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A friend of mine got a cheap Kodak from Geeks.com - it was not quite as good as the website made out. For a start it was an obvious refurb, although it didn't say that on the site.

Also it had no optical zoom and no way to add more memory - it was 8Mb built-in only, not much good for 3MP.

Most of the stuff I've bought from there has been a bit low-end, like a 100Mbit mini Firewire card, erm didn't say 100Mbit and didn't say it was 4-pin only (the mini type like on camcorders).

They're not quite as bad as TigerDirect, but...

In most cases, I believe that point n shoots get a bad rap by photographers who rely on technology to make their shot instead of skill. I had a Kodak DC something (250?) which was abour 1M and it took reasonable pictures (purchased in 2001). My only gripe was the AA battery holder was cheap plastic and it was difficult to lock in or remove.

I bought the prosumer Oly c-5060 last year and it has amazed me. It was quite a bit more than $70, but I pretty much use it as a point n shoot and occasionally I need to get manual and like having the options to do so. I may buy an aftermarket fixed telephoto lens but otherwise, the default is superb.

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=7-6468-7844 shows what talent can do with point n shoot cameras. Using the 5050, 5060, and 8080 line from Olympus he has shot for National Geographic, Newsweek and most of the major publications and won the highest photography awards.

Most people get hot and bothered seeing the big lenses available for the d-SLR's with the many tiny numbers and markings and tweakable touchy things. However, I bet any amateur carrying a $$5 disposable film camera can take 200% better pictures than they do with a d-SLR.

People always buy way more camera than they need. My recommendation would be that if you aren't planning on making a hobby out of photography, don't spend over $200 on a camera. An "advanced amateur" may buy in the prosumer line, but $650 would be the top budget.

I don't know what Jean's seeing, but the photos look horrid! I wouldn't want to see this camera operating in 'night' mode - that's for sure. Maybe $70 is all very cheap and nice, but it's definitely not making better pictures than a $300 camera. "Noise and mush" -two things that are present on this picture. Oh, and the usual unnatural exagerrated colors too, but every digital camera suffers from this.

For everyone who doesn't know that yet, there's a site le grande for digital cameras http://dpreview.com/ so check this out before buying anything.

Let me disagree, the prints look fine. Unfortunately I can't show you the prints, but printed at 4x6 there's no visible noise and the pictures are clean and sharp. I don't have actual side-by-side prints. If you want to go pixel-peeping, feel free, but personally I don't care what the pictures look like on a computer screen. I hang prints on my wall, not CDs fill with digital pictures, and I would certainly hang 4x6 and probably 5x7 prints from pictures that were shot with that camera. I wouldn't even try to print 12x18, that's not the point.

At 4:1 pixel magnification on a 100 dpi screen (where you can clearly see JPEG artifacts and chromatic aberrations), you're looking at a picture size of approximately 48x64". Printing at such a size would cost typically between $200 and $300 per print (a bit less if you get high volumes). If you're willing to spend that much money on prints, you should consider spending a bit more than $70 on your camera, and even a bit more than $300. You should talk to your local PhaseOne and Hasselblad representatives.

Since the pictures in the articles are straight from the camera "as shot", you can print them to try them. I printed with Photoshop CS on a Mac, on a HP 7960 with the HP driver, on 4x6 borderless HP premium glossy photo paper, with all the driver settings at their default values.

Certainly I wouldn't try to take night pictures with that camera. I was out on Saturday night to take some pictures under moonlight, and I took a DSLR and fast lenses. I also wouldn't take pictures indoors unless I'm in a tight enclosed space with white walls and ceiling, because the flash has very little power and is extremely close to the lens. Choosing the right tool for the job is important, and the CX7220 is certainly a tool that is right for some jobs.

I definitely wouldn't expect a $70 camera to beat a $300 camera in all aspects. But I also don't expect a $14000 car to beat a $60000 car in all aspects. But just like a $14000 can be enough car in many situations, a $70 camera can be enough camera in many situations.

