question is whether there's much future with this class of cameras. B&H wants $530 for a G6, versus $805 for a Rebel XT with kit lens. Seems to me that as D-SLRs get cheaper, they're going to consume the higher-end point-and-shoots.

I think you may be right (sadly).

Who needs RAW in a P&S? I do when I've got a 40 lb pack with skis and an ice axe in my other hand!

If Canon keeps up with disabling RAW, I can only hope other manufacturers don't follow suit, but they probably will. <sigh>


-Zeke

That Olympus is also over a year old. I went poking through DPReview's search gizmo, looking for recently announced (within the last calendar year) compact cameras with a raw mode. All I found was:

Fuji E900 - same basic class as the Canon G6, but now with a 9MP sensor.

Ricoh GR - again, same basic class as the G6, but 8MP sensor.

Olympus SP-350 / SP-310 - a smaller camera with 8MP / 7MP.

Panasonic Lumix LX-1 (and equivalent Leica Digilux) - 8MP plus image stabilization.

That's really it for recent releases, although more will presumably be announced at PMA. The Ricoh costs $700-730 (I couldn't find it for sale from any major vendors). The Fuji costs $360 or thereabouts. The Olympus SP-350 seems to be $300, and possibly much less from dodgy vendors. The Panasonic is $490. This seems to support my theory that cheaper D-SLRs are killing high-end P&S cameras.

Surely with memory getting cheaper and cheaper its silly not to include raw mode. Why would a company cease implementing the feature? To promote the sales of the SLR cameras? Or am I being cynical?

Quote:
it disables the Panorama feature if it detects a non-Olympus-branded XD card

Is that even legal? As a buyer surely you are free to choose the card manufacturer of your choice.

Well I don't think that can be called being able to choose. Do they advertise this fact anywhere?

Canon cameras make a big thing about how they use a custom Canon designed ASIC called DIGIC. One of the features mentioned is "faster processing converts RAW data to JPEG image in buffer". They've had several revisions of this chip now and it is used from the P&S cameras up to the big DSLRs.

Since the DIGIC chip does receive the raw data from the sensor then it should be possible in theory for somebody to hack the firmware to reenable this feature on cameras which don't support it. All the Canon cameras I've seen run an embedded variant of DOS on a 80186 clone. The Digital Rebel/300D crowd are/were big into hacking firmware to reenable features.