Very interesting read. My last camera is a sony DSC-H5 which at the time a local shop ranted and raved if its quality. I fell for it without a second thought. What I don;t like about it is the non existent battery life. It uses 2x AA and you MUST use expensive lithium to get any kind of life. If you buy the best Ni-MH they last for maybe 10 minutes, or 3 days in off mode. This alone make it impossible to travel with.
Also back then, to get good zoom, it had to be a gigantic camera, so again it is not very portable.
Before that was a crappy HP camera and I would be embarassed to admit I bought it. I don;t even remeber the model.
The two cannons listed in this thread I really liked at first but after reading reviews am evem more dissappointed. The image quality is questioned in the panasonic, and the expensive canon. And the reliabilby is poor on the small canon, people mention lense motor failure happenes premature. I hate that, because I am very OCD and treat my stuff above average and it always breaks due to poor build / components.
So I guess I have to add one last requirement, and that would be overall reliability, like no desgin flaws that causes premature failure.
Well already you have two competing requirements. You want a "good zoom" (I assume this means you want at least 10x zoom) while you also don't want design flaws that make it easier to fail prematurely. Well, here's the thing. Big zoom lenses require a lot of complex machinery to zoom in and out. The more the zoom, the more this is so. There are some "folded lens" cameras where all of the optical mechanisms are permanently inside the camera body, so nothing's ever exposed to damage; however, these top out at about 4x-5x zoom AFAIK. (To see an example, look at the Panasonic DMC-TS3 -- the lens never comes out of the body.)
Again AFAIK, all superzooms/ultrazooms have a lens that extends outward from the body. At this point in time, you can get a compact superzoom with 10x or 12x zoom that comes in a flat body that doesn't look DSLR-like at all. But that lens is going to be relatively fragile -- it has to pop out when you turn the camera on, and it's got several telescoping sections that move in and out. If you move up to the ultrazoom level (18x zoom or higher) then the cameras start to look more like small DSLR bodies, where the lens barrel is always out there and cannot retract flat into the body. This usually means it won't have to telescope outward as much, or in as many sections, and therefore it is probably more reliable. But suffice it to say, ALL cameras with an extending lens WILL be susceptible to this kind of damage.
That being said, I have a Canon SD600 and a Canon SD760 (both older versions of what is now called the ELPH series), and they both have been subjected to a lot of drops on hard surfaces, and they both have been damaged to some extent. The 600 has a slider switch on the back that turns it from photo mode, to video mode, to playback mode.... it is broken so that it doesn't go into camera mode any more. The other two modes work fine. The lens itself works fine. The 760 has visibly split along the bottom seams... it is literally coming apart, although it still holds together just fine, and it was thin enough to begin with that most people never notice the bottom is open by a couple of millimeters. The zoom lever at the top of the camera is also kind of sticky, so it's hard to zoom in and out. But the lens itself works fine, and the camera itself still performs admirably. Note, this is all due to hard wear/abuse... repeatedly being dropped on hard concrete, etc. Not on purpose of course, but just due to clumsiness or inattention.
Now on to the good side... you can safely say that your battery worries are over. Do NOT buy anything that uses AA's. Buy something with a proprietary LiIon battery and you're pretty much guaranteed 150+ shots per charge. Sometimes 300+ shots per charge. (Depending on whether you use the flash or not, etc.) This is enough to last all day for most people, and even a week-long vacation for some people. Aftermarket no-name batteries tend to come pretty cheap too.
People complaining of image quality issues in most modern cameras are simply spoiled. They want every photo to look like it came from a $3500 DSLR. There are compromises in making something that can fit in your pocket. Suffice to say, the image quality should be notably improved from your Sony. It's not like the camera makers are taking steps backward in image quality. The camera pros can nit-pick all day, but to most people the image quality issues are simply a non-issue.
Facebook
Twitter