The colors actually look just as shot - they look on the prints the exact way I remember them when I shot them under a bright late-morning sun. The pictures look very colorful because the subjects were very colorful.

::Puts on flameproof suit::

I don't think it's worth spending money on a low quality digital camera. The test of a digital camera isn't the pictures it takes under optimal conditions, it's the pictures it takes in variable everyday conditions that count, because most of your pictures will be in the second box.

If you can't afford or justify the expense of buying a decent digital camera, you can buck the trend and get a quality film camera. Film cameras and film developing are cheap now and can give the picture quality of an expensive digicam. You don't want the quality of special family photos degraded by a $70 digicam.

My first digital camera was a DX6340 - ideal for what I needed at the time

However, after approx a year it developed a flash misfire, apparently caused by using non CRV3 batteries (I used 2500mah rechargables). The irregular power causes the flash to not work correctly. In my case, it would sometimes not fire at all, and other times over compensate for darkness etc.

So, in short - Kodak make great point n shoot cameras, but make sure you use the correct batteries!

A better camera isn't going to help you compose a good shot, but it's going to improve the chances of a decent exposure dramatically.

I own a Sony DSC-W1. I'm pretty happy with it, but it doesn't compare to a d-slr. I can shoot at ISO400 on my camera, but the photos come out grainy. If I am zoomed all the way in, my lens is only opens as far as f5.6.

So lets say you see a bird in a tree and you want to take a photo. Assuming that the 3x zoom is will give you a sufficiently close shot, you are still shooting into shade. Since you are zoomed in any camera shake is going to be magnified. With the slow lens, your only option is to jack up the ISO or take a long exposure. If you take a long exposure, you will almost certainly get a blurry photo. If you shoot at ISO400, your photo will be grainy (and maybe blurry as well).

ISO800 on a d-slr is often less noisy than ISO400 on a compact digital camera. With a fast lens and higher usable ISO ranges, the d-slr will have no problem getting the shot.

Maybe all my negativism comes from just liking film a lot - from the way it looks and feels like to the way you care about your shots. It's just so different. And I agree with the poster that said you shouldn't judge the camera based on ideal situations. Most of the pics will probably be taken in low-light or otherwise bad conditions, or with the flash. (Why aren't here any flash examples by the way?) But okay... most of the people really wouldn't mind the quality (or absense thereof). As for the colors... I still think they're unnatural. I dunno. I just never get the same sky colors on slide film, they're always somehow different and better than on digital (even on better digicams). I say Jean-Baptiste, you should go to some place with Eugenia and take your med-format Hassel loaded with Velvia 50 with you and Eugenia takes her best digital camera and you make shots of the same scene and scan the film on Imacon. And let us know the results. Now THAT'll be interesting - I haven't seen comparisons of this sort anywhere on te net.

I don't know what you guys are seeing, but if you look at the sky in some of those shots, the images most definitely have noise, along with jpg compression (the latter from compression for web, I assume).

I've been shooting professionally for over 10 years, and have owned a Nikon 800, Canon S230, Canon Digital Rebel, Canon 10D, Nikon D70, Sony P92, and a Sony V3. In other words, nearly the full range, with exception of super highend D-SLRs, and super low end, like this Kodak.

There are much better choices for cheap digital cameras, Sony being one of them. Sure you'll pay slightly more, but I think it's worth getting a quality image.

I bought a 7220 for my granddaughter when she was 7. It really does take very good pictures, all things considered (and she loves the video mode!). The dock and software are easy -- I gave her no training at all and she figured it out. And there are advantages to having a low MP count for someone like her -- it cuts the download time.

Overall I have been very impressed with it, and yes, I have an extensive background in color and color photography. And I find the review to be pretty accurate.

