Hi, all. I'm looking into purchasing a digital camera for myself. The family already has one, a Nikon Coolpix 4300. It's a pretty darn good camera. 4 megapixels with nice color. I have a couple gripes, though. Indoor shots are _always_ blurry unless you have a tripod. It's practically impossible to take an indoor picture. Also, it only has a 3x optimal zoom.

Anyway, I'm looking to buy a newer digital camera but know little about photography. Nothing less than 4 megapixels will suffice, and I'd appreciate high optical zoom. Picture quality is extremely important. Beyond that, however, I have not kept much up to date with the developments in the digital camera world (or the camera world in general) and though I may ask for some input.

I prefer something relatively small, though it's not the top priority.
Relatively inexpensive, as in under $500. I'd prefer something that I can get for under $400 after shopping around for price. I'll likely get a 128 MB or larger memory card.

As cameras fit different people, if you know a lot about the market perhaps you can suggest brands, models, etc that would suit my needs. I can do plenty of research on my own, but with so many digital cameras on the market it's hard to know where to start.

Thanks in advance!

 

Here are a couple cameras I thought look interesting:

Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-T1
http://www.sonystyle.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP....roductSKU=DSCT1

Cannon PowerShot S400
http://www.powershot.com/powershot2/s400/

 

hmm, the sony looked good and had a nice lens on it. one thing i would ask though, what kind of photography are you going to be doing? anything like landscapes or just shots of pretty stuff i'd suggest going ahead and paying 100 $ more and getting a camera were you could do some stuff manually (focus and aperature). if not, you could go cheaper and still get some good pics. 4 megapixels is really alot (2.1 is a 1600x1200 pic.)

 

Actually, that's 1.9 megapixels.

I'd like to be pretty flexible as to what I can take picture of, but don't want to have a huge camera that I can't take everywhere. As I said, I don't know much about cameras and would have to learn quite a bit before I could do manual settings.

I'm not looking to get a 2 megapixel camera because, for all practical purposes, it can't be edited as much as one would like. The source file is too tiny to deal with, especially if one were to crop and then decide to make an 8X10. It would be practically impossible. I currently have that 4 megapixel which seems large enough for most editing without sacrificing much in the way of quality.

 

Apparently that PowerShot has been updated with the S410:
http://www.powershot.com/powershot2/s500-410/index.html

 

ahh, the elph, nice camera. i would look into that, the manual settings that are allowed are quite nice ( exposure, white balance). the smallness of the optical zoom is quite anoying, but w/ 4 megapixels it shouldnt be as noticable as w/ a 2.1 megapixel (oh, and the thing i was saying above, i looked, its a 2.1 megapixel cam. w/ 1.9 usable...whoda thunk)

 

The PowerShot S45 looks pretty darn good, too:
http://www.powershot.com/powershot2/s50-45/

Do you happen to know the advantage of digital zoom? For our current camera, we keep it off. As far as I knew, it basically just guesses about what colors should belong, therefore making things blurry. Is this not basically the same thing as manually stretching the image larger on a computer? Should I only use the optical zoom, as I am now?

 

i'd stay w/ optical zoom. digital zoom is basically just enlarging a pic...so it does get blury.

 

There's the new Cannon S60 that looks to be very nice. I don't really need 5 megapixels, but it's likely the best of all the cameras I've seen at its size. Supposidely it will be relesaed at $499.

http://www.powershot.com/powershot2/s60/index.html

 

And then there's the Nikon 4200, oddly a NEWER version of the 4300 I have.

http://www.nikon-image.com/eng/PDF/coolpix4200.htm