Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Need Help with Christmas Camera

My wife wants a zoom Camera for Christmas. I want to spend $300 to $400 at most.<p>I need your advice,Thanks<p>BTW,35mm not Disc,I think

Littlebit. The $300-400 keeps you in the range of point and shoot type. The Nikon, Cannon and Olympus are all good. The Cannon seems to be a more user friendly. Most of the new ones all have auto loading, asa, and exposure qty monitoring. They each have several models in tat price range. It would be a personal choice as to which features you like best.As with most, they usually ahve so many bells and whistles that you neve end up usin all of them.

saddlesore,<p>Thanks for the reply. I don't know squat about them. Was hoping to get some direction. Is the Cannon line the one to look at? Thanks

Our, (my wife's), everyday camera is a Canon Sure Shot 60. It's autoload, autofocus, autoflash, and autozoom. She loves it and it does a very good job. I'm sure what we paid for it is well within what you're considering. <p>We've got my camera, a Minolta 400X with a couple different lens attachments and all sorts of bells and whistles plus a digital camera of some breed, (HP?). Probably 90% of all our photos are taken with her camera.<p>2D

Littlebit- Most of todays name brand cameras offer excellent photo quality. Minolta, Pentax, Cannon, Nikon,Olympus, ect. Combined with todays film, and auto-focus it is hard to take a bad shot if you do your part. I own two Minolta's. One a point and shoot 38 & 60mm and a Maxxum body with several lenses. The point and shoot is lighter and more easily carried on long outings. I have the 28-70 and the 70-210 zoom lenses for the big camera. These are nice for long range outdoor shooting, but the 70-210 lens gets heavy quick. The point and shoot takes better wide area photos. I have a friend who is into photography and she just bought a new magnesium body Pentax that is very light. She also has the same camera I have so I can borrow her portrait lens and she borrows my 70-210 zoom. Lenses get expensive, plus the flashes add to the cost. Have a Merry Christmas. Bob

If you are taking it on outdoor outings, I'd HIGHLY recommend a waterproof, or at least weather resistant model. Our Pentaz IQZ 160 is currently in for (wet) repairs (if salvagable) for the second time! It is 13 months old. I was just looking at a Minolta, waterproof to 35 feet, floating, point and shoot at the camera store a couple hours ago while picking up film. About 90 bucks! I didn't really investigate all the features - it just kind of caught my eye floating in that fish bowl. Don't think it was a zoom tho. Pentax does make an IQZ model that is waterproof, and less than the $270 we paid for our spur-of-the-moment misjudgement. The 160 had way more features and capabilities than we ever needed or learned to use! Made too much noise in hunting situations, but took good pics. Never really liked the thing anyway, but then I'm hung up on my old SLR and interchangable lenses. Try the thing out in a store before buying, for the features important to you. Good luck.

LittleBit, I bought that Minolta Weather-proof Las talks about 12 years ago. I've taken underwater picture's of the kid's in the swimming pool, and have dropped in the lake off the boat. It's bright yellow and hard to loose sight of, heavy plastic/fibre body, with no exposed metal parts, and O-ring sealed everywhere. Right now it's packed and over at the new house, so I can't give you any specifics, its not an auto zoom, but rather has a Normal and Close Up button. New one's might be different. This camera has turned out to be my all around 35mm camera. I went all out and bought a Cannon, with all the lenses and other gadgets when I went to Alaska last year, and never even used them. Too much trouble! My wife's compact zoom takes good outside pictures, is smaller and allot lighter, but has red-eye bad. I've never had red-eye problems with my Minolta Weather-proof. I wouldn't recommend it for hunting or heavy back-packing, but for every day use it's great. <p>Phil<p>P.S. I paid about $275 for mine, but I think nowdays there in the $190 bracket. But not sure.

I just bought a 35mm compact for wife for Christmas. She wanted a small camera with auto everything. We looked at a lot of them and finally settled on the Nikon Lite Touch Zoom 120. It has about 3x zoom telephoto capability. It also will do panoramic shots which not that many compact 35's will do. I got it a Circuit City on sale for about $190.

I appreciate all the responses. I didn't know if one brand was the "Leupold" of cameras. I don't need a waterproof one as my wife doesn't hunt,she just loves to take endless amounts of pictures [img]images/icons/cool.gif" border="0[/img] <p>She does want it to have the zoom feature and I would like her to have one that takes high quality pics with good resolution. <p>I'll check around this weekend and look at some of these mentioned. Thanks