DrJ

yeah, point'n'shoots are all well and good, i use them myself, but as someone said, they're no good in non-prime situations - like poor light or even with moving objects.

i've taken some pretty poor pictures of dances where the light is low, and it's all just a blur. apparently getting a seperate flash can help, but then it's no longer p+s.

for the average holiday snap in sunshine, they're great.

Digital compacts never equal the quality of a real SLR. Why? Simple optics. Presently I have two cameras on my desk here. A Nikon D70 SLR and a broken point-n-shoot Kodak from a friend. Just looking at the size of the lens openings alone: the D70's standard kit lens has an opening that is many times wider than the few millimeters of the Kodak (it doesn't say, I estimate about 4mm. The filter on the D70 lens says 67 millimeter diameter. I suck at maths, but that D70 has a hell of a lot more lens surface area!
Never mind the fact that the D70 lens probably has more precise optics than the Kodak (I can't prove that conclusively), it's obvious that the D70 simply catches more light at any given moment due to its much larger lens opening.
Add to that the bigger size of the sensor in the D70, which allows for bigger pixels. A bigger pixel captures more light than a smaller pixel, again due to surface area, therefore lowering the noise floor considerably.
So *without* taking the actual build quality of the equipment into account, about which I can only give educated guesswork, the D70 is at a huge advantage over every compact I've ever seen simply because of physics.
You will *NEVER* create pictures that are of equal technical quality as long as compacts don't get bigger lens openings and bigger sensors.
The 6MP photo's that my D70 takes are consistently much better than anything I've ever seen coming out of a compact, even if it has a much higher pixel count. Simply because the D70 has much more light to work with. Add to that the fact that the D70 permits me to store files without lossy compression or in-camera colour "correction".. that helps a lot too.
What I'm saying here about my D70 goes for any SLR vs. Compact comparison. You need actual light to take good pictures. Many compacts and camera phones skimp on that to provide the highest possible pixel count in the smallest possible form factor.
Yes I've seen aesthetically great photography coming out of a tiny Canon Ixus digital compact but the photographer would probably have taken the exact same brilliant picture with an SLR and have gotten a technically better result.
Printing at 4x6 is also totally useless to compare print quality. Camera resolution really only starts to count at 13x19 and bigger. Print that big and you'll see the difference very clearly.
If you're planning to buy a digital camera in the eur. 600 and up range, consider an SLR. They're in a completely different leage compared to compacts. Personally I'll vouch for the Nikon D70 in combination with the 18-70 1:3.5-4.5 kit lens. I don't know about other glass, but the mentioned combination beats every compact I've ever seen for less than eur. 1000.-.
Of course film is still king of the hill when it comes to resolution and dynamic range. No digital camera beats properly exposed high quality slide film.. even if it's shot with yesterday's mediocre autozoom/autofocus film based compact of the kind that photo shops are practically giving away at the moment.

The best camera is useless without driver software. Before buying any digital camera you want to make sure that is has good driver support, either native or using PTP mode.

For cameras and drivers see:
http://gphoto.org/proj/libgphoto2/support.php
http://www.teaser.fr/~hfiguiere/linux/digicam.html

sadly a lot of the salespeople have done what the computer sales world has done - chase Mhz .. or this case MPixels ...

megapixels is only part of the story. you need:

* a good lens
otherwise you stand no hope of images of any fidelity. you need to ensure maximal transfer and minimal abberation, colour or shape.

* a good sensor
although sensor technologies vary - a good guide is the size. a tiny sensor is severly limited in the "signal-to-noise-ratio". many small cameras have small sensors - much much tinier than a normal 35mm film.

* megapixels only matter if you want to zoom and crop. too few and you won't have enough pixel-freedom to do this.

have a look at the guides on photo.net which explain the science behind some of the above.

After having tried Sony, Kodak and Canon 'point and shoot' digital cameras over the years (friends, relatives, etc.), Canon's Powershot line have been among the best performing of cameras in the $100+ price range.

