My 15 year old daughter loves to take pics and is going to Europe for 2 weeks this summer. I need advice on the "best" camera to send her off with. Limited budget (I dream of spending $300), but I'd rather spend the $ on a camera and selected accessories than on film and processing.

I "think" I need: 2-3x optical zoom, CCD, NiMH batteries and charger, optical AND LCD viewfinder, compact flashcard and USB data transfer.

I'm afraid of used and reconditioned.

Thanks for your help!

-- Rich Lash (richlash@buffnet.net), June 07, 2000

Answers

Pentax ZX-M, a 28mm lens & a 50mm. :)

-- benoit (foo@bar.com), June 07, 2000.

I'd have to agree that a digital camera probably isn't the best choice here. On such a trip she'll probably want to take lots of pictures. Any digital would rapidly fill up, no matter how much memory you put into it (unless she used really low resolution and high compression, which would likely not allow for decent prints later).

Get here a decent auto focus point-and-shoot with a zoom lens. But a bunch of film, a few sets of batteries, and send her on here way.

-- Greg Philmon (gphilmon@yahoo.com), June 07, 2000.

Well, since this was a digitally oriented forum the last time I looked and I feel my horns and tail are sprouting, I'll play "Devil's Advocate" and side with a digicam. I'll also mention that a 15 year old in Europe for the first time will probably want little more than to point, possibly zoom, and then shoot with little thought to metering, adjusting aperture, etc. unless she's pretty familiar with cameras and won't mind if a few shots don't make it to the album due to processing problems or plain old pilot error... Oh well, who needed that great shot of the Eifel Tower anyhow? :-(

You'll have to do the math and figure the feasability for yourself, but I don't think your daughter will stop taking pictures the instant she returns home or that you'll retire the camera to a dusty spot on the family mantlepiece. So, with that in mind, it seems to me that in the long run the digicam will pay for itself and get a healthy start doing just that on the trip.

Now you really have two issues at work here. Which is cheaper, digital or film? (pretty much a no brainer in the long run...) And how much storage would you need to cover the images she'll want to take on the trip?

Let's say that you can probably buy a good 2 megapixel digicam with 3X zoom for around $600, complete with rechargeables and charger. Add in another $130, or so, and you probably have all the memory you'd need for a two week trip, with images recorded in normal compression mode and a bit of judicious sorting out of bad images at the end of the day or over breakfast the next morning. With my PDR-M5 I can get about two images per megabyte of media at normal 8:1 compression. So that nets you about 128, 1600x1200 images, per 64 megs of memory which will set you back about $1 per image or $130, or so, on ebay. (well a $1 per image for filling the card once on this trip that is...)

What? You say that you're much more prolific than me and require much more storage for a 2 week trip... Well, then I say(in my best Bullwinkle the Moose voice), "Now sit right there while I pull a rabbit out of this here hat..." No, not more expensive memory. How about letting your fingers do the walking before the trip and contacting a few cybercafes along the route? I'll bet that you can arrange to download your images over the net to a free photo site or just email them home. Or you could do as some others have and simply take a zip disk, or two, or a Jaz disk along and dump images to them at each cybercafe and then erase the smartmedia or compactflash card(s) for your camera. This might be VERY do-able! Just make sure you buy a camera that has a USB port for download and you'll probably be set as long as you remember to take that all important setup & drivers disk along with you on your trip.

If you can swing the high end, or want to, I guess the simplest solution would be to buy a digicam that can take an IBM microdrive and give yourself and your daughter 340MB worth of images to play with before you even need to consider transferring them out of the camera. But that option will about triple the $300 budget you hoped for in your post.

My personal solution? A mini-laptop made by Mitsubishi called an Amity CN with an upgraded aftermarket 4GB hard drive and a PCMCIA to Smartmedia Adapter so I can dump my images to the hard drive. It's not the cheapest way to go, it cost me about $650 with the upgraded drive which I installed, but it's also a lot higher capacity storage than a microdrive, weighs a mere two pounds, and you can't surf from a digicam... yet! :-)

By the way, many posts to the contrary, it seems that smartmedia costs no more than compactflash if you shop around. Although, smartmedia, in fact, should be somewhat cheaper and you can still get larger compactflash cards than smartmedia cards.

Good Luck!

-- Gerald M. Payne (gmp@francomm.com), June 08, 2000.

After that well intentioned, but long winded, answer, I have to come down on the side of simplicity, ease and economics for this situation. Come on: A young 15 year old daughter dealing with the complications of a digital camera and all that necessary paraphernalia? While I'm not personally big on them, I sent my teenage daughters off with a nice moderate zoom APS camera (about $150 for a good one). Nothing more simple and easy to use. Drop in the film and shoot good pictures to your heart's content. Battery and cartridge film available worldwide.

-- T.B. (BTB44@aol.com), June 09, 2000.

T.B.,

I'll try to keep it short. I wouldn't want to be accused of being long winded... again! (since it was typed, shouldn't that be long fingered?) ;-)

While your reply was well intentioned(Gee, I didn't think that sounded like a backhanded compliment when you wrote it -it must be the way I typed it?), if my 7 year old niece can learn to use a digicam with about an hour of practice and manage to nail 22 out of 24 shots at a function the following day, I think it's fair to say that the average 15 year old could probably do even better with just a bit more practice. You didn't really mean to suggest that your ability to deal with consumer technology greatly surpasses that of the average web-surfing, microwaving, mp3-playing, nintendo-mastering, gameboy toting technocrat, er, teenager of today, did you? :-)

I guess the one of the main points I was trying to make, and probably failed at, was that immediate gratification is not the only benefit of an LCD display on a digicam. It provides a very nice way to determine whether or not you actually got that shot you can't live without. Try that on an APS. By the way, have you ever seen the look on the face of a person who's just "burnt up" a roll of APS film on "the best shots they've ever taken", of a one time event, and then realized that the film didn't advance because it never got started correctly or jammed after the first shot? It's not "pretty".

I wouldn't dream of making the case that digital has a lower startup cost -it doesn't, yet! But, it does have a reasonably short catching up period when you count film & developing costs, and with long term use can provide considerable savings.(I think it costs my parents something like $11 a roll for APS film & local drugstore developing) The thing that really tips the scales in digital's favor are the extras that come along with the technology, like a fast learning curve(compared to film), less arcane post processing control, low per image cost (practically zip if you don't print, just a few electrons per shot -at about $0.10 a kilowatt!), nearly instant assurance of a properly exposed, well focused, nicely composed shot, two dollar 8"x10's, etc.

Darnit, I might just be long winded, afterall... ;-)

-- Gerald M. Payne (gmp@francomm.com), June 10, 2000.