Canon S400's replacement or similar? (digital cameras) (1 Viewer)

[McPaul]

I'm looking for a new digital camera. Here's what I want.

small. like, REALLY small. I want to take it everywhere with me. EVERYWHERE. it doesn't have to be the tiniest thing you've ever seen, but it should fit VERY comfortably in a pocket.

more than 3x zoon. I want a HEFTY optical zoom. 4x? (on a small camera I doubt I'd get much more)

good battery. The battery's got to last a good while.

reasonable time between shots incl. startup time.

Excellent image quality.

above average red eye and flash (for a small camera I know this is hard to do)

good sensor to lens combination. I don't care whether it's a 4 or 5 megapixel, as long as the images come out with little noise.

I think that's it. I'm willing to pay for it.


The Canon S400 would almost be exactly what I'm looking for. the only thing I think it doesn't have is a 4+x zoom, and good red eye, and flash.



I have encountered the Pentax Optio 555 upon reading the net. It's reviewed well at Steve's and dcresource, but I don't trust those places as much as dpreview.com. and there's no review there yet.

This Pentax Optio 555 has a 5x zoom, supposedly good battery life, small-ish, although not as small as the S400, but has a cheap look and feel, and supposedly has image quality problems (lots of noise, pincushioning, vingetting, barrel distortion, bad red eye and flash capability). Does anyone have this camera? I'm really curious about HTF opinions. If the picture quality isn't as bad as I've read, it might be a good option.


Does anyone else have any options? opinions? onions? comments?


Also, I notice that the Pentax, Nikon, and some other cameras are going with SD memory instead of CF or MS. Does SD offer any advantages/disadvantages over CF or MS? I really don't care what card it is, as long as it's not going to be a beta.


Cameras I have used and liked recently:

Sony DSC-V1
- great zoom, but big, bulky, fingers got in the way of the pop up flash, good red eye, rather confusing menu system (but I didn't use it for long)

Canon S400
- as mentioned, small, great feel, but not enough zoom, and relatively poor flash power and red eye.

Canon S50
- great camera! would have liked more zoom, lots smaller and lighter. good battery life, picture quality (despite the reviews I read), but great camera for me!

Sony Cybershot 72
- no. nice size. Wouldn't mind trying an 8, 9, or 10, but with a bigger zoom, better flash and red eye, amd SIGNIFICANTLY better picture quality than the 72. good feel, again as opposed to the 72.



Combine these Cameras for me!

 

[Eggert]

Have you heard about this camera: Sony Cybershot - DSC-T1

It only has 3x optical zoom though (you mentioned 4x as a minimum), but I thought it had so many other good qualities (not too mention its small size) that I should at least mention it.


Best regards,
Eggert

 

[DaveBB]

You're looking for something that doesn't exist on the market right now; you're going to have to give in a couple of areas.

Of all the small digital cameras right now the S400 is the best out there. The Sony DCSp10 also has a lot of the things you are looking for but there's been a fair amount of complaints about noise and picture quality. The flash also has the same problem as the s400.

The Canon s50 rocks but it feels like a damn brick.

I have a feeling Canon might introduce a replacement for the s400 sometime this year because they talked about releasing a ton of new cameras this year.

I love the look of that Sony T1, but we'll see how it performs when it hits the US sometime in February.

 

[McPaul]

The Sony T1 looks tempting, this is the first I've seen of it.

http://www.hardwarezone.com/articles...49&cid=15&pg=1

This is a very 'hi-tech' camera, but the mem stick DUO card just screams EXPENSIVE!!!

It also seems to suffer from low flash power, and a few of the picture artifacts mentioned above.

Canon is set to release two cameras per month this year, or so I heard. So I'm assuming the S400 replacement will be coming soon.

I know it's not really out there on the market, but I can wait!!

Love the look of that T1!!

 

[John Nelson]

My brother has the Canon S400. Amazingly compact, truly fits into a shirt pocket and takes very sharp photos. But, it does not have that 4x zoom you're looking for (most digitals seem limited to 3x in the category you're looking at). Has a nice panoramic stitching feature he used to get a good 270 degree picture of the battlefield at Antietam, Maryland. I keep watching for the price on that camera to come down so I can pick one up myself. Like you, I'd like a very compact quality camera that I could always carry with me in case any interesting photographic opportunities present themselves (eg. Elvis, Bigfoot, UFO's, the usual stuff).

 

[McPaul]

I know!! was at a boxing match just last week with bigfoot vs. 4 green little aliens, with Elvis calling the match .... DAMMIT!! wouldn't ya know it, I missed a photo op!

 

[Jay Taylor]

I own a digital SLR camera with 6.3 mega-pixels but needed something small that I could carry in my pocket for those “UFO” shots.

I decided on the Nikon Coolpix 3700 that was released in December. Although it only has 3 mega-pixels, the deciding factor was its ability to take 640x480 full TV-frame video at 30 frames per second until your SD card fills up! I believe that as of December it was the only sub-compact camera with that capability, although the ultra-compact Sony DSC-T1 also has this capability. The Nikon also has a great macro-photography capability.

It has a 3x zoom and uses an SD card. I chose a Panasonic 512meg SD card because it had the 10 MB per second speed necessary to do the 640x480, 30fps video without problems.

I love this camera.

A good site to read reviews and user comments on digital cameras is the Digital Photography Review Forum here:

dpreview.com

Jay Taylor