Ok since this is what I do for a living (manufacture electronics) I will give you some pointers...I would look for retail priced camera between $150 and $200 (with your discount it would be less).Originally Posted by frankykeno
Okay since I can NOT live without a digital camera I need some advice. Oh and I will be buying it through WalMart since Mike works there and I get the employee discount so I've been looking at their website. This page specifically....
http://www.walmart.com/search/browse...atNavId=597467
- I want to spend at maximum about $100 dollars.
- I want a camera that will take decent close up pictures (for the snakes mostly). It doesn't have to be professional grade, just a decent clear picture.
- How many megapixels is the minimum that will do (most in that price range seem to be 5 or 6)?
- Do you need both digital and optical zoom? I'm not quite sure why some have it and some don't and what the benefits of having both are.
- WalMart carries HP, Samsung, Polaroid and Kodak in their major brand names that I recognize in this price range. Any of them preferred over others as far as a good reliable camera?
- I know I want one that will have memory cards. I am assuming when it says "internal memory" that is all the camera will do and there's no slot for extra memory cards? Is this a correct assumption since the others says "supports SD memory cards"?
- If I buy a bright pink digital camera will my husband have a fit???? (hahahahahahahaha had to toss that one in!)
Thanks for any feedback guys and gals.
The # of megapixels is a marketing gimick (and really only comes into play when you try and take large pictures (ie. a normal 35mm 4x6 is about 3 megapixels) so a 5 or 6mp camera means you can get the same picture quality of a 35mm film camera but at about 8x10 size...make sense?) The mega pixels also help when you want to zoom in on a part of a picture and blow it up (say you want to zoom in on one in a large picture). In short, if you mainly are going to use the camera to post pics to the internet or print 4x6 images the numbers of mega pixels won't really matter.
Get the best optical zoom you can (in most cases this will be 3x). Digital zoom is nice but really will kill the pic quality (personally I never use it...it is that bad)
Brands - insider note - there are only 5 camera manufactures in the world (chinese, sony, nikon, canon, samsung (though they are new)). Polaroid and Kodak don't exist as companies any longer it is just a name on a chinese camera (same with HP, Sanyo and numerous others) - now this is not to say the camera are junk but don't think the name has anything to do with quality. I own 2 sony's and a canon (love all of them) - so personally I would lean toward one o these. Samsung has gotten very good reviews but I don't have any personal experience with them.
All cameras support some type of memory card. Unless you have other devices that use a particular type I wouldn't worry what type you get (SD is the most common, but all are about the same price and work just the same)
Some featurers that are nice to have - face recognizition (makes the camera focus on faces for better pictures that don't have the skin washed out), fast saving (the time it takes to take a picture save it to memory and be ready to take another - chinese brands are horrid at take forever - a fast camera means you can take back to back pics quicker - real benefit with snakes), out to TV (nice for sharing pics on the big screen), macro (this is what allows very up close pics - like those cool head shots we see), view finder (the little hole you look through - a lot of folks are getting away from these (people just want to look at the LCD display) but when it is windy, you are moving, the snake is moving,etc. the viewfinder really helps to stablize the image so the picture looks better.
Hope this helps...if you have any other specific questions let me know.
Sean
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