Digital camera

[molecularfire]

Hello. I'm looking to buy a digital camera. I would prefer one with movie capabilities and as small as possible. I'm looking at spending around $300 but if necessary, am willing to go up on price. Any info. would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. :)

[ray]

Originally posted by chosenfool
canon digital elph
exilim (a bit pricey, but nice)

two of my suggestions, the canon elph being at an advantage since the simple s230 can be had for under $250 with coupons (try dell). Has 10-30 second movie with sound capability, does 2.1mp (all you need for 8x10 prints, and how often will you print anything that big anyway?), and uses compactflash, which is real cheap nowadays. 512MB will set you back just under $100.

for an 8x10 print you may actually need a 3.0mp camera and higher. a 2.1mp will print great as large as 5x7. Larger than that you may notice quality loss. of course i could be completely wrong, as usual.

I own a digital elph s200 and it works like a champ.

[ski]

Molecular!! This just in!!!!!!! :eek:

Dell Home has the sister camera of my Pentax Optio S... the Casio Exslim, for $399 - $40 instant - $75 MIR = $275 :D

It's about the size of an Altoids tin, the absolute smallest 3MP 3X optical zoom camera you can find, and $125 cheaper than I paid for it :P

I recommended this camera to a friend yesterday, which is how I found out about the deal.

[baggio248]

Check:

http://www.cameraworld.com

They have very reasonable prices and no shipping or sales tax if you spend over 100 I think.

[molecularfire]

Thanks for the info. guys. One question though... for the movie aspect... chosen, you said the elph has 10-30 sec. movie... is that the maximum length that I can film? Is that because of the memory size, or something else... i.e. if I upgraded the memory, could I make longer movies? Thanks ahead for the help. :)

[spigidygak]

just so you know, that an 8x10 photo is 1536x1024 resolution, so any camera that can shoot up to that resolution natively without interpolation will be good enough. About the movie thing, two things. First off don't expect much out of the quality. Second, usually its limit to length because of the memory buffer speed and how fast that gets transfered over to the memory card, but I could be wrong on that one.

[molecularfire]

Does that mean that there's an inherent limit to how long the movie capture can be despite how much extra memory I buy?

:)

[baggio248]

Here's a quick article, it may or may not be helpful. PC-Magaziene ranked 21 cameras.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1218699,00.asp

[spigidygak]

Originally posted by molecularfire
Does that mean that there's an inherent limit to how long the movie capture can be despite how much extra memory I buy?

:)

Yup, doesn't matter what size memory card you put in there, if the camera has a limit in clip length then you're sol. But again, the video feature is something I doubt you'll want to use after seeing the poor quality of it.

[Jeffbx]

:stupid:

You'll always get the best results by keeping video on your video camera & still pics on your digicam. Intermixing the two just doesn't work very well.

[zippyjuan]

Originally posted by molecularfire
Does that mean that there's an inherent limit to how long the movie capture can be despite how much extra memory I buy?

:)
Some cameras have a defined limit of video per session, but if you have the room on your memory card, you can add more sessions. Some Sony cameras let the available memory limit the video- ie more memory, longer video. Most don't include sound or if they do won't let you zoom or anythihg during recording since that noise will be audible. Quality of the video will also vary by camera.

[molecularfire]

Thanks everybody. I will soon be a proud owner of the cannon S230. :thumbup: