i've had a few cheap digital camers but now want to buy a little bit of a better one.

i found with the cheap ones from pressing the button to the photo being taken theres a delay. what is this called and what do i need to look for when buying

would this be ok for home use ?ARGOOSE

It's shutter lag and can be a real pain. Always found Fuji F and S series to be great value for the quality.

Hi Graeme,
As a point and shoot I have a FUJI FINEPIX F10.
From "powerup" to "ready" it takes less than 1 second. Pictures are great (it won some award in 2006) at 6.3Mpx with excellent colour. Size is small and flat with auto lens protect (a small door) Price is quite good now too... was about £250 at the time.

Reviews: HERE HERE and HERE

From pressing shutter release to picture taking is less that 0.5 second. Even with my digi-SLR there is a small delay.

Hope it helps... oh, and I'm NOT selling mine either!

Steve

[Edited on 7-5-07 by Hellfire]

Graeme, bit out of touch with the current range of digi compacts, so can't be much help there.

But one of the best places to buy from is:

http://www.warehouseexpress.com/

Get all of our stuff from there, and have yet to find better prices on most stuff.

David

We have a 3 year old Fuji, 2.3mp but it is fine for any pictures we need. Larger numbers does not make a better camera but the optics and sensors are critical. For a lot of stuff now your phone camera will take an adequate size picture. Our camera has the delay you mention when used in Auto mode but switching to Manual gets rid of it.

Just bought a Panasonic DMC-FZ7 in silver last week, well impressed best price from www.ebuyer.com for £150 ish.

Have a look at Samsung, i saw there range of compacts at Photokina and was impressed, 7 to 10 Mpix some with ultra close up, one with big optical lens and one that will play MP3 and Mpeg video.

SWMBO used to get quite a few compacts for testing from work. We cound the Fuji cameras to be consistently grainy, image wise. The older ones were much better.

Nikkon do decent compacts though with the flash there is a little lag between pressing the button and activity.

If you want a camera with 0 delay and infinate adjustment have a look at the canon EOS 400D....

Its a really nice camera and does some funky stuff...like this:




Or, the older brother, the EOS 350D is still a good camera and much cheaper!

quote:

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Originally posted by Catpuss
SWMBO used to get quite a few compacts for testing from work. We cound the Fuji cameras to be consistently grainy, image wise. The older ones were much better.

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Don't listen, i have the best handy camera

Buy the canon power shot A 710 IS
7.1 meg pixels
Optical zoom 6x
2 normal AA batteries (rechargable)
SD-card (upgrade to 2 GB is recommended)
Big LCD-screen
incl sound and filming possible

Don't fall for digital zoom, it's crap

If you want more optical zoom the camera will be bigger.

The small camera's don't make nice pictures


grtz and good luck choosing one!

Quite simply the Fuji F31

quote:

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Originally posted by iank
Next digital will be a low/mid range SLR. Probably a canon.

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As well as making sure the camera you get has decent optics you also have to be careful with the claimed sensor resolution (megapixels), some manufacturers have been known to inflate the numbers by interpolating from a smaller resolution. Even some of the higher end DSLR's can be a bit misleading with their non-square ccd cells in raw modes.

If i was looking for a camera at the moment i'd be keeping an eye out for something like a secondhand D50/70/100, Nikon have pretty much updated their entire range in the last few months so there's probably a decent amount of used kit appearing on the market about now.

Yep. Jessops regularly sell on recon D50s e.t.c.

The D40X is supposed to be comparible to the older cameras higher in the range.
The D40 gets good reviews too, which was what SWMBO was originally going to buy until we found the D40X was near the same price.

Repairers are a good place to pick up used kit. We use Fixation for all of our repairs, they've usually got a fair amount of stock in

Nice. I'll bookmark them in case our's needs fixing.

The original of my avatar and a whole other set done at the same time were on a Cannon EOS D30. An old beast but really nice image quality. They still seem to be going for £500+ on fleabay though.

I'm with TJ here, Canon A710.
I have the slightly older (only 6MP) A700, it's a cracking piece of kit