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Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Which super zoom digicam to choose?

Ok, here I am with my new dilemma. My old Nikon Coolpix is kicking the bucket, as the battery flap lost the hinge and keeps popping open. I love the camera but it's become unreliable, and frankly speaking I would like something which pucks some more punch, especially at the telephoto end. Plus, all the usual needs such as higher resolution (not really), better image quality and so on. A big lens would also helps in low light at short distances, I hope, another of the weak points.
Anyway, my alltime favorite was a konica-Minolta Dimage Z-X (X=2,3,5...) but apparently they're discontinued.

So I have to hunt for a substitute - my requisites are:

  1. at least a 12X Zoom, 'cause I want to take picture of squirrel far away. Plus, going to Africa in December, I don't want to have to get TOO close to lions and hippos to take a decent shot.
  2. AA Batteries, if I can, and SD Cards too. I don't want difficult and expensive proprietary formats such as xD cards (understood, Fuji and Olympus?) nor Memory Sticks (Sony? Drop them!). Ditto for batteries. If I run out of juice I want to be able to spend 10Euros for a new pack, not 40. Damn!
  3. Oh, Video + Audio (stereo if I am not asking too much) would be good, availability of an underwater case (although I can still use the old one for diving, if I can find the case again)
and now, the candidates:

There's also some unlikely outsiders:

As you may have noticed, most of them have SLR-like bodies but can't swap lenses. I am too lazy for this I just want a camera with a good zoom, for nature and travel pictures. Macro is important but am not an expert so manual modes and all those jargon-priority leave me baffled. I do not plan on printing the piccies but I definitely want to look at them on a 20" HD LCD screen. Other people would probably get my shows through Picasa.

Please help me out. I already have had some feedback but want some more unbiased, from expert and not so. Voice your opinion and thanks in advance!

2 comments:

Matt Tavani said...

I know you're saying the Canon TX1 is an outsider, but if you do want to know a bit more about it from people who are using it already, shoot over to http://powershot-tx1.blogspot.com where this is a community happening. Cheers, Matt

Unknown said...

Thanks Matt. the TX-1 is a nice piece of equipmnt but I am not too convinced about the grip. Will check the comunity though.