Recommendations for Digital camera

[JasonP]

Originally Posted by abucksdiver

Martin,
From memory, I have a 16MB, a 128MB and a 256MB xD card at home... (maybe 2 256 and no 128?)


Andrew

As you can now get a 1Gb compact flash for less than 20 quid, it's not really a consideration, is it? The fact that Canon take Compact Flash is an advantage in my book as it's cheaper and it's what all the pro kit takes,

Jason

[B]

Originally Posted by abucksdiver

My 1 1/2 YO FujiFilm F810 camera has started giving me "Zoom Errors".

Apparently, it will cost me £175 to send the camera back to Fuji, who may or may not fix it!

Anyway, for £25 less than the repair cost, I can buy a new Fji F11...

But are there better cameras out there for around the £200 mark? (and if you can get an U/W casing, that would be an advantage!)

Cheers
Andrew

dont just bin it......my old man managed to flood his digital camera..........could be bought new for £150 sold it on ebay for £45!!!!!! and they were fighting over it

[Bardo]

Originally Posted by The Prices

dont just bin it......my old man managed to flood his digital camera..........could be bought new for £150 sold it on ebay for £45!!!!!! and they were fighting over it

Yep - never ceases to amaze me what people will pay for crap on ebay. Earlier this year I managed to drop my brand new mobile phone (Sony Ericson K750i) into the lake at Vobster Quay and was most annoyed to find that I didn't have any insurance cover on it. Hoping to at least get a token sum for it, I stuck it on ebay and got over £70 for it! This was despite stating in the auction that the phone was totally f*cked and a repair had already been attempted! What made me laugh was the guy that bought it *still* seemed pleased with his purchase... unbelievable!

[Okeanos]

Originally Posted by Bardo

Yep - never ceases to amaze me what people will pay for crap on ebay. Earlier this year I managed to drop my brand new mobile phone (Sony Ericson K750i) into the lake at Vobster Quay and was most annoyed to find that I didn't have any insurance cover on it. Hoping to at least get a token sum for it, I stuck it on ebay and got over £70 for it! This was despite stating in the auction that the phone was totally f*cked and a repair had already been attempted! What made me laugh was the guy that bought it *still* seemed pleased with his purchase... unbelievable!

Perhaps he had insurance!

[ScubaK@]

I have the olympus. Brilliant camera for underwater! I'm really chuffed with it, you saw the shots we got in Jordan!

Kat

[abucksdiver]

Kat,
Is that the Oly Mju 700?

What is it like for "on the surface"? (Karen reminded me that any new camera is "not just for underwater"!)

Andrew

[Bardo]

Originally Posted by Okeanos

Perhaps he had insurance!

Well good luck to him if he did. I did look into claiming for it on my home contents insurance but once you factor in the cost of the excess and the fact that I had already made a claim on it this year, it didn't make sense to claim for such a relatively 'cheap' item...

Getting back on topic, I have to say that I'd heartily recommend the Canon Ixus 65 + WP-DC3 enclosure that I bought off Amazon for about £365. I chose the Ixus primarily due to its size and the fact that I owned the missus a new compact digital camera after dropping a twinset on her old one. Naturally the model I replaced it with had to have an enclosure available for it so that I could get some use out of it too. I've always liked the Canon cameras as they tend to produce images with very vibrant colours and they're also so kind to skin tones when using a flash - a lot of other cameras tend to 'white out' skin and make you look very pale. The Ixus, on the other hand, produces very rich skin tones that don't make you look like you haven't seen the sun for 10 years!

I took the system underwater for the first time last week at Vobster Quay and then again at Lulworth Cove last weekend. Surprisingly, the enclosure seems reasonably neutral in the water which is a good thing - especially after I attatched a bolt snap to the case with a bit of cave line. Naturally most of the photos I took had a green hue to them which you're gonna get if you don't use a flash. Unless you have a strobe on a long arm, it's not really worth using the internet flash on these things as they tend to be far too close to the lens. This again is where the Ixus really scores as it's highly sensitive ISO800 mode copes surprisingly well in even the crappiest of viz. If I do need light, I tend to fit a video lens shroud to my HID torch as I can at least hold it a reasonable distance away from the camera's lens. Obviously this isn't as good as a real strobe but - coupled with the camera's high ISO rating - it works surprisingly well and does, at least, give the camera something to lock the focus on.

The key to getting the most out of any digital camera is to get your head around image manipulation software like Photoshop or Paintshop Pro. I personally use Paintshop Pro as it's slightly less 'bloatware' than Photoshop. It also includes a surprisingly effective 'Smart Photo Fix' option which removes the green hue and enhances the contrast and colours in most of the images I've thrown at it. If you want to use Photoshop, GLOC wrote a very good article on the subject here...

What I also like about the Ixus is the video mode which transforms it into a very compact little digital video recorder capable of recording movies of upto 1Gb in size at a maximum resolution of 640 x 480 @ 30 or 60 fps. Here's a little clip I captured at Vobster using the Ixus...

IXUS 65 Quicktime Movie - Submerged Truck

[ScubaK@]

It's the one below the 700. I haven't found it great at the surface, no view finder makes it diffcult to use in bright sunshine!

Kat

[Carlb]

You could always try the new Fuji F30.

I have just bought one and it is a really nice little camera. I bought it as a package with the camera, 40m housing, 512mb xD card and leather case for £429.99. This is the package price from Fuji and is available from a number of places. It has such features as manual white balance, shutter priority, aperture priority, underwater preset mode and best of all a really fast shutter response.

There are plenty of camera review sites which can give you more details on the camera. I haven't yet taken mine for a dip, but have been playing with it out of the water since I bought it last Saturday and I like it nearly as much as my FZ5 (I can't get a housing for that!).

[BJ]

Remember, with film photography, film and processing was the ongoing cost. With digital photography it's the hardware (and software) that seems to be an ongoing cost. People keep showing me two or three-year-old cameras that have stopped working and tell me that it is cheaper to buy a new one than to send it away for a repair.