I'm looking for a digital camera for around £200, but am a bit overloaded by the selection available.

At the moment its looking like a CASIO QV-R51. We recently bought one at work and it seems very good (5MP, 3 x optical, large display, easy to use).

It has just come down from around £300 to less than £200 (in Dixons of all places!), so.....does anyone have any comments (either positive or negative) on this one, or can anyone suggest anything better?

Cheers

Dibs

see link for some reviews on it's predecessor the R40, I've got one and am very impressed, certainly much better than my previous cybershot. I'm sure the R51 is similar but with more pixels.

Very well made, good flash, compact, fast start up, excellent battery life, pictures can be a bit noisy.

Another option would be the Fuji Finepix S304 or current equivalent, a very good camera.

Allan

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/read_opinions.asp?prodkey=casio_qvr40

You can get the Canon S50 on the web now for as little as £240.


Gives excellent results from 5 Mpixels.

Alcazar

Also, check out Steve's Digicams (http://www.steves-digicams.com/) for reviews and sample pics (same subjects) from all the different cameras. Much more real-life than some of the studio shots on DPreview

Stefan

Pixmania are cheap, but 7dayshop can be a lot cheaper for certain cameras. Camers2U are another one to checkout.

Stefan

Oh, and keep it mind the cost of larger memory cards and a 2nd battery. Modern cameras are great, but most of them use proprietery batteries that can cost £40-£50 (although check availability of 3rd-party batteries). Sony use their own Memory Sticks that are almost twice the cost of all the others.

http://www.imaging-resource.com/IMCOMP/CDISPLAY.HTM

This might help, its a comparison web site and very good too.

I love the Ixus range, Ixus 430 is

£236.99 inc del at Amazon

And £236.50 inc del at Cameras 2U

7dayshop have the excellent Fuji S5000 for £194. You'll need to factor in a decent memory card (about £55 for a 256Meg xD card), but one hell of a camera for the money.

Chris

Also worth getting a memroy card from one of the eBay shops. I saw some Scandisk 512Mb cards for about the same money as a 256Mb card here in the UK.

The bloke that sits next to me at work bought a Sony memory stick for his a few weeks ago. £70 for a 512 card compared to around £150 over here. It's a pucka card and took about 4-days to arrive. No VAT or import duty guaranteed from the seller.

They're very reliable and worth the risk from buying abroad.

Stefan

I've been told that you should ask yourself what quality you'll want to take pics at and prints them on. Everyone wants more and more pixels, but with more pixels additional noise can appear on your photos. I've seen pics from friends 1MP camera that look fantastic when printed even on A4 photo paper.

A 5MP camera can produce large prints, but if you only want 7x5 prints then you may be best saving your money.

Sony W1 is a great camera. Uses AA batteries (only 2) and has a huge 2.5" LCD.
Canon IXUS 430 & 500 are great too. 500 has more megapixels, but apparently doesn't have as good a flash as the cheaper 4MP IXUS 430.
Canon S45/50/60 are other great cameras with 1.8" LCD. S60 adds a wider 28-100 4x zoom lense, but it's a good whack over your budget (about £70 over).

Going through the same decision myself and those are the cameras I'm looking at.

Casio EX-Z40 is supposed to be a good one, but the battery has to be charged inside the camera which put me right off. If that bothers you, it's worth checking for that on whatever camer you choose.

Get a camera made by a camera company, not a watch company, (woops) go for a Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Pentax. The compact flash seems to be the preferred memory storage too.
Ixus just fantastic..............

Blimey, thanks for all the replies. I'll check out some of your recommendations.

Cheers

Dibs

Get a camera made by a camera company, not a watch company, (woops) go for a Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Pentax. The compact flash seems to be the preferred memory storage too.
Ixus just fantastic..............


R32, what do you find particularly wrong with the Casio images ?

Allan

Oh, and BTW I'm no expert. Just airing my own thoughts and what I've heard from reading recent reviews.

Once you've narrowed your cameras down, have a look on some of the discussion forums (especially on Steves Digicams and DPreview). You'll spot any real-life problems that owners have reported back.

I did consider the Canon PowerShot A75/80, but heard that it's prone to producing purple edges on high-contrast photos so it put me off. There were a few shots on one of the forums and it was a big issue for those particular shots.

Stefan

I would say that it is the quality of the lens that most sharply defines the quality of the images you take - regardless of the camera. Incidently, I would agree that the obession with megapixel ratings is misleading. There is a difference in quality, but it only becomes pronounced when you blow the images up - if you are not intending to do that, then 2-3 mega pixels is sufficient to get very good quality images.

Look for optical magnification rather than digital and go and try a few cameras in the shop before you buy. Most of the stuff I post up has been taken with a fairly humble Fuji Finepix 2800. I've got some great shots with the camera, which is why I'm going for another Fuji. It ultimately depends on what you want from the camera, but there are some very good deals to be had at the moment.

Chris

I've also been looking for a digital camera and was going down the line of "cameras from a camera maker will have better lenses, etc.". I was looking at paying about £250.

Have a look at this (http://digitalcameras.kelkoo.co.uk/b/a/sbs/124901/5276215.html). A mate who seems to know about these things mentioned Kodak and mentioned a Kodak camera that gets "best buy" ratings, but the price was about £400.

Read this review (http://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/DX6490/D64A.HTM) and it seems like this is a good camera. Look again at the first link, and you'll see that Dixons are doing this as a Web special at £219.99 (as opposed to £260 in their shops).

This looks like a bargain.

HTH

Doug

Doug,
I have no personal experience of the Kodak range, looks good from the review. The zoom is pretty good at 10x.

If you can, try and see some images first hand, if you like them then buy it.

Allan