What camera to buy....

[laudrup]

Hi Peeps

I'm looking to upgrade my camera to something with a bit more manual control. Although a digital slr would be nice,I fear that I couldn't stretch my budget that far! At a push I could go to £300-450 tops!

So far I've been looking at a Panasonic Lumiz DMC-FZ20, a Fuji finepix s7000 and a Konica Minolta Dimage A200. I'm struggling to think which one I should go for and I also keep spotting other models that catch the eye! e.g. Olympus C8080 etc & I'm getting bogged down in reviews and research.

Any advice or recommendations would be appreciated. If you have any of the above cams let me know what you think. Im tempted by the Panasonic it is only 5mp but i've heard the lens are breathtaking for the money!

I've enquired about a trade in and was offered £85 for a Casio QV-R61 with 512mb card & case etc.It's less than a month old! Boo, I paid £200 just for the cam before I really knew what I was looking for in the settings!

Cheers

Laudrup

 

[Kodan_Txips]

I had this problem too, even though I have a Dimage Z1 I wanted something a bit more... basic, nitty gritty - you know, street-cred and all that.

Also, I wanted to enter slide competitions at the camera club I just joined.

So I went all nostalgic, and bought a Minolta film SLR on ebay for 26 GBP (about 40 dollars) I figured that I could buy myself a really good scanner for the difference in price, and have the best of both worlds.

Or if you want a brand new camera, Hilton Photographic are doing a Minolta film SLR with a 28-105 zoom for about 120 pounds. I tried it, it is light, has multiple exposure modes, AF, lots of stuff that would cost 5 times as much in a digital SLR.

 

[Rob]

Resale value of technology kit is a disaster area, for the fairly obvious reason that advances in the production methods and development of new innovation make a brand-new digital camera out-of-date almost as soon as it's launched. It's something most of us have got used to with computers, but not with cameras.

If you buy a good reliable 1980's or earlier manual camera, not only will you save money over more capable kit, but also you will probably get better results. There's also the added bonus of being able to p/ex your manual kit for different manual kit without losing more than about 1/3 of what you paid originally (assuming you don't damage it). I reckon your £85 for £200 is actually a surprisingly fair deal for electronic kit!

Thelma Page, on my site uses a Fuji S7000 and I was really impressed with the quality of her images. It seems to suffer less from the classic problems with fur and whiskers where digital cameras normally make a zig-zag line. It also copes well with d-o-f based shots where many other digital cameras would create an image which looks faked in Photoshop. Have a look at her pictures, especially the flower ones, which I think are great. Obviously they've been resized and compressed for the web, but they're still impressive. My digital camera is an Olympus C60 and it's dreadful. The C70 is better, but they still can't compete with the cheapest, most battered, oldest 35mm film cameras.

Good luck - and if you change your mind and go manual... you know who to ask!