Clarity, color, features...I'd buy a $200 Canon before I bought a $70 Kodak or Sony, and a $130 Canon is quite a nice camera for the money.

this is turning into a mini /.

you can't mod down OSN staff, eugenia apparently is auto +5, people asking why a cam review is posted on a supposed 'os news' website get an auto -5.. this site is crazy.

Heya,

I have been looking for a digital camera that also works well in low-light situations. It seems it is difficult to find one. Maybe it is because I 'm looking for something that is portable (it doesn't have to be very small, but also not big.) and doesn't cost more than 500 euro. I wonder if anyone knows such camera's? I have been looking around. My first look what at the minolta camera's: Z5?, ... They have a 10-12x zoom. Not all of them have image-stabilization, but this is something I would like.

thanks,

Michel

...that having owned a point and shoot film camera and they after recently graduating and buying myself a Canon EOS 20D with a 17-85 lens, the camera is a big factor in the kind of pictures you are able to capture. The thing is there are a lot of shots...especially in the case of travelling that require you to just have an itchy trigger finger. I mean I went to this river bank in India...and there was a little kid and his brother I believe it was, just diving from a ledge into the river...and the lighting and everything was just great...I whip out my camera and I fire away in continuous drive mode and get some really great shots.

It is that kind of an advantage that pushed me to getting a digital slr. True that if you take your time and compose a shot, you can get really awesome results on a throw away camera. But for those on the go and into action photography I think technology and advancements are definitely a must.

I must go ahead and say that I am not a professional photographer by any means and I have barely started exploring my camera's features and when and how to use them...there are limitless possibilities and that is quite appealing to me. My 2 cents.

I started in digital photography with a 3 megapixel Fuji, coupled with a 6x zoom lens. What others have said concerning the rotten color produced by digital cameras applies here. Because of this experience, I went back to film for a couple of years, shooting with my trusty Olympus IS1 and IS3.

I had the negatives developed at the local drug store, but scanned them using Vuescan driving a Polaroid 4000 pixel per inch scanner. Fabulous color! Amazing dynamic range!

Then there was dust, scratches, and grain, oh yeah there was grain. Since the IS series lenses were about f5.6, I tended to shoot ISO 400 and 800 film. ISO 400 today is vastly better than the dreck I shot back in the 1960s, when I started out. ISO 800 film is actually pretty usable, but the grain is there. When you look at the sky at the roughly 100 pixels per inch of a computer monitor, you see an interlocking jigsaw of grain. It looks a lot like the sky noise in the article's sample photos (yes, it is noise, Eugenia, not JPEG compression artifacts), but bigger.

Over the last couple of years I purchased a Canon Digital Rebel (300D), flashed it with a Russian BIOS, and purchased some good lenses to go with it. I'm looking at a picture right now, taken in the Dutch town of Delft of the Old Church silhouetted against a blue sky at ISO 100. There is no noise, zero, zip. I have never been able to take such flawless pictures before. Had a point and shoot taken the shot, I would have gotten a decent print, but nothing quite this perfect.

Then there are the interior cathedral shots in natural light of the Dom in Cologne, and St. Mary's in Luebeck. They were taken hand held, and blown up to 8"x12" (20x30cm). There is good detail in the darkest areas; the bright windows are not blown out; color balance is perfect, and noise is minimal on screen (and not present in the print). Fir the first time in forty years of taking pictures, a digital SLR allowed me to capture the interior of a cathedral to my satisfaction.

The Kodak camera for $70 is a good buy, and under the right conditions, will produce good photos. For me, the "right conditions" are too limited.

Peter Besenbruch

then why the heck name it 'osnews'?

makes...no..sense...

I am going to go buy this camera for a young friend's birthday. Since "graduating" from disposable film cameras to digital, I have found that my decent photos have increased by a magnitude of 10. Of course my crappy photos have increased by a magnitude of 50, but that is what the delete key is for.

