Digital cameras

It has finally come time for me to retire my trusty old Kodak DC280 digicam for a newer digital camera. The options and features available on the new cameras are almost dizzying. To that end, I am trying to decide on what the most basic features are that I should look for in a camera.

My current Dc280 is a 2 mega pixel camera with a fairly limited optical and digital zoom. A camera with at least 3.2 mega pixel seems like a good base. The limitation of the zoom on my current camera has annoyed me enough times to want a camera with at least 7x optical zoom and at least 2x digital zoom.

The next big factor in consideration is storage media. My DC280 uses compact flash and though it works fairly well, I find that it tends to slow down as the number of pictures stored on the media grows. I find that it takes longer and longer to store pictures which can get increasingly annoying as “prized” moments are missed entirely due to my cameras inability to take the picture.

This might be a limitation of my first gen digicam and have nothing to do with the compact flash media itself, but nonetheless, speed of picture storage and access is a big consideration point for me.

I’ve so far seen cameras that utilize xD Picture Card, Compact Flash, IBM Micro drive, 3″ CD-RW, Sony Memory Stick. But more to the point, each manufacturer has gone with one particular media as their primary choice.

To that end, the question is which camera should I look at?

So far, there are a few contenders:

1. Fuji film Fine pix S5000
2. Konika Minolta DiMage Z2
3. Olympus C-770 Ultra

Are there others to consider? What do you have? What do you recommend? Any and all comments welcome.

Cheers.

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