Decisions Decisions
Now I’ve finally booked by trip to India, I need to write a huge checklist of things to do, such as get a Visa, get jabs, etc. One of the things I also have to do is get a digital camera to take with me. This presents I dilemma. Now I could get the camera I really fancy, the highly rated Canon Powershot G5. I think it’s got every feature I could ever need, and will take some amazing photos. However, it’s quite a bulky camera. Not huge, but still a reasonable size. Would I want to take such a thing all the way to India? It’s a pretty good price on that site too.
What I want is a camera that has lots of settings for me to play around with, lasts a long time on batteries, can take huge storage, uses standard AA batteries (because it’s unlikely I’ll be able to charge it up when I’m out there), is robust, can be used to just point and click if need be, and is less than ?500. Recommendations anyone?
Hope you have a great time in India. I will drop you an e-mail with a few suggestions of places to go and other useful advice.
With regards to camera. I have a Nikon CoolPix 3500. It has a good blend between point and shoot and advanced features. However, finding a camera that runs on just AA batteries may be difficult.
Cheers Teg. I’ve got a Nikon Coolpix 3100 here that belongs to my parents, which runs on rechargable AAs at the moment, but it’s not really got enough manual control for me to play around with. Very compact and takes good pictures though.
Powershot G5? Bad idea – it’s basically the G3 (my camera – not bulky at all!) painted black, with a bigger CCD in it. (i.e. the lens and CCD were not designed for each other, unlike the G3) Chromatic abberation is more noticable, the noise levels are higher (more pixels on the same size CCD – bad bad bad!), the file size is larger, and it’s slower – same processor handling more data. Why else do you think the G3 (now out of production) retails at a higher price than the G5?
I reccommend the Canon Powershot A80. I have 2 A70’s, which are pretty much the same. Pocket size, can do point-and-shoot and full manual, runs on 4xAA batteries (NOT lithium though). 3.2MP (A80 has 4.0 I think), 3x optical zoom (up to 12x digital I think too). Doesn’t have a flash hot-shoe or as many features, but still a great little camera. The flip-out-and-twist LCD screen is a godsend! Oh, and it will take 640×320 AVI movies, whereas a G3/G5 only do 320×240!
Goto http://www.dpreview.com for a load of info and in-depth camera reviews. There should be plenty of sample galleries to give a rough idea of what each camera can do.
Hey, all apostrophes are preceeded by a backslash.
\’ \” It’s a site problem perhaps?
Cheers for the info John – reviews I’ve read have said the G5 is better than the G3, but I’ll look into it anyway. More pixels is not always a bad thing, after all they’re cramming more transistors into the same space on everything these days. The G3/5 are both reasonably bulky for a digital camera, if you see what I mean, though still not big.
Hmm, don’t know where all these slashes have come from, never used to happen on the previous server. I’ll have to investigate this evening.
It’s probably magic_quotes are turned on in PHP.
On cameras… for travelling I’m not sure of the need for very very high resolutions. If you’re not going to be able to copy them off the camera very often you’ll be limited by the size of compact flash you’re using. 3MP is enough to produce decent prints but on my camera (Nikon 885) they still take up 1Mb per photo. Of course, with the price of CF dropping all the time you take enough to last a few weeks provided you don’t go trigger happy (something I’m too often guilty of).
The A70 doesn’t have the flip-out screen, must be the A80. Caroline has an A70, it’s not too power-hungry (my Kodak is nuts) but then it takes 4xAAs. Some very nice pics from it, lots of settings, and smaller.
Notice you’re handling new lines now too, nice one
As for the apostrophes, I think some PHP setups automatically remove them from POSTed data, so this one obviously doesn’t. Ah, the wonders of stripslashes()…
Oh, OK you’re not handling newlines. Guess you just used HTML in your reply then.
I have an A70 (doesn’t have a flip out screen, what are you on John?). I took it to russia with me a few weeks ago and took about 400 photos in one week. It takes big CF cards i think. Can do point and shoot and also you can adjust everything manually. Its not too big, it takes good photos (see http://www.dange.co.uk), its not that expensive. Oh yeah, get the A80 for its higher resolution,
PS make this box that we type comments in bigger, its too small!
Ah ha, must be magic quotes, thanks for that Mr Nolan (not see you here before, hello!). There an addslashes() done on the comments before they go in the database, so that is where the extra ones are coming from I would imagine. Probably all to do with this swapping onto a new server yesterday. Consistent setups? nah!
Anyway, photos. Admittedly I don’t need anything above 3MP really, I’m more interested in optical zoom (digital zoom can kiss my ass). The G3/5 have 4x which is better than the 3x on the 3100. It’s good, but I’d like more. CF is a pre-requisite too, I’ll probably go for at least 512Mb, just to be safe.
Comments box – I’ll make it bigger on the new WhyTheHell which is coming at some point. Can we beat the previous high of 13 comments for one entry?
No servers are set up consistently. I just had nice statistic graphs set up for all the photos and galleries, and the new server doesn’t support any of the imaging functions! Typical.
How’s the new layout coming anyway? Much more to be done on it?
Get a digital SLR and a decent lens for it then
Yeah, but you switched hosts Rick, this is the same company… The new layout is actually pretty much finished, I’m just coding up some new features that I want to finish first, like polls and redoing the photo gallery.
I don’t think I’d have any budget left after buying a lens for any camera Mike if I went the SLR route
Back to cameras – I know the A70 doesn’t have a flip/twist LCD screen, I’m sorry I confused y’all! You can get add-on lenses for the A70/80/G3/5 etc. but they’re quite bulky. A guy in my office has just bought an A80 (inc. 256Mb CF card, case, batteries & fast charger) from pixelmania for £320. Another one is thinking of selling his A70 on ebay…
That reminds me… How’s about this for a website?
http://www.rosieharmen.co.uk
Sounds like the A80 may be the one for me. I’ll have an shufty later on.