I'm sure a camera like that is perfectly fine for small prints or images to be used on the web, but what if you want something larger?

If you're blowing images up to poster size, or even printing them A3 then I find that the pixelation and other flaws of low end digital cameras are more noticable. That's when a dirt cheap film camera easily beats a low end digital.

I got myself a refurbished Vivicam 3715. This is a 3.3MP camera that usually runs about $150 these days - I got it refurbed for $70. Two main complaints that you hear from everybody - it eats batteries and the display is almost impossible to see in bright light. Most folks turn it off and use the viewfinder.

I plug it into my linux box and the camera pops right up on the desktop so I can retrieve the photos. Despite some flaws, it works for me. With a 256MB SD card in it, I can store over 300 photos. It has a lot of nice features and takes really good pictures.

Is this author praising photo quality relative the the camera's price tag? Because those sample photos, expecially the macro on flowers...fails for me. Miserably.

I'd happily pay $20 more and have a compact flash slot and lossless image compression (even if it's very weak compression). Then I'd happily spend $100 on a big flash card... The idea of losing image quality between your shot taken and the shot stored makes me feel sick... It's just ... unecessary. But I suppose these $70 jobs are catered to people who just want a $70 camera that stores 25 pictures on its tiny onboard memory..

It doesn't surprise me the pictures taken with a cheap digital camera look good. They're well-composed, taken with a technology that's been around for around a decade, in ideal circumstances,... What's more, the subjects aren't moving. You can take similar pictures with disposable camera's and plain film for 15$ (at least, I did when my point-and-shoot film camera died on me in the middle of Bali's temples).

But how many pictures are you going to take like this? If you're an average Joe, not a whole lot. Joe likes to take pictures of his wife and kids in front of that cathedral, of his dog running around in his garden on a cloudy day, of his family dinner in the house. And those are the conditions which separate the men from the mice (in camera-terms, that is).

So this is what I find to be prohibitive issues with digital (in general, and digital Compact P&S in particular):

1. shutter lag

It may well take more than a second from pushing the button to actually getting the picture. This means facial expressions change and your dog has taken off. In the end, it is impossible to take the picture you see on the screen (and decide you want to have). Film camera's (even Compact P&S) only have this problem when your flash is trying to avoid red eyes... (even the award-winning digital P&S photographer complains about this problem)

2. Depth of Field

With my Analog P&S Pentax, I was able to take a reasonable portrait with blurred background with my 115 mm zoom. Digital P&S compact camera's make it impossible of shooting pictures with a blurred background. The award-winning photographer made these crisp images his hallmark. Of course beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but even without the fact wether or not you like the blurry-background-effect, these camera's lack the possibility of using it - and are therefore less versatile.

After the pentax, I got an old east-german SLR: quite a hassle to use it, but excellent pictures and great portraits... this one gave up on me only recently.

Even though I seriously considered going digital, this lack of depth of field-control kept me from actually doing it. This article http://www.photo.net/learn/optics/dofdigital/ explains how even digital SLR's do not offer the same possibilities... despite spending thousands of dollars.

Conclusion:

Saying people shouldn't spend more than $300 on a digital camera because they won't use all of its features is ridiculous. Digital P&S camera's today do not offer the same possibilities as analog camera's (and vice-versa). They take different pictures. You cannot fake DOF adequately in Photoshop...

People who (like me) do not want to give up on some features analog camera's offer end up paying quite some money for a digital camera with similar possibilities (and a large CCD) - the low-end camera's just don't cut it...

PS: I only posted this reaction because I feel a lot of people do not realise these differences. Many people I show my pictures to wonder why they like mine better (even if composition is the same)... It's Depth of Field. This is kind of the third dimension in photography, which is a 2d-medium. Once they know about the difference, some of them regret going digital... today (Canon release a full frame digital SLR last week, let's hope this technology trickles down to P&S'ers)