Birthday: Which Digital Camera?

Canon Powershot A520 <= my personal favorite for this catagory even though it is a little more...
HP PhotoSmart BMW Williams.F1 Team Special Edition 4.1MP Digital Camera
Kodak EasyShare C330 4.0MP Digital Camera
Sony Cyber-shot 4.1MP Digital Camera

for a 4mp camera and a $200 price limit you are not going to get the nice ultra slim models or a lot of fancy bells and whistles

I would try to stick with something from Canon or Nikon. Just my pref. I have an older Sony. Digital cameras are a blast. Enjoy!

this place has the best reviews of cameras on the internet, imho. so what ever cameras you are choosing between read the review on it.

http://www.dpreview.com/

Leareth said:

Canon Powershot A520 <= my personal favorite for this catagory even though it is a little more...
HP PhotoSmart BMW Williams.F1 Team Special Edition 4.1MP Digital Camera
Kodak EasyShare C330 4.0MP Digital Camera
Sony Cyber-shot 4.1MP Digital Camera

for a 4mp camera and a $200 price limit you are not going to get the nice ultra slim models or a lot of fancy bells and whistles

Click to expand...

his recomendations are some of the best
and i would reccomend them also
especially the sony cyber-shot

I heard really good things about the Canon Powershot series. How about the A85. That is within your price range (barely), and it also has 4.0 megapixels. If I were you I would buy from a top camera company such as Canon, as you know you will get a quality product.

Note: I just got into photography, so I'm not sure my recommendations are the best.

I just picked up a Kodak V550, It's their new Compact Line of Cameras, 5mp, Schneider Lens. Excellent Pics, Huge LCD.

Highly Recommend

my vote would be for a canon or nikon...

Be careful with Canons because of their problems with cracking LCDs. Casio EX-S100 is a very small camera with good amateaur results for around $200. I've played with Casio digital cameras before, and they are very good. My friend owns a EX-Z750 and it's very impressive (although out of your price range in this case.) The Casio battery life is far better than any Canon or Nikon, and although I wouldn't put down my Nikon for anything serious, the Casio EX-S100 is the biggest contender for what you're looking for.

Oh, and don't worry about megapixels. They don't matter, and megapixel count can usually be ignored. What matters is sensor size, and you'll get a similar sensor size no matter what camera you get in the sub-$200 range. (For example my Nikon d70s has 6 megapixels, but has better image quality [supposedly. it's so damn close that it honestly doesn't matter] than the canon rebel xt with 8 megapixels.) So I'd advise that you not take megapixels too seriously.

But yeah, that's just what I know from cameras I've actually touched/owned/fiddled with. I've heard good stuff about the Kodak camera, but haven't been able to find anyone with it.

Sony DSC-T7... oh man I want one of those. Slim sexy and 5 megapixels, Carl Zeiss optics.

DP Review is a great website & you could also check out http://www.dcresource.com.

As posted above, to stay ~$200 and get something small will be difficult.
I have a Canon S400, a model that is a couple of year old. It is similar to their current SD line in size (slightly chunkier) but uses CF instead of SD cards.
It's a great camera that is compact and takes great pictures.
You could probably get this camera for about $200 on ebay; I'm not sure if any merchants still have old stock on this.
If you're willing to get a slightly older camera that otherwise fits your criteria, I would highly recommend this one.
If not, then the current Canon slim 4MP camera is the SD300, which will run you closer to $300.

Good luck and happy snapping!

Canon SD300
http://www.stevesforums.com/forums/view_topic.php?id=44980&forum_id=15
http://reviews.cnet.com/5208-7593-0.html?forumID=58&threadID=119566&messageID=1357279
http://www.digitalcamera-hq.com/canon-powershot-sd300-reviews.html

Canon's LCDs on their smaller digital cameras crack. There's talk about the SD400 and SD500 cracking, but the SD300 has an obvious problem. I remember reading about some guy who tried to crack his SD300 screen by pushing on it, and wasn't able to crack it. He exerted a good amount of force on it, and it held. The general opinion about the LCD is that it cracks because of cold weather/temperature fluctuations. Other manufacturers don't seem to have this problem, though.

Stay away from the sony cameras. I have one and people I know have them and they don't take that great of pictures.

My friend has an Olympus C-650 or a C-700. It is a really nice camera. You can buy them on Amazon.com. They have 1.8" LCDs I think which is a good size, 10x Optical Zoom, yet for a large zoom camera, is pretty small. Its obviosuly not the size of a Canon Digital Elph, but it It's not HUGE.

I think the C-650 (4mp) is $260-270 on Amazon, but you will find that 10x zoom (x 4x digital zoom) is really helpful. I have found cameras are pretty stupid if you can't zoom in.

Canons take good pictures too, much better than my Sony DSC-p73 4mp camera.

I got a Kodak CX7220 for taking quick pics and a backup for my SLR. A huge pet peeve is that it doesn't mount in OSX when I plug it in, only iPhoto opens, or proprietary Kodak software that's a pain to use. I would check into whatever camera you're thinking of getting and make sure OSX will mount it as an external drive, so you can have complete control over your files.

Canon makes some good cameras. I have the Powershot A95 and it is very versitile. It is out of your range and kinda big but you get some great pics with it. I say look into the Powershot A85 and see if you like it. Try to find a store near you that might have one and mess around with it.

ZoomZoomZoom said:

Be careful with Canons because of their problems with cracking LCDs.

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although i am a Nikon person in the SLR world i have had several canon pocket cameras, they have been in the desert in the middle east and in the snow in the alps and the screens never cracked.

What is your source to say they crack?

EJBasile said:

Canons take good pictures too, camera.

Click to expand...

Actually, it's usually the photographer that takes the picture

javiercr said:

although i am a Nikon person in the SLR world i have had several canon pocket cameras, they have been in the desert in the middle east and in the snow in the alps and the screens never cracked.

What is your source to say they crack?

Click to expand...

I had listed 3 sources already, and there's plenty more if you google it. And, the problem is with the SD300, and maybe SD400 and SD500. Never said anything against the A95 and such - in fact, my friend had one of those (or something from the A-series) and i remember there being some manual features on there.