Compact Red

What Compact Digital Camera for a Child 8 years old?

My son is quite arty so I have decided to buy him a digital camera for Christmas. I am thinking about the Panasonic FS5 in red (fav col) as it has good reviews. I want to spend about £100 – 120.

People so often ask: “Which one is a good camera to buy?”
Here is my 10 cents on the subject:

Point & Shoot cameras are wonderfully handy because of their small size.
When light conditions are ideal, they even take really nice photos – all of them do.

However, they all DO have limitations – they don’t do very well in low light situations (i.e. noisy photos, hard to avoid blur, etc). The little onboard flash is very harsh at close range, and doesn’t reach very far.
Many of them have no manual functions, so you are limited to only very basic photos, you can’t compensate for unusual situations, or do many fun “tricks” and special effects.
P&S’s also suffer from frustrating shutterlag and many of them chew through batteries rather quickly.

However, if you’re ok with all those limitations, then go ahead and pick one, most of them (the same type and same price range) are rather similar. Personally I would pick either a Canon or a Nikon, and would certainly stay away from Kodak.

A higher end P&S will give you more manual options and better quality. Many of those even give you the option of adding a proper flash (which makes a big difference to your flash photos).

Don’t worry too much about megapixels…. there is a limit to how many pixels you can squash into a tiny P&S sensor before you actually LOSE quality rather than gain it.

Decide which features are important to you, and look for cameras that have that feature.
Then go compare a few models on www.dpreview.com .

The very best thing you can do for your success is to borrow some books and learn about basic photography. A bit of knowledge will make a much bigger difference to your photos than your choice of P&S camera can.

For what it’s worth – if I was in the market for a P&S camera right now, my choice would be a Canon Powershot SX10 IS http://www.usa.canon.com/consumer/controller?act=ModelInfoAct&fcategoryid=144&modelid=17630

However, for a young child, I understand that you might be reluctant to spend that much money. It would be a good idea, to just get a small, basic camera for starters. Should he really stick with it and show an eagerness to learn, then you can always upgrade some day.
By the way – do get him a few books from the library, hopefully he’ll enjoy actually learning about photography

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