Any camera recommendations?

Today, I broke our camera! Ooops.
At a garden centre no less! the children were in a little play area, I went to take a photo, and somehow (not entirely sure how I managed it) the camera slipped and went over my shoulder and plummeted onto a concrete floor.

i have dropped it a few times before, but this time, it was fatal. The lens bit that goes in and out is sort of bent, and no longer goes in and out, and it just won't work.

It wasn't a very expensive one (because we're quite a clumsy family ), so definitely not worth repairing.

I know there are some really good photographers on here, and I wondered if you had any recommendations for a basic but decent point and click type camera without too many fancy functions. Under £100 if possible. The one I just broke was a Fuji, and I was happy enough with it.

 

Hehehe .. .WOO you are a bit short on Second and Third choices

I hope to break mine every few years. Technology improves and I rather enjoy replacing my camera with something more capable than the last model, but I come from having had a pucker camera back in the days of film, and have been "happy" with digital camers for 5 years or more, and am now very satisfied with them. I have not found the need to go back to the change-a-lens and lug-over-your-shoulder cameras of my film-years (although undeniably their digital cousins are excellent)

My target price is a bit more than yours, so I'm no help in advising you, but I do think that the ease-of-use of the PC software that comes with them makes a difference.

My Cannons', for the last three generations of Dropped and Failed :thumb: cameras, have had superb software.

I particularly like:

Photographs uploaded to individual folders named yyyy-mm-dd - it makes it very easy to locate a particular event. (I rename the folders from "yyyy-mm-dd" to "yyyy-mm-dd-FredsWedding" keeping the chronological order by the "yyyy-mm-dd" prefix, but making it easier to find the folder when I only have a vague recollection of the date)

Mind you ... there are a lot of folders called "yyyy-mm-dd-Garden" which doesn't narrow it down much!

When I connect my Cannon to the PC it pops up with the download software which offers "Download all new pictures since last time" and "Manually download pictures". So I click on the first one and a bunch of new "yyyy-mm-dd" folders are created.

The Cannons do all sorts of "Cannon can", as per the adverts, but the other feature I particularly like is the panoramic feature. Select panoramic mode, the viewfinder shows you 50% of the previous shot, so you can line the next frame up easily, and the software makes it easy to stitch the frames back together again. I find this very useful - often trying to squeeze a view in doesn't work well - even of my garden - and I choose to use panorama instead to get an overall better quality photo.

Other than that:

Personally I prefer a viewfinder to just an LCD preview-panel on the back - much easier to use in strong sunlight.

My camera has a rotatable LCD panel - this is great if I want to hold the camera above the heads of the crowd - tilt the LCD pre-viewer so I can see it and lift the camera up. Sometime I take movies of myself doing something, tilting the pre-viewer so it can be seen from in FRONT of the camera enables me to make sure that the key object being video'd is in-frame.

My camera takes standard rechargeable AA batteries - and I still have, and use, the first set I bought at the same time as the camera 3 or 4 years ago. If they run flat I can always buy some AA's at a newsagent - rather than being photo-less - whcih might be the case if the battery was proprietary.

Good, independent, camera reviews here Digital Camera Product Reviews: Digital Photography Review

 

What camera would you like to recommend Kristen ? Thinking about getting a new one myself.
Any chance of getting some shots taken with the special features.

 

There's too much choice!
I've decided on either Fuji or Canon, based on these posts, but that still gives me about a hundred cameras to choose from.

I also can't decide whether to get something really cheap and cheerful, around the £60-80 mark. Or push the boat out a bit and go to say £150. But like i said, I'm quite clumsy and this wouldn't be the first camera i've destroyed. Don't want to kill £150 worth of camera in a couple of weeks. but neither do I want to pay £60 and it be a total waste of money because it's too slow or otherwise not good enough.

Sigh. i'm not good with decisions!

 

I haven't bought a new camera for several years, so I don't know what specifically is available at the moment.

Each generation that I have bought I have tended towards more sophisticated, but slightly larger, cameras. Originally they would fit in my pocket, now I'd need poacher's pockets!

So I'm not sure that's much help to anyone else.

But I do like a nice quality photograph, so my preference is towards better quality lenses and so on, but without it needing a handful of Sherpas to carry ...

I'll try to take a panoramic picture tomorrow, and a single shot, by way of comparison.

 

Ah, you've made me remember some other features that I like WOO.

I have some sort of image stability gizmo. I can zoom in, in poor quality light conditions, and still hand-hold the picture without it being blurred. No idea how they do that!

And that also leads to the zoom distance. My Canon has a 12x zoom, which saves me from having to have a replacement-lens SLR camera. The replacement that I might get tomorrow, if I changed, has a 35x zoom lens - amazing! (That's the optical range, using the digital range is just , to my pea-sized brain, incomprehensible.)

 

I chose one. Decided on Canon, then just had to choose between Powershot and Ixus. Ixus had some nice features, but you also seemed to be paying for the HD video capability, which I know we wouldn't use.

So, I went for a Canon Powershot A3200.

I started reading reviews last night, and that just confused me even more - some people loved certain ones, other people said they were rubbish.

But thank you for helping me to narrow it down! I've gone for one day delivery, so I'm hoping it will be here tomorrow.

I do love some of the fancier more expensive cameras, but neither me nor my husband can really take decent photos, we're not remotely artistic (and we're clumsy!), so a fairly basic model seems to be the best option for us. And after all, todays basic models are worlds apart from when we first got a digital camera many years ago!

 

Blinking Heck! 8 x Ixus and 15 x PowerShot models ... no idea how anyone can decide. Pointless marketing consumerism :(

 

I know this only too well as my daughter's camera died several days before she went on her last DofE trip and I had to come up with a shortlist in about 36hrs and then get next day delivery. And you don't need to look around very hard to find a bad review for every single camera.

So I found something new with no reviews yet!

 

Is there a "Be the first to write a bad review on this camera" option on the site you bought it from then?