Digital camera advice
 

So this weekend I want to purchase a digital camera that's going to be affordable, but also decent quality. I'm looking for something that won't be anymore than $350 ($400 max) Canadian, not that i'm cheap it's just that I don't want to spend too much when i'm saving for university. Some other things i'm looking for are:

5 Megapixels or more perferably,
Video capabilities,
Pretty good optical and digital zoom,
USB compatibility.

Any advice would be very helpful. Thanks :).

A few points:

(1) They'll ALL have USB.
(2) Digital Zoom is worthless. 100% worthless. You'll get better results enlarging the image in Photoshop.
(3) Megapixels are an e-penis myth. You won't notice a difference when printing until you basically double the number of megapixels. For a standard 5x7 print, anything 3.5MP or higher will be file.

With that in mind, are there any features that anyone would recommend that are a must have?

It's true you probably won't notice a difference in quality between 3.5 and 5 MP but the more pixels you have, the more you can crop in or less you have to res up for larger prints. With a 3.5 MP camera you won't have much room to crop at all. A 5 or 7 MP camera you can take a tight headshot of someone and print a 5x7 and it'll still look good.

How about in terms of manufacturers?
Is there one that anybody would recommend over another or am I good to go in any direction?

Canon and Nikon are considered to be the top manufacturers. My dad swears by Nikon and I swear by Canon. Brands you should stay away from are HP and Kodak.

I have a Canon Elph SD550 now and I'm pretty happy with it. 7MP, 3X optical zoom. I think you can get it for around 300 now.

Olympus' digicams are extremely good.

Nikon and Canon are of course the kings.

Minolta, Olympus, Pentax all make fantastic stuff. Sony's stuff is like any Sony Product - decent quality but you'll pay more for the same level of quality then you would with other brands.

For a Point-and-Shoot camera, I love my dad's Pentax Optio 555. I think the model's discontinued, but it's compact, it's got a good-grade 5MP sensor (quality over quantity - it's not DSLR-grade, but especially for a point-and-shoot it's a very nice sensor), it's got something like 5x Optical Zoom, and good manual controls. For my personal use, I have a Nikon D50, but that's a ways out of your price range.

Always depends on how people feel about eBay, but I consider something like this to be quite a fantastic deal: Link - Camera, extra battery, 256MB card (enough to get a couple hundred pictures on High Resolution - I think I get 370-some on a 512MB card), $200. Only thing you really wouldn't have is a factory warranty, but the camera's also pretty rugged - since it's a family camera it's been dropped a few times. It takes hits surprisingly well, and can also be repaired without much difficulty - The lens wouldn't go back in after being dropped once, and a simple screwdriver fixed that.

Thanks for everyone's help. Currently i'm liking what Canon has to offer with their powershot cameras. They definitely seem afforable and have alot of things going for them. However, since I didn't have alot of time to look into it, I still haven't checked out Minolta, Olympus or Pentax as you have mentioned Arainach (also, thanks for the link!).

I will continue to look, but any more advice or help would still be much appreciated so keep 'em coming ;).

We have an older Canon that takes fantastic pictures. Then my parents bought my brother and me a Nikon camera for Christmas (Costco had a buy 1 get 1 deal or something). After seeing the pictures we were taking with them, my mom went out and got herself a higher-grade model Nikon and it takes absolutely beautiful pictures.

I also like how they take SD cards for memory since they seem to be the cheapest and have the smallest profile, so the camera can be made really tiny.

Weird how that switch happens. All the Nikons through the D50 take SD, but the D70s and above take CF.

So is this to say that all the newer Nikon models do not use SD memory cards or can they use both SD and CF?

"Newer" has nothing to do with it, really. Their High-End DSLR models (many of which predate their newer consumer models) take CF since for some reason it's the standard that's caught on the most in Pro Photography. Their consumer Point-and-Shoot Models and the D50 (their least expensive DSLR, although I wouldn't call it "low-end" - for a lot of things it's better than the more expensive D70s) all take SD.

Since you seem very knowledgable on digital cameras Arainach, do you think a digi cam with a fast shutter speed is necessary? I mean sure I could live with a slow shutter speed, but wouldn't it get annoying if i'm trying to take multiple snap shots?

I've been looking at reviews of cameras and asking around and it seems most cameras, at the price range i'm looking in, are very very good except that they have slow shutter speeds. I'm not overly experienced with using a digi cam so i don't know how shutter speed will affect me in the long run.

If you're concerned about being able to take multiple snapshots in a row, I think you need to find a camera with little or no shutter lag (the amount of time it takes from when you press the shutter button to when it saves to your memory card.) This is different from shutter speed.

Yeah that's what I meant :(.
Thanks for clearing that up GrimReaper.

That also depends in some circumstances on the speed of the memory card. Obviously, the camera can't save any faster than the card can write. A camera that can write at a decent speed is key, but other than reading user reviews it's almost impossible to know such things beforehand. True shutter speed... For 99% of your shots it probably won't matter. While my DSLR goes down to 1/4000th of a second, I rarely take shots any faster than 1/250th of a second, and most Digital Camera have at least that much speed.

Arainach, do you have any idea if the different kinds of memory cards have different writing speeds? It might be compact flash can be written to faster so professionals choose to go with it instead of the smaller SD cards.

So i'm guessing one way to solve that would be to get a highspeed memory card, assuming the digi cam can take it.

HS memory doesn't seem to be too expensive either, unless i'm getting a huge amount of memory.

I haven't seen a comparison to be certain, but that would be my suspicion as well. My guess would be that a few years ago they were significantly faster, became the standard, and it stuck. Today, I don't think there's a huge difference. For instance, I use a 133X Corsair SD card in my D50, and I can take bursts of up to 20ish shots (6.1MP, Normal Compression JPG - a couple of Megabytes a file) at 2.5FPS before my write buffer fills up.

Canon A620 from newegg.com

Thanks everyone for all your help and advice, I really appreciate it :).
Ultimately, in the end, I went with the Canon Powershot A530.
http://img125.imageshack.us/img125/4...wershot1yt.jpg
The camera (and all its accessories), a 512MB SD memory card and rechargeable batteries came up to about $315 with tax overall.
The price felt right and I absolutely love the camera.
Thanks again everyone!