Cmaera Geeks, Advice on Digital

I want to get a smallish camera for up on the hill. I'm less concerned about pixels than lens quality and shutter lag. Advice?

There was a good post about this last winter and what i went with after all the advice was the Sony DSC-P100 5.1mp....small enough to easily take with you and you ask about shutter lag.....it's the quickest little guy around....i took some great shots last season with it.....

www.dpreview.com has shutter lag figures for every camera they test.

My Fuji F10 is really, really fast (http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/fuji...zoom/page4.asp), has amazing battery life, and takes very good pictures, but the continuous shooting mode isn't very good (though it's only about 1.1 seconds shot to regular shot).

The only pocket digicams with decent continuous shooting are the Canon S300/S400/S500 -- but they have no action (i.e. fast shutter speed) mode, meaning your skiing action shots tend to come out blurry. This sucks, because I love Canons and it would be an easy software fix, but no luck so far.

I haven't found a pocket camera that does both well and still has decent picture quality. Casios are really small and easy to use but the picture quality isn't very good. Panasonics have nice image stabilization but their pictures are really oversharpened and ugly. Nikons tend to blue fringe really badly. Sonys are inconsistent: some of them have major focus problems (skier666 had this issue), some seem to work fine.

to back up my claim about my sony, here is an action pic i took with it.....i agree with Spats that some sonys like those fancy ones with the big screens, don't have the greatest action shot capabilities but this model is good and was recommended by some pros at a respected store in NYC for this purpose.....

Oh and this is not even using burst mode, this is just straight up turn it on and shoot.....

http://www.biglines.com/photos/blpic35564.gif

P.S. - this is vinman....i feel like this is the 5th time ive posted this shot of him...

If you don't mind 3.2MP, then the Canon PowerShot A510 is an excellent ski camera with fast shutter response, 2.3fps and a good buffer. It is also cheap so you won't cry if you kill your $170 camera.

I used the previous version of this camera (two versions back, the A70) and got great results.

They just came out with the A610 which has a faster lens, better sensor (bigger and 5MP), bigger LCD, 2.4fps unlimited, and better movie modes. (edit to add 610 also has digic II processing for faster shooting, focusing, etc)

It seems to go for $300. This may be my next point and shoot... that or the Panasonic LX1.

summit does the A510 use an SD card for memory? I'm looking to upgrade from a Kodak easy share POS but I don't wanna have to shell out $$ for new memory cards if I don't have to

Facing the same issue here b/c I have a nice CF card... but yea most cameras these days use SD. S510 and 610 included.

www.dpreview.com is chock full of specs on the cameras.

My advice re memory is ebay what you have and use ebay to buy your new card you can save good money there... good 1gb for like $70 512 for like $40.

Using Nikon CoolPix 4100 - 4.0 pix, 3x zoom.
- Very small body with full range of features. Almost too light-weight.
- Single shot shutter delay can be annoying.
- Action/continuous mode excellent for skiing. Rips 15 pics in continuous mode.
- Lens clarity is excellent. results in crisp photos w/ great color. Even in continuous mode.
- decent video capabilities. i rarely use, though.

paid ~ $250 US for camera.
- purchased 256mb chip that holds ~ 500 pics shotting at 1mb pix / pic.
- uses rechargeable batteries and purchased an extra set of batteries. Must have!!! Always carry extra set.
total ~ 350US.

It is a year + old so I expect you would see some improvements for the same amount of $ this year.

Try search. I know there was discussion on digitals last spring.