New Digital Camera

Well, a few months back i managed to lose my digital camera (a canon SD600 that DaNece bought for me) out in the woods on a hike. I've been kicking myself ever since then (i mean seriously, who loses their camera on a day hike?), and been putting off getting a new one.

With vacation approaching, i think it may actually be time to finally make the purchase. Here are my requirements for my new one:

- Has to be sturdy (i am kind of rough on the poor things)

- Has to be compact (i'm a pocket toting kind of guy)

- Has to have image stabilization (i swear i must have parkinsons)

- Needs decent optical zoom, since i wont use digital zoom

- At minimum, i need a 2.5" screen so i can see what i am shooting

- Preferably takes an SD card, since everything else i own takes SD (mp3 player, ipaq, our old SD100 camera, GPS)

 

I'm looking primarily at Canon for a few reasons:

1. The 2 i have had in the past (both powershot SD series) have been great cameras.

2. They aren't as expensive as most of the equivilent Sony's and Nikon's.

3. I've never had a breakage problem with either of my other Canon's (unilke a Casio that the man-child broke in 1 day, or the nikons that i always saw broken come into best buy)

 

So at that stage it boils down to which Canon model?

It seems like there are a TON of different models right now. There is the sd700 (7.1 MP) sd700is (same camera, but with image stabilization), sd1000 (also a 7MP, but not sure what the other differences are), sd800is (7.4MP), sd850is (8.3MP) and the sd900 (10.4MP behemoth).

Since the sd900 is out of my pricerange of no more than $300 for the camera itself (it falls in at $350), I'm thinking either the sd800 ($270) or the sd850 (found for $290). For the extra 20 bucks the pros to the 850 are:

- extra megapixel of resolution

- facial recognition for portrait photos

- a few extra shooting modes (which i probably won't use)

The cons are:

- it weighs slightly more

- it's video isnt as good (1.3FPS, vs 1.7 on the sd800)

- Canon doesn't list it as using noise reduction when using long shutter speeds, which is probably the biggest problem with it if it is true (though I'm thinking more research will show that they just didn't list in in their comparison chart).

 

So this really long post has come down to this: $290 for a Canon SD850IS, $25 for a 2gb hi-performance sd card, and $10 for a case. There goes $325 in about 5 minutes. Bummer!